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The Middle Ages According to Ingmar Bergman
Lord Tore has two daughters. Karin is blonde, beautiful, and kind, zealous with her parents, servants, and strangers: and perhaps this very quality will cost her her life. Ingeri, pregnant after a sexual assault, is dark, brooding, and envious of Karin, whom she detests. When Karin is sent to bring candles to the Madonna, as only a virgin can do, Ingeri slips a toad into the bread that will serve for her breakfast. Along the way, Karin, having quarreled with her sister and distanced herself, moves ahead alone and is stopped by some shepherds (actually wrongdoers) and lingers to talk with them. Innocent and altruistic, she offers to share her meal. Just as they are about to take the bread to eat it, the toad planted by Ingeri jumps out of the loaf. This sudden event irritates and at the same time excites the men. They attack the girl, first taking turns raping her, then killing her for no reason with a blow to the head. They strip her of her precious dress and leave her lifeless and naked body on the ground. Later, when they are guests at Lord Tore's manor, they offer to sell Karin's dress, stained with blood, to her mother. The woman, ineffable and rational, locks them up to prevent them from escaping and alerts her husband. After an elaborate pagan ritual of purifying ablution, Tore kills the shepherds and, with them, the innocent child who accompanies them. Then he goes in search of his daughter's corpse and, reaching the exact spot where his Karin lies dead, vows to build a church on that site. Miraculously, in a divine response to his gesture, a spring of water suddenly gushes forth in the same place. Bergman's 21st film, the first (and maybe the only?) in which God's intervention in the action is concrete: the divine materializes with a miracle. Set in a bleak medieval period, which it shares with “The Seventh Seal” - a more immediate reference in Bergman's filmography - but from which it immediately distances itself because in it, violence is a private matter, whereas in that it was general and widespread. And also because it does not concern itself with the great problems of humanity, but with private small-great dramas. In that, Antonius Block spasmodically seeks God; in the subsequent, Odin, the pagan god, is invoked, and the Christian God is prayed to simultaneously but in another part of the house. In this, a cathartic pagan ritual is undertaken, and a virgin is sent to bring candles to the belonging Christian church. In short, “The Virgin Spring” finds itself in the midst of a continuous tension between the tradition of the old and the breath of the new religion; between mysticism and pragmatism. In the film, more weight is given to images rather than words, to dialogues: as if Bergman aims to induce the viewer, even during viewing, into more direct and immediate meditation. “The Virgin Spring,” among Bergman's films, is the only one in which, directly, the presence of God manifests itself. Even though the theophany is mediated and occurs through a didactic and, all in all, somewhat naive device. And it is also the one in which the purification from the many symbolisms dear to the director is most accurate. And it is also the one in which more than others, the mixture of paganism and Christianity is evident; between sacred and profane; between religion and secularism; between the aspect of profound divine respect and deeply secular attitude.
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