Early Bergman Eclipse Series 1, a box set of five DVDs, including Torment (B&W, 101 mins., 1944), Crisis (B&W, 93 mins., 1946), Port of Call (B&W, 97 mins., 1948), Thirst (B&W, 84 mins., 1949) and To Joy (B&W, 99 mins., 1949). A Criterion Collection release, distributed by Image Entertainment.

Jean-Luc Godard's first feature was the assured, brilliant Breathless (1959), but such a film debut is a rarity. Think of the callowness of Francis Ford Coppola's early youth comedy, You're a Big Boy Now (1967), or Robert Altman's predictable genre film A Cold Day in the Park (1969). It often takes years for an artist to find his voice and point of view, to take full control of his gifts. This is true even of a director like Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007), who served a long apprenticeship in the Swedish movie industry—unsure of himself, stumbling around directing melodramas—before he began producing classics like Wild Strawberries, Winter Light, and Persona.

On the other hand, the process by which a great director slowly feels his way to his unique perspective can be as dramatic as anything that takes place within his films. In Bergman's case, even at the very beginning one could see, in his modest, fledgling, sometimes formulaic films, signs of the motifs, characters, and themes of his later, more formally and intellectually sophisticated and imaginative work. From the first, Bergman was most at home with the dark side of human nature (though never nihilistic). In these early films he was already dealing with his signature subjects—destructive affairs, hellish marriages, oppressive families, suicidal despair, and profound guilt. The early works, like almost all Bergman's films, are full of emotional conflict and inner turmoil (though they tend to contrive neat conclusions that Bergman would on no account allow to mar his later work). But from the very start one could see, already at work, Bergman's gift for illuminating the complexity of marriage, dramatizing parent-child tensions, showing the torment of the struggle to create first-rate works of art.

Criterion, arguably the elite of DVD companies (with nearly 400 titles), has chosen five early works by Bergman to initiate a new label, Eclipse, meant to offer relatively low-cost collections of low-profile films by major directors. The Bergman set, ranging from Torment (1944) to To Joy (1949), lists at $69.95—savings made possible by eliminating supplementary materials and commentary tracks—though each disc in the collection comes with informative notes. Criterion has to be commended for producing this collection of rarely seen Bergman films, and they have hunted down fine, spotless prints of the films, though there has been no attempt made to restore them.

Bergman's first film, Torment, was actually directed by All Sjöberg (Miss Julie) the most respected Swedish director of the Forties. Still, the script was Bergman's, and one can readily see just how much the twenty-four-year-old writer brought to a film he saw as an "obsessive, anger-filled story about the torments of school and youth." Sjöberg wanted the film to reflect the period, viewing the middle-aged, sadistic Latin teacher, nicknamed by the students "Caligula" (Stig Järrel), as a crypto-Nazi (he reads a Swedish Nazi newspaper, and in Sjöberg's words was "based on Himmler"). Sjöberg's striking direction left a distinctive mark with its play of light and dark; ominous expressionist shadows that loom over the action; extreme high-angle shots that make its characters seem utterly vulnerable; and a skillful evocation of the repressive nature of the school by setting the action in echoing, empty corridors with staircases that seem to go on to infinity. But it is Bergman's vision—more psychological and personal than political—that dominates the film. (In fact, critics at the time saw the film as differing greatly from Sjöberg's earlier work.)

Torment's handsome, idealistic, and romantic student protagonist, Widgren (a stiff, dull performance by Alf Kjellin), confronts a number of father figures. Widgren inhabits a very personal hell, much of it based on Bergman's revulsion with school as an institution and his painful relation with his own father. Widgren's father in the film is an insensitive, remote bourgeois, more interested in appearances than in his son's emotional plight. The school's headmaster—in some ways a surrogate father—is a conventional, benevolent man who offers consoling pieties ("I believe there is a reason for everything that happens") to a shattered Widgren after he's thrown out of school and fails to graduate. The film's dominant father figure is Caligula, who torments the boys, saving his most intimidating behaviour for Widgren (standing over him with a pointer as he tries to conjugate Latin verbs), who is a weak student. Widgren rebels against all three, but it's his relation with Caligula, a character who reminds one of the severe, controlling Bishop stepfather in Bergman's Fanny and Alexander (1982), that is central.

Caligula is more than a mere sadist, he's self-pitying—constantly claiming he's sick and trying to elicit sympathy. He tortures Bertha (played by Mai Zetterling, who later directed controversial films like Night Games), an emotionally needy, alcoholic shop girl—who is also having an affair with Widgren—to the point of her drinking herself to death. Bergman's Caligula is no caricature, but a very human creation—solitary, harsh, raging, and utterly pathetic—the most authentic, complicated figure in the film.

Although the film is visually vivid and was a commercial success, the script lacks the complexity and subtlety of Bergman's later works. The relationship between Widgren and Bertha is a lifeless one, and Bertha herself is nothing more than a passive victim—devoid of any sign of the strength of will and intelligence of Bergman's later female characters. The film's contrived conclusion sees Widgren rejecting a beaten, dejected Caligula's plea for some sympathetic connection. Widgren then steps out of the flat with a smile on his face, the radiant light-filled day enveloping him, where we surmise that he will return to Life. It's a facilely optimistic finale that fails to expunge the sense of human misery and alienation that flows through the film.

Torment was an auspicious beginning, but Bergman's actual directorial debut came with Crisis (1946), a melodramatic soap opera that could have been made by any Hollywood studio. It's a film based on a Danish play, The Mother Creature by Leck Fischer, which Bergman saw as "an out and out bit of whoredom for the public." Still, he was yearning to direct a film, so the flawed nature of the material was irrelevant to him. But Bergman found that his first days of filming "were mghtmarish." How could he—on this project—have mastered the art of directing? But with the advice of Victor Sjöström—the great silent film director and later star of Wild Strawberries—he began to work more simply, and to at least get along with cast and crew.

Much of the film is utterly banal—simplistically contrasting life in an idealized, too serene small town with a corrupt, decadent, film-noirish Stockholm. The narrative focus of Crisis is on a sweet, innocent, dim eighteen-year-old, Nelly (Inga Landgré), who leaves her stolid veterinarian suitor, and her loving, warm piano-teacher foster mother Ingeborg (Dagny Lind), for her blowsy birth mother Jenny (Marianne Löfgren) and the excitement of Stockholm. Jenny is a chain-smoking, middle-aged beauty-shop owner, trying to hide her emotional privation beneath an artificial smile and a complacent smirk. She's a woman with a weakness for a younger man/lover who she supports and can't keep her hands off.

The younger man, Jack (Stig Olin), a mustachioed rogue, is the only distinctive character in the film. He's eloquent, seductive, and sufficiently self-aware that he can declaim about his narcissism and his fatalism. ("One day I shall step out into the dark, my clock will stop ticking.") Jack is an eternally out-of-work actor whose major role is his life, and he loves to posture theatrically. He can be affectionate and mawkish, but he is also sadistic and sinister.

The film's strongest scene takes place at night in the beauty parlour where Jack goes to bed with a captivated Nelly in a room filled with mirrors (Bergman uses them often in his work to evoke inner character) and mannequins, and with the sound of raucous laughter echoing from the theatre next door. The atmosphere is threatening and decadent. Jack's talk tends to the confessional, and to high-flown literary turns of phrase; but it isn't quite integrated into the narrative, and the film ends in an absurd fashion with Jack melodramatically committing suicide, while a despairing Nelly goes home to her provincial haven and the knowing Ingeborg's consoling embrace. One can see only a hint of the mature Bergman in the unsuccessful Crisis, and it remains nothing more than a clumsy work in progress.

Bergman directed the other three films in the collection, Port of Call (1948), Thirst (1949), and To Joy (1949), in collaboration with cinematographer Gunnar Fischer, with whom he continued to work on seventeen other films (including Wild Strawberries and The Seventh Seal) until switching to another great cinematographer, Sven Nykvist.

Port of Call was influenced by "the spirit" and neorealist style of Rossellini. Bergman wanted to emulate "all that extreme simplicity, and poverty, that grayness" of neorealism, since he was still groping around for a style of his own. As a result, the film was shot on location in the port city of Gothenberg where Bergman directed plays in its city theatre. Port of Call, based on a story by Olle Länsberg, includes semidocumentary scenes of men walking to work, shaping up for assignments, and labouring on the docks. But much of it was shot in the studio, and Bergman uses the exquisitely shot, high-contrast locations and dock work as mere background, without their playing a meaningful role in the film. In accord with neorealism, Port of Call's characters are also working class—a rarity in Bergman's oeuvre where the central characters are usually upper-middle class or artists and intellectuals (with the exception of his Summer with Monika, 1953). The characters are also much less articulate and self-analytic than the Bergman norm, though also less histrionic than the central figures of Crisis.

The film opens with a striking, high-overhead shot of Berit (Nine-Christine Jönsson) trying to commit suicide. Berit, a young milliner who works in a factory, is haunted by traumatic childhood memories of her parents' bitter fights in their cramped flat. She feels rage towards her controlling, nagging mother, and has spent time in reform school for running away from home. She is now on probation under the watchful eye of a coldly complacent social worker without an iota of human empathy. Berit's life may seem overdetermined, but her self-hatred and sense that there is nothing but misery in her future is emotionally believable.

Berit is essentially passive, craving kindness and support from men, without much strength of will to change her life. Her one hope is a relationship with a seaman, Gösta (Bengt Eklund), a steady, easygoing, tough, and taciturn man. Gösta, far more sensitive than his workmates, who cynically view women as disposable sexual objects, still can't quite accept her sordid past—becoming jealous of all the men she's been with before him. He goes off on a drunken spree, utterly confused about his feelings towards her. Berit, meanwhile, becomes involved with her friend Getrude's (Mimi Nelson) abortion—Bergman's trademark powerful close-ups and two shots figure prominently in this scene—which leads, due to the negligence of the abortionist, to her friend's death. Despite all the grief, Berit and Gösta predictably reconcile, deciding that together they will confront oppressive mothers and social workers (Berit has become stronger), and a life that will never be easy. Scenes in the reformatory and in a dance hall are artfully constructed, and convey authenticity. But Bengt Eklund's performance as Gösta is a major weakness; the character lacks energy and affect, and the relationship between him and Berit has little conviction.

In Port of Call, picking up from the neo-realists, Bergman also makes a passing stab at a social critique. Berit's factory work is alienating, the social institutions that deal with her can be obtuse, and, at the inquiry into Gertrude's death, she condemns the social system, saying the poor take what they can get, but the rich have access to gifted doctors (shades of Vera Drake). Nevertheless, in Port of Call, Bergman has not suddenly been transformed into a socially committed filmmaker. He's made a gesture in that direction, but, even from the beginning of his career, it was the existential and psychological Bergman that had primacy. Despair for Bergman almost always has its origins in existence itself.

In Thirst (1949)—in the U.S. it was released as Three Strange Loves—Bergman began to display more of his own vision, and greater control of the medium. Based on the short stories of Birgit Tengroth, the screenplay was written by Herbert Grevenius, and is built around three interlocking stories. In the central story, Rut (Eva Henning), a self-destructive, hysterical, former ballerina continually nags, rages against, and puts down her patient, assistant lecturer husband Bertil (Birger Malmsten), as they travel in a cramped train compartment from Basel thru a post WWII-ravaged Germany to an intact Stockholm that remained neutral during the war. Throughout the trip, a chain-smoking, heavy-drinking, nervously pacing Rut compulsively prattles on, aware that she's behaving impossibly, taking out all her frustrations on a quietly suffering Bertil, whose suppressed anger comes out in a dream he has of murdering her. Still, interspersed amidst the bickering are moments of real affection between them.

The intense conflict between Rut and Bertil prefigures more subtly rendered Bergman clashing couples in, for example, Wild Strawberries, Shame, and Scenes from a Marriage, where relationships are pervaded by feelings of alienation and entrapment. Thirst also contains Rut's flashbacks to a youthful, callow affair with a pompous, callous, married army officer, and an abortion that results in her sterility. The flashbacks are soap operatic and banal. At this early point in her life Rut seems unformed, and as a character arouses little interest.

There is another very loosely connected narrative that involves Bertil's cast-off, angst-ridden, neurasthenic fiancée, Viola (played by Birgit Tengroth—the writer herself). She visits a sadistic, controlling psychoanalyst (he claims he'll "deliver her"), whose therapeutic method is built on direct confrontation. He informs Viola that "her life has been one mistake," and goes on to rip her apart for her failed marriage and unstable affairs. As a satire of psychoanalysis' jargon and hubris, the sequence is terribly heavy-handed and awkward.

In a later scene Viola wanders disconsolately through the empty streets of Stockholm on Midsummer's Night, where she very nearly suffers a fate seen in the films of the late Forties as much worse than death—seduction by a predatory, unhappy lesbian. That scene was sensational for the time, and some of it was cut by the censors.

Viola's end may be melodramatic, but it was seamlessly shot. As she despairingly staggers along a jetty to commit suicide, the camera cuts away, looking at the water, and then one hears a splash off screen, and ripples in the water begin to slowly appear. Thirst then cuts back to Rut and Bertil who closely clasp each other (do they subliminally sense Viola's suicide?), choosing their hell of a marriage rather than solitude ("At least we have each other"). It's not a climax that Frank Capra would have endorsed, but a fitting one to a film where nobody seems capable of breaking out of his/her egocentricity and unhappiness.

The relationship between Rut and Bertil is the film's most trenchant aspect, with Eva Henning giving a riveting performance. In one scene Rut, in typical Bergman fashion, looks at her face in a mirror, confronting a self that is distorted by abrasiveness and self-hatred. The other elements—the flashbacks and Viola's story—are much weaker, but one can see in Thirst seeds of the director who could create strong, intricate women characters, and evoke the dynamics of male-female relationships arguably better than any other director.

The film that followed, To Joy (1949), was directed and written solely by Bergman. The film opens and closes with Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (in particular its final movement, "Ode to Joy"), introducing Stig (Stig Olin), a violinist who receives a call that his wife, Marta (Maj-Britt Nilsson), and one of their two children have died in an explosion. The film then flashes back to Stig's entry into a provincial orchestra in Helsingborg, led by the wise, avuncular conductor Sonderby (Victor Sjöström), an orchestra in which Marta was also a violinist. They meet, fall in love, and marry. In his autobiography, Bergman sees the film as describing his tormented second marriage to Ellen Lundström: "It was about me, about the conditions imposed by art, about fidelity and infidelity."

From the beginning, despite both being musicians, they seem mismatched. Stig is dour and adolescent, while Marta is radiant, nurturing, and honest (she's almost too good to be true). Marta has already been through one marriage built on deception. She is wise and perceptive and has no illusions about Stig's character or talent, but convinces herself that it will all work out.

When Marta is in labour, Stig childishly panics and takes to his bed, and then escapes to an orchestra rehearsal as she gives birth. He also overvalues his talent as a musician, declaiming drunkenly that he is a real artist, and then flubbing his one chance at being a soloist. He can't bear his dreams being shattered, so he hides away from Marta, getting drunk. What's clear is that Stig is nothing more than a competent second-rater—suited to being a member of a provincial orchestra—a reality with which he has trouble dealing.

With Stig's continuing artistic dissatisfaction, the marriage flounders. He has an affair that poisons their tense, moribund marriage further, leading to shouting matches, and to his beating Marta bloody, after she speaks ironically of his "genius." Bergman's gift for writing intelligent, acrimonious dialogue between couples is evident in To Joy, and so is his talent for constructing flawed male figures that are at least partly redeemed by their self-awareness. For example, Stig is disgusted with himself, and the affair he has with the deeply neurotic, sexy, promiscuous Nelly (Margit Carlqvist) is seemingly an expression of his desire for self-abasement.

Marta and Stig reconcile, and are apparently happy for a number of years. But then Bergman inserts the operatic climax of Marta's tragic accidental death, and Stig's joining with the orchestra in playing "Ode to Joy," with his surviving child in the audience. It's too blatantly and sentimentally a hymn to resurrection. In the old conductor Sonderby's words, the Beethoven symphony is about "joy so great that it lies beyond pain, beyond despair." In his later films, Bergman would have never ended on such an explicit note. Still, in To Joy one can see Bergman slowly maturing as a director. He handles the emotional shifts in Stig and Marta's marriage with consummate skill. He doesn't only capture the idyllic moments and the horrific moments in their relationship, but also achieves the difficult feat of evoking the ostensibly happy times where unease and discontent lie underneath.

For a critic like myself, who has never allowed the changing currents of fashion to sway me from continuing to believe in Bergman's greatness, the Eclipse collection turns out to be a revelation. Each one of these early films is flawed. But they all have moments where we glimpse the director who would later capture the nature of relationships and the intricacies of the psyche more profoundly than any of his peers—moments where Bergman, the maestro of angst, emerges.