Bergman said it himself and was not flattering about it, calling The Virgin Spring a touch of Kurosawa and an aberration in his own work. What he took is visible in the first minutes: a medieval story told in hard sunlight and deep shadow with the forest as a presence, long silent stretches carried by weather, and an act of violence staged flatly, at a distance, with no music to tell the audience how to feel. Filed MEDIUM, and the wording matters: this is a stated debt of technique on one film, not a lineage. Bergman's source is a medieval Swedish ballad; what Kurosawa gave him was how to shoot it.