If one were asked to name the cinema's greatest director of women, the automatic response would probably be 'George Cukor.' But on further reflection one might be tempted to retract this and say 'No–Ingmar Bergman.' The reason why one does not think of Bergman at once is obvious: his oeuvre is so consistent as a record of a personal development, while the only really consistent feature of Cukor's is his excellence at realizing his actresses' potentials–it is impossible, in Hollywood, to be a 'personal' director in quite the sense Bergman is.

Incompatible as these two directors seem, Bergman's handling of actresses in his more relaxed films is strikingly like Cukor's. The director's exploration of the actress's potentialities is felt as a major factor in the creative act, an end in itself rather than a mere means: consider, for example, Maj-Britt Nilsson in the middle episode of Waiting Women, or Harriet Andersson in Summer with Monika and Journey into Autumn. A number of Bergman's films are unequivocally woman-centred: Summer Interlude, Waiting Women, Journey into Autumn (Swedish title: Women's Dreams), So Close to Life, The Silence, Persona. He has returned repeatedly to a remarkably inward exploration of the essential experiences of womanhood from the woman's viewpoint: sex, marriage, childbirth.

To claim a very special importance for women in Bergman's films is not to belittle the role of men: to list the excellent performances given by Max von Sydow, Gunnar Björnstrand and others would clearly be superfluous. Yet, with one or two notable exceptions (Åke Grönberg in Sawdust and Tinsel, Victor Sjöström in Wild Strawberries), Bergman's use of male protagonists is quite different from his use of female. In his major roles before Shame–The Seventh Seal, The Face, Hour of the Wolf–von Sydow is less an independent personality than a projection of Bergman into the film. Björnstrand, an actor of extraordinary versatility and technical resource whose performances are among the chief delights of many Bergman films, is nonetheless very seldom their emotional centre. In the obvious exception, Winter Light, he is again essentially a self-projection of the director, though distanced and viewed more objectively; it is of crucial importance, I think, that Björnstrand and not von Sydow played the part. Jarl Kulle in The Devil's Eye is another fairly obvious Bergman persona (there is even some physical resemblance). The same could be said, less obviously and with reservations, about Sjöström in Wild Strawberries. One reason why that film and Winter Light are so markedly superior to, say, The Seventh Seal, The Face and The Devil's Eye, is that the characters who embody the problems that obsess Bergman personally are in these two films less immediately related to the director, the problems thus becoming more distanced and universalized. But the relationship of director to character remains clear enough.

This personal identification is clearly not the case with Bergman's women; with again one or two partial exceptions: Ingrid Thulin in The Silence; perhaps Harriet Andersson in Through a Glass Darkly. Nonetheless, Bergman's actresses have played an important, if ambiguous, part in his development. One sees fairly quickly that different actresses have had particular importance for him at different stages. The ambiguity arises from the relationship between Bergman's use of an actress as a means and his use of her as an end: between Bergman the maker of personal, self-exploratory films and Bergman the Swedish Cukor. The emergence of a new actress to be used consistently through a succession of films invariably marks a new phase in Bergman's progress. But to what extent he seeks out and uses an actress to express new inner developments and to what extent his artistic relationship with her itself provokes them is impossible to determine.

In terms of individual actresses, then, one can distinguish since Bergman's early apprentice-cum-experimental period five partly overlapping but fairly clear-cut phases: 1) A Maj-Britt Nilsson phase. 2) A phase juxtaposing Harriet Andersson and Eva Dahlbeck, sometimes within the same film. 3) A Bibi Andersson phase, overlapping with 4) An Ingrid Thulin phase. 5) The present Liv Ullmann phase. It will be objected at once that most of these actresses turn up in films outside their specific period; but there is an important difference. During her phase, each is used consistently in closely related roles which develop a single clearly defined personality; when she turns up out of period it is in a role quite distinct from this. Hence Bergman uses Eva Dahlbeck with absolute consistency as a personality from her first appearance in his work in Waiting Women, through A Lesson in Love and Journey into Autumn, to Smiles of a Summer Night; when she reappears in So Close to Life she is used as an actress, and gives an entirely different performance in a role that has an entirely different function in relation to the whole. The characters embodied by Harriet Andersson during the same period are more diverse, yet they have points in common which are absent from her out-of-period role in Through a Glass Darkly. Bibi Andersson in Persona is no longer the Bibi Andersson of The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Face and The Devil's Eye; the Ingrid Thulin of Hour of the Wolf is scarcely recognizable as the actress from Winter Light and The Silence. Now About These Women, partly a Bergman testament-movie in which he clearly tried to reunite as many of his actresses as possible, is obviously a special case and as such does not constitute a genuine exception. The case of So Close to Life is more complicated. Made in the middle of the overlap of the Bibi Andersson/Ingrid Thulin phases, it was not scripted by Bergman, hence was a less directly personal work than its immediate neighbours (Wild Strawberries and The Face); Bibi Andersson gives a 'character' performance rather distinct from (and preferable to) the personality Bergman encouraged her to develop elsewhere. Ingrid Thulin's performance, on the other hand, is absolutely central to Bergman's development of this actress's potentialities, and one is left wondering what contribution (if any) the revelations of So Close to Life made, directly or indirectly, consciously or subconsciously, to the genesis of The Silence. I want now to examine each of these periods in more detail, and try to show the relation of each actress to the different phases of Bergman's development: a development that can as legitimately be seen in terms of the progression from Doris Svedlund (Prison) to Liv Ullmann, as in terms of the inner progress it parallels.

One can hardly speak of a Doris Svedlund period; I choose her because the character she plays in Prison is representative to the point of parody of the women most typical of Bergman's early work. These remarks are necessarily tentative, as there are numerous gaps in my knowledge of the early films: I have not seen Crisis, It's Raining on Our Love, Ship to India, Night Is My Future (all adapted from other people's work) or the Bergman-scripted and reputedly very important Thirst and To Joy. But it seems clear that the type of the fallen girl (Frenzy–written by Bergman, directed by Alf Sjöberg) or prostitute (Port of Call, Prison) who ambiguously and often very unconvincingly retains her virginal innocence is of special significance in this period. The chief (and crippling) characteristic of the early Bergman films I have been able to see is the director's manifest inability to come to terms with adult life. The protagonists tend to be young, helpless and doomed, presented without critical recognition of their feebleness; their elders are corrupt, hostile and exploitive, presented without sympathy or true insight. When there is an attempt to come to terms with the older generation, through some deliberate decision of the protagonists (as at the end of Port of Call), the effect is perfunctory in the extreme and its practical means and outcome remain unexplored. The dichotomy of young and old seems absolute: there is no sense of how one can develop into the other, and no sense of any possibilities for life enduring into full adulthood.

The Maj-Britt Nilsson phase develops out of this. It comprises only three films, To Joy (which I haven't seen), Summer Interlude and Waiting Women, but the vividness and strength of the actress's personality and the sensitivity with which Bergman guides its unfolding leave one in no doubt of its importance. Summer Interlude is the great film of Bergman's early period, at once the definitive statement of the vulnerability-of-youth theme and the first film (to my knowledge) in which it begins to be transcended. Maj-Britt Nilsson's personality has a depth and resilience that offer possibilities far beyond anything revealed in the Mai Zetterling of Frenzy, the Nine-Christine Jönsson of Port of Call, the Eva Henning and Doris Svedlund of Prison. These qualities make possible the expression of the transition to maturity and the acceptance of the fully adult world, disillusioned perhaps, but still holding out possibilities for further living. This progression is repeated in the central episode of Waiting Women, which is very much the emotional core of the film. After that, Miss Nilsson disappears from Bergman's work and is a great loss.

The Maj-Britt Nilsson phase gives place to the period that balances Harriet Andersson and Eva Dahlbeck. There is an overlap in Waiting Women, the last episode of which has Miss Dahlbeck as its centre. Harriet Andersson first appears in the next film, Summer with Monika, and is again the leading actress of the next, Sawdust and Tinsel. The following film, A Lesson in Love, has the two actresses together for the first time, with Andersson subordinated to Dahlbeck. In the next, Journey into Autumn, the two are exactly balanced: indeed, the film is built on the contrast between them, and takes on an unexpected importance when Bergman's development is considered from this viewpoint. The Dahlbeck-Andersson phase ends with Smiles of a Summer Night, with its character of a Bergman retrospect. The opposition of these two actresses during this period is perfectly logical. With Harriet Andersson and Monika begins an entirely new attitude towards youth, which is no longer regarded with dewy-eyed and sentimentalizing idealism. The young girls incarnated by Miss Andersson stand in striking contrast to the Misses Henning, Svedlund and Jönsson, as well as to Maj-Britt Nilsson. They are tough, sensual, brimming with energy, often fickle or at least unfaithful. At the same time, through Eva Dahlbeck's personality and its balancing of warmth and tolerance with a shrewd protective irony, Bergman begins to explore the possibilities of full maturity, the world of adult compromises and impurities in which, however, life can still be lived and a partial fulfilment reached. The two women represent opposite poles of values, on the tension between which the films of this period are constructed.

The next phase, which (leaving aside the two Isaksson films) consists of the progression The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Face and The Devil's Eye, is the only one clearly dominated by men. Here Bergman explores an anguish one must believe to be personal, characterized by the torments of religious doubt, agonized self-distrust, the fear of emotional and spiritual sterility. Though it contains one of Bergman's great films (Wild Strawberries, which is not without flaws), this is one of the least satisfying phases of his work, containing the least likeable films of his maturity. Bibi Andersson is in all four films, throughout which she is used rather monotonously to embody much the same values. Essentially, Bergman seems through her to have sought to recapture, when it was much too late, a sense of youthful innocence and spontaneity as a leading positive value: though never without charm, the actress tends to be arch and artificial, the spontaneity forced, the charm too knowing. One blames Bergman for this, not the actress, who is so remarkable in So Close to Life and Persona: clearly what he wanted from her in the films in question prevented him from exploring her full potential.

It is during this period that Ingrid Thulin rises to prominence: in Wild Strawberries and The Face there develops an opposition of values embodied in her and Bibi Andersson comparable with (while quite different from) the Eva Dahlbeck/Harriet Andersson duality earlier. Then a poised, ironic and sophisticated maturity was balanced against a vigorous and direct but unreliable youth; now a very different, tragic maturity is opposed to a somewhat suspect youthful innocence and spontaneity. The anguished questioning of existence one associates with the Knight in The Seventh Seal is carried on in Wild Strawberries, in The Face, above all in So Close to Life, through the tragic eyes and twisted, drooping mouth of Ingrid Thulin. For three films she disappears: for part of the time she was working for directors outside Sweden, an unsatisfactory and restless period for her as it was for Bergman. The hesitant and uneven nature of his work at this time suggests that he wasn't quite ready for the exploration of the actress's potential that was to come, and which was to be also the definitive exploration of Bergman's own personal anguish. Or, if Ingrid Thulin had been available, would that extraordinarily rapid and radical development have come sooner?

That development, one might say, has made Liv Ullmann possible; at any rate, she emerges from it with an uncanny appropriateness. It was difficult at first to see exactly what her significance was to be, her roles in Persona and Hour of the Wolf being so different from each other. What they do have in common, however, is a capacity for total emotional commitment, expressed as much in Elizabeth Vogler's withdrawal from involvement in a too horrifying reality in Persona as in Alma Borg's profoundly intuitive-empathic relationship with her husband in Hour of the Wolf. In Shame she becomes the repository–at once very strong and very vulnerable, marvellously sensitive and open to experience, capable of the deepest emotional responses–for all Bergman's positive feelings about humanity.