A Film Canon

A sustained attempt to evoke the moment at which an embyronic face becomes a foetal face, The Virgin Spring translates Bergman's abstracted, supernatural topographies into a more specifically metamorphic register, and condenses his preoccupation with Christianity to the doctrine of transubstantiation, producing the continuum between human, animal and vegetable that sets the narrative in motion, and is consummated in its final miracle. To this end, screenwriter Ulla Isaksson significantly enhances the medieval Swedish ballad on which the film is based, replacing its three young virgins with a virgin (Birgitta Pettersson) and whore (Gunnel Lindblom), and prefacing the journey to church, which results in the rape and murder of the latter and disgrace of the former, and subsequent revenge of their parents (Max von Sydow and Birgitta Valberg), with a lengthy grace, meal of bread and wine, and discussion of food. Collapsing digestion and gestation, excretion and delivery, and, finally, whoredom and eating, this effectively reconfigures the virgin's largely ceremonial visit to church as the expiatory gesture proportionate to the consumption of a simple family meal; or, rather, finds the perverse conclusion of carrying a piece of Christ in one's belly in the implication that eating should only occur on consecrated ground, as the virgin's attempt to bring the bread in her stomach to church is not merely forestalled by her assailants, but stolen and returned to her home, where they add to it before inadvertently revealing their true identity. Yet any reproachful divinity is offset by the miraculous, 'virgin' spring that emerges on the site of the rape and murder, suggesting that Bergman's ultimate aim is to envisage immaculate conception as a kind of inconceivable, sublime threshold, continuous with the lurid, multicoloured phantasmagoria that preoccupy all the characters, and that Sven Nykvist's stark cinematography poetically fails to capture.