Ingmar Bergman, Swedish author and movie and theater director, is one of the foremost contributors to postwar European cinema and a leading stage interpreter of such playwrights as William Shakespeare, Molière, Henrik Ibsen, and August Strindberg. Making his published debut as a writer in 1944 in the magazine 40-tal with the short story "En kortare berättelse om en av Jack Uppskärarens tidigaste barndomsminnen," and as a playwright in 1948 with his Moraliteter, Bergman has written virtually all of the screenplays to his more than fifty feature movies, creating a new hybrid genre between script, stage play, and novel, in which he avoids the technical format of regular movie scripts and presents texts that are self-contained literary companion pieces to his works. This practice garnered him in the 1950s the reputation of being the world's foremost auteur du cinéma, a term coined by...