All for Show (Feb. 3-26, Nexus, 137 N. Second St., 215-629-1103) Curated by Lee Campbell, Nexus' monthlong show rounds up the work of two dozen or so British video artists with an underlying strange-bedfellows theme. Posed in dingy domestic settings, bald-capped Beagles & Ramsay dryly narrate the lyrics to Madonna and Prince songs, while Adrian Lee takes a swastika-shaped coat rack for a stroll through the streets of Germany. Elizabeth McAlpine reduces Nicolas Roeg's creepy Don't Look Now to a jumpy series of degraded excerpts, helpfully filling in the bits of the movie you might have blinked through, while Jaspar Joseph Lester seamlessly links the insides of several dozen elevator cars, so that the doors seem to open on an infinite variety of retail spaces. Too many of the pieces amount to filmed stunts, with the camera acting as no more than a recording device, but at least Paul Masters' Dancing Plants lets marijuana and ficus groove to the sounds of Donna Summer, and feels like a little movie to boot.

Comanche Station (Tue., Feb. 7, 7:30 p.m., free, Free Library of Philadelphia, Chestnut Hill Branch, 8711 Germantown Ave., 215-248-0977)/Seven Men from Now ($14.99 DVD) Collectively known as the Ranown Westerns, the seven movies Budd Boetticher made with Randolph Scott between 1956 and 1960 are models of terse floridity, made with B-movie economy and an expansive sense of landscape. Drawn from opposite ends of the cycle, 1956's Seven Men from Now and 1960's Comanche Station reveal the thematic consistency and constant motifs that made Boetticher a favorite of auteurist critics like the great Manny Farber. In both movies, Scott plays a stoic widower whose iron-clad morality puts him in conflict with a garrulous, colorful villain (Lee Marvin and Claude Akins, respectively). Burt Kennedy, who wrote both scripts, reprises lines and even a major sequence (involving the villain's attempt to test Scott's honor in front of a female third party) in the later film. An uncharitable observer might call it recycling, but Comanche pares down the story almost to abstraction: Its in-medias-res beginning might seem to set the stage for a movie that's nothing but action, but in fact Boetticher has merely cleared the way for lingering shots of the California countryside, a terrain at once more seductive and more forbidding than John Ford's Monument Valley. The film advances in shots whose unbroken expanses are particularly impressive given its limited budget; in one memorable tracking shot, Boetticher follows Scott and Akins on horseback for several minutes, then lets a train of animals pass by until the subject of their conversation comes into view.

Movies as obsessed with landscapes as these deserve to be seen on the big screen (the Chestnut Hill Film Group's showing is 16mm Panavision), but Paramount's bargain-priced disc offers ample consolations, including a restored transfer, commentary and an hourlong documentary on Boetticher's life and work—though not the superior career overview A Man Can Do That, recently aired on Turner Classic Movies. Apart from rare cable airings, the rest of the Ranown movies remain hard to see, but here's hoping that Seven Men is merely the first drop of a future torrent.

The Virgin Spring ($39.95 DVD)/Saraband ($29.95 DVD) "Visceral" isn't the first word you'd use to describe Ingmar Bergman, but 1960's Virgin Spring was bloody-minded enough to inspire Wes Craven's Mansonian Last House on the Left. Craven didn't credit the original, but by then, even Bergman had washed his hands of the film. Though it won an Oscar in 1960, The Virgin Spring was attacked by some of Bergman's most ardent admirers, and its still-shocking violence was censored in the United States.

Wrestling, as always, with the problem of faith—at first spiritual, then personal—Bergman took on a loose adaptation of a medieval ballad in which a young girl is killed, her father avenges her, and then seeks to atone for his act, embodying the transition from eye-for-an-eye justice to Christian forgiveness. Maintaining that rough outline, Bergman muddied the waters so that almost every character occupies an uncertain moral standing. Even Karin (Birgitta Pettersson), the unsullied maiden of the title, is vain, boastful and naive—hardly characteristics worthy of her eventual violation and death, but enough to prevent her coming off as a spun-sugar saint. Karin's foster sister Ingeri (Gunnel Lindblom) is scowling and resentful, her tattered sack dress and pregnant belly contrasting sharply with Karin's fair-haired perfection. But it's not long before we start to share some of her resentments, and her sullen shell cracks when she believes that, by wishing ill on Karin, she has inadvertently caused her death.

The Virgin Spring's intensity pushes at, and sometimes past, the edge of parody—a term Bergman later used to describe Max von Sydow's performance as Karin's stern father Töre. But Bergman contrasts the dialed-up performances with Nykvist's stark, chiseled images, which often have the disconnected beauty of a Cocteau film. That's true even for Karin's horrific rape and murder, particularly when she stretches herself out across a thicket of gnarled tree branches in an attempt to escape her attackers. Bergman's murder ballad is a fairy tale as well. Though it hardly seems "explicit" in the era of Irréversible, the dreamlike setting only heightens the brutality of Karin's death. It's as if we, too, are in a nightmare from which we cannot escape—a sentiment reprised when the murderers are themselves trapped, having unwittingly taken refuge in Karin's home after killing her. After a grotesque Last Supper parody in which the killers dine with Karin's parents, the killers are locked in the barn and left until morning, when Töre commences his bloody work, though not before scouring himself with the branches of a fresh-cut tree. The shot of von Sydow struggling to uproot a solitary sapling is a potent symbol of his grief, and the fact that he waits until daybreak to exact his revenge perfectly anticipates his distraught cry, "God, you saw it!" Despite, or perhaps because of, its excesses, The Virgin Spring is one of Bergman's most engagingly ambiguous works; his weakness for speechifying is mitigated when he's not sure what he wants to say.

Bergman has called Saraband, released last year, his final film, but his quasi-sequel to Scenes from a Marriage feels more like a postscript than a grand farewell. In a documentary attached to the DVD, Bergman can be seen attending to every detail of the production, much more of which was shot in the studio than you'd ever imagine. He dictates what kind of red wine needs to be on the table in one scene, tweaks the timing of the actors' movements, and even sends a production designer to dab gold paint on leaves to achieve the proper autumnal look. Not surprisingly, his process is one of dissection, right down to the fact that each part of what seems to be a contiguous house is composed of its own set. It may be standard TV practice, but the disassembly of Johan's house seems the ideal summary of Bergman's art.