By all appearances, Ingmar Bergman is a successful man. But those who study his autobiography and have perchance never heard his name must think they are reading about a man of almost endless shortcomings, an unusually intriguing failure in both the arts and in his life during the 20th century in a faraway country called Sweden.

The fact that Laterna Magica reads like this is not an expression of coquetry, but part of Bergman's strategy for dealing with life. If the latest generation of his contemporaries or posterity should reassess him, then so what? He was the first one to the punch and is consequently not the least bit surprised. He has, moreover, consigned himself to oblivion in an unforgettable way. This is a clever technique for not letting himself be obliterated.

A man obsessed with failure has succeeded better than others in portraying it.

This could be referred to as the Bergman vaccination method. The only thing that can prevent a poison from spreading is that poison itself. The only way to face demons is to conjure them up. And the more chaotic your feelings, the stricter order you impose. Such order pervades not only Bergman's theatrical set design and cinematic camera angles, but also takes charge of all the movements, angles and details of his everyday life. Everything must be predictable and predicted. The only thing allowed to surprise Bergman and others is Bergman himself. He wants to know where everyone stands: colleagues, friends, obstructions, enemies. But no one should know where he stands. Freedom can only be found in lack of freedom. Not being surprised by people requires getting to know them. Bergman approaches the great works with matchless intuition and insight. He is a brilliant reader. Then he folds the living into the pattern of the fictional. The stage is the platform of truth.

He sketches his own patterns of truth into his films. Art is a matter of letting everything happen before it happens.

Thus he practices the art of aging as early as in Wild Strawberries. In private he can play an old man with a cane, letting himself be treated as a befuddled senior citizen, because one day he may indeed become one. At the next moment he is bursting with excitement over a project and surprising you with his professional inventiveness and almost manic lust for life. His defiance of physical infirmities suddenly gives a hip injury a Biblical dimension. A half-grown beard hints at a drama.

This is not coquetry, either, but a testing of roles, a conquest of experience. A gesture is an instrument of knowledge. The most insignificant everyday habit becomes an act of choosing, an exercise in portrayal—something that can be applied, developed, given a different meaning. The director is at work and life is a stage production. If life slips along pleasantly for a time, you have to find a reason to practice your rage.

Sometimes it is a choice between whether anxiety should chase away sleep or sleep chase away anxiety. Is a well-rested body or a tortured soul the gateway to Strindberg? Both are, of course. Anxiety opens up the text, and the well-rested body provides the strength to portray it. Is illness a chance to give a major project time to mature, or the body's protest against a deadly insight hiding around the corner? Anything is possible. Genuine weariness appears, one can imagine, when Bergman tires of Bergman's drama. These lulls are brief, thank goodness. Soon the search for new, secret vaccines is on once again.

The search for vaccines. Like all the great directors of our age, Bergman has a bit of the scientist and scholar in him. He has eliminated the artificial contradiction between intellect and intuition and has identified new opportunities. I believe that he objects to being termed a scholar. But a thoroughness in text analysis, a search for sources and facts and backgrounds—all this is part of his many irresistibly energetic traits.

His energy and curiosity free his erudition, which he quite honestly denies, from any touch of academism. He is simply knowledgeable. That is part of his craft. You should know everything about the camera and as much as possible about Shakespeare. You should be able to distinguish between different kinds of raw film and between infatuation and love. Everything serves as an instrument of maximal expression.

Being thoroughly familiar with the prerequisites, mechanisms and possibilities of expression perhaps also requires that you have a command of people and things. Directing is a way of exercising power, even though the rules of the game call on you to deny this. At the edge of power lurks jealousy. Perhaps to impose discipline and order on both jealousy and the pleasures of power, the orderly but anarchistic Bergman has been attracted to major institutions: the municipal theatres of Malmö and Göteborg, the Royal Dramatic Theatre, the National Theatre in London, the Residenztheater in Munich, Svensk Filmindustri, the Swedish Film Institute.

As for film, he has of course had his own companies too; to make the picture fit together, we must add that administration is also part of his craft as well, which is quite true. It is also true that Bergman could have become the head of numerous institutions. He has tried that role, but somehow prefers the artist's struggle against an institution to that institution's struggle against national and local governments. He has been tempted by the latter but apparently finds the drain on his energy and adrenalin too taxing on his own work in producing, writing and directing.

If we wish to squeeze meanings and significance from his behaviour, we can of course also say that major institutions are family-like establishments. They offer opportunities for revolts against father-figures, for sibling love, familial hierarchies, exercise of authority, good table manners, regulated systems of punishments, unexpected rewards and endless gossip in the nursery chamber. An institution broadens the concept of a family but is recognizable as one.

Broaden and narrow, narrow and broaden while constantly searching for new and surprising recognitions—perhaps this is one way to describe Bergman's work, this calm exercise in restlessness. Overpoweringly self- assured in his efforts to overpower insecurity. Full of empathy in order to keep his impatience under control, full of impatience in order to keep his empathy under control when it threatens the force of requirements.

Stillness is restrained motion, and the camera is damned well not supposed to go off and do its own thing. It is supposed to stand still until the narrative and expressions threaten to smash it to pieces if it doesn't move a little. The proscenium and the frame around the picture are accepted boundaries and limitations. Precisely for that reason, life throws itself irascibly, expressively and violently against them. From the movie screen a woman's face talks to us minute after minute, without movement. The screen is a limitation, the picture is a limitation, the body and the face are limitations, yet it all breathes artistic freedom.

All these challenges stimulate the artistic drive that is a necessary prerequisite to such work. It is a matter of constantly battling triviality or equipping triviality with meaning—of giving it dimensions. This is one of the many gateways to Strindberg. This is why Thomas Mann's boring diaries are so fascinating, an exalted form of relaxation. In the end, should we still not dare ask whether God ever has a stomach ache? Publicly and in artistic form.

In that case, it might also be a counterweight to all the attempts to monumentalize Bergman. His trivialities in Laterna Magica are also a way of replying to those attacks that try to transform Bergman into some kind of symbol, so that simply by attacking his name someone can throw the spotlight on his own.

Doing this does not even require arguments, only a fresh and witty vocabulary. This is sometimes called debate. Meanwhile the man and his works remain one of Sweden's most outstanding, remarkable instruments for important and living discourse.

Erland Josephson has collaborated with Ingmar Bergman throughout his career, as a script writer, actor and director.