"I traded my country to my brother for the magic lantern," said Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish film director. "I was 6 years. He was 9. I have never regretted it." The country he traded was two opposing armies, 100 tin soldiers, always in battle. Strange, for a child brought up in the peaceful air of a parsonage, in a country that has not been at war in 150 years, but then Bergman is a complex of paradoxes, ambivalences and enigmas.

Bergman loves his country and rarely leaves it, yet is almost painfully sensitive to its cold weather. (On the warm indoor set of The Communicants, he was wearing a wool cap, wool sweater, windproof jacket and heavy flannel pants.) He is a sad man who likes to laugh, a thin man addicted to sweets, a tense man with the facade of ease, a solitary man who needs company. He is, above all, a perfectionist who begins writing at 5:30 A.M. (he writes most of his own screen plays with a ballpoint pen) and ends the day by dropping in on a play he has directed to see if the performance is up to standard.

The people who work for him reflect his ambivalences; they resent his demands, admire his results. They roll their eyes and complain of his insistency; they are proud of their unplumbed capacities Bergman constantly reveals; they are totally loyal to him, as he is to them.

The magic lantern of Bergman's childhood was supplemented by a Chinese shadow theatre and a film projector with a single, endless strip of action film. Bergman is now 43, but he still plays with the toys of fantasy. His equipment is more expensive: Mitchell cameras and sound stages; theatres and live actors; opera houses complete with orchestras, sets and singers–his latest production, Stravinsky's "The Rake's Progress"–but in the end, Bergman is doing now what he did as a child in 1924, giving dimension to his private fantasies, embroidering an infinite tapestry of film with the symbols of his personal concerns.

Mutual Aid

He was born with talent, he created his own concerns, but he has been remarkably lucky in being given the opportunity to master the crafts, men, machines and being given the money to produce whatever he wants. His luck was in the sponsorship of the late Carl Anders Dymling, president of Svenskfilmindustri, producers of Bergman's films for twenty years. Dymling saw in the 24-year-old Bergman an unrealized talent, hired him, gave him his head, fought for him for years while his pictures lost money, (until 1956) and fought with him, too. The present management has continued the turbulent, but finally rewarding, tradition.

"He has always been a problem, not only to others but also to himself, and I think he will remain so," Dymling once observed. "He is a high strung personality, passionately alive, enormously sensitive, very short-tempered, sometimes quite ruthless...suspicious, stubborn, capricious, most unpredictable." But Dymling allowed Bergman "to use the film as a means of self-expression to an extent which few directors in the world have done."

Self-Expression

The very personal quality of everything Bergman does is the measure of his successes and his failures. A graph of his work would have to be three-dimensional, at least. He has not (and probably never will) proceeded in any single direction because he is constantly exploring and expressing a complex and inconsistent spirit. When he finished The Virgin Spring he was so drained and tense, he had "to tell a joke" as a friend puts it. So he made The Devil's Eye. Where did he find the "Old Irish Proverb" ("A woman's chastity is a sty in the devil's eye") from which the title comes? "I made it up," says Bergman. He seems uninterested that a second-hand, second-rate picture like The Devil's Eye may water Bergman stock.

If any trend is discernible in his work it is toward purity and simplicity. His latest film, which Swedish critics unhesitatingly call his best, is Through a Glass Darkly. It has only four characters, takes place with twenty-four hours, contains only eight minutes of music, and uses no camera trickery. "Style and technique, as palpable entities, are serious impurities to my way of thinking," he writes in connection with Through a Glass Darkly.

Bergman lives in a world as tightly knit as the rusty navy-blue wool cap he wears every day, and has been wearing daily for as long as anyone can remember. "I do not take it off because I then would not feel secure," he says. For the same reason, he works at the same studio, often with the same actors, the same crew, as he has done for twenty years. "It is cold on top," a friend says, "and these old friends keep him warm." The same friend says that Bergman's stormy personality is now a legend: it existed "when he wasn't sure what he was doing, then it is difficult to control oneself," the friend says. "But today, Bergman is totally in control, when he works there is a marvelous calm, the set is bathed in a light, creative atmosphere."

Religious Motif

One can see this on the set of The Communicants in Svenskfilmindustri's Film Staden (literally, film city) in Stockholm. The set was the interior of a fifteenth-century church, complete to apse, nave, choir stall, altarpiece and even a ceiling.

"I want the feeling of being inside," Bergman said. Some of the gothic arches were in the shape of men with outstretched arms touching at the peak. "They were not willing to give up entirely the old Gods," Bergman said. "They were not sure that the new God had the answer." When everything was ready, he quietly ordered the sound and camera: a hymn was heard and the camera focused on the faces of Max von Sydow and Gunnel Lindblom. Then Bergman touched the camera man's shoulder and the latter swung the machine toward Ingrid Thulin, in a back pew, while an assistant manipulated the lens. Something went wrong with the sound: Bergman made a joke of it, everybody laughed; in three minutes they were ready for a second take. Bergman said "Tak," "Thanks."

Double Exposure

Then he ordered another set-up, this one of Gunnar Björnstrand, dressed as a minister, reading from the Bible. This, too, was done twice. Bergman rarely does more than three takes. Then it was near the end of the day and Bergman said "Tak for all," and that was that.

Of his own work he picks Illicit Interlude ("It is close to my heart") and, modestly, Through a Glass Darkly. "I say honestly, but I don't want to make"–here he interrupted himself to translate a Swedish word–"advertising, to make advertising, to me this is my most personal work. (It is dedicated: 'To Käbi, my wife') I feel close to a satisfactory technique and formal esthetic, more close to human beings."

Handle With Care

As he speaks, he gestures with his strong, spatulate-fingered hands–hands that do not quite belong to his sloping, slender body, his soft, almost feminine colouring–and one can see a gold wedding band. That he should symbolize his closeness to his wife with something as restricting as a finger ring is truly revealing, for to Bergman, hands are the most sensitive and vulnerable members. That a hand should be injured as happens in Wild Strawberries and in Glass, is almost too much to bear and he writhes just talking about it.

Of other directors Bergman says, "Hitchcock is my teacher. He has learned me much." On a less tutorial plane, he admires Japan's Akira Kurosawa and Italy's Federico Fellini. He also recollects with gratitude what he learned from Victor Sjöström, one of the two rocks–the other was Mauritz Stiller–on whom Svenskfilmindustri was founded.

Bergman is alive to the tradition of Swedish films bequeathed by these men and the cherishing of it. He works with many young directors, as he was doing when visited on the set of The Communicants, to give them training, advice and guidance. "We must take care of our tradition, not to be imprisoned by it but faithful to it," he says. "We work for Scandinavia, we must not be dependent on a world market. This gives us freedom. I can't worry what happens to my pictures in foreign countries."