Why are viewers interested in Ingmar Bergman again? By the early Sixties Bergman's position in the cinematic canon was fully cemented. But as early as the mid-Seventies one sensed that opinion in the cinematic community was shifting away from Bergman, his canonical titles slowly slipping down and out of the international critics' polls. (This backlash was famously lampooned by unrepentant Bergmanite Woody Allen in Annie Hall [1977].) By the Eighties and throughout the Nineties, it looked as though Bergman's stock had bottomed out for good, with Persona (1966) eventually serving as a less-than-emblematic standard-bearer for the entire corpus. But fortunes appear to have shifted once again, with the young century ushering in something of a Bergman renaissance.

Some of the reasons for Bergman's devaluation are relatively simple, pertaining as they do to both critical fashion and cultural mandate. Part of it was overexposure. Like Fellini and Truffaut, Bergman came to represent 'art cinema' for an entire generation, and in this regard the grim severity of many of his best-known films became a liability, too easily mocked as self-importance. (Recall the many parodies of Bergman's The Seventh Seal over the years, perhaps the cleverest being found in Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey [1991]), in which the two titular heroes engage Death in a game of Twister.

In addition to this overfamiliarity with Bergman's tropes and tendencies, it seems that several key critics of the Seventies found Bergman's cinema too literary, too beholden to the theatre. Film esthetics were shifting towards a purer modernism, a cinematic language stripped of all extra-filmic excess. In the area of Scandinavian cinema, Bergman's cachet fell around the same time that Carl Theodor Dreyer's was on the rise. Similarly, those spiritual themes that characterize much of Bergman's first career phase were addressed more palpably in the films of Dreyer and Robert Bresson, part of the so-called 'transcendental' tradition. Whereas Bresson's cinema foregrounded the shimmering physicality of the isolated moment, and Dreyer's constructed an anxious world whose gravitational pull is inscribed in camera movement and mise-en-scène, Bergman tended to use language—finely-wrought, literary language, performed by some of the world's greatest actors—to articulate philosophical insights. So ironically, much of the educated general public had come to find Bergman pretentious, while the very seriousness of Bergman's approach fell out of favour with highbrow critics, since it went about seriousness the wrong way—textually, not visually. In short, both ends of the spectrum unfairly forced Bergman's achievements into that deadly of holding pen, 'the middlebrow.'

But Bergman does appear to be garnering new interest among cinephiles. Part of this is due to material circumstances. The recent traveling Bergman series was occasioned by the striking of new prints from the Janus Films collection, and several recent DVD releases by Criterion in conjunction with these reissues have made some key Bergman classics available for the first time since their VHS editions in the Eighties. (These include Smiles of a Summer's Night [1955], the complete Fanny and Alexander [1982], and the early Sixties trilogy of Through a Glass Darkly [1961], Winter Light [1962], and The Silence [1963].) No doubt the resurgence is also cyclical, a new generation discovering for the very first time those same films that had been shoved down their parents' throats (provided they had been of a particular class background). Part of this has also to do with Bergman's stylistic difference from those very filmmakers who supplanted him in the canon. International festival cinema has, by and large, absorbed the lessons of Dreyer and Bresson so thoroughly that for a director to hire professional actors these days seems like an act of defiance. Where Bergman once represented the cultural establishment, he now once again represents difference.

But it also has to do with the times. Zeitgeist arguments always risk reductivism, but surely it cannot be entirely coincidental that the original Bergman cult in the U.S. coincided with the shift from the values of the Eisenhower era to the first flowerings of the counterculture. Staid though Bergman may have come to seem over the years, his has been a cinema of philosophical and theological inquiry, pondering the material consequences of religious faith. Now, as Americans we find ourselves in another era of knee-jerk religiosity and the closing-down of true spiritual introspection. The president claims to speak with God, and we are meant to understand that there is no ambiguity whatsoever in what God says in return. In light of this, Bergmanian uncertainty may once again serve as a provocative alternative to McMorality.

In this regard The Virgin Spring is an awkward film for the revival. As Peter Cowie's brief but excellent catalogue essay explains, this film is a transitional one for Bergman, and one that the master himself never felt entirely comfortable with. In the Bergman corpus, it is primarily notable for being the first complete collaboration with cinematographer Sven Nykvist. (Nykvist was one of three lensers on Sawdust and Tinsel [1953], his first effort for Bergman.) Adapted from a thirteenth-century ballad of innocence despoiled, The Virgin Spring tells the story of Karin (Birgitta Pettersson), a vain young girl who is raped and murdered on her way to church. The three goatherds who commit the act (although strictly speaking, the youngest of the group simply looks on in horror) make their way to the home of Karin's worried parents who, upon being offered their daughter's bloodied silk shift as a sale item, exact pitiless revenge. Töre, the girl's father (Max von Sydow) immediately regrets his cruel vengeance, vowing to glorify the Lord by building a stone church at the site of his daughter's violation. Where her body lay, water spontaneously springs from the ground, a Christian miracle.

The Virgin Spring is, fundamentally, a tale of the twilight of paganism and the uneasy but inevitable consolidation of Scandinavian Christianity. At the start of the film, Karin's rival, the adopted housegirl Ingeri (Gunnel Lindblom), is shown praying to the Norse god Odin to punish Karin's pride. This opening sequence is one of the most visually rich in the entire film. In the first shot, we witness Ingeri, unkempt and smudged with ash, bending down to blow into the stove. Through her bodily effort, we see fire emerge. Next, Ingeri is seen wielding a long rod, manipulating it through the top of the frame. She is opening a skylight, slowly allowing the sun to stream into the house. These shots concretize the daily weight of life in the Dark Ages. Physical existence, not to mention illumination both literal and figurative, is a tremendous struggle. This world seems to always threaten to slip back into the darkness. The Virgin Spring is, fundamentally, a tale of the twilight of paganism and the uneasy but inevitable consolidation of Scandinavian Christianity.

As it happens, just as the film depicts a transitional or liminal space, it also functions as such in Bergman's filmography. Here, Bergman and Nykvist are starting to move away from the thick, large-form chiaroscuro style that Bergman absorbed from German Expressionism and late Eisenstein. We see the director and the cinematographer taking tentative steps toward a more naturalistic visual style, characterized by the receptive, tactile use of Northern light. Visually, The Virgin Spring is suspended between these two poles, Nykvist's exacting use of light and shadow and in particular his resonant use of barren winter forests resemble gelatin-silver photography, every branch in every frame slicing definitively into the emulsion. At the same time, there are rather heavy-handed uses of foreground /background relationships, flattening the filmic space for baldly symbolic ends. The view of Karin's body through the trees, wherein two bent branches in mid-frame create an ovoid flame-within-the-flame—possibly cradlelike, even vaguely vaginal—is one example of this tendency, and The Virgin Spring contains many other such elements. Although the sombre mood of this film is consistent, stylistically it bears the marks of a tonal bipolarity, with pictorialist and 'straight' photography battling for dominance.

Nevertheless, The Virgin Spring provides a glimpse of the development of Bergman's style to come—the situation of specifically human dramas in a Swedish landscape so pregnant with visual possibility as to obviate needless symbolization. Only with the opening sequence of Persona six years later would Bergman return to unmistakable metaphor, although of a very different character. Intellectually, The Virgin Spring finds Bergman lurching towards open-and-shut religiosity, broaching the possibility of holy abandonment (Töre's chastising God, noting "you let me do this") only to seal it over in the end. It would be too simple to blame screenwriter Ulla Isaksson (or the ballad itself) for this rather ham-handed conclusion, but one certainly senses that Bergman himself was not entirely satisfied with The Virgin Spring's definitive announcement of God's benevolent presence.

As Cowie notes, Bergman almost never referred to this film in his autobiographies, considering it a minor achievement even as it went on to win the foreign-language Oscar in 1961. But, if we were to perhaps read The Virgin Spring 'against the grain' and put it to our own purposes, we might reconceptualize its struggle between paganism and Christianity for our own times. Töre kills the heathens out of misplaced revenge, repents, and is forgiven. If we find this conclusion every bit as aesthetically and spiritually unsatisfactory as Bergman himself appears to have found it, this can only reflect on our palpable need for a complex, untidy, and far less Manichean social discourse.