This parting shot was premonitory, for two years ago in Stockholm, during a performance of his production of Woyzeck, Bergman did just that. The critic Bengt Jansson, who has a reputation for being heedlessly venomous, was seated on the stage along with other members of the audience, for in this unconventional production of the Büchner play, the audience was allowed to overflow onto the boards. Jansson, in a conspicuous position and conscious of being recognized, was taking notes and responding in a negative way to the performance. "I was becoming more and more angry with him, and so I thought to myself, what can I do to scandalize this man, to make him unable to write any more about my productions, to make him the centre of attention in such a way that everyone becomes aware of what he is? I decided the only thing to do was to strike him, officially, in cold blood, as a deliberate attempt to remove his influence. I didn't want to hurt him, you understand, just to make an official scandal."

The ploy worked in spite of the fact that before Bergman could actually connect with his chin, the critic defensively slumped to the floor. There was the anticipated sensation, attendant newspaper publicity, even legal action. Yet even today in Sweden one cannot mention Jansson's name without commenting on his unjustified sourness and recalling the Bergman scuffle.

But the violent Bergman, the young man who used to rip telephones off the walls and throw chairs through glass control booths, is long gone. He was, according to the mature film director, an insecure person who felt the need to assert himself in order to get his own way. To meet him today, either socially or at work, is to confront a placid, methodical, almost over-fastidious man with droopy eyelids, thinning hair and hatchetlike features, who appears to take a genuine interest in everyone he speaks to. He listens attentively, coolly deliberates alternative courses of action, operating cerebrally rather than emotionally. But of course, there are still incidents. "I am impatient; I have always been impatient—particularly with incompetence. If someone comes to me and says, 'I'm sorry, Ingmar, I don't know exactly now to do such and such a thing,' it's all right. But when people are incompetent and try to make me believe they are competent, then I fall into a rage."

Next to his films, Bergman's love life is one of the most discussed subjects in Swedish gossip magazines and newspapers. Bergman himself refuses to discuss his personal life and, when I began by stating it was a highly personal interview I wanted, he replied: "If I had known that, I would never have agreed to see you."

Bergman is now in his fifth marriage, to Countess Ingrid von Rosen (who, as Ingrid Bergman, now establishes the Ingrid-Ingmar confusion for all time). She is a wealthy woman in her 40s whom Bergman met 25 years ago and allegedly fell in love with on the spot. But before he married her, there were choreographers, actresses and conceit pianist Käbi Laretei, with whom he seemed to have an idyllic relationship. Bergman has eight children in all. One of them, Linn, now 6, was born of his five-year liaison with actress Liv Ullmann.

Bergman is on genial terms with all his women ("When I start to love someone, it is for life") and three of them worked in complete harmony on his latest film, Cries and Whispers—Miss Ullmann playing a leading role, his present wife, Ingrid, acting as his assistant, Käbi Laretei playing the piano for the sound track. Little Linn also contributed a walk-on performance. Shortly after the split with Miss Ullmann ("We were really living his life," she once said), Bergman worked with her on a television series which dealt with emerging consciousness: the story of a woman who can live without the help and support of a man. For many, the series was Bergman's reworking of the Ullmann relationship, a significant example of the way in which he can methodically structure incendiary personal material before it has completely cooled. "He doesn't marry women," said one ex-wife, "he appropriates material." But even she said it fondly.

As with most artists, Bergman's true home is the Bergman imagination, but geographically, he has found a home on the island of Fårö in the Baltic Sea. When he first contemplated living there, he was in a very romantic frame of mind, seeing it as a kind of island retreat away from the worries of the world. But on Fårö, which has only 754 inhabitants, he found himself for the first time in a little world where, because it was so small, everyone was interdependent and isolation was virtually impossible. "I live with these people's problems. They are my problems. When there's a storm, the ferryboat to the mainland cannot operate: we all stay together on the island. When the electricity fails, I sit here in the dark, as does my neighbour. When the snow falls, we help each other to shovel it away. If someone asks you for help here, you can't say, 'Please come back tomorrow.' He comes for help because he needs it; there is no place else to go; he is your neighbour—you see him each day. You are obliged to live one for the other. You see, I originally came to this island to escape social communities, and then I found myself within one. Although I am miles from Stockholm, I never feel isolated here. I live in a true society, one I can understand."

Bergman's attachment to the island is more than that of a city dweller's fondness for a rustic retreat. One senses that the community has taught him about life among simple, uncomplicated people with elementary human appetites, an experience he never had as a child and which is markedly different from the life he leads in Stockholm. He has made a touching documentary about the people on the island and, in all his conversation about it, one discerns the unmistakable satisfaction of a man who has adopted a locale he is proud to call his own. Since it is the very antithesis of an ivory tower, it seems a curiously uncharacteristic home for Ingmar Bergman.

Although he professes to love the theatre more than the cinema and has established a creditable reputation as a stage director, being at present director of the Royal Dramatic Theatre of Stockholm, it is with films that Bergman will always be associated. Lionized by the cineastes, he is once again the darling of the French and American intellectuals. Yet Bergman's attitude toward film making is untheoretical and almost anti-intellectual.

"As far as I'm concerned," he once said, "I am making things for everyday use. I'm making utility articles. If they do become something above and beyond that, I'm pleased. But I'm not working sub specie aeternitatis." He shies away from definitive statements about filmic art ("that tapeworm 2,500 metres long that sucks the life and spirit out of me").

"There was someone who said that a film director is a person who never finds the time to think because of all the problems. That is the closest definition I can think of. Then, of course, one can think up a lot of things on the spur of the moment. All sorts of explanations. One can say that film direction is the transformation of visions, ideas, dreams and hopes in pictures which convey these feelings to the audience in the most efficient manner. One can also say that film direction can be given a strictly technical definition. Along with an awful lot of people, performers and technicians, and a tremendous lot of machines, one produces a product. It's an everyday product or a work of art, whichever one prefers. What it is in reality, or if it is all of this or none of this, I'm unable to answer although I have been directing films for 27 years."

Bergman is not concerned with politics. What interests him is the "inner politics" between people, which never changes. "I don't set out to paint a picture of society, but it's obvious that indirectly I depict the society I'm living in. I'm only a reflection of the conflicts, phenomena and tensions that exist in society, the upbringing, the world that is mine. Certain things produce a reaction in me, in my guts, on my radar. Certain things give me a reading on this radar and begin to merge and function with earlier experience. This is then expressed in works of art, a kind of correspondence, a need for contact, an appeal to the world around me."

Bergman believes a clear distinction must be drawn between his private commitment ("which is surely nobody's business") and his commitment as an artist. "As an artist I am totally awestruck by what's happening, and I can't take any sides." He has no patience with overtly political cinema statements. Discussing the French director Jean-Luc Godard, he once said: "You know, little French children are taught rhetoric at school. They have to go up the front of the class and hold a discours on some subject. It seems to me that Godard should get top marks for standing in front of the class and talking crap."

To get some insight into Bergman's aesthetic, one examines the way movies begin to bud in his consciousness. Persona came to life when one day Bergman saw two women sitting together comparing hands with one another. "I thought to myself that one of them is mute and the other one speaks." The germ for The Silence came from a hospital visit where "I noticed from a window a very old man, enormously fat and paralyzed, sitting in a chair under a tree in the park. As I watched, four jolly, good-natured nurses came marching out, lifted him up, chair and all, and carried him back into the hospital. The image of being carried away like a dummy stayed in my mind." In other cases, films have been suggested to Bergman by essays, novels, pieces of music. In every case, some outside event has turned the key on some deep-seated memory. Each film has been a projection of some past experience. To make a film which didn't in some way materialize the spectres of his inner life would be unthinkable for Bergman. (Cries and Whispers was shot in a house in which Bergman used to live and with which he had profound associations.) The satisfaction he derives from film making is akin to that of a man returning to the haunts of his past and suddenly understanding the implications of what took place there.

Bergman, nearing 55, has no apprehensions about old age. "It's like climbing a mountain. You climb from ledge to ledge. The higher you get, the more tired and breathless you become, but your view becomes much more extensive." He divides his time between Stockholm and Fårö, preferring the island hideaway. He is a passionate newspaper reader and television viewer. He suffers from insomnia and listens to pop music on the radio, sometimes all through the night. He always loved music and, if he had not been a film maker, would likely have been a musician, a player of the cembalo. He has unexpectedly popular tastes; he loves the Beatles and thoroughly enjoyed The Godfather. His favourite film directors have always been Fellini (with whom he feels an enormous closeness) and Kurosawa ("He is so warm and yet ice cold as well. He has these things he wants to tell you. He's like a cozy voice just going on and on—telling you things all the time. I think he's incredible"). He has an abiding admiration for Hitchcock and Chaplin, and a little while ago, when asked his favourite films, listed The Lady With the Dog, Rashomon, Umberto D, and Mr. Hulot's Holiday.

I told him that although Sweden always conjured up sexual associations in American minds, the pornographic films I had seen in Stockholm were very disappointing. "I agree," he said. "The German porno and even the Danish porno films are better than the Swedish, but the best of all, you know, is Japanese pornography, for the Japanese have a fantastic pornographic tradition going back thousands of years. Yes, pornographic art can be a kind of new field. It really belongs on television. Just imagine a pornographic channel. You switch it on late at night and amuse yourself and your family. It could be marvellous. No, the Swedes are clumsy with sex; we don't know how to behave. Yet we too have a pornographic tradition—in our folklore, in our humour, stories which have been handed down from generation to generation."

For a long time Bergman had a feeling of inferiority before the newer, younger film makers, of being left behind, démodé. This fear, as he has said, was dispelled during his work on Winter Light, a time when he came to terms with his own nature as an artist. He now makes no bones about his reverence for tradition. He recalls how he experienced the sense of tradition while waiting in the wings before a performance of his production of Strindberg's Ghost Sonata in Stockholm's Royal Dramatic Theatre, the same theatre in which the play was originally performed 66 years ago, with the same lines about to be spoken, the same situations about to be played out. Although his production was vastly different from Strindberg's original, he was still conscious of the link between the nineteen-hundreds and the nineteen-seventies, a sense of belonging to and perpetuating what Strindberg had wrought.

Bergman makes an important distinction between living and dead traditions. "Take Brecht," he said to me. "He was always fresh, always searching; a totally alive man, writing, drinking, wenching, quarreling with his wife. And yet, one year after his death, the Berliner Ensemble had become institutionalized, petrified, his followers embalming all the works. Great artists," he said sadly, "should have no disciples."

In his own work, although there are no disciples as such, Bergman takes great pains to encourage and assist his younger colleagues. Birger Juberg, one-time head of Svensk Filmindustri, revealed that many of Bergman's 15 daily working hours were spent helping other film writers and directors. "He has a knack for immediately finding solutions," said Kenne Fant, a Svensk Filmindustri producer and director. And Bergman points out there are dozens of new, up-and-coming men making first-rate pictures—directors like Bo Widerberg (Elvira Madigan) and Jan Troell (The Immigrants).

Despite the "great fear" of leaving Sweden, Bergman recently accepted an offer to direct Molière's The Misanthrope at the Royal Theatre in Copenhagen but again there were buffers. He was friendly with the leading actor, having used him in his films; Stockholm was only hours away, and there was also his great love for Molière, whom he sees as an adorable maverick in the highly disciplined society of Louis XIV's France.

Although he often talks of retiring, it is clear that there are still demons in Bergman's mind that must be exorcised. To stop film making would be tantamount to ceasing to think, for so long as Bergman's mind is alive, his craft must translate what he finds there. Cries and Whispers was his first real foray into colour photography, and one senses that he has other experiments up his sleeve (like shooting an entire film from one, unchanging camera angle). Whatever work is produced in the future, one can be sure it will come out of need or conviction for Bergman is as incapable of marking time in the cinema as he is of wasting it in his private life. In a wildly fluctuating international film industry, where producers and distributors vie for profit, actors are "properties" and films "packages," it is somewhat reassuring to know that in the frozen twilight of Sweden, there is a man for whom there is no difference between art and movie making.

Charles Marowitz is an American critic living in London, where he is director of the Open Space Theatre, known for its avant-garde productions.

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