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On set or location, Bergman works swiftly and surely, plans and almost always manages to shoot three minutes of finished film every day. He runs four rehearsals for each scene, shoots three takes (as against dozens sometimes done in Hollywood), uses up about 20,000 feet of film for a 7,000-foot picture. (For Ben-Hur, which ran 19,000 feet, Hollywood's William Wyler exposed 1,250,000 feet of celluloid.) When a picture is finished. Bergman cuts it ruthlessly, taking his motto from William Faulkner: "Kill all your darlings!" When they are all dead, Bergman collapses in a savage depression that he cannot shake until he starts writing his next script.
"For me," Bergman has said seriously, "there is only one loyalty: to the film on which I am working. I may lie if it is a beautiful lie, prostitute my talent if it will further my cause, steal if there is no other way out. I could also kill my friends or anyone else if it would help my art."
Maze of Mirrors. What emerges from Bergman's personal and passionate process of creation bears small resemblance to the Hollywood product. Often Bergman's images are sudden, vivid, enigmatic. His camera makes a running and usually ironic comment on the action. He tells his story in subtle cadences of closeups ("What interests me is the face"), letting his camera move surely, sensitively with the flow of feeling and expression. There is a kind of stillness sometimes even in violence, a magic even in the commonplace.
Confined by his budget to black-and-white film, he exploits the expressive possibilities of light perhaps more fully than any director alive. And he uses sound—and silence—with the skill and sensitivity of a composer. With subtle verve and dazzling control, he can alternate dreamy love with Gothic horror or wonderfully bawdy hilarity. He is equally at home with Wildean wit and low Shakespearean vaudeville. Like a gadfly, Bergman buzzes about his favorite target: the normal, healthy, inadequate male. ("Grown men are so rare," one of his women says sweetly to her husband, "that we pick the child who suits us.")
Along with these vital virtues come pernicious defects. Bergman's work is often pretentious, obscure, and riddled with private references. He has the courage to use clichés, and often they work beautifully—witness the white-faced, black-cloaked figure of Death in The Seventh Seal. But at other times, particularly in his comedies, the clichés are the devices of a back-country Ernst Lubitsch; in A Lesson in Love, the last-minute, sappily symbolic entrance of a small boy dressed as Cupid is pure Kitsch.
Furthermore, the spectator is too frequently caught in a maze of mirrors, a ricochet of flashbacks. Bergman likes to wander away from his audience into a child's garden of vices where he plays "biting little games" of innuendo and digs "poisonously squirming worms of association." Often he wanders even farther, down into weird sea valleys of sick imagination where all human values are dissolved into primordial symbols and only a psychiatrist can adequately follow. Yet Bergman's films can be seen as a fascinating psychological record of his struggle to rise out of these cold depths of isolation to the warm world of human feeling.