As a college student in the Fifties, I sat in the dark watching, with uncritical admiration, such films as Sawdust and Tinsel, The Seventh Seal, and Wild Strawberries. Along with the films of Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Jean-Luc Godard, and François Truffaut, Ingmar Bergman's questing, melancholy knights, shabby, emotionally trapped circus people, and chilly, civilized doctors were part of my introduction to the European art film. I soon learned that Bergman's films ranged from drab social-realist works like Brink of Life to airy, witty comedies like Smiles of a Summer Night, and to expressionistic films about artists and critics like The Magician. Not every film was a masterpiece, but they all carried great emotional impact. Although it's become something of a cliché of Bergman criticism to speak of his penchant for posing 'existential' questions, his films can be deemed honest and passionate inquiries that explore the nature of artistic commitment, death, relationships between husbands and wives and parents and children, and God's existence. During my youth, his films so powerfully moved me that I began to examine my own life in a different light–something that few works of art ever achieve.

Bergman began making films in 1945 and made his last and arguably his most tender (but never saccharine) and high-spirited feature film, Fanny and Alexander, in 1982. (He has not retired, however, and continues working in the theatre, writing books and scripts, and making television films into his mid eighties.) Fanny and Alexander is a valedictory, three-hour epic, Bergman's celebration of the power of the imagination, and a lush, phantasmagoric recreation of his often painful childhood. It's an apt, bountiful final testament to a brilliant film career.

During his lengthy career, Bergman made more than fifty films, including masterworks like Wild Strawberries, Persona, Shame, and Scenes From a Marriage. In the early 1960s, Bergman directed three chamber-drama films–The Silence, Through a Glass Darkly, and Winter Light, three very different films unified only by their formal bareness, beauty, and dark power–that The Criterion Collection has now released on DVD as a box set. Also included is a fourth film, Ingmar Bergman Makes a Movie, a five-part comprehensive documentary on the making of Winter Light, one of Bergman's favourite films. The documentary is directed by filmmaker Vilgot Sjöman (I Am Curious–Yellow), and was, in Sjöman's words, "the first and only time that Bergman let someone document his filmmaking from the first idea to the first showings."

Bergman envisioned the trilogy as "films that deal with reduction"–"chamber works" that allow for only a limited number of voices and motifs, in which the external world is "put into sort of a fog."¹ He also conceived the trilogy as evoking variations on the theme of God's existence and silence–the last time that Bergman confronted these themes directly. All three films are small in scope, large in ambition, and at moments emotionally overpowering. All of them were made with the close collaboration of the great cinematographer, Sven Nykvist, with whom Bergman had, in his words, "developed a private language." They worked together on more than twenty films.

Light Keeps Me Company, a documentary lovingly directed by Nykvist's son, Carl-Gustav Nykvist, allows us to see the great cinematographer behind the camera and hear a number of the people who worked with him discuss his work, including Woody Allen, Roman Polanski, and, of course, Bergman. What Bergman and Nykvist both share is a profound respect for light, and a commitment to "registering the human soul in the human face." The two men worked brilliantly in concert and the trilogy reflects their concern with visual power and perceptiveness and human drama.

The trilogy also evokes Bergman's troubled childhood as the son of a severe Lutheran pastor, who he remembers as being rooted in "sin, confession, punishment, forgiveness, and grace." The director's youth was generally a time of torment that was dominated by his parents' loveless marriage, a difficulty distinguishing between illusion and reality, and a "joyless relationship with God"–all elements that profoundly shaped the psyche and films of the adult Bergman.

Many of these themes come to the fore in the Academy Award-winning Through a Glass Darkly (1960). Set on a remote, strikingly severe, rock-strewn island, the film chronicles the gloomy vacation of a self-involved novelist, his gangly vulnerable adolescent son, his schizophrenic daughter, and her compassionate but weak doctor husband. In a Bergman film, it's rare that any character is untroubled and buoyant, and Through a Glass Darkly adheres to that pattern, with all the family members weighed down by an assortment of emotional demons.

The father, David (Gunnar Björnstrand), uses his daughter's pain as material for his fiction. The husband, Martin (Max von Sydow), loves his wife, but is condescending ("dearest little girl") and incapable of offering Karin more than soothing, dutiful responses that she finds wanting. The brother, Minus (Lars Passgârd), is undergoing all the sexual and psychological torments of puberty, and is too closely bound to his sister, who teases and flirts with him. And Karin (Harriet Andersson), who suffers from an incurable mental illness, hears voices in the wallpaper, seeks a radiant benign God, and seamlessly shifts from lucidity to uncontrolled madness, always conscious of her changing emotional states.

All four characters are intelligent people trapped by their own tortured, solitary selves, and almost constantly in despair. While other directors might reduce the anguish of these protagonists to a single note, Bergman depicts their suffering in a nuanced, multilayered fashion. The cultivated, successful novelist cries alone in a gloomy room and claims to be a failed suicide. A chilly man, he creates a "magic circle" around himself for self-protection. This carapace, however, proves ineffective–his pain and sense of emotional impotence cannot help but come to the surface.

The husband Martin walks with the bearing of someone beaten down by life, and is emotionally out of his depth when dealing with Karin. Still, he's complex enough to sharply confront David for writing fiction subtly filled with half-truths that resemble truth. It's a charge that grows less from Martin's character than from Bergman's own subtle, slyly defensive autocritique.

Minus is a callow, aspiring writer anxiously seeking his father's acceptance. He is sensitive to Karin's pain, but can't do more than follow her lead when her madness takes over. Despite her mental anguish, Karin is sensual, perceptive, and the film's central and strongest figure. Much of Karin's madness is expressed in religious terms, and the God she seeks turns out to be an evil spider that tries to enter her. For Bergman, God has turned into either a destructive force, a monster–or, more likely, has been replaced by salvation found only, in this world, through the power of "love."

Through a Glass Darkly's most powerful scenes are emotionally riveting enough to bring to mind Kafka's notion of art as an axe that smashes the "frozen sea" within us. Although it's not a formally virtuosic work, it uses sound–foghorns, birds, pelting rain–to haunting effect. Its most glaring weakness lies in its penchant for making portentous, empty statements, without the saving grace of irony. David seems to be Bergman's mouthpiece; he glibly asserts near the film's conclusion that hope lies in "every sort of love," and that consolation rests in the idea of love as a substitute for God. The concluding scene seems tacked on–an affirmative, contrived note that appears incongruous in a thoroughly pessimistic film.

Winter Light (1963) is the least dramatic and most brilliantly severe of the trilogy, what Bergman's wife of the time called a "dreary masterpiece." Bergman retreated from Through a Glass Darkly's more upbeat approach (in fact, he mocks it here), and wanted to "sweep his house clean" of religious faith but still leave us with some possibility of leading a meaningful life.

The film's central figure is Tomas (Gunnar Björnstrand) a somber, sickly pastor in a rural church with a minuscule congregation, who has lost his faith ("God, why have you forsaken me?"). Tomas offers only hollow words or self-involved confessions of his own agony to his parishioners, which just promotes, rather than alleviating, the suicidal despair of a fisherman who comes to him for help.

The setting–the dark, cold, frozen landscape and silent, empty churches–adds to the mood of desolation that permeates the film. The despairing Tomas cares little about other people, and is surly and sadistic to his long-suffering lover, Marta (Ingrid Thulin), the woman who loves him (too obsessively and egoistically), and continually tries to console him. Marta is a myopic spinster teacher who suffers from eczema and is constantly blowing her nose. But she has an awkward passion for life, and in her excessive twenty-seven-page letter to Tomas she simultaneously displays an incisive intelligence, complete awareness of her own unhappiness, and abject need for him ("I live for you").

By the film's conclusion, although Tomas does not magically recover his faith, something has changed. God remains silent, but Tomas conducts a service for only Marta and his forlorn, crippled sexton that affirms some small connection and even empathy for his two fellow sufferers. A small community has been created here, without belief in God or in some other abstraction like love. Nothing grand is discovered, just a touch of meaning in the void. In Winter Light Bergman states he finally ended his "traumatic conflict" over religious belief, destroying God's image but holding to a "perception of Man as the bearer of holy purpose."

In Winter Light (without indulging in any false or rhetorical notes), Bergman creates fully realized, unhappy characters with palpable yearnings, played by actors who subtly convey every nuance in their discordant relationship by a look or a shift in their posture. Tomas and Marta may be irritating, unpleasant people–devoid of a scintilla of grace–but the film still succeeds in evoking sympathy for their plight. Winter Light is a small, austere, emotionally true and fully realized film.

The Silence (1963) completes the trilogy, and is the most controversial and least hopeful of the three films. It provoked anger from audiences and government censors for its relatively explicit sexuality, and, as a result, it predictably became a commercial success. The Silence contains powerfully erotic sequences (masturbation, fornication), but is far from pornographic. It is a work built around striking visual images and motifs, without a real narrative or much dialog to provide information or explanations. In fact, the one scene that contains a great deal of dialog between the two sisters is too literary and artificial.

The two sisters (who possibly once had an incestuous relationship, and who are, on another level, alter egos)–are like spirit and body. The tense, intellectual, dying Ester (Ingrid Thulin) and the voluptuous, overheated Anna (Gunnel Lindblom) with her lonely, observant son Johan (Jörgen Lindström) arrive by train to an alien Eastern European city. It's a city whose language they don't understand, and, with tanks mysteriously moving through its streets, the place seems on the verge of war.

The sisters are both profoundly linked and hostile to each other. Anna is hedonistic, luxuriating in her body, and appeases her sexual hunger with a hotel waiter. She rages against what she sees as Ester's sense of superiority and "self-importance." Ester's remoteness only makes Anna more furious. Ester, in turn is repelled by Anna's indolent physicality. While Ester may project a chilly persona, one senses that beneath her tendency to self-laceration and controlled bitterness lies a great deal of unexpressed passion.

The innocent Johan is caught between the two women, although there is no suggestion that he's emotionally harmed by their conflict. He's in thrall, in Bergman's words, to Anna's "magic circle of her own animality." But Johan is also fond of the repressed Ester and embraces her before leaving with Anna on the train. Ester's final act is handing him an enigmatic note with words in a foreign language. Johan is the only life-sustaining figure in a film in which emotional barrenness is the norm.

The Silence is less about the tormented conflict between the two sisters than it is about an alienated world, enveloped in silence, where communication is almost impossible. Bergman may stack the deck here by including a troupe of dwarf actors, a hotel with endless corridors, and an utterly strange language that the sisters can't speak or understand. But the rich, mystifying imagery and the lengthy close-ups that capture the essence of the two sisters' characters evoke a mood of bleak hopelessness without seeming at all pretentious.

Criterion has also recently released on DVD Bergman's Scenes From a Marriage, an accessible, straightforward work that is a change of pace from the despairing tenor of the trilogy and films such as Persona and Hour of the Wolf (no dreams, self-reflexivity, or stylized sequences). Scenes From a Marriage was also a commercial and critical success. Made originally as a six-part television film that reached millions of people, in the course of being made into a feature film entire scenes and characters and almost 120 minutes were cut for theatrical release, yet the shorter version never feels diluted or incoherent. The DVD includes both the theatrical and television versions. The television version includes stretches of nonstop dialog that would not work in a single evening screening, plus scenes that provide additional texture to the lives of the main characters. The exclusion of these scenes, however, in the version released to American audiences, doesn't diminish the quality of the feature film at all.

Scenes From a Marriage is deceptively simple in style. Tight close-ups, two shots, and the classical shot/countershot style take precedence. Stylistic pyrotechnics are less important than the quest for intimacy and psychological truthfulness; the harrowing fight between husband and wife, for example, is shot with a hand-held camera. The film is also dependent on searing, penetrating dialog–arguably offering the most moving and complex dissection of marriage ever shown on screen. The central figures of Scenes From a Marriage are less anguished and more sympathetic than the Bergman norm. Johan (Erland Josephson) is an egotistical academic scientist with a stalled career, and Marianne is a more selfless and passive divorce lawyer. They ostensibly have a happy marriage, but Bergman quickly disabuses the audience of that illusion when their relationship begins to unravel.

Bergman never depicts the shifts in the relationship in a simple one-dimensional manner, with love abruptly turning to antipathy. Instead, he evokes the tenuous and infinitely changing nature of human connection. There are role reversals (she becomes more assertive, he more confused and melancholy), condescension, self-deception, resentment, rage, physical blows, and genuine tenderness. During one evening, the couple indulges in loud recriminations and then express a need to touch each other, without any of their behavior being telegraphed–the changes in mood occuring in an almost imperceptible manner.

Ending with neither joyous affirmation nor irreconcilable hostility, Scenes From a Marriage is, in the final analysis, tinged with tenuous optimism. At the film's conclusion, the central couple are each now married to other people, but are having an affair with one another. We are left with two people who are incapable of living together, but cleave to each other in the warmth, sexual attraction, and alienation of an "earthly and imperfect" love.

An additional five-film DVD box set of Bergman's films, including Persona and Shame, has just been released by M-G-M. Persona is Bergman's most enigmatic, most formally experimental, most complex, and greatest work–he admitted that he "did not care in the least whether the result would be a commercial success." It's a film given to a variety of interpretations, with every one of them open to contradiction–a work that Bergman saw as "going as far as he could go" and "touching wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover."

Persona's precredits sequence exemplifies the film's ineffable and self-reflexive quality–Bergman opens with a montage (rare for him) of poetic images that helps establish the sense of dislocation that permeates the film. The images include footage from a naughty cartoon, a hand being nailed to a cross, a lamb being slaughtered, and then scenes from a morgue–a boy lying under a sheet, who comes alive, and wipes his hand over a screen with a woman's face on it. The screen reveals an image of two women's faces merged–the central motif of a film where selves dissolve into each other, dream and reality blur, and what is seen is always open to question.

The indeterminate narrative of Persona centers on an actress Elizabet (Liv Ullmann) who has made a conscious choice to withdraw from the world into a sullen, superior silence. She is sent from an eerily blank-walled hospital to Bergman's rocky, desolate home island (Faro) in the care of a vulnerable and seemingly cheery Alma (Bibi Andersson), who admires her. The settings are ostensibly realistic, but they are stylized to evoke a profound sense of aloneness, which is one of Bergman's prime tropes. Soon Alma begins to change–she becomes unprofessionally intimate–recounting to Elizabet a self-abasing story about having sex with two boys on a beach, a sequence whose eroticism is heightened by leaving its enactment totally up to the viewer's imagination. There are also the reaction shots of Elizabet stimulated by the story, "her face transformed into a sort of cold, voluptuous mask" that reinforces the erotic atmosphere.

Of course, in a Bergman film the characters who appear untroubled and in relative control of their lives–Alma is a case in point–are often overcome by inner turmoil. The film doesn't, however, just see Alma turned inside out by Elizabet's aggressive silence. Alma does change into an extremely disturbed pinch-faced woman (expressing her Jungian inner soul or alma), furious, to the point of violence, towards Elizabet who she feels has treated her with condescension and contempt. But when the narrative shatters–the film burning inside the projector, the screen turning blank, some images from the prologue recapitulated, atonal music on the soundtrack, and the image going out of focus–the two women's consciousnesses begins to fuse. And what occurs is never clearly spelled out–it remains fragmented and enigmatic–something that can't be reduced to a psychological explanation. As Susan Sontag observes, "the difficulty of Persona stems from the fact that Bergman withholds the kind of clear signs for sorting out fantasies from reality offered, for example, by Bunuel in Belle de Jour...The viewer can only move toward, but never achieve, certainty about the action."

Alma and Elizabet exchange masks, and soon they begin to share one–the doubling that is manifested in a variety of ways throughout the film. There is a soliloquy running several minutes repeated verbatim twice by Alma–once focusing on Elizabet's reactions, and then on her own utterances. Alma speaks for Elizabet, expressing all that she has left unspoken, and even dreams that she has become her–kissing Elizabet's husband passionately.

The feverish agony of the film's second half may not be easily explicated, but it is so potent that one finds oneself recoiling from Alma's rage and desperation (stunningly embodied by Bibi Andersson's mesmerizing performance). Bergman is a genius of filming the human face to capture the essence of his characters' feelings. And Alma's ire, desire for retribution, and emotional deterioration registers in her eyes and the set of her mouth. Soon Alma's language begins to disintegrate–sucked dry by Elizabet's silence–and she's left with voicing "a desperation perhaps"–feeling the uncertainty of both language and identity. At the conclusion we see Elizabet return to the stage, and Alma to nursing–back to the personae that uneasily cloak their tormented inner selves.

One other aspect of Persona should be mentioned. Bergman has never been a film-maker with a particular concern for the political and social world or its dynamics or problems. He has stated in an interview that, "[A]rtists are hardly the social visionaries they used to be. Reality is running away from artists and their political visions." In Persona, he somewhat gratuitously inserts a classic photograph of Jews being rounded up in the Warsaw ghetto, and a television image of a South Vietnamese monk's self-immolation. He does this possibly either to suggest that these horrendous public events emotionally reinforce Elizabet's decision to withdraw from the world, or that the murderousness of the world parallels the violence and sense of victimization she carries within her.

In Bergman's Shame, however, political anguish has a more central role. The film focuses on a musician couple whose marriage is alternately happy and stormy–the voluptuous, maternal, practical Eva (Liv Ullmann) and the hapless, needy, and selfish Jan (Max von Sydow), who have taken refuge from a war on an island where they grow and sell fruit.

The civil war reaches the island, and these two private people are trapped by events that bewilder, ravage, and transform them. Bergman sees these people as "acting in panic" and "out of one motive: self-interest " The war itself is detached from any political or historical reality–it's nameless and abstract–a disembodied struggle with no clearly defined sides. Bergman's concern is in what happens to people when they confront a violent crisis–where the sounds and sights of devastation and slaughter become omnipresent–rather than in the ideological or political roots of a war–the existential rather than the political.

In using the plight of these two apolitical figures, Bergman stunningly and realistically evokes what wars and political terror do to the human psyche. The world turns into a "state of nature" out of Hobbes, where life is "nasty, brutish, and short." An older, urbane friend of the couple, Jacobi (Gunnar Björnstrand) has some political clout and they become abjectly dependent on his favours. But since those who hold power are constantly changing, his authority is abruptly undermined and he is executed. Eva, who has always been the strongest of the couple, sees her will and capacity to cope diminish, while Jan turns into a brute–committed to survival at all costs.

The war has destroyed their humanity, and, according to Bergman, "we've disinherited ourselves" and there is no hope. It's a shattering film–made more powerful by Bergman's willed detachment from the war in Vietnam that was raging at that time (there are no good or bad forces in Shame). What he leaves us with are ineluctable neoexpressionist images of the broken couple dazedly wandering about a violated landscape of stripped trees, dead people and animals, and ultimately sitting mutely in a boat going nowhere, as the sea turns into a graveyard filled with dead bodies that float past them.

The Passion of Anna is a less successful film than Shame, but contains a number of emotionally overwhelming scenes. It takes place on the same remote island as Shame, where an ex-convict Andreas (Max von Sydow) has taken refuge from his failed life. He's a withdrawn, solitary man, capable of tenderness, who also displays a great deal of violent rage. He finds relative solace for a time with another severely wounded person, a translator, Anna (Liv Ullmann), who is striving for spiritual perfection and truth. She has moral force, but has built her life on a lie, and for Bergman there's something "terrifying" and "dreadfully destructive about Anna's moralism"–it's a passion that is literally murderous.

Loosely constructed and utterly bleak, The Passion of Anna does not even offer a glimmer of hope or light. Bergman conceived the film "as growing out of the setting of Shame that now manifested itself for me in the same milieu but in a more surreptitious way." Consequently, Bergman populated the island with a lunatic who is tormenting and murdering animals and a reclusive man who is mistakenly accused of the crimes, then moved to committing suicide by the island folk's attacks. And Anna's friends Eva (Bibi Andersson) and Elis (Erland Josephson) live very well, but the comfortable surface they have constructed belies their profound unhappiness. Eva is insecure, bored, and suicidal, and while Elis may be a successful architect, he is utterly cynical about his work and protects himself with a weary and sardonic exterior.

Every character in the film lives in isolation, and most are suicidal. The problem with The Passion of Anna is that it's monochromatic–it offers no relief from its emotional barrenness and the destructiveness of its characters and environment. But within these limitations, Bergman exhibits a genius for capturing the physical and psychic fury that can exist between people who live with one another (in one scene Andreas cannot stop himself from beating Anna). Andreas and Anna are insulated figures, who are unable to transcend their crippled selves, and stem their suffering. In the final scene, we see Andreas madly pacing back and forth and then falling to his knees, as the camera zooms in, with the screen becoming grainy. The light then increases, and the image disintegrates before our eyes. The narrator's final intonation–"this time they called him Andreas Winkleman"–suggests that this is not a unique story, and that the stunted self-destructive lives of intelligent, sensitive people are a commonplace, at least in Bergman films.

While all these films are compelling and powerful to greater or lesser degrees, Bergman was also capable of making imaginative and ambitious films that artistically misfired. The Hour of the Wolf is an extremely personal work, for example, that contains startling images of a world of labyrinthine corridors, shadows, and cannibalistic boys, but it feels strained and excessive. The film strives too hard to evoke a sense of the grotesque and the mad–at moments turning itself into some conventional work of horror filled with images like an ancient woman ripping off her masklike face and removing her eyeballs, and the insidiously mild-mannered Baron effortlessly walking on the ceiling.

Bergman's tormented painter alter ego, Johan (Max von Sydow) struggles with his own destructive demons that separate him from the stolid reality of Alma (Liv Ullmann), the nurturing pregnant woman he lives with. Johan is an insomniac, a compulsive artist, who can't control his inner life and obsessions. Bergman saw the film as exploring a "deep-seated division within me, both hidden and carefully monitored." It was a split that has appeared in the guise of different characters such as Aman in The Magician, Ismael in Fanny and Alexander, and Tomas in Face to Face. Bergman offers no one explanation for Johan's hallucinations, but the film suggests that his growing psychic fragmentation has roots in early childhood trauma, and also derives from the abject role of the artist in a society that treats him with disdain and tries to emasculate him. The Hour of the Wolf is a richly suggestive work, but it also clearly exhibits one of Bergman's weaknesses–his penchant for humorless grandiosity.

The Serpent's Egg, another Bergman film in the M-G-M box set, has even fewer redeeming qualities than The Hour of the Wolf. It's a film that Bergman himself saw as a "substantial failure." Shot by the director when he was in self-imposed exile in Germany during the mid-Seventies (the result of a traumatic conflict with the Swedish tax authorities), the film is on the surface a richly realized recreation of 1923 Berlin in a disintegrating Weimar Republic–a city of tawdry nightclubs, public beatings, massive unemployment, and rampant anti-Semitism.

Unfortunately, the historical and political perspective of The Serpent's Egg is subordinated to a more metaphysical vision, with the film's most powerful image being a gray, haggard-faced crowd struggling in slow motion, like people making their way through quicksand (a black-and-white motif that underlines Bergman's debt to German Expressionism). Bergman's vision of Weimar society contains no class or historical analysis, just a depiction of hapless marionettes dancing to some undefined, murderous tune. There is no possibility for change, human nature itself having become corrupted to the point of having turned demonic.

But the film's central weakness lies in what is usually Bergman's greatest strength as a director, his handling of his main characters–the two former circus artists, the solitary, apolitical, and Jewish Abel (the wooden David Carradine) and the naïve, easily victimized Manuela (Liv Ullmann). They are carriers of free-floating despair, more social exemplars than fully-realized characters. And their anguish has little connection with the public nightmare that Germany is undergoing, and which will evolve into a full-blown apocalypse. The descent of a society into anomie is more than the sum of personal tragedies, but Bergman's work is rooted in the personal, not the social and political. In The Serpent's Egg even his normally acute exploration of private emotions never comes alive.

Credit must be given to both The Criterion Collection and M-G-M for so handsomely mounting Bergman's work on DVD. The Criterion discs preserve the luminous black-and-white imagery of the trilogy and contain commentary by Bergman biographer Peter Cowie, who always speaks cogently and with quiet authority about Bergman's work. The MGM DVD on Persona carries a not particularly revealing commentary by another Bergman biographer, Marc Gervais, in the short documentary, A Poem in Images. The DVD, however, is redeemed by its ability to preserve the unique look of Persona–all lengthy close-ups and long shots–and to include two short interviews with Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson, which provide a great of deal of illuminating personal detail about their relation with Bergman. This MGM collection also contains an additional disc, which includes a perceptive interview with Bergman from 1970, and a short feature exploring the austere beauty of his favorite location–Fårö Island–where a number of his films have been set.

Given Bergman's repeated use of the same actors, locations, and his exploration of some of the same themes and obsessions, the Bergman signature has always been recognizable. Apart from their thematic richness, Bergman's films brilliantly exhibit a capacity to convey his characters' interior landscapes through evocative sound and image. Think of the mysterious, haunting night image in Persona when, under a hazy light, Elizabet appears to float and embraces Alma. In fact, Bergman sees "film as above all connected with rhythm," and "the primary factor being the image."

I'm not uncritical of Bergman's films–they rarely display wit or irony–and his sometimes unremitting sense of life as a vale of tears is ripe for parody. Still, without indulging in hyperbole, he is a great filmmaker, the moody maestro of angst. Although his work is often linked with Strindberg (whose plays he continues to direct and infuse with his own vision), Bergman's work is usually more nuanced (even offering a sliver of hope) than Strindberg's relentless pessimism.

Bergman sees film as "a form of art that goes beyond ordinary consciousness, straight to our feelings, deep down into the dark rooms of our souls." Indeed, there is no other director who can convey the heart of his characters' psyches and souls as profoundly and as intensely as Bergman. He's the most personal and honest of filmmakers–a man whose work is a direct expression of his guilt, dreams, frustrations, and confusions. Bergman's films project a struggle with the complexities and ambiguities of his existence, and almost never take refuge in intellectual games or constructs. His work is emotionally naked rather than cerebral. I know it has become unfashionable to glory in the unique vision of an artist/auteur, but in Bergman's case the exultation is well deserved.

Bergman Cracks a Smile The one exception to Bergman's generally humourless oeuvre was Smiles of a Summer Night (1955). Smiles won the award for Best Comedy at Cannes, was an international success, and gave Bergman, in his words, "free rein" from then on to make the films he wanted to make. The film was the turning point in his career, and was later even turned into Stephen Sondheim's hit musical A Little Night Music. Smiles of a Summer Night is a verbally elegant, brilliantly choreographed tragedy-farce, which, though touched with despair, maintains a lighthearted tone throughout. Bergman successfully set out to make an epigrammatic, decorative, and stylized film about love that is characterized by a veil of irony. The film's dominant character is Desiree (Eva Dahlbeck), a statuesque, blond actress, an independent woman who views love as a "juggler's act." Desiree is hedonistic, wise, manipulative, and maternal. In comparison, the men in her life are absurd in their vanity and emotional blindness. In most Bergman films, in fact, the women characters are much stronger and more knowing than their men. Still, despite Desiree's talent for amorous game playing, nobody in the film comes out victorious. The men and women who are meant for each other ultimately find their way to the right person, but there are no passionate embraces, just weary acquiescence at the film's climax. In Smiles of a Summer Night, those who find romantic love are shallow and virginal, while the others, who are aware of their true natures, make the best arrangements they can. Smiles may be a comedy, but it is one shrouded in Bergman's vision of human limitation.