Oscar Horrors: 'The Virgin Spring'
Friday, October 19, 2012 at 5:00PM 
Oscar Horrors continues with Beau and his favorite filmmaker.
HERE LIES... Ingmar Bergman's The Virgin Spring, which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film for 1960.
I'm not going to beat around the bush here. Let's just get right to it. Ingmar Bergman is my favorite filmmaker of all time. He's self-indulgent, woefully meandering, and I love him for it. I first watched The Seventh Seal when I was all of eighteen, and the imagery and gallows humor wowed me. I pursued the rest of his respective oeuvre like a feverish animal, devouring early works and late masterpieces with the rabid enthusiasm of a junkie who just discovered Burroughs, Kerouac and Ginsberg on the same day.
That being said, The Virgin Spring was a strange one for me. A meditation on the convoluted, considerable blindness of faith at odds with the cold, ruthless foundation of nature by way of a virginal sacrifice? Oh no, Ingmar, no. Don't worry about imbuing levity here dude, we cool.
While all of his films have resonated since first viewing, The Virgin Spring was peculiar for the fact that you sensed he wasn't entirely being himself...
