Imprecision. Untruth.

At the end of The Passion of Anna, Ingmar Bergman's last film, a man is poised centre screen. Agonizingly, shufflingly, he moves first to the left, then to the right, then back again. Throughout the film he has lied to people and they have lied back at him. Even his relationship with the women closest to him has been a tussle of evasions and deceits. He turns and paces; turns and paces; and gradually the chemical composition of the film becomes more and more apparent as the grains grow larger in a slow, slow fade. The screen becomes a bleached sea of dots: the agonized figure can still be seen pacing–just, just. Then it is gone.

Precision. Exactitude. Routine.

It is eight o'clock and Bergman drives into the Svensk Filmindustri studios in his dark green Peugeot. He has made every one of his 34 films in these rather ramshackle studios behind the parking lot. In his small office he puts on a windcheater and a pair of brown shoes, 17 years old, which he always wears when he is working–superstition? Change might break his luck? Every day he starts filming at 8:30 and finishes around six. Every day he breaks for lunch at 11:30 and has his lunch away from cast and technicians in his office, and every day he eats the same meal–boiled eggs, sour cream and jam, crispbreads. Every Friday he breaks early and takes the complicated journey by air, ferry and car to the tiny island of Fårö, off Gotland, where he has a house, and which is obviously a sort of refuge. Every Monday he is back at 8:30 and the same routine begins again. His life is ordered so that one event glides smoothly into gear after the next: last summer, for instance, a production of Hedda Gabler in London; a production of Strindberg's Dream Play at the Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm; his latest film, The Touch, which is made in English and which uses a foreign actor, Elliott Gould, for the first time in a Bergman film; then, the day after shooting ended, the production of a new musical based on the life of Lenny Bruce. Apart from the weekends on Fårö, there are no gaps: each project deliberately overlaps with the next and is taken up full time as soon as the last one is finished. Bergman has kept to this rigorous schedule for 25 years, in which time he has directed the 34 films–many of them arguably among the greatest films ever made–produced countless plays and operas, written plays himself and, also, for four years found time to be the Administrative Director of the Royal Dramatic Theatre–Stockholm's equivalent of Britain's National Theatre.

At 51 he is lean, cold and wary of those he has not reason to trust. He dislikes giving interviews, is said to have little social life and budgets his availability stringently.

The pressure of time drives him palpably. He seems deliberately to eliminate all extraneous complications from his life, as if energy not spent deciding what to wear or what to eat for lunch or where to go for the weekend was for him that much more energy to be channeled into his work. It is an extraordinary creative puritanism, perhaps partly the heritage of his childhood. Bergman's father was an Evangelical Lutheran parson; the family atmosphere seems to have been one of oppressive emphasis on duty and worship, rather than love and freedom. "I survived," he said of his childhood, "and it gave me something to break." It is as if, amidst the welfare state efficiency of 20th century Sweden, he retains a 13th century awareness of moral values and the transience of life. "Wise and farsighted men in the Middle Ages," he has written, "used to spend nights in their coffins in order never to forget the tremendous importance of every moment, and the transient nature of life itself."

As a child, Bergman accompanied his father from parish church to parish church on Sundays, and the memory of their medieval frescoes–a world of hellfire and temptation, where Death plays chess with a Crusader–clearly haunts him still, and has provided him with the imagery of many of his films. They have also, perhaps, provided him with the personal equivalent of the medieval scholar's coffin, or skull placed on the desk...with, in fact, a constant memento mori. Implicit in Bergman's life, in the way he works, in the perfectionism of his films, is the realization–as he himself has said–"each film may be my last."

Bergman began making films in 1944, in his mid 20s, after working in the theatre as a director. Sweden already had a fine tradition of filmmaking, notably the work of directors Sjöström (whom Bergman used as the old man in Wild Strawberries) and Stiller (who discovered Garbo). Between 1914 and 1925, when they both left for Hollywood, these directors completed over 50 films between them. Their work was to some extent taken up by Alf Sjöberg (who directed Miss Julie) and whose first film–The Strongest–was released in 1929. It was to Sjöberg, in 1944, that Bergman sent the script of his first film Frenzy, which Sjöberg filmed with Mai Zetterling.

"He was," Sjöberg has said of Bergman at the time, "a very angry young man–long before they came into fashion. A writer deliberately choosing to look at the world through the eyes of a teenage rebel."

Before Frenzy, Bergman's experience of filmmaking had been largely confined to the work he had done revising screenplays in what he calls "the script laundry" at Svensk Filmindustri. "At the time," Bergman says, "they needed a lot of scripts and a lot of films–not enough were coming in. I had no real experience but I asked questions all the time of anyone who knew anything at all about film, about cameras." The first film which he directed was Crisis. which he also wrote. "It was a terrible script, but I agreed to do it," he says. "If they had said to me, 'Make a film of the telephone directory,' I should have done it."

After Crisis he continued to make a film a year with unfailing regularity: many of these early films–It Rains on Our Love, Port of Call, Prison and so on–are still not well known outside Sweden, and are unfortunately rarely shown: for it was with the superb films he made during the decade of the '50s–Summer Interlude, Summer with Monika, Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Face and The Virgin Spring are some of them–that Bergman's reputation as a filmmaker became established first in Sweden (where Smiles of a Summer Night, his first comedy, was a great commercial and critical success) and then, more slowly, abroad, where distributors suddenly found that there was a large potential audience for the non-Hollywood, or "art film," movie.

The discovery is comic, because it is the discovery–particularly by American distributors–that something they often did not understand, with a whole lot of actors with unpronounceable names, was suddenly "commercial."

"Thanks to Bergman's films," Variety announced in 1960, "Janus film rentals (the U.S. distributors for Bergman) will gross over $1 million–15 to 20 percent up on last year." And in inimitable Variety-ese they went on: "To Cassandras who might suggest that the popularity of the Bergman pix in the U.S. is just a passing fad, Cy Harvey, topper of Janus films, answers–'Is Picasso a passing fad?'"

Bergman (mindful, perhaps, of Stiller, who had been broken by Hollywood) wisely resisted all American blandishments. Again and again it was rumoured that he would go to America to work. According to Time magazine in an (unintentionally) hilarious profile, and cover story in March, 1960, Bergman had been offered 12 times what Time described as his "modest annual income of $22,000" by a Hollywood producer who wanted him to work in the States. Bergman turned him down. He also turned down Harry Belafonte when Belafonte wanted him to direct a film about Pushkin, who was an octoroon, with Belafonte as Pushkin. "Pushkin was a genius," said Bergman. "Belafonte is not."

Two ethics of filmmaking came into head-on collision, and Bergman indubitably won. Ten years later he still has not gone to Hollywood, Hollywood has come to him-and entirely on his terms. His present film, The Touch, is financed by ABC Pictures–the filmmaking division of ABC-TV. Apart from the fact that the money is American and the budget ($1,000,000) is larger than he has been accustomed to work with–Summer with Monika, for instance, cost only L14,000–the film is being made in exactly the same way as Bergman always makes a film. The script was not shown to the backers, Bergman merely talked to them about his ideas; Bergman cast the picture himself (including choosing Elliott Gould, whose unsinkable talent he spotted in the appalling Getting Straight) and then proceeded to film it, in Sweden, with precisely the same technicians he always uses. His will be the final cut, and he will have the last word on how the film is publicized.

"I make my film," Bergman said. "I give it to ABC. They give me the money. That is our only contact. It's marvelous."

Once, when discussing filmmaking with David Lean, Bergman said, "1 make films with the help of 18 friends." "I sometimes feel," replied Lean, "that I make them with 90 enemies."

Over the years Bergman has, of course, built up a superb repertory of actors who are instantly familiar to anyone who sees his films. Most of them are also stage actors, and he uses them in his theatre productions: Max von Sydow; Bibi Andersson; the ascetic looking Gunnar Björnstrand; Erland Josephson, the sinister husband of The Passion of Anna, Naima Wifstrand, superb as the mother in Wild Strawberries and the witch-like "granny" in The Face. Then there is Harriet Andersson, Eva Dahlbeck, Gunnel Lindblom, Ingrid Thulin and most recently Liv Ullmann, the Norwegian actress whom Bergman used in his last four films–Persona, Hour of the Wolf, Shame and The Passion of Anna. With such a superlative company of actors to draw upon, the fact that he also works with a repertory of superlative technicians has gone virtually unnoticed: the technicians are Bergman's "18 friends."

His clapperboy, Hans Rehnberg, has worked with Bergman for 14 years, his chief electrician, Gerhard Carlsson, for 18 years. His continuity director, Katinka Faragó, went to work with Bergman as a very young girl when he was beginning to make films, 20 years ago: "Then," she says, "he was terrifying. He had the highest, most meticulous standards and if something went wrong, or didn't come up to those standards, he would get furious. Now he is much mellower. Not so temperamental."

Bergman's fury as a young director is legendary. He is reputed to have ripped telephones out of walls, and thrown chairs through windows, if something really displeased him. He dislikes being reminded of this however: "I was young and insecure and ambitious," he has said. "I haven't behaved that way since I was 26, but reporters always go away and print a lot of old gossip about me–or their editors throw it in because it's more entertaining than the truth."

"If I wanted to be temperamental," he said to me, "then I would go to Hollywood, there's plenty of room for prima donnas there."

Everything on a Bergman film is exhaustingly tested. He has a special studio where they try out different lighting. All the actors attend, and with Lundgren, his set designer, and his costume designer, Mago, who has worked with him for 19 years, Bergman experiments. How does that chair cover look with that coat, the coat with Bibi Andersson's complexion, or hair colouring? All the 18 technicians, from the make-up woman to Bergman's lighting cameraman, Sven Nykvist–perhaps the greatest cinematographer working in film today–are involved: although none of the film is actually being shot.

"In one scene in The Touch," says Mago, "we wanted Bibi Andersson in a red coat. We had a rack of red coats–each slightly different in cut and shade–about 12 or 14 of them, and we tested them all until we found the one that looked best."

"The main problem in filmmaking for me," Bergman says, "is to create an atmosphere of complete security and complete open-minded honesty. An actor has a creative mind–he is a creator, with his soul and body as material. I have to make sure that when he is working everything is right for him, nothing is worrying or distracting, and the atmosphere around him is totally concentrated and sympathetic." It is for this reason that Bergman precedes filmmaking with six weeks of meticulous tests, and always works with a closed set: "Do you know what filmmaking is?" he has said. "It is eight hours of hard work to get three minutes of film–and during those eight hours there are maybe 10 or 12 minutes of real creation. Everyone on the set must be attuned to finding those moments, and the presence of an outsider, even a friendly presence, is basically alien to the process that is going on in front of him."

It is evident that for Bergman himself there is an immense amount of strain involved in the search for those 10 or 12 minutes. "A film is a tapeworm," he says, "a tapeworm 2,500 metres long that sucks the life and spirit out of me. It is dreadfully exacting work. When I am filming I am ill."

To meet, Bergman is brisk and intimidating, giving no indication of the strain which he says his work places on him. Of medium height, with lean, rather cruel features, he has the controlled power of a man who does not suffer fools gladly, though he may no longer make that fact as instantly apparent as he might have done in the past. There is a feeling of repressed energy about him, as if he gauged nicely how much of himself was worth putting into his conversation, and if it was not much, then was prepared to coast along in neutral, reserving his energies, his animation and warmth for a time when it was strictly necessary: for when he was working, perhaps.

Any questions remotely touching on his private life will, it is clear, go unanswered. It would take daring to ask them, because Bergman's contempt of intrusions into his private life is well known: when he was younger and the question of his several marriages (he has been married four times and has six children by his different wives) and rumoured affairs was raised he would walk out of the interview. His attitude is understandable but frustrating, particularly so since he admits that his work draws strongly on his personal experiences. Perhaps Bergman is right, and the fact that–say–a writer like Strindberg's own marital experiences are drawn on extensively in his plays is ultimately irrelevant and unimportant: perhaps, on the other hand, it is not.

Bergman clearly draws great sustenance from solitude, and is most animated when he talks about his island, Fårö, where he filmed large sections of his last four films, and about which he made a documentary a year ago. "I first found Fårö when I was looking for a location for a film in 1961–Through a Glass Darkly. As soon as I went there I fell in love with the island and wanted to build a house there–though it's difficult to do that because there are military installations there. Now, after four years of struggle, I have my home. It's a very small island, 17 kilometres long, that's all. There are about 100 of us inhabitants–mostly hunters and fishermen and farmers. For me it is really the fulfilling of a life-time ambition: I have always hated cities, but my profession has forced me to live in them."

On his island Bergman has his own cinematheque–a collection of about 250 films on 16mm, including his own films. "Sometimes," he says, "when I am absolutely alone, I watch one of my own films. I put it into the projector and settle down and watch it–I try and learn from it, I think; I feel completely removed from it. But I have to be absolutely alone. Even if the cat is in the room I don't like it." He smiles. "I think I might be boring it."

The image of Bergman alone in his house on his remote Baltic island is somehow an appropriate one for him: an image which might occur in one of his own films, for his characters are often confined in a bitter spiritual solitude, desperately trying to make contact with other human beings, and often not achieving it. Bergman can, of course, make delicious comedies, like Smiles of a Summer Night, with its elegant Mozartian structure and wit, or like Now About All These Women, with its fast pace and slapstick: but nonetheless the majority of Bergman's films (particularly the more recent ones) leave one with a sense of characters frustrated and alone. "I have no social conscience," he has said–which is not true: it is just that in his films a documentary sense of society is missing. Bergman charts the interior landscape of the mind; the struggle of those physically close to become psychically close.

"There are two sorts of artists, I think," he says. "One goes out with a camera to inform us about reality–failure, injustice, the corruption of society. Then you have the other artist, who is fascinated with the insides of people. He goes into them, and comes up with what he has discovered inside this particular human being. Both kinds of artists seem to me equally necessary–if artists are necessary at all. We are after all working on the same front, and it is ridiculous that one should become a la mode at the expense of the other. But I am the second kind: I like to go inside."

In all of Bergman's films there is present his own acute sense of time. His characters frequently react as if they were in a pressure chamber: the brief hour-and-a-half's duration of the film which must encompass often total and lasting changes in their lives. But within the films both time and space are ever-present dimensions. Frequently the action of his films takes place on a journey–a physical act of traveling from A to B which is the counterpart of the spiritual distance his characters travel in the course of the film. And the sense that they follow these spiritual journeys, as it were against the clock, with time inevitably running out on them, is also constantly reinforced.

In Summer with Monika, the film begins and ends with shots of city streets and a church clock chiming the hour: in the scenes in between, Monika and Harry escape for a few idyllic weeks in the islands, but even there the sense of time passing, the weather breaking and the summer coming to an end is acutely conveyed. Several of Bergman's films, in fact, take place solely within the summer months, as if those few months of long sunshine provided the characters with a brief chance to explore the magical midsummer night and come to terms with their lives before the onset of the long, dark Swedish winter.

And as time runs out for his characters, so they search for some kind of absolute–God / love / truthfulness / communication–which will cheat time, age and the eventual imminence of death. It is a search which clearly preoccupies Bergman himself: "For one who has found the meaning of life and spiritual values in the love of men and women, there remains only one desire," he has said. "That this love should be able to conquer death. It must be able to. There must be some eternal being that justifies the value of that love by its immortality...I call that infinite love God."

Again, "Whenever I am in doubt and uncertainty I take refuge in the vision of a pure and simple love. I find this love in those spontaneous women who more than anything else are the incarnations of purity."

The overtones of Bergman's ecclesiastical upbringing are strong here in his very language, and also in the need which he expresses. But in his films, although Bergman denies that they are pessimistic, which is certainly a simplistic way to view them– the fact remains that his characters find such certainties continually elusive. Jof and Mia, the players in The Seventh Seal, are perhaps the only examples of a totally achieved purity and happiness–so much so that the Knight sacrifices himself rather than let them be taken by Death. But Jof and Mia's happiness is exceptional; more often romantic love (between man and woman) is tested and found wanting: Harry and Monika's love lasts the duration of a summer; in Sawdust and Tinsel the awkward aging circus owner, Albert, and the beautiful young bare-back rider, Anne, are forced to come to terms with their own natures–his age and boorishness, her brittle ambition and frivolity. Each is unfaithful. Albert almost kills himself, and in the end they are reunited: the circus moves on, and they go with it, accepting the limitations implicit in themselves and in their love.

Increasingly in Bergman's later work the absolute changes: it is no longer romantic love, although it often involves the relationship between a man and a woman; rather it is a kind of truthfulness, either to oneself or other people. These later films are also increasingly secular in their imagery and subject matter, as if Bergman's always humanist beliefs no longer needed religious metaphors. Yet the struggle for communication in these later films is as daunting as the struggle for love in the earlier work. More than once Bergman uses the imagery of language (in The Silence, the characters are in a strange country, Timoka, whose language they do not understand; in The Passion of Anna, Anna Fromm works as a translator; in Persona, Elizabet the famous actress, exhibits her withdrawal from the world by a refusal to speak) to convey the struggle which his characters have to communicate. And as often as not the film ends with a sense of failure, or near failure: Andreas Winkelmann, in The Passion of Anna, is bleached slowly from the screen at the moment of his maximum indecision; the dying Ester at the end of The Silence hands a list of "foreign words" which she has managed to learn on to the little boy, Johan; in the future, maybe, communication will be more possible. Meanwhile Bergman's characters continue to lie and deceive one another, and sometimes spiritual deceit is conveyed in the traditional way, by sexual infidelity, and sometimes it is conveyed by something comparatively slight (Elizabet writes a scornful letter to a friend, in Persona, ridiculing the most intimate revelations which her nurse, Alma, has made to her). Most frightening of all, it is sometimes self deceit which is involved–as in the character of Anna in The Passion of Anna, who refuses to acknowledge the hell that was her first marriage.

In the old painted frescoes which Bergman saw in the country churches when he visited them with his father, there was the painting of Death playing chess with a Crusader. It was an image which was important enough for him to make it the central one in The Seventh Seal; and it is an image which is, perhaps, implicit with hope. After all, chess is a game of skill, and it is at least theoretically possible that the Knight might win. Writing or painting or composing have all been ways in which artists have traditionally comforted themselves that they have won that game: they die, but their work survives after them. It is the great theme of Shakespeare's sonnets–a poet who had as acute a sense of time running out as Bergman:

Time doth transfix the florish set on youth,
And delves the parallels in beauty's brow,
Feeds on the rarities of nature's truth,
And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow.
And yet to times in hope my verse shall stand,
Praising thy worth despite his cruel hand.

The last couplet is, perhaps, too glib for total assurance: however, survival–of the specific immortal and yet humanistic kind, which Bergman spoke of seeking–is clearly its hope.

And yet even posterity Bergman seems to view sardonically. Sternly he rejects its comforts: "My attitude to the practicing of my art is that I'm making beautiful things for everyday use. I'm making utility articles. If it does something above and beyond that I'm pleased, but I'm not working sub specie aeternitatis."

Significantly, when Bergman includes portrayals of artists in his films his treatment of them is often satiric and slightly sour. In his last film, The Passion of Anna, there is a man called Elis, a chilly ambiguous man who may or may not be aware of his wife's infidelity, and who has an extraordinary hold over the rest of the characters. Elis is an artist of sorts–a photographer who calmly stores all his photographs away in neat boxes, photographs of beautiful women next to photographs of atrocities in Vietnam. And his pictures are misleading: a radiant photograph of his wife was taken when she had a migraine; a gentle recluse appears savage and murderous. Elis is aware of the deceptions inherent in his photographs, but accepts them.

It is perhaps a hint, the briefest of indications that for Bergman as well as his characters, absolutes are elusive. Even his work has an uncertain value: if not for his audiences then maybe for him (the perfectionist) they remain an approximation.

Reprinted from the London Dally Telegraph Magazine