The combination of high-contrast black-and-white cinematography with extreme close-ups – a stylization that, in this country, reached a belated apogee in “Raging Bull” and is now enjoying a surprise return in “Good Night, and Good Luck” – achieved Nordic apotheosis in the middle-period films of Ingmar Bergman. The pictures he made between 1957 and 1963, from “The Seventh Seal” through “The Silence,” have a gleaming, inky, fixed look, the images as doted on as the gown in “The Virgin Spring,” sewed by 15 maidens. However bleak humankind’s prospects in an indifferent universe, the pictorial opportunities are ravishing.

This paradoxically stark yet luscious visual approach helped secure Mr. Bergman a brief art-house hegemony and decades of parody. It continues to secure for his films a respectful if by no means reverent reception. The handsomeness itself is dramatic, compensating for the sluggish pans, logical lapses, and “whither God?” meditations.

These heirlooms from a distant shore are not beyond criticism, just impervious to it. We may speak of each shot in an Antonioni movie as a perfect photograph, but we don’t really mean it; that is, we never really feel we are in a museum instead of a movie theater. Perusing middle-period Bergman is not unlike strolling through, say, London’s National Portrait Gallery and spotting the originals for dozens of vaguely recalled paperback and classical music album covers. Mr. Bergman’s stills have wider currency than his films.

“The Virgin Spring” (1960), its gleam fully reverberant in Criterion’s new DVD – and bolstered by comments and reminiscences from Mr. Bergman (audio), actors Gunnel Lindblom and Birgitta Pettersson (video), fan Ang Lee (video), scholar Peter Cowie (print), and scenarist Ulla Isaksson (print) – arrived midway in the cycle. It was the second and last of Mr. Bergman’s medieval tapestries and the first of his films photographed by his longtime second-in-command, Sven Nykvist. The plot is so tidy and generic (revenge is mine, if that’s okay with you, Lord) that it found an audience even as critics dismissed its technique and concerns as passe. Censorship battles regarding the rape and murder of the virgin didn’t hurt.

The story is based on an old Swedish ballad, “Tore’s Daughter at Vange” (included in the DVD booklet), in which Karin, the vain and spoiled daughter of a farmer, rides late in the day to church, richly adorned. Three herdsmen rape and murder her, and a miraculous spring flows where her body is abandoned. The killers ask for shelter at her home, revealing their foul deed by offering for sale Karin’s clothing. The father, Tore, butchers them and prays for forgiveness, vowing to build a stone church.

Isaksson’s screenplay makes many alterations, of which the most significant involve conflicts between nascent Christianity and lingering Paganism, personified by the dark and wild-eyed Ingeri (Ms. Lindblom, whose finest moment is a barking “Ha ha!”). Ingeri, a pregnant and abused foster child who is jealous of Karin (Ms. Pettersson), wills the catastrophe. In terms of movie and box-office conventions, the key plot change saved the miracle for last, after Tore (Max von Sydow), begs forgiveness. “The Virgin Spring” is the only Bergman film in which God isn’t silent; he takes Karin, but gives back a spring. The moment Tore lifts his daughter’s head and the rivulet begins to gush is memorable, though perhaps not as picture-perfect as Tore wrestling with a birch tree. A particularly nice touch has Ingeri as the first to accept the spring as a sign, devoutly cleansing her face in it. For a true pagan, one superstition is as good as another.

“The Virgin Spring” moves at a deliberate pace, but not one of its 89 minutes falters. Mr. Bergman not only framed his shots as souvenir postcards (Here’s our last supper! Wish you were here!), he filled them with religious symbols, rituals, allegorical side steps, fairy tale replications, woodcut chiaroscuros, and imaginative medieval observations. When Karin wants to examine her features, she looks into a water barrel, asking her hovering mother to get out of the light. (Medieval teenagers were just like today’s – only more virginal.) The overall structure reverses God’s rainbow sign, beginning with the invocation of fire and ending with purifying water.

But when action is called for, it’s delivered. The rape and murder of Karin is made singularly appalling by mechanical details (one scoundrel holds her legs out so the other can position himself), oppressive silence during the ordeal, and Karin’s final, terrible, dazed glance back at those who inexplicably took her innocence, sense of self, and life. Similarly, Tore’s vengeance, though illogically staged, is no more in doubt than Viggo Mortensen’s Ubermensch triumphs in “A History of Violence,” which bears a more than passing resemblance. Tore is trying to live the life of a peaceful, Christ-abiding farmer, though his wrath is made the more horrible because it involves killing an abused and innocent boy.

In Mr. Bergman’s filmography, the middle period divides his early, more naturalistic work from his mature, psychologically fragmented masterpieces of the mid-1960s, including “Persona” and “Hour of the Wolf.” After “The Silence,” he tried color for the numbingly unfunny satire of artists “All These Women,” but soon mastered saturated color with distinctive sureness in such benchmark films as “Cries and Whispers,” “Autumn Sonata,” and “Fanny and Alexander.” If “The Virgin Spring” seems like a minor endeavor in his development – stylistically and thematically regressive – it stands out as peculiarly characteristic of its time.

Released in 1960, it was not the only film that year to bring a new, graphic, sexually animated violence to world cinema. At a time when young French and Italian directors were propagating a self-reflective new wave, breaking with the standard grammar of filmmaking, veteran directors were gnawing at the conventions of censorship. Their grueling violence was almost always directed toward women.

Alfred Hitchcock, who had rarely indulged in explicit bloodletting, unleashed “Psycho”; Michael Powell, who had tempered his most violent conceits in ballet and opera, went for the jugular in “Peeping Tom,” and Luchino Visconti sacrificed a prostitute on the altar of rape and murder in “Rocco and His Brothers.” The year after Mr. Bergman took an Academy Award for “The Virgin Spring,” Vittorio De Sica, the most charming of naturalists, won one for Sophia Loren, who survived rape in “Two Women.” (Best foreign picture went to Mr. Bergman again, for “Through a Glass Darkly,” in which another Karin seduces her brother and loses her mind.)

The horrific content of “The Virgin Spring” outlived its religious-ethical concerns and was twice invoked in straight-out horror films, by Wes Craven as “The Last House on the Left” (1972) and, more stylishly, bloodily, and morally intricate, by Italian giallo specialist Aldo Lado as “Night Train Murders (1975). Mr. Lado goes far beyond Mr. Bergman in implicating the audience in obscene crimes while whetting its appetite for vengeance, but his film will never be more than a cult favorite for those with strong stomachs and a need for sadistic gratification, because the religious factor, for which Mr. Bergman was mocked, is absent. “The Virgin Spring” holds the imagination because in addition to its vivid beauty, it acknowledges the truism that even if we don’t believe in God, we can’t help but wonder what in heaven’s name he’s thinking.

Mr. Giddins’s column appears alternate Tuesdays in The New York Sun.