Scene analysis of Ingmar Bergman's 'The Virgin Spring'

This is a scene by scene analysis of Ingmar Bergman's film The Virgin Spring. 

Title 1: (2:55—8:40) (5:45)
A pregnant servant girl named Ingeri is jealous of a young virgin named Karin who is the daughter of a wealthy farmer. The farmer, Tore, and his wife, Mareta, both pray to a figure of Christ on the cross. Karin is supposed to take the candles to church for mass this morning because she is a virgin and the custom is that the candles are to be delivered by a virgin.  But Karin is not feeling well and is still in the bed. She’d spent the previous night dancing with boys and had worn herself out.

My viewpoint

• This scene is the last supper as described in the Bible 
• Karin’s mysterious illness is an omen of something terrible about to take place
• Ingeri’s character is a female version of Cain out of  the Bible. She is scorned by the servants and the farmer’s wife for giving away her virtue
• Ingeri is very dirty which represents sin and Karin is very clean, a metaphor for virtue

Title 2:

Title 3:

Title 4: (11:36—18:45) (7:21)

Mareta dresses Karin:
she wears a yellow silk dress and blue shoes, a blue cape and white pearls
15 virgins made her yellow dress

My viewpoint
Karin’s blue shoes and cape represent the sky, her yellow dress represents the sun (Son of God), and her white pearls represent the rosary
The15 virgins that made the dress represent the 15 hail Mary’s
Ingeri accompanies Karin on her trip to the church
 Ingeri’s horse its dark brown in contrast to Karin’s horse, which is white, the dark brown horse, like Ingeri’s dirty clothes and face representing sin and Karin’s white horse representing goodness and virtue.

Title 5:

Title 6: (22:45—24:45) (2:00)

This is a very interesting scene!
Karin vows that she’ll only have a child in marriage (a bad omen foreshadowing her rape and murder)

(23:25) An old man roaming the countryside tells Karin “It’s better to blossom on the road than to whither in church,” (an omen foreshadowing her rape and murder. This statement is also a slight against the church’s position on chastity) Karin slaps Ingeri for insinuating that she saw Karin behaving inappropriately with the man who impregnated her.

Title 7: (26:42—30:40) (3:58)

Ingeri meets the old man in the woods who sees and hears what men think in their hearts. He makes human sacrifices to the Pagan god Odin and he already knows Ingeri and offers her her heart’s desire in exchange for sex. Ingeri is torn between her conscience and her hatred for Karin and escapes the old man.

My viewpoint

This scene is a crossroads in Karin’s journey to the church. She and Ingeri separate and Ingeri is left to consider whether to go through with her wish to see harm to Karin. The old man in the woods is Karin’s conscience. The presence of water in this scene is important because of it’s symbolic meaning. Water, in Christianity, symbolizes cleansing as well as life and death. In this case, the brook running through the woods represents the opportunity for Ingeri to turn back on her desires for Karin’s death. Ingeri could use this water to clean the dirt from her face (as she does in the final scene of the film) but she does not. She rejoins Karin but she is still torn between her conscience and her desire to fulfill her jealous desire to see Karin killed.

Title 8: (31:21—34:15) (2:54)

Karin meets three herdsmen and offers to share her food with them.

My viewpoint

Virginity in this film equates virtue, innocence, and ignorance. In the beginning of the film, her father, Tore, is accused by his wife of spoiling Karin and being overprotective of her, meaning that he shelters her from the harsh realities of life. Here, she sees 3 herdsmen (2 men and a boy) who could overpower her as Ingeri said but Karin doesn’t give the situation a 2nd thought and follows them to a remote spot off the trail. The trail itself is symbolic, representing the way of God. In this case, she’s being led off the path in much the same way as Ingeri was in the film’s backstory.

Title 9:

Title 10: (36:40—43:00) (6:20)

The herdsmen show Karin their true motives. Karin tries to escape but they overpower her. The adult herdsmen rape her as the boy watches. Ingeri sees all of this from a distance. She clutches a large stone to help Karin, then drops it. After raping Karin, the herdsmen kill her and strip off her clothes.

My viewpoint
Karin falls victim to the herdsmen’s lust, representing Jesus’ crucifixion due to the fact that she is considered pure sacrifice. This paradigm is reinforced by the lamb she holds when she realizes what the herdsmen intend to do. In the Bible, Jesus is often referred to as a lamb, an animal representing innocence.


Title 11: (43:45—45.25) (1:40)

The men who rape Karin leave the boy to watch the goats. The boy attempts to cover the girl’s naked body with dirt.

My viewpoint

This is an ironic scene. The boy is the only one among the herdsmen who has any guilt for the crime his adult counterparts committed. The boy is so sickened by the girl’s death that he even vomits. That she is left naked is symbolic of shame, the shame of what the herdsmen did. And as if to hide this shame, the boy makes a poor attempt to covered the girl’s naked body.

Title 12: (47:00—53:05) (6:05)

Karin’s father stands watch outside of his home as the sun begins to set. The 3 herdsmen appear at his gate. They are on a long journey and the winter is cruel. Karin’s father lets them stay the night in his home. Inside, Karin’s mother Mareta looks at her husband hopefully but he shakes his head. He invites the 3 men to his dinner table where the boy, still thinking about the way Karin was raped and murdered, throws up.

My viewpoint

Again, out of the 3 herdsmen, the boy is the only one who shows remorse for the girl’s death. Earlier in the scene, one of the farmer’s helpers recites a lyrical poem containing clues about the crime the herdsmen committed.


Title 13:

Title 14: (100:00—104:10) (4:10)

Mareta can’t sleep. She’s up late worrying. Karin hasn’t returned home from the village where she delivered candles to the church for mass. Mareta hears a scream from the herdsmen room and there, she finds the boy unconscious with blood trickling from his mouth. Nervously, one of the herdsmen offers her a bundle of clothes for sale but Mareta recognizes her daughter’s clothes, which are dirty from when the herdsmen raped her.

My viewpoint

Karin’s clothes return to her parents as the physical body returns to the earth when we die. When Karin started out on her journey to the church, her clothes are clean meaning that she hadn’t had any knowledge of the world because she had been sheltered by her father. Her dirty clothes suggests the violence she suffered. This is also a very curious scene because Mareta was the most pious of all the characters in the film. As soon as she recognized her daughter’s clothes you knew that forgiveness was the last thing on her mind.

Title 15: (104:30–107:48) (3:18)

Ingeri confesses that she not only prayed for something bad to happen to Karin, but that she could have intervened but dropped the large stone she held and watched the herdsmen rape and kill Karin. Tore prepares to kill the herdsmen who are sound asleep in their cabin completely unaware.

Title 16:

Title 17: (115:40—118:40) (3:20)

Tore avenges Karin’s death. He waits till dawn and kills the herdsmen with his dagger, even killing the boy who had nothing to do with the girl’s death.

My viewpoint

Tore plays the role of God here, dispensing harsh judgement on both the guilty and the innocent. Notice how dirty his once clean face is now. This dirt represents sin in this film. Another Biblical symbol here is the fire representing Hell or wrath. This is a sad scene as Mareta’s maternal instincts kick in to protect the boy from her husband. Here, she was probably thinking about her daughter Karin who was their only child.



Title 18: (121:30—126:50) (5:20)

Ingeri leads Tore, Mareta, and the other servants through the woods and off the path where they find Karin’s body where the herdsmen left it. Tore implores God, asking why He allowed this to happen to their daughter. He then swears to build a church of mortar and stone on the spot of his daughter’s murder.

My viewpoint

Karin’s death gets Mareta to confess her jealousy and guilt over the fact that the girl loved her father more. But Tore accepts equal blame for Karin’s death; he’d spoiled her. As Tore implores God over the death of Karin, we see Tore not up close but from afar and from behind him as he is juxtaposed against a stream running into a pool. To see him isolated against his surroundings makes the scene more introspective because the space around him makes him appear more isolated. Even when the camera closes in on Tore, it remains behind him and impersonal and this makes Tore’s words seem universal, like he is speaking for not only himself but for all mankind.

Title 19:

Title 20: (2:30)

My viewpoint

In this film, Karin is equated with Christ because she is a virgin, therefore her life is a ransom for sin which is why Ingeri is dirty. Spring represents the beginning where everything is clean. However as the season grows older and changes we pick up dirt from the world. Even Ingiri was once a virgin but along the road of life she stumbled, as Mareta tells Karin, and was seduced by evil. The journey to the church represents the evils and temptations of life and the church represents God, or perfection and Karin, in taking this road, was following in Ingeri’s footsteps. At the same time, keeping in line with the allegory this film makes with the crucifixion, Karin is the only one who can make this trip because she is without sin and her life is a sacrifice for the sins of the world, represented by Ingeri. The stream that comes out of the ground underneath Karin’s body is the death of Christ washing away the sins of the world and redeeming mankind. Ingeri finally washes the dirt from her face with this stream, but you notice that at no time in the movie does she attempt to clean the dirt from her face. When they meet the one eyed man at the house on the brook, she could wash her face in his stream but she can’t because only water from the blood of a pure being like Karin can clean the dirt from her. Water is an important symbol of Christianity.