THE SCREEN: I Am A Conjurer

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At home, inside Bergman, is a morbid population of major and minor terrors. He has unusually keen hearing and claims that the slightest sound disturbs him. Not long ago, when a painter was making sketches of him, Bergman stuffed wool in his ears; he could not bear the sound of squeaking charcoal. He is equally sensitive to emotional dissonance: "I cannot work if I have a single enemy on the set." He nourishes imaginary illnesses but is horrified of real ones; he gets furious if some one with a cold comes near him. He feels "The Great Fear" whenever he leaves Sweden, and has spent less than six months of his life outside the country. He sleeps badly and has frequent fantasies of death.

Theatrical though some of these terrors are — flummery from the conjurer's bag of tricks — the people who know Bergman best are convinced that the core of his torment is genuine. "He is pursued by God," says a friend. And God is pursued by Bergman. "I want knowledge," one of his characters declares in The Seventh Seal. "Not faith, but knowledge! I want God to stretch his hand toward me, to uncover his face, to speak to me!"

The Confession Couch. A strange child was father to this strange man. Second son of an ambitious Evangelical Lutheran parson who eventually became chaplain to Sweden's royal family, Ernst Ingmar Bergman grew up in a home filled with cold constraint and deep unhappiness. His mother and father, a friend relates, were "sealed in iron caskets" of duty, he to the church, she to the household. They had little to do with each other and considered it "sinful to fuss over the children." Father held frequent court on the "confession couch," where he heard the children recite their sins. Little Ingmar soon developed a stammer and a chronic stomachache, retreated into a life of fantasy. Only in the last few years has he been reconciled with his parents. "I survived," he says with a shrug. "And they gave me something to break." They also gave him, as a French critic has pointed out, "the themes of his future work: God and the Devil, Life and Death, the drama of the couple and the tragic solitude of beings."

At nine, Ingmar got a magic lantern as a present ("I can still smell the exquisite odor of hot metal"), and in it his fantasies came to focus. A year later he got a primitive film projector and soon after that a puppet theater. The demon took over. With a burst of energy, Ingmar began to build dolls and scenery. Soon he produced a full-length drama by Strindberg; he handled the puppets and spoke all the parts himself, from memory.