INGMAR BERGMAN’S ‘THE VIRGIN SPRING’: “Big, wonderful dreams!”

 © 2018 by James Clark

      Now, as we open a third can of worms installed by the inimitable, Ingmar Bergman, we need to open our eyes to the seriously bizarre communication these films consist of. Unlike the catch-as-catch-can opportunities to turn a buck by fulsome cinematic and mainstream cultural techniques, Bergman puts to himself and his clients two simultaneous and contradictory presentations. Why did he work like that? He didn’t want to starve. And, moreover, he was obliged to maintain—with reservations—that the mainstream has much to recommend.

The works, in question now, introduce with silent-film-optics-brilliance, figures variously galvanized by the resources of the history of Christian assurance. Though the most overt aspects of the narratives very convincingly appear to sustain the integrity of loyalty to a Christian power, there coincides an ambush exploding the entire enterprise and mooting the uncanny ways of fearlessness.

The era when Bergman displayed such an impressive changeup pitch was perhaps less experimental and volatile than our own. But his assumption that he was on to a crucial singularity resonates—to those with advanced reflective skills—in our own millennium. The films, Through a Glass Darkly and The Seventh Seal, subtly found much amiss in insisting that strong but fabricated personalities could put one on easy street. In our film today, The Virgin Spring (1960), only a last minute convulsion cements that whimsy. But, all the better from our point of view, the drama concerns a very flesh-and-blood problematic, namely, distemper.

A devout farming couple (in medieval Sweden) sends off their adolescent daughter to a distant church in order to fulfil a clerical edict that a virgin deliver candles for the observances. She is intercepted by three goatherds who rape and kill her. The murderers, having heard from the naïve and smug girl how opulent her family farm is, pay a visit and—something the goats might have red-flagged—attempt to sell the victim’s expensive and now bloodied clothes. Her father beats and stabs to death the naïve trouble-makers. This triggers for the God-fearing parents a spate of fence-mending. The whole retinue of the rough-hewn estate is led to the girl’s corpse by an eye-witness. At that site, the contrite and grief-stricken killer looks upward and repeatedly addresses his Lord. “I don’t understand you!” Then he adds, “Yet I still ask for forgiveness… I don’t know any other way to live… I will, with these hands, build a church here.” The distraught parents embrace their child for the last time; and then they and their underlings submit to the mass hallucination (a couple of no-names from the staff bemused in accurately seeing nothing—as per the skeptics in the other two films cited) of a spring coming into force where the girl’s head had lain. (Hallucination being prominent in those two aforementioned films.) A young semi-adherent to paganism, who had been charged to see that the trip be a safe and happy one, imagines being refreshed by the “waters” and now becomes as devout as the others on hand.

I hope you can appreciate that this angle on the eventuation leaves a lot of questions. A close look at the film’s first moments can introduce a level of sensibility from which to comprehend what really happens here. We’re confronted with a ragged, swarthy and beautiful young woman, crouching over a fire pit, with arms extended. Very definitely, it is the coursing of the fire per se, and not the kindling of the cooking apparatus, which absorbs her. She exhales with vigor and with a sense of urgency, her cheeks puffed-out grotesquely. “Odin, come!” is her non-breakfasty wake-up call. She pushes a long wooden pole upward to allow the smoke to escape from a trap-door beyond the ceiling. As she looks upward to the billows she is filmed close-up from the floor, and the large features of her face bring to mind an early cave-dweller, more primitive animal than rational ruler. Moreover, her peculiar dance is unmistakably an expression of solitary anger. “Come to my aid!” she cries out. At this window of opportunity, she is fearless, a condition we know to be at the heart of  Bergman’s constructs.

The screenplay is credited to one, Ulla Isaksson, whom the auteur commissioned to deal with a Norse ballad involving child murder, which caught Bergman’s eye at the time of his production, The Seventh Seal (1957), with its desperate traffic of medieval piety. Isaksson’s inhabiting the idiom of faith and her concern to set in relief the 14^th century triumph of Christianity over the forces of the pagan God, Odin, would, in fact, be merely useful dilettante spadework for Bergman’s finalization of a drama concerning fearlessness and its slide to distemper (hardly a matter confined to the distant past).

The sensuality of that firebrand, named, Ingeri, gives way to the principals of the farm, namely, Tore, and his wife, Mareta, who start their morning being stalk-still, in prayer. Tore recites, “Heavenly Father, Son and Holy Ghost, with all your hosts of angels, guard us this day and always from the devil’s snares…” Mareta adds, “Lord, let not temptation, shame, nor danger befall thy servants this day.” In strong and ironic contrast to Ingeri’s commitment to conflagration, Mareta drips warm, runny candle wax on her hand. “It’s Friday,” she explains, “the day of our Lord’s agony…” Then she crosses herself, “So help me God.”

Instead of just distributing that stark contrast, there is a cut to an elderly lady, Frida, who presents us with a blanket filled with new-born chicks, delicate, beautiful and full of life. Holding one in her hand, she says, “You poor thing. Live out your wretched little life, the way God allows all of us to live.” Here, then, a synthesis tumbles our way—the “wretched little life” hovering toward the possibility of disinterestedness, with aspects of wild Ingeri and the calculators, in the mix. But life is not a sure-fire recipe, as Frida soon shows us why. Ingeri’s dance in the kitchen is interrupted by the seeming old dear, her colleague in cuisine, asking her in a harsh voice, “Where were you all night? If you don’t care where you sleep, you could at least come back for the milking… Instead, I had to run around on these poor legs…” Where did the “wretched little life” go?

We’re on track, at this introduction, to deal with, not religious wars, nor with bromides about improving the Dark Ages with prayer books; but instead with an addiction for eclipsing others and leaving them seen to be inferior. After her celestial entrance, Ingeri, about six months pregnant, flashes her enhanced profile in a bid to drive Frida to feel that all her chaste priorities have become obsolete, have come to naught. Just before that, her surliness elicits from the old semi-dear, “What’s wrong?” A far cry from her silent gambit, Ingeri very commonly, even old and obsolete, explains, “Nothing more than the usual—bastards beget bastards…” Not that Frida improves the tone with her spiteful, “Serves you right, the way you behave—spitting and snarling like a wild cat. You should thank God on your bare knees for his mercy. To come to a farm like this and stay in this house like a child of the family. But you are, and always will be, a savage child.”

The objective of personal power, bringing down upon many a blast of horror, derives from that patrimony of advantage, of seizing the upper hand. The proprietors, over and above their systematic prayers, have seen fit to be the only ones to provide the regional church with candles for the observances of the Virgin Mary. In accordance with a tradition that a virgin must carry the candles to church, the onus falls upon their adolescent daughter, Karin, to double-down the piety in that way. Whereas the parents are fastidious in consummating their secular and religious challenges, Karin has chosen to exploit the vantage point she was born to and thereby occupy a medium where she always appears paramount. True to form, she had been the focal point of the party the night before, the party also dear to Ingeri; and whereas the servant had showed up, the princess had slept in, leading Mareta to think of the only other virgin, namely, Frida, to carry the goods that day. Tore’s edict, “Go put some life in that loafer,” takes Frida off the hook, and Karin ending her winning streak.

The Virgin Spring may be bountiful in evoking the mysterious and perilous tumble of sensual energy. But it also shines in its dramatic dialogue (Bergman being a connoisseur of theatrical rhetoric, to the point where speech and its imagery joins that tumble). Therefore, we’ll track with some detail the distemper within the first family, whereby Karin seeks wedding garb for running an errand of piety. She is roused by her mother only by way of racking up lavish indulgences in apparel and cuisine. “I’ll wear my yellow dress,” she proclaims. And when Mareta reasons, “My child, it’s a week day,” the child threatens, “Then I won’t go.” Mareta fortuitously perseveres to an upshot of how superior the girl and her parents not only believe themselves to be but tolerate in themselves such cheapness. “You’re behaving like a little child… [but] I can’t be hard to you.”/ “Mother, I’ll ride to church with such dignity, and Blackie will raise his hooves gently, like a pilgrims’ procession. I’ll look neither right nor left, but straight ahead.” Mareta changes the subject, but not the nonsense. “This is not an ordinary dress. Fifteen maidens sewed this! “ She attempts to return to some ascetic territory, not enjoying the cross-purposes. “You’ll give the devil such joy. Angels will punish you with boils and toothaches…” She goes on to refer to her disturbing dreams and Karin counters with, “I wish I had dreams, too… Big, wonderful dreams! But I never do…” Tore comes by, and pleased by the glamor and glory, he exclaims, “I’ll ride into the mountains with this naughty girl and I’ll say, ‘I won’t have such a daughter… I’ll imprison her in the mountains for seven years until she’s been tamed!’”

The taming of Ingeri—chosen by Karin to accompany and thereby accentuate her own fabulousness on the road and to have the audacious one’s brain picked on the subject of intercourse—proceeds by her own volition, first of all (in being tasked to provide a meal for the princess) as to placing a toad within one of  o the buns. Such childish distemper not becoming her fluency with the realm of fire. Abandoning, for the moment, the most revealing interplay of the girls in the first phase of the trip, there is the shining and appallingly brief (semi-) fearlessness of Tore. After killing the goatherds (who had displayed a [semi-] retardation of predatory appetite) and rushing to Karin’s semi-nude corpse, he dispenses with meek piousness and samples some fearlessness at the borders of power as he has come to understand it. He stands close to the stream which Karin had seen before being devoured by fish-like feeders (one of which playing a Jew’s harp—a factor recalling the Nazi touch by Martin, in Through a Glass Darkly; but here the bite is far more controversial, possibly at the basis of the often-remarked down-play by Bergman toward this film); and he leverages Ingeri’s account—he very likely being the father of the child—of that   viciousness and guile to a point of serious rebellion. After looking to skies that have become efficacious, no longer supernatural, he smashes his face with his fist, kneels down and then falls over, face down. Presently, he looks up in extreme divided confusion and calls out—already, in this move, sliding away from a medium of efficacy—“You saw it, God, you saw it! The death of an innocent child and my vengeance. You allowed it to happen [here a fascinating disclosure of boldness clinging to a safety net, replete with his shaking his fist]. I don’t understand you [a close-up seen from behind]. I don’t understand you [the rippling waters actually going nowhere]. Yet I still ask for forgiveness. I know no other way to make peace with myself. I don’t know any other way to live…I promise you, God, here by the dead body of my only child… I promise that as a penance for my sin I shall build you a church. On this spot I shall build it… out of mortar and stone… with these hands…” The melodramatic stance, with legs far apart, and arms up to the sky, reminds us of Ingeri at her best, bestriding the cauldron and dispensing with verbiage.

Searchlit singularity comes to a bemusing crescendo in one of Tore’s marginal retainers, namely, “the Professor,” with a vaguely clerical baldpate head. He comes into his own in scrutinizing the little brother of those killers intent on doing even more damage, but being too dull to make the most of the occasion. That the kid-minding kid (initially ordered by his adult brothers to keep an eye on the body, but soon tagging along) has been shocked to the point of not being able to keep any food down presents no mystery to the master of inferences—he having already figured out that the dark night bringing no princess means she has been murdered by those operating along the route of the church and now partaking of Tore’s hospitality. (On the other hand, Tore tells Mareta, “If Karin doesn’t come tonight, she’ll surely return tomorrow… I know you’re worried about Karin. But she’s stayed in the village overnight without permission before.”)

A preamble to that seer (a country cousin to the Joseph of The Seventh Seal) involves Frida—she of the presence of affection and the language of affliction—denouncing our sharp but not sharp enough navigator. He carelessly teases her, “A woman like you no doubt needs a confessional close at hand.” And she pushes back, “Says the man who had to flee the country to save his hide… I know all about you, Professor…” He shoots back, “A bird on the wing finds something, while those who sit still only find death. I’ve seen both women and churches…” (Frida brightens up at the prospect of learning more about religious edifices. “What were the churches like?” And he brags, “Tall as the sky. And big… Not of wood, but of mortar and stone.”)

But when the chips are down, the Professor shows that his reputation as a spoiler to sedate invalids derives from his having taken a deep measure of “a bird on the wing.” The sick and terrified boy is put to bed by Frida, and when she departs he takes over with his bass baritone baseline, to implicitly officiate the  boy’s funeral. “You see how the smoke trembles up the roof hole? As if whispering and afraid [both fear and freedom conjoined]. Yet it’s only going out into the open air, where it has the whole sky to tumble about in. But it doesn’t know that. So it cowers and trembles under the sooty ridge of the roof. People are the same way. They worry and tremble like leaves in a storm because of what they know and what they don’t know. You shall cross a narrow plank, so narrow you can’t find your footing. Below you roars a great river. It’s black and wants to swallow you up. But you pass over it unharmed. Before you lies a chasm, so deep you can’t see the bottom [‘Hell is other people,’ has also been used]. Hands grope for you. At last you stand before a mountain of terror.” (Here the bird on the wing conflates to an interfering manipulation.) “It spews fire like a furnace and a vast abyss opens at its feet. A thousand colors blaze there. Copper and iron, blue vitriol and yellow sulphur. Flames dazzle and flash and lash at the rocks. And all about, men leap and writhe, small as ants, for this is the furnace that swallows up [the boy looks away in fear.] But at the very moment you think you’re doomed, a hand shall grab you and an arm circle around you and you shall be taken far away where evil no longer has power over you…”

What appears to be gross self-contradiction in that funeral sermon pertains to a duality with which the film is passionately absorbed. The short-lived fire of Ingeri and the rather long-winded but engaging metaphors of the Professor constitute an uncanny poetic life-blood, haunting, to those who have striven to reach heights. In addition to that, however, a curtain of inertia—demonstrated by Ingeri’s loss of grip and the Professor’s withering to clichés—intrinsically busies itself to foster preoccupation with others in survival action. We should take care, at this point, to more closely discover how Bergman evokes, with a horrific shambles, the bracing dilemma and delight of a groundswell often overt but rarely sustained.

One of the most felicitous cinematic portrayals of the endless struggle to harmonize between the two moments of creativity occurs in the course of Tore’s steeling himself to kill his daughter’s devourers. Seemingly needing to fire up his flesh by whipping himself with branches from a supple young tree (recalling the flagellants in The Seventh Seal, seen by notables to be deranged), he proceeds to break the trunk near the base. But in carrying out his effort to break the trunk, Tore becomes caught up in pushing to and fro the plant’s elasticity, a vivid metaphoric rendition of the work of balancing, countering overarching advantage, like the kills he is intent on. (That Ingeri, slinking back to the farm, goes on to accompany and assist his questionable motivation—preparing scalding vessels for him to shower nude—becomes an indicator of the “savage child” having capitulated entirely to the rapacity of advantage, getting things done without due attention to the possibility of that other, poetic accomplishment.)

The early moments of the ride to the church never reached by Karin present many rich features of those essential polarities being not and never effectively reached. Karin, the self-styled star, rides on a snow-white mare and sits in archaic, chivalric side-saddle, cosseted by the ancient airs and dances of a routed, effete and dull constituency. She sits barely touching her mount, as if messaging to the countryside that a hierarchy has come to pass. Ingeri, upon a dark, splotchy runt, rides using her legs but only faintly derives the gifts of the earthiness which the opportunity affords. Karin in the lead, they skirt a sparkling lake in the sun. The camera of Sven Nykvist draws back to reveal the vast hilly forests and skies and cosmos beckoning the girls toward a memorable treasure of travel. Karin gets as far as a pleasant song with that recorder and timbrel motif which accompanied the credits. “The little bird, he soars so high/ It is such work , such work to fly/ And over high mountains to spring./ The streams flow so merrily/ All under the verdant trees/ In springtime’s breeze…” (Here the billowy white clouds with wild flowers below accentuate the endowments of nature, seldom heeded.) Prior to this stage, there was the Professor accompanying the girls as they passed beyond the farm’s gate. He, too, was induced to song, the kinetic subject of which inclined to flattery and a premonition (of death amidst verdant trees twisting in an ambiguous breeze) ravaging lovely fruit. “So lovely an apple orchard I know/ A maid with virtues so dear./ Her hair like spun-gold does flow/ Her eyes like the heavens so dear./ The streams flow so merrily/ And under verdant trees/ In springtime’s breeze.”

Contrasting with the early field of fruition, Ingeri, in the sequel, gets her face slapped by Karin for teasing her about seducing at that party a young farmer in the hinterland (perhaps another of her paramours), brought into view as they encountered him in his pasture. (This descent into cheapness parallels the Karin in Through a Glass Darkly, being unable to regain poise after participating in an ill-conceived birthday skit.)  Karin quickly apologizes; but the once fearless (implying disinterestedness) loner clings to petty advantage. “Don’t ask me for forgiveness!” From there, the dark horse, taking up a rather distant rear, doesn’t have a ghost of a chance. A raucous raven in close-up keys the next closure of Ingeri’s heart. Having come upon the pathway’s attendant to a bad crossing of the stream, Ingeri walks her mount and the beauty of that modest beast speaks volumes. Here, with her integrity in shreds, she cries out to Karin, “Let’s turn back!” When Karin refuses, the unstable outsider blurts out, “I’ll take the candles!” (melodramatic rolling the dice being a symptom of shallow desperation). Karin, being the stable one for the time being, finding some backbone in light of another’s cowardice, offers a glimpse of how volatile, how kinetically challenging, one’s emotional resources can prove to be. Ingeri does not, her gypsy looks notwithstanding, possess any capacity to foresee the future. Instead, her skittishness stems from a factor of her own failure to bring equilibrium to the firestorm of her sensibility. “The forest is so dark! I can’t go on!” Too much prose, advantage. Not enough poetry, disinterestedness. Karin, occupying a rare picture of daring and, thereby, caring, tells her, “Don’t cry so hard. You could hurt the child.” Then she shows some more of the aristocratic stream we all inherit, but have to live up to. “I’m not frightened. I’m going to church. May she [addressing the rough-hewn official] rest in your cottage a while until I come back?” Karin offers a portion of her large lunch hamper. “Look, here! This is enough for both of you.” Overwhelmed by an abyss no longer sparkling, Ingeri clings to Karin’s horse, terrified. “Did you think I was going to slap you again?” the one with the upper hand asks. When Karin is on that way she’ll need all the confidence and maturity she’s ever had, the bridge man asks, “Are you in labor?” Shaking her head, she replies, “Worse than that!” (And could Bergman, apparently fond of American genre films, have seen and been struck by the noir, Kiss Me Deadly [1955] and listened closely to its theme song, “Rather Have the Blues” [than what I’ve got]?) After the spooky old guy does some mumbo jumbo with bones and tries to embrace her as a pagan kin—a status she now regards as sterile and just another failure in her battle to engage “Something Big”—Ingeri, trembling, cries, “You have taken human blood!” She races away, the terror in her eyes and on her mouth showing that she’ll never be the player she seemed qualified to be, in those first seconds of the saga (the leaven of sensual lucidity gone forever). Before she ran away, the self-styled seer, presuming to be able to bring her around, declared, “But you’re afraid. You mustn’t be. I will give you strength!” During her flight to distance the seer, the conifers along the way have become a tomb rather than a take-off. The blur of her race through the thick woods affords no dynamic step forward, and in this she becomes a kin of that Wendy of Wendy and Lucy, in the box-car, with the trees flashing by and deadness prevailing.

Ingeri settles for commonness at the site of Karin’s corpse—a Karin murdered by way of her letting slip away that once-in-a-lifetime balance (seeing) she commanded at the bridge (a bridge to endless enmity, advantage). Ingeri had run fast enough to witness, from a hiding place, the rape and kill and desecration. The inert rock she held, and failed to use, would be her kin for life and for leveraging an after-life as an angel. That she had run afoul of shallow fantasy calculation coincides with the shallow carnal calculation of her own modus operandi which might have lasted longer in the secular fold, but with no real traction. During the squabble at the outset of the deadly ride, Karin tells Ingeri (who had lorded over Karin in experiencing the pain of carrying a child), “Then I’ll be married and mistress of my house with honor.”