STOCKHOLM. In the films of Ingmar Bergman, everyone seems to be afflicted with the extreme form of Wilhelm Reich's "emotional plague." Brows are knit, eyes are glazed, consciences are stricken and souls are tortured. Bergman's universe—and to most Americans, Sweden is nothing more than a cinematic projection of that universe—is a place of anguish, guilt, fear and isolation.

For some, this is a slightly absurd universe, for it bears little relation to the workaday world we all have in common. It is certainly true that people have identity crises, suffer from isolation and are haunted by nameless terrors. It is also true that they brush their teeth, slip on banana peels, burp and generally make asses of themselves. But very few of these activities creep into Bergman's cinematic vision. Judging by his preoccupation, Bergman should be a gaunt, tortured, hallucinated neurotic. The fact that he is as normal as smorgasbord is an infuriating contradiction.

There is an enormous amount of misconception about the man. The general impression is that he is a moody, suffering artist who tortures a movie out of his anguished soul and then recuperates in a mental institution. Part of that fallacious notion grew out of the fact that years ago he suffered from a bleeding ulcer and had to visit a hospital regularly for treatment, but nothing has been heard of the ulcer for the past seven years, and Bergman assumes, whatever its psychosomatic cause, it has now disappeared forever. "I am, I'm sorry to report, very balanced, very happy in my marriage and thoroughly unneurotic toward my work. What I mean by that is this: When we are on the stage or in a studio and we create terrible things, moments of death or torture, still we are all in a very good mood. In fact, we even joke among ourselves. We know that we are playing a game, are allowed to play a game just like children. That seems to me to be very unneurotic behaviour."

What many people do not seem to have realized is that there was a profound change in Bergman about the time of his work on Winter Light, a film that was not very successful by Bergman standards but which provided a catharsis for him. "When the religious aspect of ray life was totally eradicated," he said, "my life became so much easier. Did you ever read a wonderful essay by Sartre which was printed in some silly magazine? I think Vogue. In it he spoke of his inhibitions as artist and writer. He suffered because what he did wasn't good. Slowly he realized that this nagging anxiety about his failure to create things of value was an atavism rising out of a religious idea that there is something that can be called the 'highest good' or 'perfect,' created by man. In discovering this atavism within himself, the surviving idea of the absolute, extreme perfection, and in seeing through it and cutting it away, he lost his inhibitions in regard to his artistic work. I have had a strangely parallel experience. When the heavy religious superstructure collapsed and disappeared, my writing block also vanished. I lost my literary inferiority complex. I lost, above all, the fear of not being up-to-date and modern. Everything was cleared with Winter Light."

Part of Bergman's revelation had to do with the perishability of life and the futility of spiritual abstractions. "The only life that exists for me is this life, here and now, and the only holiness that exists is in my relations with other people. And outside, nothing exists. When I realized that, when I began to understand that everything happens here and now in the world around me, it gave me a marvellous feeling of relief and security. I found a new power with which to do my work, and there was a kind of new beginning for me. No, I don't believe in any afterlife because this life gives me everything I need; the cruel, beautiful, fantastic life. For me, the meaning of everything is life itself. I don't need any other."

The change in Bergman was almost classically existential. Released from the fetters of a childhood dominated by religious influences, Bergman discovered that there was sweet liberation in embracing things themselves without referring them to demons or deities. But he also believes that people never change and that blinding perceptions about one's character very rarely lead to a transformed personality; and in his work, particularly Cries and Whispers, the demons persist.

It is this dichotomy in his nature, the demonic in combat with the earthly, which accounts for a certain lack of cohesion in his later works. It is as if the filmmaker did not entirely believe his own films, as if he appreciated their power to persuade others without himself being persuaded. In Cries and Whispers, for instance, a highly evocative piece of film making, which dominated this year's New York Film Critics awards, characterization and situation thoroughly hypnotize the spectator. Only afterward is one aware that one's emotions have been manipulated by a master craftsman rather than gripped by any inherent content.

As with Hitchcock, whom Bergman admires and from whom he admits he has learned a great deal, we realize, after being released from the spell, that the images and apparitions which held us were all of a wizard's making, that wizardry is not the same thing as plausible reality. As far back as 1960, Bergman almost conceded as much: "I am really a conjurer and in my work I am guilty of deceit."

There is probably no "conjurer" in the world who possesses as much freedom as Bergman. On several occasions he has rejected lucrative Hollywood offers—mainly because they did not insure his approval of the final cut of the film. "It's like approaching Oistrakh," says Bergman, "and saying to him, 'Come to New York and play Beethoven's Violin Concerto—but of course, you must use my violin, not yours.' Do you think he would come?"

Artistically, there is no reason in the world why Bergman should consider any other place. In Sweden where for many years he was Svensk Filmindustri, the country's largest movie company, he has his own technicians, his own cameramen and his own stable of actors and actresses; people who, in many cases, have been his for more than 20 years. What kind of incentive can any foreign studio offer to compare with that? But there are other, perhaps more basic, reasons why Bergman refuses to stir from Sweden and speaks of "the great fear" whenever he leaves.

For Bergman the production of a film or play is an exercise in family life. He works with friends and colleagues of long standing, cannot abide "an enemy on the set" and grows paranoid if, even for legitimate reasons, one of his family of actors refuses an invitation to lunch or tea. "Do you know what movie making is?" he once asked. "Eight hours of hard work each day to get three minutes of film. And during those eight hours, there are only 10 or 12 minutes, if you're lucky, of real creation. Everything and everyone on a movie set must be attuned to finding those few moments. You've got to keep the actors and yourself in a kind of enchanted circle. An outside presence, even a completely friendly one, is basically alien to the intimate process going on in front of him." Bergman, despite tantrums and peevishness, recognizes that, at base, he is a timid person and a lonely one. He profoundly needs the feeling of being "part of a group," of living in "the collective world of film making" where "performers, the members of the crew—everyone is forced into a form of communion that is worthwhile and constantly fascinating. The great stimulation one has all the time is that one is with people. Living people."

But there is something even more important. "Here," he has said, referring to his work setup in Sweden, "I have complete loyalty and real loyalty is not uncritical." The American critics ill-treatment of Elliott Gould's performance in The Touch disturbed Bergman because "I know how vulnerable this man is, and how absolutely loyal he has been when we worked together." Alluding to the actors of the National Theatre with whom he undertook "Hedda Gabler," his first venture with an English-language production, Bergman said: "Wonderful actors, sensitive, professional and extremely loyal to me." One senses that balancing his obsession with loyalty is a capacity to turn ferocious if betrayed, and that in his earlier days, before he became the autocrat of the Swedish cinema, there must have been betrayals which left their mark.

Bergman was born on July 14,  1918. His father was a Lutheran parson who eventually became chaplain to Sweden's royal family and, as far as one can gather, Bergman suffered much isolation as a child, perhaps because his parents felt it was sinful to fuss over children. Significantly, his earliest memories of childhood are of light and death. "I remember how the sunlight hit the edge f my dish when I was eating spinach and, by moving the dish slightly from side to side, I was able to make different figures out of the light. I also remember sitting with my brother, in the backyard of my flat, aiming with slingshots at enormous black rats scurrying around. And I also remember being forced to sit in church, listening to a very boring sermon, but it was a very beautiful church, and I loved the music and the light streaming through the windows. I used to sit up in the loft beside the organ, and when there were funerals, I had this marvellous long-shot view of the proceedings, with the coffin and the black drapes, and then later at the graveyard, watching the coffin slowly lowered into the ground. I was never frightened by these sights. I was fascinated."

At the age of 9, he traded a set of tin soldiers for a battered magic lantern, a possession which altered the course of his life. Within a year he had had created, through play with this toy, a private world in which he felt completely at home. He fashioned his own scenery, marionettes and lighting effects and gave puppet productions of Strindberg's plays in which he spoke all the parts.

Bergman's first notable venture into live theatre was a student production of "Macbeth" in 1940, in which the theme was closely associated with the recent Nazi invasions of Scandinavia and the Low Countries. It caused a great stir in the town and was something of an embarrassment to his parents. But Bergman admits that, despite being hailed as a highly relevant political statement, it had very little to do with a political conscience. "I was very fascinated by the play and I thought this was a very fitting way to do it. Nothing more. I was, like so many of my generation, very unconscious politically."

Then came a stint at the Royal Opera House where his main job was fetching sandwiches and coffee for the directors. "I was assistant to everybody and paid nothing. It was incredibly humiliating, but it helped me to learn my craft because, you must remember, there were no schools then at which one could learn to be a director." Bergman's film career was launched by Carl Anders Dymling, then president of Svensk Filmindustri, who saw Bergman's university production and offered him a job. After many months of routine script work came an opportunity to direct a film every other director at the studio had rejected. "But at that stage in my career, if I had been asked to direct the telephone book, I would have done it." The first 14 days were a disaster as the tyro Bergman coped, for the very first time, with the intractable mechanics of putting together a film. Everyone who saw the work asked Dymling to cancel the project because it was so atrocious, but Dymling stuck by his apprentice. "After the first two weeks he said to me: 'Now we put aside everything you've done and we start all over again, for now you've acquired some experience.' And so I started all over again from the beginning and made an extremely bad picture." "Do you remember the title?" I asked him. "Crisis," said Bergman, exploding with laughter.

Soon after that he submitted a short novel intended for a film (this is the way Bergman usually prepares his scenarios—as prose narratives): it became Torment in the United States, Frenzy in England, and launched Bergman in a film career almost without parallel in Europe. "Here was an extremely angry young man," Dymling recalled, "long before such men became the fashion. A writer looking at the world through the eyes of a teen-age rebel, harshly criticizing his parents, offending his teachers, making love to a prostitute, fighting everything and everybody in order to preserve his integrity and his right to be unhappy." Just how uncharacteristic Torment was at the time became clear as Bergman's canon unfolded. Before 1956, he was practically unknown outside Sweden. Then, within four years—after Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, Brink of Life, The Magician and The Virgin Spring, a host of film trophies and an Academy Award in Hollywood—he became a towering cult figure in the art cinema and, more important to his American distributors, box office as well. For most Americans, the notion that Swedes were screwed-up God-obsessed souls living in torment was the legacy of Bergman's early films, and there were many in Scandinavia who resented this, insisting that one man's aberrations should not be taken to represent an entire country's character.

As with any film maker whose work spans nearly 30 years, there have been highs and lows. Bergman remembers them all. In the sixties, many critics disparaged his impregnable privacy and his predilection for Gothic imagery, which remained obscure to the general public. "It may sound ridiculous, but the wounds go deep when you're told again and again to give up: 'Do we have to see the films by this Ingmar Bergman any longer? If you do go into the cinema, hold your nose.' And someone wrote about Sawdust and Tinsel: 'I refuse to make an ocular inspection of this most recent sample of Ingmar Bergman's vomit.' This kind of thing was poured over me during my most sensitive years—before I'd gained any confidence in myself. I often thought that they might be right. And I felt terror at the thought that what I was doing might be wrong."

For several years, the anti-Bergman crusade was in full swing and although Bergman was quoted as saying, "I've given up reading what's written about me or about my films," certain criticisms, to a man who craves loyalty and wants to be liked, must have been hard to bear, coming as they did after so much glittering idolatry.

At the height of the anti-Bergman wave, the Swedish cinema magazine Chaplin decided to produce an anti-Ingmar Bergman issue. There were many vitriolic contributions. One of the most telling came from an Ernest Riffe, who demolished the filmmaker with astonishing insight. "This artist without any substance of his own," wrote Riffe, "needs a literary work to fall back upon. Then, and only then, can his best qualities be released." As this coincided with the view held by most Swedish intellectuals, the essay was welcomed. Then Ernest Riffe revealed his true entity—none other than Ingmar Bergman. Riffe made a second, less publicized, appearance several years later when Bergman, whose attitude toward notoriety is, as with all celebrities, fiercely ambivalent, wrote a piece entitled: "Through a Film Maker Darkly." Here are some of the answers to his own questions:

Where do you stand politically?

"Nowhere. If there were a party for scared people, I would join it. But as far as I know there is no such party."

Your religious leanings?

"I don't belong to any faith. I keep my own angels and demons going."

Say something about The Shame.

"I don't discuss my own films. That would kill the pleasure for audiences and interpreters."

Can we talk about your private life?

"No, we can't talk about my private life."

What the hell are we going to do then?

"I don't know. You're being paid to write about me, not me. If you start crying, I don't plan to console you."

If you don't cooperate. I'm going to write something terribly unpleasant about you and your films. If I were you, Mr. Bergman, I would watch myself. You're on the skids. You need us. We don't need you. You're terribly old. You're not big business. Face the facts and let's work out an interview in an atmosphere of mutual consent.

"Excuse me. If I have offended you, I'm sorry. You destroy me. I'm willing to make all the concessions you wish. What do you want me to do? Shall I kiss your behind?"

I can imagine greater pleasures.

"Do you know what a film is? No; how the hell could you? You're a critic. A film is like a big wheel that one gets started with all the physical and spiritual power that one can muster. Slowly, the wheel starts to move. And its own weight gets it to turn faster and faster. In due course, one becomes hopelessly a part of the wheel, of its motion. That's the way it goes. Let me conclude our discussion with a punch on the jaw and by wishing you good luck."

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