A DECADE AGO, Ingmar Bergman loathed critics. His unquestionably worst film, Not to Speak About All These Women (1964), was devoted to attacking a pathetic character who embodied the critic. In the late sixties, perhaps influenced by Liv Ullman, his lady at the time. Bergman warmed a bit and granted a few interviews. Even then it seemed he felt an interview was a chore, a quite unpleasant side effect of fame to be conducted with the smug assurance of the true artist.

As late as 1972, Bergman still played his games of aloofness. He told Birgitta Steene that he never thought about his past films. When Charles Thomas Samuels began his interview, Bergman admonished. "This way you've started will only keep us talking like two puppets discussing absolute nonsense."

What a different sort of dialogue is his interview with John Simon, '46, conducted while Bergman filmed The Touch (1971) but published for the first time in Ingmar Bergman Directs. Now we find two men joking with each other, categorizing directors as good or bad, feeding each other's prejudices:

Simon: Are there any young film-makers that you particularly like? I hope you don't like Godard.

Bergman: No, no, no.

Simon: I detest him.

Bergman: Yes, I do, too,

Each man asks the other to express his views, and Bergman treats Simon with respect.

Simon asks about difficult passages from Bergman's past films. With Steene, Bergman's reaction to such topics was "Birgittal" but with Simon it is, "I will try to be honest." He does think about the past films, had seen Winter Light a few weeks before and was "very satisfied." The Seventh Seal is sometimes successful, sometimes not. Bergman even discards a major myth he had created. Concerning the endlessly quoted parable he wrote for Cahiers du Cinema (July, 1956), in which he compared himself to an anonymous artisan working on the cathedral at Chartres, he now tells Simon: "Very romantic, Forget it."

The presumption of the interview, as of the rest of Simon's book, is that Bergman is the greatest genius the cinema has produced. The sum of his artistry, in Simon's view, surpasses all other film-makers'; the individual works are unmatched except by Fellini and Antonioni at their best. In the interview. Simon tells Bergman his judgment straight off, but the book is by no means mere obeisance, though the unsparing acidity characteristic of Simon's New York magazine theater column corrodes few Bergman frames.

Four long essays fill most of the book, one each on the films Simon considers to be Bergman's best: The Naked Night (1953) which Simon, setting a welcome precedent, calls by its correctly translated title The Clown's Evening: Smiles of a Summer Night (1955); Winter Light (1962)) and Persona (1966). Simon's analytical and descriptive abilities, seen most often in his film reviews in The New Leader, flourish in these expansive essays, unencumbered by the disputatious color of his reviews.

Simon's most enduring articles have always been on the few films he loves, while he has been quick to trifle with or even denounce the imperfect nascent films so influential in the development of a classical style like Bergman's. In dealing with the classical, he is on his own firmest ground, and in his Bergman book Simon is willing, for the first time, to take his stands, in relation to--not merely above--other crities.

JUST AS MANY PEOPLE think of John Simon only as a malicious theater critic, so for many the quintessence of Bergmanism remains, unfortunately, The Seventh Seal. Simon mentions the film only a few times, and in passing; his omission is one of his best critical judgments. In 1956, the film made Bergman intellectual chic. In later years, its fame, coupled with its lack of substance, led many to a premature disenchantment not only with Bergman but with foreign films as a group. The labored allegory's saintly sheen cannot disguise its sanctimony; stark and serious do not by themselves make profound.

Viewed in perspective--as a compelling project Bergman had to get off his chest--The Seventh Seal can be recognized as an impressive failure. Its ostentatious images, with a couple of exceptions (the witch-burning, the flagellants), make better stills than film. But the concerns of the film find more coherent treatment elsewhere. The spiritual plagues are more carefully distilled in Winter Light; the worldly ones are more powerful in The Clown's Evening.

The Clown's Evening, Bergman's first masterpiece, sums up attitudes Bergman had suggested in his films of the preceding three years. During the course of a single day's action, we see the owner of an impoverished travelling circus and his mistress, the bare-back rider, each betray the other. Albert tries to return to the wife he had left long ago. Anne, partly in retaliation, has a pitiful affair with a condescending actor. Both are rejected in these attempts to escape the circus life, and, after still further torment, the day ends with the pair together again, walking in silence alongside the caravan.