THE SCREEN: I Am A Conjurer

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Bohemian Superman. In his teens Ingmar attended a private school in Stockholm, where the boys considered him somewhat peculiar. "So he read Nietzsche," a friend recalls, "and consoled himself that he was a superman." While at Stockholm University, he ran a youth club theater, and in 1940, just after the German invasion of Norway, his production of Macbeth — with angry, anti-Nazi overtones and Bergman himself in the role of Duncan — made a minor sensation. In 1941, over papa's furious objections, Bergman quit college, holed up in the Gamla Stan (the old section of Stockholm), pounded out play scripts, slept on backstage mats, slouched around town in baggy slacks, a turtleneck sweater and a three days' growth of protest.

Bergman's mood at the time is suggested by his sense of humor. One of his "comedy" ideas: on a hot summer day, a clergyman goes to a striptease palace and finds that he is the only customer; in gratitude, the stripper goes to his church next Sunday and finds that she is the only worshiper; after a love affair, the clergyman, overcome with guilt, castrates himself. "This is comedy?" asked a horrified friend. Reluctantly, Bergman gave up the joke, produced his play as a tragedy, Murder in Barjaerna.

In those days, an impressionable older woman recalls, his "derisive laughter seemed to originate in the darkest corners of Hell." It was impressionable women who first understood that Bergman was something special, and made him understand it too. Bergman signed on as an assistant at the Royal Opera House, broke into the legitimate theater as a director, eventually staged everything from The Merry Widow to Faust. In 1944 he submitted his first script to Svensk Filmindustri, the biggest of Sweden's main film companies. Shot by Alf Sjöberg, Sweden's top director at the time, Torment became an international hit. "The Bergman Renaissance" had begun.

The Tapeworm. It could not have happened in a more unlikely place. Built while films were still silent, Stockholm's SF studio was partly "soundproofed" until last year by old Oriental rugs strung up on the walls. And Bergman's glorious closeups are achieved with an ancient horror of a camera that has to be smothered with rugs and pillows to stifle its mechanical groans. New equipment is out of the question. Few Swedish films make money, even though most of them cost less than $200,000. The industry lives on government subsidies and profits from distributing U.S. films. "There is no Swedish film industry." says one moviemaker. "There is only Ingmar Bergman."

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