A couple of months ago I began an alphabetical journey through the work of the world's great moviemakers, revisiting classics I'd forgotten and seeing for the first time films I'd missed. I made it as far as Ingmar Bergman before this issue on women in film came up. The timing couldn't have been better, since Bergman's women are among the most luminous to ever appear on a movie screen. But to imply that they "belonged" to him is not entirely accurate, since Bergman was often the one possessed. His Swedish sirens lured him, not with their beauty, but with their strength while in the grip of madness, their grace in the throes of collapse.

Bergman himself said women were "the world I have developed in, perhaps not for the best, but no man can really feel he knows himself if he manages to detach himself from it." Bergman found self-enlightenment in his exploration of femininity, or what Truffaut called, "the feminine principal." Politics meant little to him in his films, so he was not interested in feminism. Instead, he was concerned with the psyche and spirit of women; women abandoned by God, or trapped in lifeless marriages; women whose squelched desires often erupted as bitter confessions. In nearly all his films, there is a moment when a woman unloads everything: each regret or petty annoyance is voiced, half-truths and lies are admitted to, betrayal and hate are laid face-up on the table. These ritual purgings are always difficult to watch, but refreshing. He allowed his women to cleanse their souls, before disease or boredom swallowed them up.

The director's leading lady Liv Ullmann in Face to Face (1975).

His men were never as interesting. Who could compete with a gallery of stunning Swedish goddesses such as Ingrid Thulin, Bibi Andersson, Gunnel Lindblom, Harriet Andersson, and Liv Ullmann? What male actor could steal their close-ups, or demand their respect?

When Max Von Sydow stalled Death in The Seventh Seal (1957), it was to allow Bibi Andersson's escape with her husband and small child. To include her in Death's final round-up would have been too much for Von Sydow, or us, or Bergman, to bear. In A Winter Light (1962), Gunnar Bjornstrand's tormented minister paled in the saintly, suffering glow of Thulin's unconditional love. And in one of Bergman's early films, Brink of Life (1958), set entirely in a maternity ward, the men are either autocratic doctors, self-serving husbands or boyfriends who deposit their sperm and then stand back to watch the women agonize alone with abortion and stillbirth. In Bergman's view, it is the men who judge, the women who suffer.

Instinctively, Bergman trained his camera on their faces and torsos. His 1973 masterpiece, Cries and Whispers, was composed of sequences that began and ended with close-ups of women staring into the camera, mute introductions to flashbacks that told the story of three sisters and their servant. The servant cares for the cancer-stricken oldest sister by exposing her heavy, maternal breasts, and letting the dying woman nuzzle there. It is a scene of marvelous sensuality, a tribute to the life-sustaining power of a woman's body. The Shame (1968) opens with Liv Ullmann bustling out of bed and sponge-bathing her breasts, while Max Von Sydow, the cowardly husband, looks on, unable to compete with such primal sexuality.

From Through a Glass Darkly (1962)

Persona (1966), his strange and haunting tale of a nurse caring for a psychologically unstable actress, is a study in profiles and expressions, with the faces of Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann poised side by side, an inch from touching. One of the more memorable shots in The Silence (1963), is of Lindblom napping with Ullmann's son, her bare back exposed in the dunes of white sheets, his body curled fetally next to hers. It suggests heat and suppressed sexuality, like Edward Weston working in wide shots.

It is rare to see a film these days with such respect for women, which depicts their sex and their bodies with such honesty. Bergman's two accomplished cinematographers, Gunnar Fischer and Sven Nykvist, each photographed his women beautifully, while also allowing the light to expose their blemishes, their "sweat, heat, erectile tissue" (The Silence). Harriet Andersson dies of cancer before our eyes in Cries and Whisper, her white skin pulled tight across her bones, her body embalmed in regret. Thulin suffers from eczema in A Winter Light, her bandaged hands an object of Bjornstrand's rejection. And in The Silence, the same actress spends much of the film in bed, gripping the bedposts and writhing from some unnameable disease. Bergman found a path to clarity through illness. Healthy people were boring.

He preferred to work in close quarters, with the same group of actors, on scripts written like short stories, with little action, few extras, and even fewer exteriors. The austerity reflected his own Lutheran upbringing. His father was the minister to the Swedish royal family, and under the twin institutions of religion and politics Bergman suffered the same repression and rigid formalism to which he subjected his characters. His father sometimes locked the young Bergman in a closet for hours. It's no wonder, then, that to him a bedroom seemed immense, or a living room could contain a universe. Within these spaces he created a family of mostly sisters, daughters, and mothers, sheltering dark secrets, capable of hate as deep as love.

Thulin was Bergman's ice queen, his stoic sufferer. She was a mother pregnant with a child her suicidal husband didn't want in Wild Strawberries (1957); and had a soul-draining abortion a year later in Brink of Life; she subjugated her sexual needs until they erupted into a skin rash in A Winter Light; she was an unfulfilled lesbian who masturbated on screen in The Silence (in 1963!), and proclaimed, after an earlier, aborted pregnancy, that "I stank like a rotten fish when I was fertilized." By the time Cries and Whispers rolled around a decade later, she was slashing her vagina with broken glass to spite her insensitive husband. When Thulin smiled in a Bergman film, it was a flash of the fang before the bite.Bibi Andersson was his virgin, his temptress, his naive schoolgirl on the cusp of womanhood. She lived to see the newly dead dance across the horizon in The Seventh Seal, but lost her baby in Brink of Life. She was the freewheeling hitchhiker who helped an old man relive his past in Wild Strawberries, and the nurse who recounted her experience of a beachside orgy with lucid eroticism in Persona. In The Passion of Anna (1969), she was a wife who felt her existence was meaningless. Andersson was as close to a heroine as Bergman would allow, her buoyant spirit lifting her above the wretched self-examinations of most of his characters. She shared an acting prize with Eva Dahlbeck and Thulin at the Cannes Film Festival for Brink of Life.

Cries and Whispers (1973)

Liv Ullmann was Bergman's mystery woman. She could express her characters' interior lives with a quiet stare, an implacable stance, or a sudden, youthful smile. She shared Bergman's intuitions about women, but kept something of an emotional treasure chest that contained elements of anger and terror. Her performance in Persona, as the actress who refuses to talk, is a shifting Ouija board of smiles and frowns, conjuring up a multitude of diagnoses for her condition. She is oblique and utterly compelling. And in Face to Face (1976), who can forget the moment when Ullmann's face registers the horror that her insanity is inextricable, that death is the only way out.

She was at her most accessible, her brightest and strongest in The Shame, which is as close as Bergman ever came to an "action picture", with bombs exploding and cars racing around, with escapes and betrayals, and Ullmann standing tall amid the chaos. As the bored but loving wife of the weak-willed Von Sydow, she refused to surrender to the clichéd brutality her husband adopts in the face of civil war, but instead despairingly submits to another cliché: she sleeps with the man who saved their lives. Ullmann was at her best when you could see, beneath her translucent skin, her struggle, not with the truth itself, but with exactly which truth to tell.

Bergman was, like Cassavetes, a lover of truth. His films were battlegrounds. For Cassavetes, love was the weapon and truth the prize; for Bergman's women, truth was the weapon. Loveand God were dead and gone. Existence was all that mattered. When in Cries and Whispers Ullmann and Thulin decide to end their years of bitter feuding, they make up with a heart-to-heart talk that Bergman shoots silently, knowing it is a sham. He was only interested in the real thing, and the real thing for him was women coming clean. MM