| Jared Meyer |
The Virgin Spring plays in glorious 35mm at the Trylon Cinema on Thursday, June 12th, as part of Bleak Week. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
Ingmar Bergman was the first filmmaker who made me realize you can film the invisible. While first discovering my love of film and beginning my practice as a filmmaker, Bergman’s films broke open my perception of movies as entertainment, that they could be just as complex a probing of the human psyche as any other art. I ravenously began to watch his filmography, and The Virgin Spring stood out to me as the definitive transition into the realm of the invisible, from classically structured stories about human relationships into explorations of characters’ interiors. This transition happens within the film itself, beginning as a more conventionally shot story about interpersonal conflict, staged in expressionistic studio lighting and playlike, stagey blocking, but then transitioning into naturalistic, spare lighting, blocking that articulates inner states rather than interpersonal dynamics, bringing forward the war within themselves even more than with each other. This particularly comes through in the tension between how interior and exterior scenes in the film are photographed, and paradoxically, in the filming of the exteriors and the characters’ relationship to nature, the inside of their minds is most clearly realized.
The movie begins with Ingrei, a family servant, starting a fire, amplified by a stage light offscreen to simulate the firelight. Smoke bellows up through the roof as she prays to Odin. This offering is in secret from the Christian family, who emerge after. They are introduced through a series of scenes articulating the interpersonal dynamics of the family. The relationships are marked by jealousy and rivalry, particularly centered around Karin, the beloved daughter of the family. Coquettish and innocent, she revels in the adoration of the family and the attention of the village’s men, sparking Ingrei’s. Throughout the sequence, Bergman uses blocking to show these dynamics, placing Karin in the foreground, the attention of others drawn to her, while Ingrei looms in the distance, alone. Play-like in its construction, bodies in space externally express all that needs to be known about character relationships. But once Karin is tasked to deliver candles to the village church, this classical technique gives way to naturalistic, psychological visuals. This change in Bergman’s visual style is as much about the use of light by his longtime collaborator, Sven Nykvist, as it is about how he blocks a scene. The Virgin Spring was Bergman’s first time working with Nykvist as the sole cinematographer, a relationship that would span the rest of their careers. What will become the hallmark of their visual style begins here in this journey through the forest. As they travel through the woods on horseback, Nykvist lights the scene with gorgeous sunlight bouncing off the lake; it’s as if the sun were admiring the beauty of the younger daughter in the same way the other characters do. This use of realistic natural light expressing emotional subtext would become his visual trademark in Bergman’s films, and within the story, conveys a crucial emotional change in how natural light communicates in a scene. It expresses the emotional state of the world itself. The interior light in the film’s scenes expressionistically wraps around the faces of the characters, highlighting their emotional states, particularly in response to how others affect them. This use of light is conventional and was in use for decades to express emotional states, but Nykvist here gives an inner feeling to the exterior world. The emotions of the natural world will be further used throughout the film, opening the possibility for a dialogue between it and the characters essential to the story.
Further along the path, three herdsmen spot the women, and single out Karin, who, in her naïveté, takes them as mere admirers, extensions of the village boys, her parents, and the sun. Ingrei watches from a distance as she lays her blanket and invites them to share a roadside picnic, wrapped in the warm glow of the day. But as their horrific intentions become clear, nature becomes an indifferent observer of the horrors. As they overpower, rape, and kill Karin, the exterior world goes on, silent, unchanging in its beauty. Whereas the light had synced with the characters’ feelings to this point, the assumed relationship between light, environment, and character is suddenly severed. But Bergman doesn’t merely maintain this indifference between environment and character; it is transformed, given a new structure of meaning. He does this through the blocking and framing of the scene, moving away from utilizing it to express relationships between characters to externalize the psychology within them. As the older criminals ransack her belongings and run from the scene, they make the young boy of the group stay and keep watch. Darkness falls, a light snow begins, and he is framed from above, huddled amid twisted bare tree branches. A close-up of him follows this, then a match on action cut to a medium wide where he walks through branches to the food leftover, which he chokes on. The boy then looks over to Karin’s dead body in the distance, also framed in a snarl of dead branches. He moves over to her and places dirt on her, the camera again framing them with the branches twisting in the foreground. He runs, turns for one last look, where the branches again frame her in a wide shot, before he runs from the area, and the camera fades to black. This change in how the natural world is used in the frame marks the core shift of the film from being about relationships between people to the psychological working of the characters themselves. The framing of the branches conveys the inner workings of the boy’s mind, no longer commenting or framing the characters’ actions, but becoming an extension of psychology, a screen for the workings of the mind, the invisible made visible. The image becomes a canvas to show the soul of the characters. This new visual language continues throughout and climaxes with Töre, Max Von Sydow’s vengeful father character.
As the herdsmen reach the family’s home in the film’s final act, the psychological framing also begins to overtake the interior interpersonal framing from the beginning. At first, the family is still blocked and framed as before, but as the young boy’s disgust is fully displayed at dinner and the truth about their actions is revealed, the visual style changes. The young herdsman’s revulsion continues as he cannot eat the meal given to him, and he lies down. Nestled in the sparse, expressionistic stage light, he looks up at the smoke rising into the night in a shot mirroring the sacrifice to Odin earlier. The meaning, however, is interpreted to reflect this new psychological emphasis, as the servant tells him while looking at the smoke, “People are like that, they worry and tremble, like leaves in the storm,” directly referencing the smoke and calling back to the leaves and branches that surrounded him in the earlier scene. The dialogue makes explicit what was implicit in the visuals—the physical world is a mirror that expresses our inner workings, human psychology is reflected in the natural world. This trembling finds its most powerful expression when Töre, after discovering his daughter’s tattered gown perversely gifted by the herdsmen, goes out to take down a tree before exacting his revenge. Has a more direct and potent image of human psychology ever been expressed through the natural world than Von Sydow’s Töre wrestling down the tree? Flat, natural light illuminates the scene, the opposite of the hard studio light used to light the exterior scenes in the beginning. A singular tree and a single man are framed in a wide shot, and he wrestles the tree to the ground. The anger, sorrow, and struggle of his mind are manifested against the sparse, indifferent landscape. Töre’s violent wrestling of the tree foreshadows the violence he’s about to impose out of his anger and pain, whereas the boy was caught within it, a fly in the web of his guilt. Bergman films the killing of the three similar to the murder of Karin—blunt, direct, relentless. The final death in a struggle by the fire takes the visual of the fire and utilizes it to achieve the metaphorical transmutation of the natural world. The first scene shows it in a wide, one component among many, augmented by stage light. Here, the fire is pure foreground and pure psychology—rage made manifest as Töre completes his revenge, subsuming the image as his rage subsumes him. Once his vengeance is complete, his rage turns to anguish and shame, setting the stage for the final scene and last word on the relationship between environment and psyche in the film.
The end scene, where the movie receives its name, is marked by another offering. Upon seeing his dead daughter’s body, Töre cries out to God in anguish, offering to build a church at the spot to absolve himself of his actions. He is framed with the river behind him as he makes the offering, indifferently flowing as the birds chirp around them. At this moment, Karin is lifted, and from her spot, a spring emerges. This moment establishes a new ethics between humanity and the natural world, an ethics of psychology. Where prior burnt offerings were made to Odin to enact in the world, now the natural world is articulate; it communicates to them as well, instead of being a mere channel for communication. The natural world evolves from a channel to a canvas for meaning to be found, an extension of inner human needs rather than external wishes. However, this move, while done in a religious context, is a dramatic rupture from the religious worldview. The fire at the beginning and the candles for the church were both symbols of transaction, the religious mind currying favor by giving gifts. The spring is nature directly communicating through psychology. Töre has evolved from the man of faith of the Middle Ages to a more modern, man who sees his emotions reflected in the world, not merely God’s will. His offer to build the church comes from his psychological needs rather than a higher power, and his need to read meaning in the world comes from within.
Bergman would continue to follow this strain of filmmaking, reducing the role of the external world less and less in favor of images of pure interiority. This film is not mere expressionism, however. It continually wrestles with conflicting expressive tendencies at odds with each other, not just the world as internal made external. The soft natural light of dawn as the tree is grappled to the ground, the chirping of the birds as the family mourns their loss, and even the spring itself, flowing freely amidst the anguish of the onlookers, all show a world at odds or indifferent to the suffering of humanity. It is up to the characters to make meaning of this, to project themselves more fully, to make some sense of the world around them.
Edited by Finn Odum