Ingmar Bergman

The Virgin Spring

The Virgin Spring

Winner of the Academy Award for best foreign-language film, Ingmar Bergman’s The Virgin Spring is a harrowing tale of faith, revenge, and savagery in medieval Sweden. With austere simplicity, the director tells the story of the rape and murder of the virgin Karin, and her father Töre’s ruthless pursuit of vengeance against the three killers. Starring Max von Sydow and photographed by the brilliant Sven Nykvist, the film is both beautiful and cruel in its depiction of a world teetering between paganism and Christianity.

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Film Info

  • Sweden
  • 1960
  • 90 minutes
  • Black & White
  • 1.37:1
  • Swedish
  • Spine #321

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

  • New 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
  • Audio commentary from 2005 by Ingmar Bergman scholar Birgitta Steene
  • Interviews from 2005 with actors Gunnel Lindblom and Birgitta Pettersson
  • Introduction by filmmaker Ang Lee from 2005
  • Audio recording of a 1975 American Film Institute seminar by Bergman
  • Alternate English-dubbed soundtrack
  • PLUS: Essays by film scholar Peter Cowie and screenwriter Ulla Isaksson and the medieval ballad on which the film is based

    Cover by Eric Skillman

Purchase Options

Collector's Sets

Collector's Set

Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema

Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema

Blu-ray Box Set

30 Discs

$239.96

Collector's Set

Essential Art House: 50 Years of Janus Films

Essential Art House: 50 Years of Janus Films

DVD Box Set

50 Discs

$650.00

Out Of Print

BLU-RAY SPECIAL EDITION FEATURES

  • New 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack
  • Audio commentary from 2005 by Ingmar Bergman scholar Birgitta Steene
  • Interviews from 2005 with actors Gunnel Lindblom and Birgitta Pettersson
  • Introduction by filmmaker Ang Lee from 2005
  • Audio recording of a 1975 American Film Institute seminar by Bergman
  • Alternate English-dubbed soundtrack
  • PLUS: Essays by film scholar Peter Cowie and screenwriter Ulla Isaksson and the medieval ballad on which the film is based

    Cover by Eric Skillman
The Virgin Spring
Cast
Max von Sydow
Töre
Birgitta Valberg
Märeta
Gunnel Lindblom
Ingeri
Birgitta Pettersson
Karin
Ove Porath
The boy
Axel Düberg
The herdsmen
Tor Isedal
The herdsmen
Allan Edwall
Beggar
Credits
Director
Ingmar Bergman
Screenplay
Ulla Isaksson
Cinematography
Sven Nykvist
Editing
Oscar Rosander
Music
Erik Nordgren
Production design
P.A. Lundgren
Costume design
Marik Vos-Lundh

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A scene from The Virgin Spring

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Current

The Virgin Spring: Bergman in Transition
The Virgin Spring: Bergman in Transition
Ingmar Bergman was enjoying one of the happiest spells of his life while making The Virgin Spring (1960). On a personal level, he was felicitously ensconced in his fourth marriage, to the concert pianist Käbi Laretei. And, professionally, he was del…

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Essays — Jan 23, 2006
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Wes Craven, who died this week at age seventy-six, was a horror master with few equals in contemporary American movies. The director of A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream may not often be spoken of in the same breath as the classic auteurs of Europ…
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The Brilliant Careers of Sven Nykvist and Gunnar Fischer

The author recalls the two great cinematographers and their work.

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Features — Jun 11, 2015
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In compiling his top ten, Elmes, who shot The Ice Storm and Ride with the Devil, chose those films, he says, “that influenced me most.”

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Ingmar Bergman

Writer, Director

Ingmar Bergman
Ingmar Bergman

The Swedish auteur began his artistic career in the theater but eventually navigated toward film—"the great adventure," as he called it—initially as a screenwriter and then as a director. Simply put, in the fifties and sixties, the name Ingmar Bergman was synonymous with European art cinema. Yet his incredible run of successes in that era—including The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, and The Virgin Spring, haunting black-and-white elegies on the nature of God and death—merely paved the way for a long and continuously dazzling career that would take him from the daring “Silence of God” trilogy (Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, The Silence) to the existential terrors of Cries and Whispers to the family epic Fanny and Alexander, with which he “retired” from the cinema. Bergman died in July 2007, leaving behind one of the richest bodies of work in the history of cinema.

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