If ever a film seemed destined to age badly, it was The Seventh Seal, Ingmar Bergman's medieval fantasy about a Knight playing chess with Death. The 1957 film was a major part of Mr. Bergman's international breakthrough, and the white-faced, black-robed Death figure was parodied almost as soon as it appeared. The image has passed from the still hilarious 1968 short De Duva ("The Dove"), in which Death plays a mean game of badminton, to a cameo appearance by Death two years ago in The Last Action Hero. By the time an image appears in a Schwarzenegger movie, it has probably been co-opted beyond recovery.

One of the many glorious surprises in the Bergman retrospective opening today at the Walter Reade Theatre is how well The Seventh Seal holds up, its haunting and eloquent emotional power shining clear through the decades. Presented by the Film Society of Lincoln Centre, "Landscape of the Soul: The Films of Ingmar Bergman" is the centrepiece of a vast Bergman Festival. For the next two months, New York will be rich with work that displays the many forms of Mr. Bergman's genius.

Also beginning today is a major retrospective at the Museum of Television and Radio. Called "Ingmar Bergman in Close-Up: The Television Work," it includes the premiere of The Last Gasp, a television play first shown in Sweden three months ago. In late May and June, two plays directed by Mr. Bergman will be presented at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (the overall producer of the festival). Also coming up are related programs at the Museum of Modern Art and the American Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, Bergman films on Channel 13, an exhibition at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, panel discussions and a tie-in book.

A Bergman tribute is an obvious idea, of course, but this festival offers more than a celebration. It creates a chance to break through the narrow preconceptions that have accumulated around him, the most common being that he will depress you to death. In fact, his restless imagination has often embraced the joyful and mordant moments of life as well as the harrowing and doomed.

Though he has never abandoned or short-changed theatre, it is as a film maker that Mr. Bergman remains an overshadowing presence. His position in the great triumvirate of directors dominating the second half of this century (with Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa) is unquestioned, and an essay he wrote in 1965 offers a clue about why his work is so enduring. When he discovered cinema, Mr. Bergman recalled, he found a way to communicate "in a language that literally is spoken from soul to soul in expressions that, almost sensuously, escape the restrictive control of the intellect."

Mr. Bergman's intellect is rigorous, but so are the poetic images that refuse to be reduced to religious or philosophical theories. One of the major distortions handed down from early Bergman critics is that his films can be expressed as pithy Ideas. This wrong-headed approach puts the Knight in The Seventh Seal on a dated existential search for knowledge instead of on a profoundly human quest. Today it is clearer that Mr. Bergman's greatness comes from the way he combines emotions and intellect, then conveys them in pure cinematic images, speaking a language that is itself the soul of film.

Love and Memories

Within that language, his style is astonishingly fluid. This weekend alone suggests his variety, as "Landscape of the Soul" begins with two days of Bergman's Greatest Hits, an overview that includes a casual handful of masterpieces like Wild Strawberries, Smiles of a Summer Night and Fanny and Alexander. His realistic films include Summer With Monika (1952), once noted for being a sexy Swedish movie with a glimpse of nudity, and now notable for the kitchen-sink drama that surrounds the young lovers' summer idyll. There is the wrenching close-up vision of Scenes From a Marriage, made as a television mini-series. (The complete six-hour version will be shown tomorrow and Sunday at the Museum of Television and Radio.)

Wild Strawberries, from 1957, and Fanny and Alexander, his last feature, from 1982, are exquisitely lyrical works that now seem like companion pieces. In Wild Strawberries, a 78-year-old man named Isak Borg (played by the silent-film director and actor Victor Sjöström), drives through the country, stops at his childhood home, relives the graceful and painful memory of his first love, and comes to terms with his own terrible emotional isolation. He has horrifying and vivid dreams, including one in which he nearly tumbles out of his own coffin.

"I had created a figure who, on the outside, looked like my father but was me, through and through," Ingmar Bergman has said of Isak Borg. "I was then 37, cut off from all human emotions." He is now 76, and for more than a decade he has been gloriously exploring the days of his childhood (the very days that Isak Borg spent with his young love in a wild strawberry patch), reinventing his parents and his relationship to them and to his art. Wild Strawberries plumbs straight through to the fantastic memoir of childhood Fanny and Alexander and to Mr. Bergman's screenplays and novels The Best Intentions and Sunday's Children.

Opening weekend also includes defiantly unrealistic films like Persona (1966). This may be Mr. Bergman's purest work of cinema, in which the personalities of two women break down and merge. (Anyone who has seen the stark, black-and-white television ads for Calvin Klein's Obsession, its posturing actors talking into the camera, will recognize Persona as the bastardized source.) Mr. Bergman's theatrical, imagistic and realistic styles merge in Cries and Whispers (1972), a merciless portrait of three sisters, including one whose dying soul refuses to let go of the living.

Chronological Order

Starting on Sunday, the Walter Reade series goes back to the beginning and presents almost all of Mr. Bergman's films chronologically (repeating those from the opening two days). There are substantial and quirky surprises among these lesser-known works. The first film both written and directed by Mr. Bergman is Prison (also known as The Devil's Wanton), from 1949. It is a too-talky, too-complicated, yet engrossing story about a movie director given a plot: a young prostitute's child is taken from her and killed, evidence that the devil rules the world.

Already, some of Mr. Bergman's crucial themes are evident. There is the issue of whether God or the devil is in charge (the rebellious question of a minister's son). There is the theatrical world, to which he will return endlessly throughout his career, creating characters who are actors, dancers, even circus performers.

Most important, Prison includes a scene in which the prostitute and a man who befriends her watch a movie at home. Sitting behind the small projector (like the enthralled Alexander with his magic lantern in Fanny and Alexander), they see a silent short Mr. Bergman made for the purpose, a slapstick in which three men bounce around a bedroom, jumping on a bed and out the window. They are pursued by a rambunctious death figure wearing what looks like a skeleton costume from Halloween. This film-within-a-film is a tribute to Mr. Bergman's fondness for silent movies, as well as a hint of his death obsession. (It is also the very film that a small boy watches at the beginning of Persona.)

In Summer Interlude, sometimes called Illicit Interlude (1951), a ballet dancer recalls a long-ago love affair. Mr. Bergman has called this "my first film in which I felt I was functioning independently, with a style of my own." In typical Bergman fashion, the affair's tragic finish leaves the dancer emotionally cold; in a less-familiar way, she arrives at a happy ending. This lovely romance with a dark undertone points to the more deliciously comic Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), with its roundelay of lovers who find the right partners in the end. In Summer Interlude, a crone walking on the road–pale-faced and covered head to foot in a black cloak–anticipates the image of old Death himself.

The film also includes a small, charming segment of animation, as the young lovers doodle cartoons that come to life; it may be the only scene in all of Bergman that deserves to be called cute.

Perhaps the first of Mr. Bergman's truly great films is Sawdust and Tinsel, from 1953 (originally released in the United States with the more lurid title The Naked Night). Set in a traveling circus, it looks at first glance like a Fellini film, but is classic Bergman. It begins with a flashback, in which a woman named Alma flaunts herself before a regiment of soldiers, teasing them, bathing naked, until her husband, a clown named Frost, comes to carry her away.

This virtually silent episode is one of Mr. Bergman's early masterpieces of imagery. The white-painted faces of Alma and Frost are incomparably eerie. ("Death as a white clown" is Mr. Bergman's own description of the similar image in The Seventh Seal.) Frost's desperate, inarticulate sadness as he carries his wife out of the water forecasts decades of miserably married Bergman characters.

Returning to the main story, the film depicts the circus owner, a big, blustery man named Albert, who is having an affair with a young, sensual performer, Anne (Harriet Andersson, from Summer With Monika, among the first of many actresses Mr. Bergman made famous). Albert longs to return to his middle-class marriage, but his wife refuses; Anne sleeps with a callous young actor in exchange for a necklace that turns out to be worthless. Beneath their masks, the performers lives are filled with sexual tension, jealousy and discontent, but the film's visceral impact surpasses any summary of its theme.

On Sober Reflection...

Mr. Bergman acknowledges that he is partly responsible for the way his work has been misread. In his 1990 memoir, Images, he takes a shrewd look back at his long career. He once agreed that three of his most somber films, "Through a Glass Darkly" (1961), Winter Light (1962) and The Silence (1963), formed a trilogy about religious faith. In Images, he rejects the notion that these films fit together like a jigsaw puzzle: "Today I feel that the 'trilogy' has neither rhyme nor reason. It was a Schnaps-Idee, as the Bavarians say, meaning that it's an idea found at the bottom of a glass of alcohol, not always holding up when examined in the sober light of day."

Though schnaps-idees have dogged Mr. Bergman, they shouldn't obscure his crucial role in the acceptance of film as art. His probing films of the 50's and 60's came at a time when some people were still exhilarated that film could be considered more than mere entertainment.

Occasionally Mr. Bergman crossed the line from art to arty, sometimes in one film. The opening sequence of Persona, with flashing images of a nail stuck in a hand and bloody slaughtered sheep, doesn't hold up as well as it might. But the film is still extraordinary to experience, its acting still astonishing. In a nearly silent role, Liv Ullmann plays an actress who would rather stop speaking than submit to the lies of ordinary life, and Bibi Andersson plays her nurse, whose role becomes one long confession. In one of Mr. Bergman's most erotic and hypnotic scenes, Ms. Andersson tells of an anonymous sexual encounter on a beach, creating through language and the imagination more heat than any flashback might have.

Ms. Ullmann and Ms. Andersson are among the actors whose work with Mr. Bergman spanned many films. Other important Bergman collaborators include Max von Sydow (The Seventh Seal, The Magician and many others), Erland Josephson (whose films include Scenes From a Marriage and Fanny and Alexander) and the cinematographer Sven Nykvist. Mr. Nykvist's work ranges from the black-and-white Persona, whose blinding flashes of white are dramatically evident in the new print to be shown at Walter Reade, to the stylized blood-red brightness of Cries and Whispers.

Well-Chosen Faces

Mr. Bergman has always relied on actors whose faces, often shot in ruthless close-up, can express their inner lives. Those close-ups made at least one of Mr. Bergman's many styles perfect for television, as the Museum of Television and Radio series reveals. Scenes From a Marriage works even better in its episodic form than it does as a three-hour feature. As the film begins, Ms. Ullmann and Mr. Josephson are in a supposedly happy marriage that, to the viewer, is already claustrophobic. The relationship goes down from there. The film, Mr. Bergman has said, "took three months to write, but rather a long part of my life to experience."

This well-chosen retrospective includes television versions of his stage work as well as documentaries and interviews (he is especially cheerful being interviewed by Dick Cavett in 1971). The two high points of the series are the full-length, six-hour version of The Best Intentions (the eloquent 1991 film about his parents' marriage written by Mr. Bergman and directed by Bille August) and The Last Gasp.

That playful title should not necessarily be taken as a reference to Mr. Bergman, who is constantly toying with the idea of giving up movies. This is a charming hour-long program that begins with clips from the Swedish silent films that influenced Mr. Bergman so much. It moves on to become a fictional encounter between the down-and-out silent-movie director Georg af Klercker and a mogul named Charles Magnusson, who ruined his career.

Klercker charms, cajoles, pleads for a chance to direct again. He melodramatically pulls a gun. And he tells the mogul something Mr. Bergman has clearly known all along. He says, "It's the tiny trite details that bring laughter or tears," that evoke the reactions all movie makers long for. Though Mr. Bergman's details are never trite, the emotional effect of his work is inescapable, its richness inexhaustible.

The director in The Last Gasp is simply the latest of many Bergman characters for whom art and life are never wholly distinct. Some, like the traveling minstrel Jof in The Seventh Seal and the young Alexander in Fanny and Alexander, actually see ghostly visions from time to time. As Mr. Bergman wrote with disarming simplicity in Images: "Jof and Alexander are in turn related to the child Bergman. I did see a vision or two, but more often I embellished my stories. When my visions ran dry, I made some up."