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The Virgin Spring and Nykvist's First Bergman
26 jan 2023
Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring (Jungfrukällan, 1960) was the first Bergman film photographed by Sven Nykvist (1922-2006). Fischer had done The Devil's Eye (1960) that same year; Nykvist, who had shot some second-unit work for Bergman in the 1950s, took over as primary cinematographer beginning with The Virgin Spring. He would photograph almost every Bergman film for the next thirty years.
The film is a fourteenth-century Swedish legend of rape, murder, and miraculous vengeance. The teenage daughter of a wealthy farmer is raped and murdered in a forest by three goatherds. The goatherds, not knowing she is his daughter, later take shelter at the farmer's house. The farmer realises who they are and kills them. At the site of the daughter's body, a spring of water bursts from the ground.
Nykvist's photography for Bergman in this film is distinct from what Fischer had been doing. Fischer's Bergman is engraved, high-contrast, heavy on filtered skies. Nykvist's Bergman is softer. He favours diffused sources, lighter shadows, middle grey tones. The Virgin Spring is lit mostly by available daylight in the forest sequences and by fire and single-source interior lamps in the farmhouse sequences. The rape and murder in the forest are photographed in flat, bright midday light, which makes them harder to watch than the low-key treatment the subject would have invited.
Bergman would later say he considered the film a failure, too literal, too dependent on a single emotional beat. He made Through a Glass Darkly (1961) in response, a more abstract treatment of similar material. Both films share Nykvist's new visual register, which would define Bergman's mature period.
| film | Jungfrukällan / The Virgin Spring (1960) |
|---|---|
| director | Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007) |
| cinematography | Sven Nykvist |
| screenplay | Ulla Isaksson, after a 13th-century Swedish ballad |
| stars | Max von Sydow, Birgitta Valberg, Gunnel Lindblom, Birgitta Pettersson |
| studio | Svensk Filmindustri |
| runtime | 89 min |
| format | 35mm, 1.37:1 |
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sources
[1] Bergman, Ingmar. Images: My Life in Film. Arcade, 1990.
[2] Gado, Frank. The Passion of Ingmar Bergman. Duke UP, 1986.
[3] Cowie, Peter. Ingmar Bergman: A Critical Biography. Scribner, 1982.
[4] Nykvist, Sven. In Reverence of Light (documentary, dir. Carl-Gustaf Nykvist, 2000).