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"The Virgin Spring" (1960).
“Now I want tom make it plain that The Virgin Spring must be regarded as an aberration. It’s touristic, a lousy imitation of Kurosawa. At that time my admiration for the Japanese cinema was at its height. I was almost a samurai myself!”
- Ingmar Bergman in Bergman on Bergman, 1970
The most obvious Kurosawa comparison regarding the above themes and Bergman's quote would have to be "Rashomon". That being the case, I will share a partial comment i recently made on the film talk blog to get us started...
i also just watched Rashomon for the second or third time, but it felt like a first. i had never before been so struck by the final scene with the infant, which carries a significant amount of symbolic weight. So much so, that i am not sure that kurosawa was making a film about the relativity of truth (that is so often written about), but that he was actually making a film about an ultimate truth, in regards to our response to our broken, dishonest, and violent nature.
so maybe he was suggesting, that by recognizing our broken nature and taking responsibility for it through an opportunity to reconcile broken relationships (adopting an orphan, re-unifying mother and child, frogs falling from the sky, hari and kris, etc) that there might be hope for redemption? - and if that were true, maybe "Truth" actually does exist, despite are incapability to be totally honest with ourselves? ...to which i strongly feel, was the actual "point" of Rashomon, and seems to be a substantial truth of "Paris, Texas" as well.
and also a substantial truth of "the virgin spring". bergman, as usual, digs as deep into our being as possible, forcing us to confront our humanity on it's lowest level. interestingly, with this film, bergman allows us, encourages us to feel justified in the possibility and execution of revenge...at least against the two men who raped and killed his daughter. but they also had with them a child, their brother, who was innocent, traumatized, and abused. he witnesses this act of severe revenge, runs into the arms of the dead virgin's mother, who embraces him - only to be ripped from her arms, thrown and killed by the raging father, furious with revenge. but immediately, the father is mortified by his act. and those of watching are unable to breath.
both bergman and kurosawa push us to the limits of our devastation. as if there can be no hope for reconciliation or redemption or enlightenment, until we are willing to accept that you, and I, and we, are capable of horrible atrocities against those we love and hate. we are damn vulnerable to it, and to not accept it in ourselves, makes our attempts at loving our neighbor, our God, and ourselves, feeble and surface. and i believe one of the essential foundations for the relational holocaust in the western post-modern world, is our inability to look in the mirror before we put on make-up.
Only after the two men in the respective films accept the worst of themselves, accept the worst of humanity, can they offer penance to God and neighbor. One rescues an abandoned infant at the gate of Rashomon, the other promises God that he will build a church of stone and mortar, right where the innocent virgin lay, raped and dead.
which is somewhat reminiscent of St. Francis confronting and embracing the repulsive and disgusting leper...
"One day, while crossing the Umbrian plain on horseback, Francis unexpectedly drew near a poor leper. The sudden appearance of this repulsive object filled him with disgust and he instinctively retreated, but presently controlling his natural aversion he dismounted, embraced the unfortunate man, and gave him all the money he had. About the same time Francis made a pilgrimage to Rome. Pained at the miserly offerings he saw at the tomb of St. Peter, he emptied his purse thereon. Then, as if to put his fastidious nature to the test, he exchanged clothes with a tattered mendicant and stood for the rest of the day fasting among the horde of beggars at the door of the basilica.
Not long after his return to Assisi, whilst Francis was praying before an ancient crucifix in the forsaken wayside chapel of St. Damian's below the town, he heard a voice saying: "Go, Francis, and repair my house, which as you see is falling into ruin." Taking this behest literally, as referring to the ruinous church wherein he knelt, Francis went to his father's shop, impulsively bundled together a load of coloured drapery, and mounting his horse hastened to Foligno, then a mart of some importance, and there sold both horse and stuff to procure the money needful for the restoration of St. Damian's."
and in confronting and embracing our own poverty, our own repulsion and disgust and disease - only then will we be at the starting point of reconcilation and redemption - only then will we subvert the relational holocaust, rather than perpetuate it. i guess that could be true. at least, i feel that this is what is being offered by the medieval context of all three narratives - that "the salvation of humanity lies in it's shame."
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