The trailers on this website require Adobe Flash player 8.0 or
later.
To get the player click Get the
Flash Player from Adobe
website and restart your browser to watch this trailer!
Ingmar Bergman won his first Oscar and the international Critics Prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1960 for The Virgin Spring, a brooding medieval tale based on an old Swedish ballad, closely comparable to The Seventh Seal, which examines the conflict between Christianity and the paganism rife throughout the Middle Ages. Set in beautiful 14th century Sweden, the film tells a sombre, powerful fable of peasant parents (Max Von Sydow and Birgitta Valberg) whose daughter, a young virgin (Birgitta Petterson), is brutally raped and murdered by swineherds after her half sister (Gunnel Lindblom) has invoked a pagan curse.
By a bizarre twist of fate, the murderers ask for food and shelter from the dead girl's parents, who, upon discovering the truth about their erstwhile lodgers, exact a chilling revenge. This cruel and sensational medieval allegory, made all the more powerful for the luminous, haunting black and white photography and Bergman's meticulous direction, was later to be notoriously remade by Wes Craven as Last House On The Left.
Winner, Best Foreign Film - Academy Awards, 1961
Winner, Special Mention - Cannes Film Festival, 1960
Winner, Best Foreign Film - Golden Globe Awards, 1961
|