The Director, By Alexander Ahndoril, trs Sarah Death

Alexander Ahndoril's fascinating novel The Director follows the creation of Ingmar Bergman's film Winter Light, from its first stirrings in his mind and his notebook jottings of summer 1961, through the often fraught filming, beginning in October 1961 and ending in January 1962, to its triumphant opening in February 1963. This last was a ceremony which the exhausted Bergman and his wife fled. Bergman was then married to the celebrated concert pianist, Käbi Laretei, their relationship corroded by mutual lack of trust. However they wanted a child together, and in September l962 Daniel, later himself a director, was born. Ingmar and Käbi didn't take the baby with them on their Swiss escape, but he was an off-scene presence. In one of the last images Ahndoril provides of Bergman, he is holding up to a candle-flame a strip of film of his new son appropriately, for behind both novel and film the father-son relationship stands.

Bergman's own father, Erik, was a priest in the Swedish Church, who became Chaplain to the Royal Household. Erik was frankly disappointed in Ingmar. Considering film a valueless field of activity, he took no sustained interest in his son's successes. And this is the Ingmar Bergman whose Virgin Spring (1960) had won international acclaim, whose Through a Glass Darkly ( l961) constituted a peak of cinema art, and who had to his credit recent major productions at Stockholm's prestigious Royal Dramatic Theatre, including Stravinsky's opera The Rake's Progress, referred to in Ahndoril's text. (In Sweden Bergman was as revered and influential a stage-director as film-maker.) Bergman could not prevent a perpetual resurfacing (brilliantly managed in this novel) of disruptive boyhood memories in which Erik Bergman tyrannised him with his sadistic outbursts and mood-swings. Nevertheless, Ingmar never jettisoned his need, indeed his desire, for his father's approbation, perhaps even his blessing.

Bergman was to write about his father overtly in his autobiography The Magic Lantern (1987), which in turn gave rise to the full-length portrait of him when younger in both his wonderful novel, The Best Intentions, and his script for Bille August's film version of this (both 1991). Even allowing, as one must, for Ingmar's emotional distortion of his father in the myth he ceaselessly made of his own life, one finds it hard (in Ahndoril's book also) to acquit Erik Bergman of damaging ungenerosity of spirit, which the son saw as both characteristic of and compounded by the joyless religion he served.

All problems in their relationship were bound to be exacerbated by Winter Light. Bergman's protagonist here is a priest. Supposedly a study in how he himself might have turned out in middle age had he followed his father into the clergy, the film presents a dark picture of a bitter, unloving man routinely carrying out thankless tasks in one of the most thoroughly secular societies on the planet. Our pity for him as he administers the sacrament to a tiny handful of marginalised country-folk is vitiated by our recoil from his spiritual disdain and dishonesty, for deep-down he is an unbeliever. Throughout the film the priest suffers from flu; his stubborn carrying-on of duties on a freezing day forms an immensely effective metaphor for his chosen mode of life.

Winter Light is probably not one of Bergman's best-known films in Britain, but it is surely one of his greatest, perfect in its sombre artistry, moving in its pent-up anger. Ahndoril's fascinating novel partakes of both qualities. It gives us an Ingmar more than usually troubled. Management at his company, Svensk Filmindustri, was unconvinced that so thematically circumscribed a piece was commercially justifiable, Käbi nagged him about whether he was attracted to beautiful Ingrid Thulin, the film's pathetic school-teacher besotted by the priest, and his own irritability seriously upset the lead actor, Gunnar Bjrnstrand, while not impairing his superb performance. Always prone to inner variations on external reality, Ingmar told lies during the film's making, and morbidly revisited his past. Yet his intellect and feelings were never more profoundly concentrated.

Ingmar Bergman was shown Ahndoril's novel in manuscript. Its knowledge of film and of himself, drawn from many sources, impressed him. Afterwards he changed his mind, declaring the portrait humiliating. Both responses helped the book's phenomenal Swedish reception in 2006. We here need only admire The Director as an honest, empathic and respectful account of creativity, flowing from a unique mind to affect other people's lives, made with Bergmanesque spareness and attention to detail, a vivid tribute to the Shakespeare of our age.

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