A dark and gloomy film, The Clown's Evening presents life as a brutal humiliation--a life difficult to endure which, in the final analysis, resignation and companionship may make tolerable. Many people interpret the film as absolute pessimism, probably because it eschews the idyllic presentation of Bergman's earlier films such as Summer Interlude and Summer with Monika. But the romance in those films eventually breaks down--totally. The more concentrated Clown's Evening begins after the break-down, discrediting illusions that we never see on the screen.

Simon divides this film into two elements: the visual and the thematic. His justification is unclear. He would never tolerate such bilidity on the part of a film-maker. His examination of The Clown's Evening is, however, sufficiently perceptive on all counts to make this weakness merely an organizational problem. Attaching defailed comment to extensive paraphrase. Simon gives a clear picture of Bergman's command, particularly of the nightmarish flashback done with heightened contrast and masterful manipulation of sound. Drawing somewhat on earlier analyses by British critics Peter Cowie and Robin Wood, he integrates his observations, obtaining a more complete picture of The Clown's Evening than has been seen before.

Bergman's best comedy, Smiles of a Summer Night, has a clever structure that allows its tone to range from the comic to the bitterly tragic. At base level, its concern is with the rebounds its numerous characters make between lovers. Though its charm and impact are unique, its subject and its unusual emotional range create an often-noted resemblance to Jean Renoir's Rules of the Game--a film Bergman had not seen at the time he made his production, and which he does not like today.

SIMON THINKS RULES OF THE GAME one of the very best films ever made, but he barely mentions the famous comparison. As one alternative, he tries to emphasize the geometrical nature (or "quasi-mathematical, or even biochemical"!) he perceives in the "oscillations" of the characters. He soon leaves such doctrinaire analogies behind, proceeding with the most knowing comments yet written about the film. Yet, extending his criticism too far, Simon gets caught up in still more analogy as he tries to set up metaphors (theater, dance, and music) within which to fit the analysis.

Simon chose Winter Light to represent Bergman's religious trilogy from the early 60's. More than any of Bergman's other films, it has an austere, condensed visual strength that makes analysis of its imagery almost superfluous. Its depiction of religiosity is ambiguous, yet profound, and so Simon carefully explores possible conclusions to be drawn from the ending--where the pastor, whose faith has deserted him, begins the Vespers service before an audience consisting solely of his church's staff and his atheist former mistress.

Simon gradually uncovers the substance of Winter Light, moving us in the same way that the film itself moves us as he completes his interpretation of the film as a heightened, penetrating version of the insight that "hell together is better than hell alone." In considering the visual impact of Winter Light, he examines the ways in which watching a film of Communion affects the viewer. This type of analysis could well have been brought to bear on Persona, a film so sophisticated that many one-time viewers found nothing but visual impact.

Persona is the most innovative of Berman's films and, as Simon points out, it is also his most difficult. Simon's honesty as a critic is well revealed by comparing his original review of the film (The New Leader, May 1967), in which he admitted he did not yet understand it, with the article in the current book, in which he presents several years' reflection with no condescension toward the reader. When the film was first released, many baffled reviewers gave up, terming Persona a work of poetic images with no substance. The first intelligent analysis was Susan Sontag's essay reprinted in Styles of Radical Will.

Sontag argued that the film could not be understood in terms of plot. To do so would necessitate strict identification of each scene as real or imaginary, destroying the coherence built up from the disjoint opening images. The film presents an actress whose mental condition has suddenly left her mute. She is accompanied by a young nurse to an empty house on the sea. There they somehow merge or change identities--most people got that far, but that's, not very far at all. The film is not a puzzle but a meditation, Sontag said, and that interpretation is Simon's starting point.

But Simon, in his longer essay, goes beyond Sontag. He is much clearer than she, to begin with, in his framework of a meditation on the numbers one and two. He explores the film as a perfectly realized experiment, the Ulysses of the cinema, and, putting scholarship before pleasure, even admits that there are influences from Godard. In the Persona essay, even more than in the other three, Simon's presentation is helped along by his editors' useful choice of stills, many in sequences, which clarify important scenes and give a feeling for the marvelous texture of Sven Nykvist's cinematography.

Simon did not choose the structure of his book, Since it is the second volume in a series, he inherited the organization set up for the first volume--an interview, a short essay, detailed analysis of four films. Had Simon written according to his own desires, he might have written a survey work. That would have been too bad. Several fine general studies of Bergman exist now, and Simon's disagreements with Wood and Cowie and others are not so major as to warrant another. So Simon has written essays on just four films. They are the best, most thorough critiques of single fims that he has written--perhaps the best, most thorough that have been written on any films.