Stockholm in the grip of winter; it seemed the right time to beard the Northern Film King in his icy lair. First the setting; the town, a city ungarish and ascetic.

One looks in amazement at the thousands of birds dotted on the ice before the Royal Palace and wonders why they should halt their migration there—until one learns that they, in their harsh wisdom, have discovered that survival chances are greater here than in the balmier South where enemies lie in wait, even though here many freeze to death as they sleep. State banquets are laid out for them under conical thatched hats in the parks.

The faces of the older people are puckered into frozen pasty folds, but in the squares the children are skating gaily in bright red hose and bonnets to the music of Strauss, and thet white lamp globes glitter against the black tree trunks. You slump through the frozen streets in search of a restaurant, and to the lugubrious accompaniment of two electric guitarists playing "Today I Feel So Happy" you eat a modest Wiener schnitzel and drink a glass of beer and come to the first of many conclusions that you must have mistaken the exchange rate.

But you haven't, for this must surely be the most expensive country in the world. Life seems to be suspended in prosperous middle-class placidity—the last place in the world where one would expect to find advocates of free love or progressive architects. To scratch the surface of life in Sweden one feels one would need to take a pick-axe.

"Stockholm is provincial," says Bergman later. "You leave Copenhagen, which isn't, and then come the vast distances, lakes and forests, forests and lakes—then, suddenly, for no apparent reason, Stockholm. But in this place one can create in peace—and sometimes the results are less provincial than those in London. If you lived here for a whole winter, though, you would understand what spring means when it comes at last in May. The wild strawberries are the first fruit, and to pick them is to experience the purest joy." (One remembers that Bergman has more than once used the wild strawberries to symbolize purity and innocence; the unhampered rush of joy which all too soon life dams up.)

Bergman can be found (if you are prepared to lay long protracted siege, for he is intensely wary of journalists) in the National Theatre, of which he is now the autocratic head. His movements are quick and his figure is slender (he is now forty-five), but his affable manner cannot conceal that here is a man very much on his guard.

In the cinema, as well as in the theatre, he has absolute control (he has now made thirty films, written many more scripts, and has some eighty theatre productions to his credit; an already prodigious achievement). Few directors in the history of the cinema have ever attained his consistent freedom of expression.

The question of power and its effect on the artist seemed to offer a good beginning for an interview—particularly as Bergman has generally depicted the agents of power in his films (vide The Magician) as smug and corrupt. Bergman considers the question, seems about to answer, then asks for it to be repeated in German. Then neatly dodges it.

"Here I have my kingdom. I am often asked to work in Paris or London, but why should I? Here I have complete loyalty, and real loyalty is not uncritical."

At this point I scribbled down a key-word as an aide-mémoire and felt him stiffen like someone who has detected a concealed tape recorder. I placed the pencil on the table to diminish its threat.

Bergman sprang into international prominence with The Seventh Seal (1956). This allegory of a knight returning from the Crusades to find chaos and pestilence abounding was widely interpreted as a depiction of modern man in spiritual crisis and also at the mercy of The Bomb. Immediately the world's critics were divided into devotees and equally passionate detractors. In a brief space of time he joined the cinema élite known by their surname alone.

I mentioned the fact that many of his films have debated the existence of God: God is Love, they have implied, but as Love has generally been revealed as a puny force declining swiftly into a source of mutual torment, then by extension the Bergmanian God must be presumed to be either extremely vengeful or non-existent. And in his new film, The Silence, the characters move in a greater, more doom-laden desperation than ever before; in a kind of living Death.

"Ester, the sister who dies at the end of The Silence, is already dead at the beginning of the film," explains Bergman; "her spirit has died."

"Then does God exist for your argument now?"

"It doesn't need to be talked about."

"You mean you don't need to talk about it?"

"Yes." The reply is flat, smiling and final. Clearly we shall have to wend our way back to this later.

One soon becomes aware of a peculiar Bergman characteristic: when he is wary his eyes glaze over and he will halt in the middle of a sentence for an extraordinary length of time. One's instinct is to help him out with the words, and that, I began to suspect, was precisely what he was waiting for, for then he would agree benignly to whatever one said. One needed to summon up every reserve of sadism within oneself to sit out the pauses in relaxed silence.

"You can hold a pause longer than any actor I've ever known," I eventually told him. He looked hard for a moment, then released his surprisingly rollicking laugh which ends with equally surprising abruptness.

But the laugh was liberating, and he went on to talk of his childhood. "It was a contented time for me, and today my relationship with my parents is very good. Nowadays children have to grow up without an atmosphere. Our atmosphere at home was strongly Lutheran, of course, as my father was a pastor."

Thus it was that from his earliest days Bergman lived in an atmosphere where God and the Devil were very present personages and where the trappings of Death in funeral services were part of everyday life. Though obvious, these references to Bergman's early ambience seem vital to an understanding of his obsessive themes.

"All my family for generations have been alternately pastors and farmers," he went on.

"Which are you?"

"Both," he retorted with another rollicking laugh.

"Strindberg and Kierkegaard are generally cited as your major literary influences—is this so?"

"No. I love Strindberg. But I think one of my greatest influences was Molière, whom I discovered when I lived for five months in Paris. We perform his plays regularly in the theatre repertoire."

One's mind races through the Bergman film canon in search of support for this and halts, faute de mieux, at Smiles of a Summer Night.

"That was Marivaux," Bergman asserts, with more reason.

Only now can one feel the beginnings of a relaxed communion, and Bergman waves away the time-limit he had originally set on our talk.

"I don't like to talk about my films," he remarked almost apologetically, and proceeded to do so.

"The creative process is self-analysis. I think the film of mine I like best is Winter Light. Not because it was a flop," he added quickly, before I could frame the cruel words myself.

Winter Light is the second of Bergman's recent trilogy, beginning with Through a Glass Darkly and ending with The Silence. Its main character was a pastor who, having lost the ability to communicate with his flock, has thereby lost communion with his God.

"I made the film because I really wanted to, and I made it with no concessions to the public. I know it's a difficult film, but I think that I achieved that much (holding up two fingers) of truth concerning the spiritual crisis I've been striving for years to describe."

It seemed almost inevitable that the current Bergman production in the theatre should be Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Instead of the evocatively seedy, realistic set in the London production, one enters the theatre to find the stage uncurtained, a bare, gray back wall surrounded by black tabs, four pieces of gray furniture, a drinks table and one book. The mood is heightened by changing intensities of light from unrealistic sources.

But this set becomes a prison; it throws the characters into naked relief, and one finds oneself condensing the content of the play down to an oft-repeated Bergmanian concept that Hell together is better than Hell alone. Contrary to general preference, it is the third act that particularly fascinates Bergman.

"After the marvellous fluency of the first two acts, I feel that Albee is stabbing furiously in all directions in the third, breathlessly striving to say something about himself—as if he were hacking away at an ice surface through which he can see plants and animals. And he can't get through. I'm tremendously interested in what he will write next."

I had heard from someone with good reason to know that Bergman had attended only six rehearsals during the two and a half months of preparation for the play. Apparently the technicalities of staging no longer intrigue him.

"How, then," I had asked, "did it come about that the production is so emphatically his interpretation?"

"It does sound contradictory," comes the reply, "but he seems to be able to direct with remote control—his assistants know precisely what he expects to see."

One shies away from such mystical evaluations, but the fact remains that Bergman is everywhere in the air in Sweden; he enters into well-nigh every conversation, from the weather (which apparently Bergman controls) to the Japanese film director Kurosawa, whom Bergman reveres for his superb narrative control.

As director of the National Theatre, Bergman controls the activities of the country's best actors; and film directors, even from companies other than Svensk, where Bergman officiates as artistic adviser, must obtain his sanction to use the theatre's actors. One of the few recent Swedish films not by Bergman to achieve some international success was The Mistress, by Vilgot Sjöman, considered to be Bergman's protégé.

"He is not my protégé," declared Bergman. "I merely advised him." But Stockholm gossip claims that Sjöman must report every morning like a pupil to a stern master.

We looked at each other like two bland foxes, and it occurred to me that Bergman is au fait with every ripple of opinion in his Swedish backwater; he is moreover extremely anxious to be approved of.

Bergman has seven children; six from his earlier marriages and a son from his present wife, the pianist Käbi Laretei. I said to him: "You often stress man's dependence on women yet at the same time you imply that the two sexes conspire to work out their own Hell together. But I understand that personally you are happy now?"

The fatuous nature of this question, addressed to such a depicter of despair, made us both laugh, but Bergman replied as if he acquiesced.

"You know, when I made the comedy Smiles of a Summer Night it was the unhappiest time of my life. You can only make a film like The Silence when you are content; it is the only time when you have the courage to peer deeply into yourself, to dare to try to understand."

"Those erotic scenes in The Silence," I reminded him, "which are currently harassing the world's censors...you must have been well aware that you were heading for trouble when you made them?"

"I swear to you I never thought about it," he replied. "I made the film as I had conceived it, and it was only during the editing that I started to reflect and told the producer, 'I don't think this film will ever be seen.' But he reassured me."

(The Silence has now been seen by 2½ million Swedes and is still being shown; in Germany it has received a certificate of special artistic merit which entitles it to a substantial tax exemption, and in New York it has been cut by only thirty-five seconds. The British censor will see the film on Friday to determine whether it will be shown here more or less in its entirety or restricted to the specialized cinema clubs throughout the country—such as The New Arts in London—which are not affected by the censor's judgment.)

"I can't understand your reason for making the relationship between the sisters a lesbian one," I said.

"Is it?" he queried. "Ester loves her sister, she finds her beautiful and feels a tremendous responsibility for her; but she would be horrified if it were pointed out that her feelings were incestuous. Her mistake lies in the fact that she wants to control her sister—as her father had controlled her by his love. Hers is a despotic love (Bergman's fist is clenched). Love must be open (he holds forth a receptive palm). Otherwise Love is the beginning of Death. That is what I am trying to say."

So therein lies the way to Bergman's God, I concluded. Therein lies the key to Bergman's simplified religion, rooted in Christianity but given a universal extension.

"You see," he adds, "when I was younger I had illusions about how life should be. Now I see things as they are. No longer any questions of 'God, why?' or 'Mother, why?'. One has to settle for suicide or acceptance. Either destroy oneself (which is romantic) or accept life. I choose now to accept it."

The atmosphere is lighter now, and by way of corny symbolism the sun is suddenly dazzlingly bright outside. We seem to have struggled through to some sort of cathartic communication; we have made, in a small way, a Bergmanian journey.