The Favorites - The Virgin Spring (#22)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. The Virgin Spring (1960/Sweden/dir. Ingmar Bergman) appeared at #22 on my original list.

What it is • Based on a famous folk ballad, The Virgin Spring may be Bergman's least complicated film about faith: without getting too specific, a Christian noble (Max von Sydow) experiences tragedy, repents after a violent reaction, and experiences a miracle. Viewed this way, it may not be surprising that Bergman was dissatisfied with the movie. While impressed by the naturalistic sun-dappled photography of characters moving through forests (this was one of his earliest ventures with cameraman Sven Nykvist, maybe his closest collaborator behind the camera) he felt his own direction of the action was too derivative. But The Virgin Spring is also one of Bergman's most unflinching explorations of depraved humanity. Despite the simplicity of its storytelling, the emotions run deep. Grief, guilt, lust, resentment, all coalesce in the (double - maybe triple) destruction of innocence, centered on one of the most brutal rape scenes of its time. This resulted in frequent censorship (including one court case between Janus Films and the town of Ft. Worth, Texas, which Ft. Worth won) and later inspired Wes Craven's revenge horror film Last House on the Left. The scene is not particularly graphic. It is psychologically rather than physically raw, terrifying because it depicts the utter helplessness of the victim. Whether or not you agree with The Virgin Spring's view of justice, vengeance, atonement, and divine will, whether you see said view as ambiguous (Bergman introduces an element of rival paganism into the mix, which - as I recall - suggests a struggle of forces rather than a world simply dominated by God's authority), the film's stark content will force you to draw your own conclusions.

Why I like it •

Fragments of Cinephilia, Pt. II

Short thoughts on: The deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni • The Wild One • The Virgin Spring • The Departed and Infernal Affairs • Bus 174 • Pan's Labyrinth and The Spirit of the Beehive • John Cassevetes and Noah Baumbach • The Stranger • Benito Mussolini's weenie

A year and a half ago, I transferred ten of my old comments from the Internet Movie Database to The Dancing Image, in a post called "Fragments of Cinephilia". This here is the follow-up: ten further memoirs of my pre-blogging days, in this case recycled from the summer of 2007 and including some great quotations from others. The topics range from heady to trivial: we start on a silent Olympus and end with a castrated dictator. Feel free to leave your own musings below - one of the pleasures of my old hunting ground (the IMDb) was the give-and-take, and I'd love to see it continue here. Enjoy.

Sixties Rising 1959 - 1962 • "32 Days of Movies" Day 13

The thirteenth chapter in "32 Days of Movies", an audiovisual tour through 366 films.
(2015 update: included Vimeo embed after the jump)

View "Chapter 13: Sixties Rising"

Sixties Rising

They called it a new wave. When a young boy skipped school and went for a spin, when party guests stood frozen as sundials in a chateau garden, when Anna Karina tossed her hair to and fro, it was hard to shake the image of a terrific tsunami crashing down upon an unsuspecting film world. There was the tremendous vitality of the images themselves: that whirling dervish seen through a dizzyingly subjective lens, those guests posed with gigantic shadows like something out of a Dali painting, the beautiful girl captured - or unable to be captured - by a handheld camera shooting casually on the street (contemporary audiences would have to wait for that particular image, as the film was banned; but there were dozens of others in the same spirit). Then there was something else, something beyond the visuals, as if the frame was a window through which one peered into a new state of ecstatic, thrilling consciousness. There was a certain je ne sais quoi in the air, and not just in France; all across Europe the promise of the late fifties was suddenly spreading its wings and soaring skyward.