Memory's Screen THE MAGIC LANTERN

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

Click. A son sits alone for hours at his mother's deathbed after she has died. What he later recalls most poignantly is the Band-Aid on her finger.

Click. A little boy, hating his older brother, lies in wait behind their bedroom door and strikes him so hard with a water carafe that it breaks. A gush of blood mingles with shattered glass.

Click. A world-famous director rehearses one of Strindberg's plays. Suddenly policemen appear in his theater to arrest him on charges of tax evasion. His bowels weaken and he must make a lengthy, humiliating trip to the water closet, with a cop posted outside the door, before going to confront his accusers.

Click. A youth is lured into a mortuary by the attendant, who locks him up with the corpses. One of them is a beautiful young woman. The boy lifts the sheet from her body. As he gazes upon her she seems to come alive. Terrified, he races for the door, now open. She is the first of the demons that will haunt his reveries and his work for the rest of his life.

Click click click. The central figure in all these vignettes is the real- life Ingmar Bergman, and never has an autobiography been more aptly titled than The Magic Lantern. For it is as if the great director, whose passion for the transforming power of the vividly projected image was first stirred by the paraffin-lamp projector that was his favorite childhood toy, is rummaging through a boxful of old slides and throwing them on memory's screen in the order they come to hand, without pause or transitional comment.

Whether confronting the deep past -- his bourgeois childhood as the son of a stern Lutheran minister and dutifully repressed mother -- or his adult past, where wives, mistresses and children drift almost anonymously through the shadows of his theaters and sound stages, Bergman rarely strikes the customary autobiographical notes of nostalgia and the tranquil acceptance of fate. To him, middle-class morality is a cloak for madness, family life an invitation to distraction and guilt. Neither helps one come to grips with decay, eroticism, violence -- those irrational torments by which the unseen world insists on its presence in our lives.

At first one is astonished and dismayed by his disregard for the convention of chronological recall. For Bergman's films, no matter how deeply they plunge into the dank depths of his characters, have always been severely, intricately logical in structure and cool, almost objective, in tone. But one comes to see that this is the most profound point of this ruthless book. What Bergman is saying is that however acutely his art reflected his sense of life, it was much more important to him as a refuge from life. It was the place where he could at least briefly impose order on life's terrible confusions, find for himself a sustaining moment of peace and grace.

His admiration is for figures like Laurence Olivier, whom he glimpses backstage, sweating, swilling champagne, denying desperate illness -- and making up to go onstage once more and transform despair into dominance. His pity is for someone like Garbo, who has allowed herself to be victimized by her beauty's decay and so exiled from the consolation of creation. Describing a rehearsal of Der Rosenkavalier he once heard Herbert von Karajan conduct, Bergman writes, "We were drowned in a wave of devastating, repellent beauty." That is how one feels emerging from this book, which is surely one of the finest self-portraits of an artist written in our time.