The rape scene, invariably cut in a screened version in U.S. theatres, must be viewed whole in order to "justify" the savagery of Töre's vengeance. Trapped in a forest glade, Karin is pinned down and violated by the two brothers, then clumsily handled by the small son of one of the herdsmen. By today's screen standards, the sequence looks tame, yet the palpable loss of beauty and innocence still appalls us, especially as Karin lurches across the glade for a few hypnotic steps before letting out a moan of anguish -- and dying. A disgusted audience plainly accepts the father's right to massacre the men who have ravished and killed his beloved daughter, but may be surprised when this Old Testament ethic gives way in Bergman to a sudden awareness of the Christian need to atone for one's sins and seek forgiveness from the Almighty. Töre's perplexed stance at the end of the film reflects modern man's confusion also, when faced with a choice between his natural instincts and his spiritual aspirations.

All the principal characters in The Virgin Spring suffer from insecurity. Their behavioral ambivalence colors some of the finest moments in the film. Ingeri, the foster-daughter, chafes with envy of Karin's smug, immaculate appeal, and swears fidelity to Odin in defiance of her family's neophyte Christianity. Karin's mother seeks to conceal her own bitterness by embracing the more masochistic aspects of early dogma. Töre, the father, seems to regard Karin more as a potential lover than as a daughter. His subsequent uprooting of the birch tree as he prepares for the slaughter of the herdsmen carries a strong whiff of sexuality. And Karin herself flaunts her nubile charms to parents, yokels, and herdsmen alike.

As he proved with The Seventh Seal, Bergman shares with the Japanese masters, Kuurosawa and Mizoguchi, a flair for evoking the medieval world with neither fuss nor extravagance. When Karin prepares her face for her journey, her youthful vanity as well as historical custom is suggested by shots of her gazing into the mirror-still water of a cask. And when Töre sits down at table, he finds his cutlery in a pouch at his belt. The pagan significance of fire, earth, and water emerges in several scenes: from the opening shots of Ingeri blowing alight the morning fire in the farm to the close-ups of a sparkling stream in the forest and, finally, of the water that flows from beneath Karin's corpse as Töre lifts her head in sorrow.

If you holiday in the entrancing Swedish province of Dalarna, it is easy to find the locations where Bergman shot The Virgin Spring in the summer of 1959. At Styggförsen, outside Rättvik, stands the forest through which young Karin was filmmed riding to church on a fateful medieval Sunday.

The crew was modest by Hollywood standards: just 22 actors and technicians, waiting for a break in the weather to set up the elaborate, Kurosawa-like tracking shots through the tightly-packed trees. Unexpecdtedly, Bergman recalls, two majestic cranes soared overhead. The crew dropped their equipment and scrambled up a slope to get a better view. The birds disappeared over the western horizon, and Bergman and his colleagues returned to work, invigorated by the sight. "I felt a sudden happiness and relief," he said. "I feel secure and at home."

The incident exemplifies the intimate, informal nature of filmmaking in Scandinavia. Cast and crew were obliged to improvise from day to day; the leaves on the trees looked too abundant for a script that demanded buds about to burst, and so new locations had to be scouted further north. The birch-tree up by Max von Sydow's Töre had to be planted artifically in an open field, because no stretch of ground containing just a single sapling or tree could be found. There were difficulties with the sound recording, and with the evening light in certain sequences.

Bergman has never acknowleged The Virgin Spring as a major achievement. Yet he recognizes that the Academy Award® it won in 1961 helped his career from a financial and prestigious point of view.

Besides Bergman was enjoying one of the happiest spells of his life while making this film. He was in love with his fourth wife, the pianist Käbi Laretei, and delighted with his new lighting cameraman, Sven Nykvist (his regular collaborator, Gunnar Fischer, had been shooting a Disney feature during the winter and was unavailable for pre-production work). Bergman also felt comfortable entrusting the screenplay to Ulla Isaksson, who had written Brink of Life for him in 1957. It's a credit to everyone, not least Max von Sydow in the imperious role of Töre, that a simple, 14th-century poem should have been endowed with so many layers of meaning -- and such a disturbing degree of moral ambiguity.
-- PETER COWIE

Peter Cowie is Editor of the annual International Film Guide and author of Ingmar Bergman: A Critical Biography. He is International Publishing Director of Variety.

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