Bergman 16 & 17: The Virgin Spring (1960) & The Devil's Eye (1960)

As with The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries in 1957, it's fascinating to think about the way Bergman's imagination worked to be able to produce such different films in a single year. (Although the dating probably introduces a slighly arbitrary sense of division into what was really a more continuous state of productivity, constantly switching between theatre and film, and - quite simply - working really hard.) The Virgin Spring is another stone-cold masterpiece. As others have commented, it really succeeds at making its medieval protagonists seem like real people, with the usual complications and inconsistencies, unlike so many other "historical" films which can make it feel as if it was a misfortune to be born in the 14th century, say, because the human race hadn't quite "grown up" yet. Uniformly strong performances, plenty of humour but also some real brutality - and it also avoids the rather buffoonish use (presumably meant to be Shakespearian) of the lowlife characters in which The Seventh Seal indulges. The Devil's Eye is a lighter work but nonetheless successful, I think, though the format may be a little more unfamiliar to contemporary audiences - a comic allegory in the form of a kind of morality play, with Don Juan released by the devil with a view to corrupting a young virgin (Bibi Andersson, in a very well-controlled performance). Again there are fine performances all round, particularly from Nils Poppe (Jof in The Seventh Seal) at the vicar and Gertrud Fridh as his wife. The script has a lot of fun with the ironies enabled by the allegory ("I'll be damned!", says someone on more than one occasion), and I suspect there may be Swedish proverbs or sayings I don't know that are also being exploited (anyone know if there's such a saying about "having a devil in your cupboard"?). I particularly like the way it handles its tonal shifts, not lurching from the excessively comic to the oppressively melodramatic, as I suspect a contemporary take on the premise would be liable to do. These two films taken together also form something of a handover of cinematographers, with Sven Nykvist working with Bergman for the second time on The Virgin Spring - about to embark on the extraordinary run of films they made together in the 60s and 70s - while The Devil's Eye marks the last time Gunnar Fischer worked with Bergman. It's a very elegant send-off, with a beautifully elegant classicism to it. Nykvist's work on The Virgin Spring, though, really highlighted for me something of Bergman's influence in a certain strain of art cinema - everything from early Tarkovsky to Béla Tarr came to mind at different times. Something to do, I think, with a tension and intensity of composition and lighting that is fully expressive, never purely "pictorial" for its own sake (whatever that would actually mean).