With no assist from an MM or BB, Ingmar Bergman has drawn fire from censors and tributes from critics as one of today's rarest film geniuses. The Swedish writer-director heats his screen with sex, probes religion with like vigour. His insights into the subtle privacies of men and women, his highly personal approach to basic realities, his unpredictable viewpoints and cryptic allusions make him a cinematic Proteus

The late Robert Sherwood evoked an unforgettable image of Franklin Delano Roosevelt when he pictured the Presidential psyche as a "heavily forested interior." He could never understand, Sherwood wrote in Roosevelt and Hopkins, "what was going on in there... multiplex... contradictory to a bewildering degree.... He could appear utterly cynical, worldly, illusionless, and yet his religious faith was the strongest and most mysterious force that was in him."

The words are temptingly suggestive of Ingmar Bergman, although precise analogies between the Swedish film genius and Roosevelt, or any other genius, would be perilous. In his sexual comedies (A Lesson in Love, Dreams, Smiles of a Summer Night) Bergman can be cynical, worldly and illusionless. In The Seventh Seal or The Virgin Spring he can show something akin to intense religious conviction. When Max von Sydow, in The Virgin Spring, before brutally murdering two men and a boy to avenge the rape-slaying of his daughter, wrestles a birch tree from its soil, the combat is between a father and a creation of God. Still, to speak of absolutes, of cynicism or of God is to beg the question. Not even the most insignificant of his 23 feature films says only one thing, rides only one mood, arouses only one response.

There may be God, for instance, but there is most definitely Woman. The fumbling husband of A Lesson in Love mutters only half in jest, "Maybe God's a woman." Currently married to his fourth wife, Bergman has said, "The world of women is my universe." To see his movies is to agree. Even the diamond purities of The Seventh Seal are interrupted by seven bawdy divagations drenched with a sensuality his films alone possess.¹

God and Woman, whole catalogues of images and symbols–the critics have already burrowed in Freud's beard for their childhood origins. So has Bergman himself. In the introduction to his Four Screenplays he recalls the magic lantern given to him when he was nine, with slides of "Red Riding Hood and the Wolf and all the others. And the Wolf was the Devil, without horns but with a tail and gaping red mouth...a picture of wickedness and temptation on the flowered wall of the nursery."

A KINSHIP WITH PROUST

Another prodigious child was moved in the same way. "At Combray...someone had the happy idea of giving me, to distract me on evenings when I seemed abnormally wretched, a magic lantern...in the manner of the master builders and glass painters of Gothic days it substituted for the opaqueness of my walls an impalpable iridescence, supernatural phenomena of many colours, in which legends were depicted, as on a shifting and transitory window." Aside from these two echoes, there would seem to be little in common between the asthmatic Parisian author of Swann's Way and the dyspeptic Scandinavian son of a sternly Lutheran minister (Bergman takes himself to bed each spring to soothe his ulcer and write a new movie). But Marcel Proust and Bergman would not have been utter strangers in a strange land. The fracturing and binding of time, the alteration of character with altering circumstances, both figure in Wild Strawberries. As in Proust, Bergman's grandparents and elderly people are prominent, transmitting severity and love through generations. They are treated with utmost respect, all the way from the cold and ancient lady of Wild Strawberries to the charming, henpecking old couple of A Lesson in Love. The very young are treated with equal respect. It is the parents, representing the generation in between, who suffer clinical scrutiny.

By such a canon Victor Sjöström, the father in Wild Strawberries, magnetizes our sympathy almost too adroitly–the one flaw which, for some, ranks this film below the uncompromising mastery of The Seventh Seal. Mothers, by the same canon, are seldom displayed sympathetically, unless as a metaphor for the Virgin (Bibi Andersson in The Seventh Seal), as a naughty flirt (Eva Dahlbeck in Smiles), or a betrayed wife rejecting her husband (Gudrun Brost in The Naked Night). The real family authorities are more often aunts and uncles. Brink of Life, directed and co-authored by Bergman, virtually denies the family itself. Three women are in a maternity ward. One has a miscarriage. A second loses her baby in violent labour. Only the unwed mother brings forth a living child.

A COMPREHENSION OF HOMOSEXUALITY

In The Commonweal Arlene Croce accurately described Bergman as "provisionally" a feminist, "because a world governed by the female principle is a world whose air he breathes most naturally, and with the natural joy of animal appreciation." From this born insight comes Bergman's remarkable comprehension of homosexuality. The Lesbians of Three Strange Loves (1949) and certain hints in his later comedies have an unequalled honesty of style and gesture. Dreams takes us briefly to a photographer's studio: the decorateur, a classic specimen, first ties a rose at the model's waist, then at her neck, and at last, with delicate coolness, he places it between her teeth. Or consider the secret moment in Smiles of a Summer Night: Ulla Jacobsson and Harriet Andersson, a young wife and her housemaid, discover themselves giggling together about the most intimate pleasures and imperfections of men.

From the same insight springs the stream of ravishing women which floods through Bergman's films: Bibi Andersson, a joyful, ripened fruit; Harriet Andersson, a heady tomboy; the radiant Ingrid Thulin; the platinum-blonde Eva Dahlbeck, witty as Candida; Birgitta Pettersson, pampered and kittenish; Ulla Jacobsson, hesitant as the dawn; Gunnel Lindblom, a brown, infernal scullery maid. They make all kinds of love, not least the literal and physical, and Bergman understands them all, in a medieval kitchen or visiting a contemporary modiste. In the latter short scene from Dreams, Gunnar Björnstrand, a would-be roué, picks up the naïve Harriet Andersson on the streets of Gothenburg. She has been staring avidly at a dress-shop window and he cajoles her inside. The head saleslady and her two assistants step forward. They know all there is to know about this aging consul and his sexual misadventures. Björnstrand knows they know, and so does the audience. Not a word breaks the stifling politesse. At last a dress is chosen and the consul and his "niece" depart. The three shop ladies take a half step toward the window. A whole novel is written in the posture of that half step, in the atmosphere of that woman's stronghold.

For Ingmar Bergman the world of women is one of permanent, if often latent, hysteria. With few exceptions, his women are, by definition, manic depressives. Three Strange Loves, the unfortunate American title of the original Thirst, was not written by Bergman, and was not even very good. But his relentless exploration of psychological detail is marvellously shown by the husband and wife in the train compartment. They are one of those couples who are miserable with each other or without each other. The wife becomes so enraged at her husband's placid sleep that for endless minutes, at the top of her lungs, she gargles. Raucous, untidy, painfully true to life, and calculated.

Bergman divides women and men into three strata: young lovers, the idealists; clowns, fools, his favourite "unredeemables"; and "the sad, the depressed, the sleepless, the confused, the frightened, the lonely"–in short, most of the human race. While steeped in the lore of women, Bergman will speak from his darkest, most private recesses only through husbands and other males.

In early films, except for Secrets of Women, he concentrates on young men, students and rebels. They are grave, handsome lads–Alf Kjellin or Birger Malmsten–fighting their parents and teachers, suffering and dying young. In later films students occasionally appear as minor figures, but portrayed by actors like Björn Bjelfvenstam, objects of mirth as much as compassion. The most invidious character in The Seventh Seal–thief, rapist, bigot, chauvinist and coward–is, by contrast, a former theological student.

Illicit lnterlude, one of the early films and said to be close to Bergman's heart, delves into an affair between a journalist and a Stockholm ballerina. Forced to choose between the man's insistence and her career, she flees by boat to the fiords and uplands of her youth. In an apparently incidental shot, she sees an old crone walking soundlessly through the woods. They pass each other in total silence. Is the crone Death? (A typical brush stroke, crucial and mysterious. Like the magnificent riverbank shot of Isak's parents in Wild Strawberries, it illustrates how Bergman borrows from painting–as he also does from music and everything else.) The locale reminds the ballerina of a fateful adolescent romance she had the summer before she left for dancing school. She relives it in a long flash back. The romance is shattered when her young man, a student, dives from a ledge over the sea only to be crushed on the rocks below. Was it an accident, or have we been warned? He is somewhat like the student in Torment, beautiful and engaging, but inwardly crippled. His mother is doing her best to emasculate him. Shortly after she tells him he will never become a man he plunges to his death.

A REVELATION OF AGONY

Now the girl's rich and ominous uncle attempts to make her sleep with him. It is not clear if she resists him successfully. The flashback dissolves and the ballerina goes back to Stockholm. The journalist, perhaps personifying the man the dead boy might have become, talks to her at length about her illusions and her failed womanhood. At last what he says begins to make sense to her. As the girl and as the wearied ballerina, Maj-Britt Nilsson is faultless.

Two years later, in 1953, Bergman produced a far darker film, The Naked Night. Here the man, Åke Grönberg, is the owner of a seedy traveling circus. He is middle-aged and gruff but has the heart of an adolescent. Harriet Andersson, his spoiled little mistress, is ready to deceive him with the first fancy talker to come along. The motif is soon established. A flash back–Bergman would perish without them–discloses an astonishing incident. A clown's wife is bathing in the ocean, deliberately nude, before the hoots and catcalls of an artillery company. The clown is told. He races past the soldiers to drag his wife from the water and, barefoot, carries her back over the rocks. Instantly she is deeply ashamed and, with his contorted body and arms, he conceals her nudity. The entire sequence is shot in "burnt in" overexposed film, while the sound track mixes harrowing silences with waves of distant laughter and the vulgar percussion of guns. In these 30 seconds of "parenthetical" action, Bergman fuses the screen with a blinding, white-hot revelation of human agony and human dignity.

The theme is repeated in the main narrative. The circus owner, in turn, publicly humiliated, kills a bear with his naked hands. Thus he purges his violence and wins back his bedraggled mistress. (We have seen how, six years later, Max von Sydow kills the birch tree in The Virgin Spring.) With his troupe he passes through the town where he abandoned his wife and children. He desires to make his peace with her, but she won't have him. He can stand up to a bear, hut not to the dull responsibilities of hearth and home. He is alone and, so to speak, a self-emasculate.

At this point Bergman cuts off the early phase and begins all over again with the three scintillating comedies referred to earlier: A Lesson in Love, Dreams and Smiles of a Summer Night. Are grown men fatally tied to the umbilical cord? Well, why complain about it? The male is the infinite and willing inferior of the female. The incredibly talented Gunnar Björnstrand is now introduced. This actor realizes Bergman's ideal of the modern homme moyen sensuel–virile, intellectually and physically attractive, yet morally and even emotionally impotent. Through every absurdity Björnstrand holds up a wicked mirror to life, perhaps also to Ingmar Bergman. No one could forget his face in Smiles when he must play Russian roulette with the Count. He seems to sense a vague stench. The stakes are death. Only they aren't–Björnstrand doesn't know the bullets are blanks. It's all a fake. Maybe death itself is a fake.

Or is it? The next film Bergman wrote and directed, The Seventh Seal, is his masterpiece, possibly the film masterpiece of our era. Its genesis is evidently Albrecht Dürer's engraving, The Knight, Death and the Devil. A pseudo-medieval allegory of Dürer's 16th-century nightmare, an inquiry into God, Death and Salvation, it is written, with rare nerve, for the commercial screen. Bergman has acquired another brilliant actor, Max von Sydow, whose stride and carriage in the saddle are straight from the Middle Ages. He plays the disillusioned knight, home from the Crusades, looking for the God in whom he wishes to believe, but cannot. Bengt Ekerot, as Death, is to vanquish the knight at chess. Various monks, flagellants, torturers, et al., are aspects of the Devil. Bergman supplies a fourth character, the part of man that does not wish to believe, the rational, humane squire, Jöns, played by Gunnar Björnstrand.

The struggle between knight and squire reflects the warring halves of Bergman himself. In subsequent films the knight proves the stronger. The Virgin Spring, hardest round of the battle so far, ends in a pure and simple miracle. Many think this film too pat, as if Bergman had declared: Look, I have found the answers; they were right there all along.

ILLUMINATION FROM THE LANTERN

Between The Seventh Seal and The Virgin Spring Bergman made Wild Strawberries, Brink of Life and The Magician. Like all his studies of men and women, this last shows the powerful influence of Strindberg, whom Bergman acknowledges as his "great literary experience." In it he reverts, almost, to the final stoicism of Squire Jöns. Midway in the picture, Max von Sydow, as Vogler the magician–he has the face of Christ, Judas or Mephistopheles–is sitting in a dark chamber. He begins to toy with a little machine. We see what it is, a magic lantern throwing shadows of the damned on a wall. "Suddenly," the screenplay directs, "a shape frees itself from the room's forest of shadows." It is Spegel, a man we thought dead. In two minutes he will die permanently, and the magician will inexplicably exchange bodies with him. But now the drunken Spegel, an itinerant actor, sways on his last legs and holds his hand in the beam of the lantern.

SPEGEL: A shadow of a shadow. (To Vogler) Don't worry about me, sir. I am already in a state of decomposition.

He disappears among the shadows as silently as he came. Vogler takes a few quick steps to follow him. They meet behind the drapery where the shadows are deepest...

SPEGEL: I have prayed just one prayer in my life. Use me. Handle me. But God never understood what a strong and devoted slave I had become. So I had to go unused. (Pause) Incidentally, that is also a lie. (Pause) One walks step by step into the darkness. The motion itself is the only truth.²

Some critics, notably Miss Croce in The Commonweal, have recognized that Spegel's prayer is Bergman's plainest talk to date. Bergman never jokes about actors. He is never joking when he turns on his magic lantern. Has anyone a fixed central point? If Bergman has, it is here, in the flickering realities of the illusionist.

¹Among recent imports, La Dolce Vita and L'Avventura use women merely as props; Hiroshima, Mon Amour focuses on a self-pitying female bore; Breathless deliberately caricatures the girl.

²From Four Screenplays of lngmar Bergman. © 1960 by Simon and Schuster, Inc.