Edition: U.S. / Global

FILM; On the Essential Strangeness of Bergman

Published: February 8, 2004

''HE'S a very strange man,'' David Carradine says of Ingmar Bergman in one of the many interviews featured in the new DVD set ''The Ingmar Bergman Collection.'' Mr. Carradine is not alone in that judgment. The word ''strange'' crops up with alarming frequency in the reminiscences of the actresses Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann, who know Mr. Bergman, the legendary Swedish director, much better. (Ms. Andersson appeared in a dozen of his pictures; Ms. Ullmann starred in nine, lived with him for five years and had a child with him.)

Ingmar Bergman was such an idol of art house cinema in the 50's, 60's and 70's -- he seemed as remote and forbidding as God Himself, and worked in even more mysterious ways -- that it's refreshing to hear him described in such plain, down-to-earth terms. That Mr. Bergman's movies can be spoken of less reverently now is, as this collection demonstrates, a wholly good thing. The passage of time has restored to them their essential, imperishable strangeness.

This odd set consists of four films from the late 60's -- ''Persona'' (1966), ''Hour of the Wolf'' (1968), ''Shame'' (1968) and ''The Passion of Anna'' (1969) -- along with the big-budget, English-language curiosity ''The Serpent's Egg'' (1977) and a disc of extras, which includes a 2002 interview with Mr. Bergman, looking shockingly fit in his 80's. Watching the six discs straight through is not recommended, even if you're in exceptionally sound mental health, because each one of these films means to disorient and disturb. But it's probably wise to take them -- slowly, carefully -- in chronological order. They're like a diary of an artist's obsessions.

''Persona,'' one of Mr. Bergman's most celebrated films, marked the beginning of a particularly anguished phase of his work, in which the movies became rougher-edged, more jittery, more explicitly neurotic. What's fascinating about ''Persona,'' which tells the fairly simple story of an actress (played by Ms. Ullmann) who has decided to remain mute and the psychiatric nurse (Ms. Andersson) assigned to care for her, is how Mr. Bergman tries to disrupt the smooth flow of the narrative with frenetic self-referential montages, unmoored dream imagery and a variety of photographic tricks. (Most famously, a close-up that combines half of Ms. Ullmann's face with half of Ms. Andersson's.) Looking at ''Persona'' today, it's clear that the picture's greatest strength is the unusual psychological realism of the relationship between the two women: the way the actress's silence makes the nurse babble, then makes her ashamed of what she's revealed, and finally induces in her a fierce, gnawing resentment -- the suspicion that her life is being stolen from her, to be used as material for her patient's art.

Without the self-reflexive flourishes, that is, ''Persona'' might have been seen as what, at its best, it is: the most elegant and emotionally acute vampire picture since Carl Dreyer's enigmatic ''Vampyr'' (1931). But back in the 60's, when Mr. Bergman was considered pretty much the last word in cinematic profundity, his every tic was scrupulously pored over, analyzed, elaborated in ingenious arguments about identity, the nature of film, the fate of the artist in the modern world and so on. In effect, his mannerisms served as the evidence of his genius.

The resident commentator of ''The Ingmar Bergman Collection'' -- a chipper academic named Marc Gervais, author of a 1999 book with the unpromising title ''Ingmar Bergman: Magician and Prophet'' -- proves that the Bergman canon is still a gold mine for the exegetically inclined. Mr. Gervais, though, takes pains to show that he's more au courant than the earnest symbol hunters of the bygone intelligentsia: his Ingmar Bergman is a deconstructionist and a postmodernist. Whatever gets you through the night.

It seems to me that the primary interest in the long stretch of angst represented by ''Persona,'' ''Hour of the Wolf,'' ''Shame'' and ''The Passion of Anna'' lies not in the conscious artistry of the films but in the evidence they provide that Mr. Bergman was not, at least in this period, in very firm control of the emotional and intellectual materials of his art. He seems to be working perilously close to the psychic edge in these pictures: there's a nervous, insomniac quality to all of them, and not just ''Hour of the Wolf'' (which is, to give it its due, the most helplessly Gothic, and by far the silliest, of the bunch). Even the extraordinary ''Shame'' is a nightmare -- about war and its effects on human behavior -- but this is the sort of nightmare that, as sometimes happens, miraculously takes the form of a clarifying vision: the movie is so lucid and shapely that it makes interpretation feel superfluous.

Mr. Bergman was clearly troubled by the violence of the late 60's -- the war in Vietnam occasionally intrudes on his characters' lives, as silent (and silently received) television images. And all these movies struggle to show, in one way or another, how the general atmosphere of cruelty, rage and moral chaos trickles down to the level of personal relationships: supply-side psychology. The hero of ''The Passion of Anna,'' played by the infallible Max von Sydow, is an apparently gentle man living a quiet, almost hermitlike existence on a sparsely populated island: he fixes his roof, has a quick, furtive fling with a married neighbor (Ms. Andersson) and begins a more serious affair with a recent widow (Ms. Ullmann). An ordinary kind of life, it would seem, with an acceptable share of small pleasures and small disappointments. But someone on the island has been mutilating and killing animals; and in the end someone commits suicide, and the hero himself goes violently berserk, lashing out for no apparent reason at his startled lover.

In ''The Passion of Anna'' the horror appears to come out of nowhere. Mr. Bergman has rammed it, with unseemly force, into what is otherwise a straightforward, small-scale story about human relationships. The problem for Mr. Bergman in this period, I think, is that, having turned his back on both the heavily allegorical mode of pictures like ''The Seventh Seal'' (1957) and ''The Virgin Spring'' (1960) and the death-of-God metaphysics of ''Through a Glass Darkly'' (1961), ''Winter Light'' (1963) and ''The Silence'' (1963), he's no longer sure how to generate meaning dramatically. Most of ''The Passion of Anna'' is looser, more naturalistic, more intuitive than Mr. Bergman's usual work (on the DVD the actors reveal that, atypically, he allowed some improvisation in this film) and he seems surprisingly insecure about his own instincts. He falls back, as he did in ''Persona,'' on awkward metacinematic stunts -- here, the actors briefly step out of character to talk about the people they're playing -- and throws in that inexplicably, weakly motivated violence in the apparent belief that it will hook him back into the zeitgeist, somehow connect his little island domestic drama to the larger world outside. It's desperate, and kind of touching.

The island of ''The Passion of Anna'' is, in reality, Faro, where Ingmar Bergman lives, as he has done since the mid-60's. ''Persona,'' ''Hour of the Wolf'' and ''Shame'' were also filmed there, and the DVD set's extra disc contains a little essay on the island; it looks bleak, but by all accounts Mr. Bergman feels perfectly at home, happy to contemplate the great expanses of gray sky and cold sea. The very strange movies that this very strange man made on Faro between 1965 and 1969, though, show that he wasn't always so contented there. They reveal a filmmaker in a kind of panic of solipsism, feeling that all he can do is put his dead-of-night musings up on the screen and hope for the best. (Sometimes, as in ''Shame,'' the best does happen.) But don't tell Ingmar Bergman no man is an island; he even knows which island he is.

The films in ''The Ingmar Bergman Collection'' are all, in their various ways, horror movies; cautionary tales about the terrors of solitude, dream plays in which the filmmaker functions as his own Freddy Krueger. Ingmar Bergman's work no longer seems as intimidating as it once did. But it's still scary as hell.

Photos: Liv Ullmann and David Carradine in Ingmar Bergman's ''Serpent's Egg.'' (pg. 21); Bibi Andersson, left, and Liv Ullman in Ingmar Bergman's ''Persona'': an emotionally acute vampire picture. (pg. 13)