So we did nearly everything together, day after day, week after week. At the National Film Theatre we had complete seasons of Fritz Lang, Howard Hawks, and Jean Renoir, as well as an extended survey of French cinema. This made for a magical coincidence in education, for it was in the early 1960s that revolutions occurred—the films of the French New Wave: The 400 Blows, Shoot the Piano Player, Jules and Jim, Les Cousins, Paris Belongs to Us, as well as Breathless and Vivre Sa Vie. It was not just that these were wildly exciting movies. They were made by young men we knew from the yellow-covered Cahiers du Cinéma where they had for years been reveling in Hollywood cinema. They adored Howard Hawks, Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Preminger, Vincente Minnelli, Sam Fuller, Anthony Mann, and Nick Ray. In Sight & Sound (the prim English film quarterly we deplored), there had been an article by the editor, “Ray or Ray?,” in which the humanist compassion of Satyajit Ray was preferred to the desperate cinematics of Nicholas Ray. We admired Satyajit Ray, but we adored Nick Ray because his films were closer to our world. His Rebel Without a Cause was a knowing title, getting at the existential uncertainty in modern opportunities. Kieran and I collaborated on the most complete Nick Ray filmography yet done for the insurrectionary magazine Movie in 1963.

We are being allowed to see something that ought to be forbidden. Instead, it captivates us. Movies are the industrialization of murder and orgy as regular human fantasies. There has always been a shadow of censorship or control, and it adds to the air of an illicit thrill coming our way. Though lifelike, the medium is a ticket to transcend our humble circumstances. We say we believe in fidelity in our life, but on screens for decades we enjoyed different men and women, week after week. Faithfulness and promiscuity rattled in the same head, like dice being shaken.

[...] One principle in this book—and it has been of enormous influence in our lives as a whole—is that in watching pretense we acquire a deeper sense of our reality but a growing uncertainty over our psychic integrity. What else are movies for? We thought we were identifying with characters for fun, but perhaps we were picking up the shiftiness of acting—for life.

Daphne the misfit has a stranger joy. She is noticed by an addled millionaire, Osgood Fielding III, wonderfully played by Joe E. Brown. When the film reaches the breathless point of needing to end, Osgood has a motorboat to sweep everyone away. He regards Daphne by then as his significant other so she feels she has to make it clear that her relationship with Osgood can only be limited. At last he takes off the wig and can blurt it out. “I’m a man.” To which Osgood responds, “Well, nobody’s perfect,” with the aplomb of an elderly fellow who’ll take what he can get and a premonition that strong or surviving men need not be immaculate.

[...] Ingmar behaved appallingly with wives and children—he had five wives and at least nine children in addition to affairs with many of his stars. He took sexual advantage of actresses who longed to be in his films, because they believed he was so good. To read his autobiography, The Magic Lantern, is to meet a creep, a user, and a cold-blooded, self-pitying predator. He was awful, but fascinating. So will we ban his films now because of that?

I hope not, but I don’t want a sophisticated finessing of the Bergman problem, like a tidy separation of his work from his life such as we often make with Picasso, Chaplin, or Wagner. The riddle is more complicated: the eye for women, the sexual curiosity, and the stress on desire in Bergman’s films are inseparable from his biographical disorder. He gazed at women with conspiratorial longing, and some of those women featured in his private life as much as in his films. You can say that Bergman worshipped women in abstract, but so much of his best work puts them under cruel stress and keeps watching. He was as chronic a voyeur as Hitchcock. In Persona, the Liv Ullmann character sits back in silence, contemplating the Bibi Andersson character, in just the way we are allowed to watch both of them. The overlapping urges to adoration and predation remind me of Molly Haskell’s pioneering book From Reverence to Rape, first published in 1974. Sometimes that is hailed as a feminist classic, but that label is belittling. Her book is about all of us—like Bergman’s films.