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From Hate to Hope. The struggle begins in Bergman's first script, where it is expressed as a young man's attempt to escape the influence of a cold and evil old man. He fails. In Bergman's early films the evil old man is gradually transformed into an evil mother (Illicit Interlude), who tells her son he will never be able to live his life. He drowns. Then dramatically in The Naked Night, one of Bergman's most powerful films, the hero after a moral and physical ordeal kills a bear. One Jungian analyst, after seeing the film, pointed out that the bear is the traditional totem of the evil mother in myths and fairy tales.
Whether or not this far-out interpretation is correct, Bergman's pictures suddenly brighten. He makes three comedies (A Lesson in Love, Dreams, Smiles of a Summer Night), in which his first worthwhile women appear and begin to educate their demoralized and dependent men. The education obviously succeeds, for in The Seventh Seal, Bergman's first heroic hero appears: a knight who delays implacable Death long enough to accomplish "one single meaningful action." He preserves the lives of Mia and Jof (Mary and Joseph)" and their infant son, who will one day ''perform the one impossible trick" of making a ball stand still in the air, i.e., he will transcend nature. The Seventh Seal marks the great divide in Bergman's life and work. With it death and desperation fall away, life and hope appear.
From Mind to Faith. Warmed and inspired by this intimation of divinity, Bergman in Wild Strawberries begins a determined search for God within himself. In the person of his principal character, an old physician (played by Viktor Sjöstrom) who has lived the life of the mind but personifies the death of the heart, Bergman (as he has described it) weighs his whole life and finds it wanting in love. But at the finish, the old scientist returns to the bosom of his family and there finds the love and meaning he had lost.
With love, life can begin, and in Brink of Life, Bergman watches three pregnant women as they attempt to achieve birth (in the context, birth may symbolize an attempted rebirth in the spiritual sense). But nothing is born, and in The Magician Bergman examines the reason for the failure—lack of faith. His magician-hero, made up to resemble Christ, has supernatural powers, but he listens to rational objections, doubts himself, loses his powers. But in the last reel of the film, after long sufferings in obscurity, the magician is "called at last" to perform in the presence of the King. And in the latest picture, The Virgin Spring, God makes his first miraculous intervention in the world of Ingmar Bergman. On the spot where the beautiful virgin is brutally done to death, a spring bubbles forth from the dry land. And Bergman cries out, with the voice of the girl's father: "Here I will build unto Thee a church . . . I know no other way to be reconciled with my own hands. I know no other way to live."