STOCKHOLM. In the films of Ingmar Bergman, everyone seems to be afflicted with the extreme form of Wilhelm Reich's "emotional plague." Brows are knit, eyes are glazed, consciences are stricken and souls are tortured. Bergman's universe–and to most Americans, Sweden is nothing more than a cinematic projection of that universe–is a place of anguish, guilt, fear and isolation.

For some, this is a slightly absurd universe, for it bears little relation to the workaday world we all have in common. It is certainly true that people have identity crises, suffer from isolation and are haunted by nameless terrors. It is also true that they brush their teeth, slip on banana peels, burp and generally make asses of themselves. But very few of these activities creep into Bergman's cinematic vision. Judging by his preoccupation, Bergman should be a gaunt, tortured, hallucinated neurotic. The fact that he is as normal as smorgasbord is an infuriating contradiction.

There is an enormous amount of misconception about the man. The general impression is that he is a moody, suffering artist who tortures a movie out of his anguished soul and then recuperates in a mental institution. Part of that fallacious notion grew out of the fact that years ago he suffered from a bleeding ulcer and had to visit a hospital regularly for treatment, but nothing has been heard of the ulcer for the past seven years, and Bergman assumes, whatever its psychosomatic cause, it has now disappeared forever. "I am, I'm sorry to report, very balanced, very happy in my marriage and thoroughly unneurotic toward my work. What I mean by that is this: When we are on the stage or in a studio and we create terrible things, moments of death or torture, still we are all in a very good mood. In fact, we even joke among ourselves. We know that we are playing a game, are allowed to play a game just like children. That seems to me to be very unneurotic behavior."

What many people do not seem to have realized is that there was a profound change in Bergman about the time of his work on Winter Light, a film that was not very successful by Bergman standards but which provided a catharsis for him. "When the religious aspect of ray life was totally eradicated," he said, "my life became so much easier. Did you ever read a wonderful essay by Sartre which was printed in some silly magazine? I think Vogue. In it he spoke of his inhibitions as artist and writer. He suffered because what he did wasn't good. Slowly he realized that this nagging anxiety about his failure to create things of value was an atavism rising out of a religious idea that there is something that can be called the 'highest good' or 'perfect,' created by man. In discovering this atavism within himself, the surviving idea of the absolute, extreme perfection, and in seeing through it and cutting it away, he lost his inhibitions in regard to his artistic work. I have had a strangely parallel experience. When the heavy religious superstructure collapsed and disappeared, my writing block also vanished. I lost my literary inferiority complex. I lost, above all, the fear of not being up-to-date and modern. Everything was cleared with Winter Light."

Part of Bergman's revelation had to do with the perishability of life and the futility of spiritual abstractions. "The only life that exists for me is this life, here and now, and the only holiness that exists is in my relations with other people. And outside, nothing exists. When I realized that, when I began to understand that everything happens here and now in the world around me, it gave me a marvellous feeling of relief and security. I found a new power with which to do my work, and there was a kind of new beginning for me. No, I don't believe in any afterlife because this life gives me everything I need; the cruel, beautiful, fantastic life. For me, the meaning of everything is life itself. I don't need any other."

The change in Bergman was almost classically existential. Released from the fetters of a childhood dominated by religious influences, Bergman discovered that there was sweet liberation in embracing things themselves without referring them to demons or deities. But he also believes that people never change and that blinding perceptions about one's character very rarely lead to a transformed personality; and in his work, particularly Cries and Whispers, the demons persist.

It is this dichotomy in his nature, the demonic in combat with the earthly, which accounts for a certain lack of cohesion in his later works. It is as if the filmmaker did not entirely believe his own films, as if he appreciated their power to persuade others without himself being persuaded. In Cries and Whispers, for instance, a highly evocative piece of film making, which dominated this year's New York Film Critics awards, characterization and situation thoroughly hypnotize the spectator. Only afterward is one aware that one's emotions have been manipulated by a master craftsman rather than gripped by any inherent content.

As with Hitchcock, whom Bergman admires and from whom he admits he has learned a great deal, we realize, after being released from the spell, that the images and apparitions which held us were all of a wizard's making, that wizardry is not the same thing as plausible reality. As far back as 1960, Bergman almost conceded as much: "I am really a conjurer and in my work I am guilty of deceit."

There is probably no "conjurer" in the world who possesses as much freedom as Bergman. On several occasions he has rejected lucrative Hollywood offers–mainly because they did not insure his approval of the final cut of the film. "It's like approaching Oistrakh," says Bergman, "and saying to him, 'Come to New York and play Beethoven's Violin Concerto–but of course, you must use my violin, not yours.' Do you think he would come?"

Artistically, there is no reason in the world why Bergman should consider any other place. In Sweden where for many years he was Svensk Filmindustri, the country's largest movie company, he has his own technicians, his own cameramen and his own stable of actors and actresses; people who, in many cases, have been his for more than 20 years. What kind of incentive can any foreign studio offer to compare with that? But there are other, perhaps more basic, reasons why Bergman refuses to stir from Sweden and speaks of "the great fear" whenever he leaves.

For Bergman the production of a film or play is an exercise in family life. He works with friends and colleagues of long standing, cannot abide "an enemy on the set" and grows paranoid if, even for legitimate reasons, one of his family of actors refuses an invitation to lunch or tea. "Do you know what movie making is?" he once asked. "Eight hours of hard work each day to get three minutes of film. And during those eight hours, there are only 10 or 12 minutes, if you're lucky, of real creation. Everything and everyone on a movie set must be attuned to finding those few moments. You've got to keep the actors and yourself in a kind of enchanted circle. An outside presence, even a completely friendly one, is basically alien to the intimate process going on in front of him." Bergman, despite tantrums and peevishness, recognizes that, at base, he is a timid person and a lonely one. He profoundly needs the feeling of being "part of a group," of living in "the collective world of film making" where "performers, the members of the crew–everyone is forced into a form of communion that is worthwhile and constantly fascinating. The great stimulation one has all the time is that one is with people. Living people."

But there is something even more important. "Here," he has said, referring to his work setup in Sweden, "I have complete loyalty and real loyalty is not uncritical." The American critics ill-treatment of Elliott Gould's performance in The Touch disturbed Bergman because "I know how vulnerable this man is, and how absolutely loyal he has been when we worked together." Alluding to the actors of the National Theatre with whom he undertook "Hedda Gabler," his first venture with an English-language production, Bergman said: "Wonderful actors, sensitive, professional and extremely loyal to me." One senses that balancing his obsession with loyalty is a capacity to turn ferocious if betrayed, and that in his earlier days, before he became the autocrat of the Swedish cinema, there must have been betrayals which left their mark.

Bergman was born on July 14,  1918. His father was a Lutheran parson who eventually became chaplain to Sweden's royal family and, as far as one can gather, Bergman suffered much isolation as a child, perhaps because his parents felt it was sinful to fuss over children. Significantly, his earliest memories of childhood are of light and death. "I remember how the sunlight hit the edge f my dish when I was eating spinach and, by moving the dish slightly from side to side, I was able to make different figures out of the light. I also remember sitting with my brother, in the backyard of my flat, aiming with slingshots at enormous black rats scurrying around. And I also remember being forced to sit in church, listening to a very boring sermon, but it was a very beautiful church, and I loved the music and the light streaming through the windows. I used to sit up in the loft beside the organ, and when there were funerals, I had this marvellous long-shot view of the proceedings, with the coffin and the black drapes, and then later at the graveyard, watching the coffin slowly lowered into the ground. I was never frightened by these sights. I was fascinated."

At the age of 9, he traded a set of tin soldiers for a battered magic lantern, a possession which altered the course of his life. Within a year he had had created, through play with this toy, a private world in which he felt completely at home. He fashioned his own scenery, marionettes and lighting effects and gave puppet productions of Strindberg's plays in which he spoke all the parts.

Bergman's first notable venture into live theatre was a student production of "Macbeth" in 1940, in which the theme was closely associated with the recent Nazi invasions of Scandinavia and the Low Countries. It caused a great stir in the town and was something of an embarrassment to his parents. But Bergman admits that, despite being hailed as a highly relevant political statement, it had very little to do with a political conscience. "I was very fascinated by the play and I thought this was a very fitting way to do it. Nothing more. I was, like so many of my generation, very unconscious politically."

Then came a stint at the Royal Opera House where his main job was fetching sandwiches and coffee for the directors. "I was assistant to everybody and paid nothing. It was incredibly humiliating, but it helped me to learn my craft because, you must remember, there were no schools then at which one could learn to be a director." Bergman's film career was launched by Carl Anders Dymling, then president of Svensk Filmindustri, who saw Bergman's university production and offered him a job. After many months of routine script work came an opportunity to direct a film every other director at the studio had rejected. "But at that stage in my career, if I had been asked to direct the telephone book, I would have done it." The first 14 days were a disaster as the tyro Bergman coped, for the very first time, with the intractable mechanics of putting together a film. Everyone who saw the work asked Dymling to cancel the project because it was so atrocious, but Dymling stuck by his apprentice. "After the first two weeks he said to me: 'Now we put aside everything you've done and we start all over again, for now you've acquired some experience.' And so I started all over again from the beginning and made an extremely bad picture." "Do you remember the title?" I asked him. "Crisis," said Bergman, exploding with laughter.

Soon after that he submitted a short novel intended for a film (this is the way Bergman usually prepares his scenarios–as prose narratives): it became Torment in the United States, Frenzy in England, and launched Bergman in a film career almost without parallel in Europe. "Here was an extremely angry young man," Dymling recalled, "long before such men became the fashion. A writer looking at the world through the eyes of a teen-age rebel, harshly criticizing his parents, offending his teachers, making love to a prostitute, fighting everything and everybody in order to preserve his integrity and his right to be unhappy." Just how uncharacteristic Torment was at the time became clear as Bergman's canon unfolded. Before 1956, he was practically unknown outside Sweden. Then, within four years–after Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Brink of Life, The Magician and The Virgin Spring, a host of film trophies and an Academy Award in Hollywood–he became a towering cult figure in the art cinema and, more important to his American distributors, box office as well. For most Americans, the notion that Swedes were screwed-up God-obsessed souls living in torment was the legacy of Bergman's early films, and there were many in Scandinavia who resented this, insisting that one man's aberrations should not be taken to represent an entire country's character.

As with any film maker whose work spans nearly 30 years, there have been highs and lows. Bergman remembers them all. In the sixties, many critics disparaged his impregnable privacy and his predilection for Gothic imagery, which remained obscure to the general public. "It may sound ridiculous, but the wounds go deep when you're told again and again to give up: 'Do we have to see the films by this Ingmar Bergman any longer? If you do go into the cinema, hold your nose.' And someone wrote about Sawdust and Tinsel: 'I refuse to make an ocular inspection of this most recent sample of Ingmar Bergman's vomit.' This kind of thing was poured over me during my most sensitive years–before I'd gained any confidence in myself. I often thought that they might be right. And I felt terror at the thought that what I was doing might be wrong."

For several years, the anti-Bergman crusade was in full swing and although Bergman was quoted as saying, "I've given up reading what's written about me or about my films," certain criticisms, to a man who craves loyalty and wants to be liked, must have been hard to bear, coming as they did after so much glittering idolatry.

At the height of the anti-Bergman wave, the Swedish cinema magazine Chaplin decided to produce an anti-Ingmar Bergman issue. There were many vitriolic contributions. One of the most telling came from an Ernest Riffe, who demolished the filmmaker with astonishing insight. "This artist without any substance of his own," wrote Riffe, "needs a literary work to fall back upon. Then, and only then, can his best qualities be released." As this coincided with the view held by most Swedish intellectuals, the essay was welcomed. Then Ernest Riffe revealed his true entity–none other than Ingmar Bergman. Riffe made a second, less publicized, appearance several years later when Bergman, whose attitude toward notoriety is, as with all celebrities, fiercely ambivalent, wrote a piece entitled: "Through a Film Maker Darkly." Here are some of the answers to his own questions:

Where do you stand politically?

"Nowhere. If there were a party for scared people, I would join it. But as far as I know there is no such party."

Your religious leanings?

"I don't belong to any faith. I keep my own angels and demons going."

Say something about The Shame.

"I don't discuss my own films. That would kill the pleasure for audiences and interpreters."

Can we talk about your private life?

"No, we can't talk about my private life."

What the hell are we going to do then?

"I don't know. You're being paid to write about me, not me. If you start crying, I don't plan to console you."

If you don't cooperate. I'm going to write something terribly unpleasant about you and your films. If I were you, Mr. Bergman, I would watch myself. You're on the skids. You need us. We don't need you. You're terribly old. You're not big business. Face the facts and let's work out an interview in an atmosphere of mutual consent.

"Excuse me. If I have offended you, I'm sorry. You destroy me. I'm willing to make all the concessions you wish. What do you want me to do? Shall I kiss your behind?"

I can imagine greater pleasures.

"Do you know what a film is? No; how the hell could you? You're a critic. A film is like a big wheel that one gets started with all the physical and spiritual power that one can muster. Slowly, the wheel starts to move. And its own weight gets it to turn faster and faster. In due course, one becomes hopelessly a part of the wheel, of its motion. That's the way it goes. Let me conclude our discussion with a punch on the jaw and by wishing you good luck."

This parting shot was premonitory, for two years ago in Stockholm, during a performance of his production of Woyzeck, Bergman did just that. The critic Bengt Jansson, who has a reputation for being heedlessly venomous, was seated on the stage along with other members of the audience, for in this unconventional production of the Büchner play, the audience was allowed to overflow onto the boards. Jansson, in a conspicuous position and conscious of being recognized, was taking notes and responding in a negative way to the performance. "I was becoming more and more angry with him, and so I thought to myself, what can I do to scandalize this man, to make him unable to write any more about my productions, to make him the centre of attention in such a way that everyone becomes aware of what he is? I decided the only thing to do was to strike him, officially, in cold blood, as a deliberate attempt to remove his influence. I didn't want to hurt him, you understand, just to make an official scandal."

The ploy worked in spite of the fact that before Bergman could actually connect with his chin, the critic defensively slumped to the floor. There was the anticipated sensation, attendant newspaper publicity, even legal action. Yet even today in Sweden one cannot mention Jansson's name without commenting on his unjustified sourness and recalling the Bergman scuffle.

But the violent Bergman, the young man who used to rip telephones off the walls and throw chairs through glass control booths, is long gone. He was, according to the mature film director, an insecure person who felt the need to assert himself in order to get his own way. To meet him today, either socially or at work, is to confront a placid, methodical, almost over-fastidious man with droopy eyelids, thinning hair and hatchetlike features, who appears to take a genuine interest in everyone he speaks to. He listens attentively, coolly deliberates alternative courses of action, operating cerebrally rather than emotionally. But of course, there are still incidents. "I am impatient; I have always been impatient–particularly with incompetence. If someone comes to me and says, 'I'm sorry, Ingmar, I don't know exactly now to do such and such a thing,' it's all right. But when people are incompetent and try to make me believe they are competent, then I fall into a rage."

Next to his films, Bergman's love life is one of the most discussed subjects in Swedish gossip magazines and newspapers. Bergman himself refuses to discuss his personal life and, when I began by stating it was a highly personal interview I wanted, he replied: "If I had known that, I would never have agreed to see you."

Bergman is now in his fifth marriage, to Countess Ingrid von Rosen (who, as Ingrid Bergman, now establishes the Ingrid-Ingmar confusion for all time). She is a wealthy woman in her 40s whom Bergman met 25 years ago and allegedly fell in love with on the spot. But before he married her, there were choreographers, actresses and conceit pianist Käbi Laretei, with whom he seemed to have an idyllic relationship. Bergman has eight children in all. One of them, Linn, now 6, was born of his five-year liaison with actress Liv Ullmann.

Bergman is on genial terms with all his women ("When I start to love someone, it is for life") and three of them worked in complete harmony on his latest film, Cries and Whispers–Miss Ullmann playing a leading role, his present wife, Ingrid, acting as his assistant, Käbi Laretei playing the piano for the sound track. Little Linn also contributed a walk-on performance. Shortly after the split with Miss Ullmann ("We were really living his life," she once said), Bergman worked with her on a television series which dealt with emerging consciousness: the story of a woman who can live without the help and support of a man. For many, the series was Bergman's reworking of the Ullmann relationship, a significant example of the way in which he can methodically structure incendiary personal material before it has completely cooled. "He doesn't marry women," said one ex-wife, "he appropriates material." But even she said it fondly.

As with most artists, Bergman's true home is the Bergman imagination, but geographically, he has found a home on the island of Fårö in the Baltic Sea. When he first contemplated living there, he was in a very romantic frame of mind, seeing it as a kind of island retreat away from the worries of the world. But on Fårö, which has only 754 inhabitants, he found himself for the first time in a little world where, because it was so small, everyone was interdependent and isolation was virtually impossible. "I live with these people's problems. They are my problems. When there's a storm, the ferryboat to the mainland cannot operate: we all stay together on the island. When the electricity fails, I sit here in the dark, as does my neighbour. When the snow falls, we help each other to shovel it away. If someone asks you for help here, you can't say, 'Please come back tomorrow.' He comes for help because he needs it; there is no place else to go; he is your neighbour–you see him each day. You are obliged to live one for the other. You see, I originally came to this island to escape social communities, and then I found myself within one. Although I am miles from Stockholm, I never feel isolated here. I live in a true society, one I can understand."

Bergman's attachment to the island is more than that of a city dweller's fondness for a rustic retreat. One senses that the community has taught him about life among simple, uncomplicated people with elementary human appetites, an experience he never had as a child and which is markedly different from the life he leads in Stockholm. He has made a touching documentary about the people on the island and, in all his conversation about it, one discerns the unmistakable satisfaction of a man who has adopted a locale he is proud to call his own. Since it is the very antithesis of an ivory tower, it seems a curiously uncharacteristic home for Ingmar Bergman.

Although he professes to love the theatre more than the cinema and has established a creditable reputation as a stage director, being at present director of the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Stockholm, it is with films that Bergman will always be associated. Lionized by the cineastes, he is once again the darling of the French and American intellectuals. Yet Bergman's attitude toward film making is untheoretical and almost anti-intellectual.

"As far as I'm concerned," he once said, "I am making things for everyday use. I'm making utility articles. If they do become something above and beyond that, I'm pleased. But I'm not working sub specie aeternitatis." He shies away from definitive statements about filmic art ("that tapeworm 2,500 metres long that sucks the life and spirit out of me").

"There was someone who said that a film director is a person who never finds the time to think because of all the problems. That is the closest definition I can think of. Then, of course, one can think up a lot of things on the spur of the moment. All sorts of explanations. One can say that film direction is the transformation of visions, ideas, dreams and hopes in pictures which convey these feelings to the audience in the most efficient manner. One can also say that film direction can be given a strictly technical definition. Along with an awful lot of people, performers and technicians, and a tremendous lot of machines, one produces a product. It's an everyday product or a work of art, whichever one prefers. What it is in reality, or if it is all of this or none of this, I'm unable to answer although I have been directing films for 27 years."

Bergman is not concerned with politics. What interests him is the "inner politics" between people, which never changes. "I don't set out to paint a picture of society, but it's obvious that indirectly I depict the society I'm living in. I'm only a reflection of the conflicts, phenomena and tensions that exist in society, the upbringing, the world that is mine. Certain things produce a reaction in me, in my guts, on my radar. Certain things give me a reading on this radar and begin to merge and function with earlier experience. This is then expressed in works of art, a kind of correspondence, a need for contact, an appeal to the world around me."

Bergman believes a clear distinction must be drawn between his private commitment ("which is surely nobody's business") and his commitment as an artist. "As an artist I am totally awestruck by what's happening, and I can't take any sides." He has no patience with overtly political cinema statements. Discussing the French director Jean-Luc Godard, he once said: "You know, little French children are taught rhetoric at school. They have to go up the front of the class and hold a discours on some subject. It seems to me that Godard should get top marks for standing in front of the class and talking crap."

To get some insight into Bergman's aesthetic, one examines the way movies begin to bud in his consciousness. Persona came to life when one day Bergman saw two women sitting together comparing hands with one another. "I thought to myself that one of them is mute and the other one speaks." The germ for The Silence came from a hospital visit where "I noticed from a window a very old man, enormously fat and paralyzed, sitting in a chair under a tree in the park. As I watched, four jolly, good-natured nurses came marching out, lifted him up, chair and all, and carried him back into the hospital. The image of being carried away like a dummy stayed in my mind." In other cases, films have been suggested to Bergman by essays, novels, pieces of music. In every case, some outside event has turned the key on some deep-seated memory. Each film has been a projection of some past experience. To make a film which didn't in some way materialize the spectres of his inner life would be unthinkable for Bergman. (Cries and Whispers was shot in a house in which Bergman used to live and with which he had profound associations.) The satisfaction he derives from film making is akin to that of a man returning to the haunts of his past and suddenly understanding the implications of what took place there.

Bergman, nearing 55, has no apprehensions about old age. "It's like climbing a mountain. You climb from ledge to ledge. The higher you get, the more tired and breathless you become, but your view becomes much more extensive." He divides his time between Stockholm and Fårö, preferring the island hideaway. He is a passionate newspaper reader and television viewer. He suffers from insomnia and listens to pop music on the radio, sometimes all through the night. He always loved music and, if he had not been a film maker, would likely have been a musician, a player of the cembalo. He has unexpectedly popular tastes; he loves the Beatles and thoroughly enjoyed The Godfather. His favourite film directors have always been Fellini (with whom he feels an enormous closeness) and Kurosawa ("He is so warm and yet ice cold as well. He has these things he wants to tell you. He's like a cozy voice just going on and on–telling you things all the time. I think he's incredible"). He has an abiding admiration for Hitchcock and Chaplin, and a little while ago, when asked his favourite films, listed The Lady With the Dog, Rashomon, Umberto D, and Mr. Hulot's Holiday.

I told him that although Sweden always conjured up sexual associations in American minds, the pornographic films I had seen in Stockholm were very disappointing. "I agree," he said. "The German porno and even the Danish porno films are better than the Swedish, but the best of all, you know, is Japanese pornography, for the Japanese have a fantastic pornographic tradition going back thousands of years. Yes, pornographic art can be a kind of new field. It really belongs on television. Just imagine a pornographic channel. You switch it on late at night and amuse yourself and your family. It could be marvellous. No, the Swedes are clumsy with sex; we don't know how to behave. Yet we too have a pornographic tradition–in our folklore, in our humour, stories which have been handed down from generation to generation."

For a long time Bergman had a feeling of inferiority before the newer, younger film makers, of being left behind, démodé. This fear, as he has said, was dispelled during his work on Winter Light, a time when he came to terms with his own nature as an artist. He now makes no bones about his reverence for tradition. He recalls how he experienced the sense of tradition while waiting in the wings before a performance of his production of Strindberg's Ghost Sonata in Stockholm's Royal Dramatic Theatre, the same theatre in which the play was originally performed 66 years ago, with the same lines about to be spoken, the same situations about to be played out. Although his production was vastly different from Strindberg's original, he was still conscious of the link between the nineteen-hundreds and the nineteen-seventies, a sense of belonging to and perpetuating what Strindberg had wrought.

Bergman makes an important distinction between living and dead traditions. "Take Brecht," he said to me. "He was always fresh, always searching; a totally alive man, writing, drinking, wenching, quarreling with his wife. And yet, one year after his death, the Berliner Ensemble had become institutionalized, petrified, his followers embalming all the works. Great artists," he said sadly, "should have no disciples."

In his own work, although there are no disciples as such, Bergman takes great pains to encourage and assist his younger colleagues. Birger Juberg, one-time head of Svensk Filmindustri, revealed that many of Bergman's 15 daily working hours were spent helping other film writers and directors. "He has a knack for immediately finding solutions," said Kenne Fant, a Svensk Filmindustri producer and director. And Bergman points out there are dozens of new, up-and-coming men making first-rate pictures–directors like Bo Widerberg (Elvira Madigan) and Jan Troell (The Immigrants).

Despite the "great fear" of leaving Sweden, Bergman recently accepted an offer to direct Molière's The Misanthrope at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen but again there were buffers. He was friendly with the leading actor, having used him in his films; Stockholm was only hours away, and there was also his great love for Molière, whom he sees as an adorable maverick in the highly disciplined society of Louis XIV's France.

Although he often talks of retiring, it is clear that there are still demons in Bergman's mind that must be exorcised. To stop film making would be tantamount to ceasing to think, for so long as Bergman's mind is alive, his craft must translate what he finds there. Cries and Whispers was his first real foray into colour photography, and one senses that he has other experiments up his sleeve (like shooting an entire film from one, unchanging camera angle). Whatever work is produced in the future, one can be sure it will come out of need or conviction for Bergman is as incapable of marking time in the cinema as he is of wasting it in his private life. In a wildly fluctuating international film industry, where producers and distributors vie for profit, actors are "properties" and films "packages," it is somewhat reassuring to know that in the frozen twilight of Sweden, there is a man for whom there is no difference between art and movie making.

Charles Marowitz is an American critic living in London, where he is director of the Open Space Theatre, known for its avant-garde productions.