Yearning for Grace : IMAGES: My Life in Film, <i> By Ingmar Bergman, Translated from the Swedish by Marianne Ruuth (Arcade: $27.95; 448 pp; illustrated</i> .<i> )</i>

“My play opens with an actor walking down into the audience, where he strangles a critic, then reads aloud from a little black book all the humiliations he has noted therein. Then he throws up on the audience, after which he exits and puts a bullet through his head.”

This fragment from an old notebook, which Ingmar Bergman uses to introduce “Images: My Life in Film,” is not only the book’s wriest passage, it is its most telling. It suggests the infantile, vengeful, exhibitionistic character of the old Magician; it revels in rancor toward critics, brazens out its contempt for the audience, and shrugs off its self-loathing in that novel, self-administered (and irrevocable) version of what was once known as getting “the hook.”

Bergman gave himself the hook. He pledged in 1982 to “hang up” his camera after finishing “Fanny and Alexander.” “I don’t have the strength anymore, neither psychologically nor physically. And I hate the hoopla and the malice.”

An artist as prodigiously productive as Bergman might put aside his camera, but not his creative obsessions. If “Fanny and Alexander” was a relatively sunny valedictory, the lenses Bergman had looked through--oh, so darkly--focused mostly on landscapes of tormented guilt and neurosis with only the occasional smile on a summer night. What he calls his “demons” doubled spectacularly as muses. Bergman’s preeminence as an auteur is largely attributable to his “ability to attach my demons to my chariot,” and he has done so as ruthlessly as any artist with genius and the requisite indifference to prevailing standards, whether those of the audience or the bank.

Time’s chariot cuts to the chase now that Bergman is 75. He continues to work in his first and truest love, the theater, and has completed a pair of novels for others to film: “Best Intentions” for Danish director Bille August and the forthcoming “Sunday’s Children” for his son, Daniel Bergman. There are two volumes of something like autobiography: “The Magic Lantern,” published in English in 1988, and now--as commentary on the career--”Images: My Life in Film.”

To prepare for his review of four decades of filmmaking, Bergman sat alone in screening rooms for a year and watched his filmic output unreel from beginning to end for the first time in his life. This process he found both “murderous and painful,” he says, a remark that may smack of false modesty or be gratifying to those who have acknowledged his genius at the same time they knew that a Bergman film was something to get through, not just sit through.

“The Magic Lantern” was a brilliantly honed self-portrait that revealed little about the films, their connections to the life or the conditions of their making. “Images” seeks to correct that by examining a body of work its author tells us was mostly “conceived in the depths of my soul, in my heart, my brain, my nerves, my sex, and not the least, in my guts.” That is to say: not in offices or hanging around the pool.

Here we are in the realm of Art with a capital A. The big surprise has always been that Bergman’s bleak visions brought home not only the bacon but a clutch of Oscars (for “The Virgin Spring,” “Through a Glass Darkly,” “Cries and Whispers” and “Fanny and Alexander”) as well as the Irving Thalberg Award. For those who still need persuading, “Images” is full of Art palaver, some of which is just plain guff.

You don’t have to be a Philistine to feel your brain boggle when one talks about film as “a sacrosanct cinematographic piece of poetry” with a straight face. There is enough of what Bergman calls “wordless secrets that only cinema can discover” to make the most generous reader wonder what wordlessness is doing in a book in the first place and reach for the VCR remote control.

This sort of prose impresses a lot of people and may have been inevitable in a book that began as a series of interviews. Questions were removed from the resulting transcripts, and Bergman revised his answers, adding quotations from notebooks, diaries, screenplays and earlier publications. These multiple sources form an uneven mosaic over which the reader stumbles on the path to understanding the unknowable, the enigmatic “that which cannot be explained.” This last is what Bergman represented to a hostile critic--whom he quotes here with cryptic pride.

The style of “Images” is erratic and becomes obscure when discussing already difficult films such as “Wild Strawberries,” “Persona” and “Face to Face.” (“Here, finally, all forms of storytelling are dissolved,” the director exults, consumed perhaps by “that which cannot be explained.”)

“Images” could also use an index and plot synopses that don’t read like computer manuals. The more than 200 photographs are often helpful, though Bergman’s text incorrectly describes the shots of Bob Hope, Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour in “Road to Morocco.”

Diary and notebook entries frequently provide mood or intellectual underpinning for the evolution of a given picture, and Bergman’s comments in hindsight are as often as self-castigating as they are self-congratulatory. This does not always make them helpful. We learn, for instance that “one of the few films really close to my heart” is “The Seventh Seal,” but “actually, I don’t know why.”

Still, there is the inevitable fresh anecdote, the unfamiliar bit of shoptalk that brings the oracular pronouncements down to earth. We find, for instance, that the bottom line is not a concept exclusive to Hollywood and unknown in Scandinavia or to Ingmar Bergman.

During a long motion picture strike in 1951, Bergman filmed commercials for “a soap that practically tore the skin off your body.” Later, the Swedes wanted no part of “The Seventh Seal” or “Cries and Whispers,” and Bergman turned to former lover Bibi Andersson to borrow money for the former (she “was the richest one of us”), and to cameraman Sven Nykvist and co-starring actresses Liv Ullmann, Ingrid Thulin and Harriet Andersson for financing of the latter.

These are minor illuminations in a book of minor rewards. Bergman’s voice can be intimate and grandiose, lively or laden with gloom, demure or vulgar, seductive and repellent. Paradox is to be expected from “a walking chaos of conflicting emotions,” busily recycling his best material.

Here and there the master of “The Silence,” of “Sawdust and Tinsel,” of “Shame” brings the reader up short, fixing eyes and mind to the page, but too often this happens when quoting or reworking “The Magic Lantern.”

Bergman is a shrewd and perverse old ringmaster, begging our indulgence as a “spiritually handicapped clown,” diverting our attention from the magic act he has never mastered, the one he once called “the yearning for something at last to touch me, to give me grace.”

That particular trick may be beyond the wizardry even of a Bergman and may be why he disingenuously begs off with, “I pretend I’m an adult. . . . I am constantly astonished that people take me seriously.” They do, though, because of the films “Images” was meant to illuminate. Which is why it disappoints.