And then think of Kristen Stewart in Personal Shopper, a fashionista’s factotum, drop-dead lovely (for she is not quite alive)

[...] 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.