It begins like Chekhov's Three Sisters and ends like The Cherry Orchard and in between it's more like Strindberg. Cries and Whispers, Ingmar Bergman's latest film, was a tremendous success in London and New York, and the sensation of the Cannes Festival last week. It will open in Paris in September. Unanimously considered a masterpiece, Cries and Whispers is going to bring back to Bergman the public that has been avoiding him since his last great success, The Silence, in 1963.

Yet there has been no body of work of the calibre and integrity of Bergman's since the war. Between 1945 and 1972 he made thirty-three movies. His name became well known with the success in Cannes in 1956 of Smiles of a Summer Night, his sixteenth film. Ten years earlier the first Bergman film to be shown in France had been noticed by only one critic, André Bazin, who congratulated the young Swedish director for "creating a world of blinding cinematic purity" (Review of L'Eternel mirage [A Ship Bound for India] in L'Ecran Français, September, 1947).

Since 1957, almost all of Bergman's films have eventually come out in France, though not in the right order. The most famous are Sawdust and Tinsel, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Virgin Spring, The Silence, and Persona; the most touching are Sommarlek [Summer Interlude], Summer with Monika, Les Communiants [Winter Light], The Rite. Let's speak briefly about The Rite.

For the past few weeks, this extraordinary film, shot by Bergman in black and white for Swedish television, has been playing in Paris. The theatre of the Studio Galande is tiny, and the eighty spectators who come each day to see it don't cover the costs of showing it. In a move of real stupidity, The Rite was closed the day before Bergman arrived in Cannes; his arrival was an event we've been hoping for for fifteen years. Taking The Rite off the bill last week is like taking an author's book out of the bookstore window the day he receives the Prix Goncourt. What a mess! And a mess for which the Paris critics have to bear some responsibility. A film of extreme inner violence, The Rite shows us three artists executing a judge—in other words, a critic. It is curious, then, that the press chose to ignore this film.

Bergman is a stubborn, shy man. He devotes his whole life to the theatre and movies, and one has the sense that he is only happy when he's working surrounded by actresses, and that in the near future one won't see a Bergman film without women. I think he's more involved in the feminine principle than in feminism. Women are not seen through a masculine prism in his films, but are observed in a spirit of total complicity. His female characters are infinitely subtle, while his male characters are conventions.

Instead of squeezing four hours worth of material into an hour and a half as most contemporary directors do, Bergman works with short stories—a few characters, very little action, little in the way of stage effects, a brief time frame. Each of his films—it's fascinating to see them together in a week-long retrospective or at a festival—reminds us of a single painting in an exposition. There are Bergman "periods." The present period is more physical than metaphysical. The strange title Cries and Whispers stays with you as you come away from watching the film, having been cried to and whispered to.

Bergman's lesson is three-fold: freedom in dialogue, a radical cleaning of the image, and the absolute priority of the human face.

As far as freedom of dialogue goes, the text of his films is not meant to be a piece of literature but simple spoken words—actually spoken and unspoken words—confessions, and confidences. We could also have learned this lesson from Jean Renoir, but curiously it comes through with greater weight by means of a foreign and cinematically virginal language. This has been evident since Sommarlek—the film of our salad days, of our twenties, of our first loves. As we watch a Bergman film, our senses are strongly involved. Our ears hear Swedish—it's like a piece of music or a dark colour—and we read the subtitles which simplify and reinforce the dialogue. If you are interested enough to compare Buñuel's Mexican or Spanish films with the ones he made in France, you can reflect on this phenomenon of shifted communication.

Consider the cleanness of his images. Some filmmakers allow pure chance to enter into their images—the sun, passersby, a bicycle (filmmakers like Rossellini, Lelouch, and Huston) and others want to control every square inch of the screen (Eisenstein, Lang, and Hitchcock). Bergman started out like the first group and then changed camps. In his latest films you never see a chance pedestrian; your attention will never be distracted by an extra object in the setting, even a bird in the garden. There is nothing on the canvas except what Bergman (who's anti-pictorial, like all true filmmakers) wants there.

The human face. No one draws so close to it as Bergman does. In his recent films there is nothing more than mouths talking, ears listening, eyes expressing curiosity, hunger, panic.

Listen to the words of love that Max von Sydow addresses to Liv Ullmann in The Hour of the Wolf. Then listen to the hate-filled words the same couple hurl at each other in The Passion of Anna, three years later. What you hear is the most mercilessly autobiographical director working in movies today.

His most rueful film is Now About These Women. It's ironic to realize that Bergman's finest work is precisely involved in bringing out the dormant genius in each of the actresses he's chosen to with—Maj-Britt Nilsson, Harriet Andersson, Eva Dahlbeck, Gunnel Lindblom, Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullmann. They are not kittens or dolls but real women. Bergman films them as they look out at the world, their gazes increasingly intense with toughness and suffering. The results are wonderful movies that, like Renoir's, are as simple as saying hello. However, is saying hello so very simple?

— 1973