Cycladic Screening

Jeff Koons returns again and again to the ancient forms that bind us to our own history, and the figure of the “Venus” has occupied him since the late 1970s. Innocence and self-acceptance, the body as the source of life, and the gleaming, mirrored surface that is completed only when the viewer stands before it and meets their own reflection within it: these are the constants of his work.

The same themes recur, in a far more sombre register, in Ingmar Bergman’s “The Virgin Spring.” Set in medieval Sweden, at the moment when the old pagan faith is giving way to the Christian one, the film is a story of innocence, loss and redemption that seeks, as its very title suggests, the source of life through darkness, the same generative force carried by the Paleolithic “Venuses” of the exhibition.

The Virgin Spring, 1960, 89’

Medieval Sweden, on the threshold between the old pagan faith and the new Christian one. Young, innocent Karin sets out to carry candles to the church and, on the way, falls victim to a terrible act of violence; her father, Töre (Max von Sydow), takes merciless revenge, only to find himself afterwards broken before his own crime and before the silence of God. With an austere, almost spare eye, and through the luminous black-and-white photography of Sven Nykvist, Bergman does not hold us at a distance but draws us into the heart of the drama, turning the act of looking into one that carries moral weight.

And when all seems lost, at the very place where innocence was extinguished, water springs from the earth, a source, a beginning, life rising up out of death. Winner of the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, “The Virgin Spring” remains one of the director’s harshest and at the same time most luminous works, a reverent allegory of loss and redemption that, in its final image, touches the oldest theme of the exhibition: the source of life itself.

Director: Ingmar Bergman
Screenplay: Ulla Isaksson, based on a 13th-century Scandinavian ballad
Cast: Max von Sydow, Birgitta Valberg, Gunnel Lindblom, Birgitta Pettersson