About

I wanted to make a blackly brutal medieval ballad in the simple form of a folk-song.

The Virgin Spring will screen from an archival 35mm film print.

Bergman would win his first Academy Award ('Best Foreign Language Film' 1961) for the gripping The Virgin Spring. The film is a powerful treatise on guilt and vengeance, strongly coloured by screenwriter Ulla Isaksson's fascination with the conflict between Christianity and medieval paganism. Max von Sydow plays a devout Christian father in the Middle Ages who discovers that he is housing the men who killed his daughter.

Bergman's technique on The Virgin Spring was inspired by his love of Japanese cinema – in particular, the films of Akira Kurosawa – and consequently it is shot with a high level of kineticism, bringing extra power to the shocking violence perpetrated by the characters. The film would later be remade as Wes Craven's insalubrious debut Last House on the Left 1972. Despite the extra levels of blood and sleaze present in that adaptation, the force of Bergman's original remains unmatched.

M | Moderate violence

The Virgin Spring also screens on Wed 8 March at 6.00pm