Harriet Andersson in a scene from Ingmar Bergman’s “Summer with Monika,” from 1953. Photograph Courtesy Janus Films / Film Forum

This year marks the centenary of the birth of Ingmar Bergman, and, for any New Yorkers keen to pay homage, the journey starts now. Over the next five weeks, starting on Thursday with “The Seventh Seal” (1957), Film Forum will be showing forty-seven films. One of Bergman’s most appealing traits is that, though the mood of his movies could be famously difficult and fraught, they poured forth in generous profusion, as if he could hardly help himself, and knew no other release. He dreamed, drew, pondered, probed, and agonized on film, and what resulted, more often than not, bore the grip of a thriller and the elegance of a waltz. If you wish to be reminded of what the medium can do, or if you doubt the depths that lurk beneath the flat skin of celluloid, waiting to be fathomed, Bergman is your man.

Not the least of the pleasures, for anyone with the stamina for the complete retrospective, will be the chance to make connections. As the flighty heroine of “Dreams” (1955), for instance, Harriet Andersson explores a row of gramophone records in the house of an ageing roué, plucks one out, and reads the label aloud, saying “Saraband” and “Bach” (which she pronounces “batch”). For a second, our minds are spirited forward to “Cries and Whispers” (1972), in which the mournful saraband, a movement from Bach’s fifth cello suite, is heard during a scene of reconciliation—as it is, once again, during one of Bergman’s final works, made for Swedish television in 2003, and simply titled “Saraband.” In both cases, Liv Ullmann, another of Bergman’s indispensable performers, is onscreen as the music plays. You want one more link? The role of the woman who dies, of cancer, in “Cries and Whispers” is played by Harriet Andersson. All these movies pass each other in orbit, sometimes decades apart. The more of them you observe, in wonder, the greater their gravitational pull.

Even people who have never seen a Bergman movie know about the guy who plays a game of chess with Death. Why else could it be parodied so fondly in “Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey” (1991), in which the grim—and increasingly pissed—reaper gets trounced at Battleship and Clue? But the added thrill, for those watching “The Seventh Seal,” which plays through the rest of this week at Film Forum, will be doubled by coming back, on February 20th or March 10th, for “Summer Interlude” (1951), in which an elderly lady sits opposite the local pastor, with a chess board between them, and two young lovers standing near. “I like living too much, and that’s why I’ll outlive the lot of you,” the old woman says, before getting up to fetch a blanket. Alone with the lovers, the pastor admits to “a professional interest,” adding, “I have a feeling of sitting next to Death himself.” All this is said with a smile, in a sunlit garden beside the sea. Mortality need not always be a source of terror, and Bergman, despite his reputation, is not the merchant of unshakable gloom. He did attempt straight comedies, but seldom with success; I found “All These Women” (1964), a Fellini-flavored farce, about as amusing as pleurisy, whereas the richly shadowed stories, like “Wild Strawberries” (1957), are all the more telling for their streaks of comic light.

That is true even of those tales whose subject matter, in synopsis, sounds unappealingly tough. “The Virgin Spring” (1960), which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film, is about a rape and murder in fourteenth-century Sweden. “Winter Light” (1963) is about a pastor, in a rural community, who has to contend with the amorous advances of one parishioner, whom he claims to despise, and with the suicide of another, who shoots himself beside a foaming river. Yet, having watched them both again, on the big screen, I can testify to the stillness of the audience around me, rapt and tensed as the dramas unfurled. And they are dramatic; never, with such force, has the act of giving and receiving the bread and wine been granted its cinematic dues, as Bergman—the son of a minister—cuts from one communicant to the next, inspecting them in turn. (He is the only filmmaker who can derive as much from a profile as he can from a full-face shot.) Even the most atheist viewer will sense the momentous nature of this everyday rite, and will also notice the inquiring glance that the pastor directs to each kneeling figure as he takes back the cup. He could almost be a detective, mustering a row of suspects. Critics have fretted and argued as to what extent Bergman believes in God, but that is not what matters. What matters is that he believes in the people who do believe, and in what it costs them to wrestle, like Jacob, with the angel of faith.

It is fourteen years since Film Forum hosted a hefty season of Bergman films. I wrote about them at the time, for this magazine, and suggested that the best—indeed the only—way to reach the metaphysical, as we confront such work, is via the physical. In other words, let’s not deny the solemn burdens that Bergman chose to shoulder: hope and despair, shame and silence, and what Samuel Beckett once called “that desert of loneliness and recrimination that men call love.” The intervening years have only strengthened my conviction, however, that Bergman’s movies cannot and must not be mistaken for abstract ruminations, let alone cautiously balanced debates. They are violently, ecstatically open to the evidence of the senses; you can feel every particle of experience drumming on the characters like rain. The parents who cradle their dead child in a forest, at the finale of “The Virgin Spring,” are joined and bowed in grief, but because we regard them from overhead, in a tableau of lamentation, and because the light that floods the glade is beatific, the tone is calmly and peculiarly blessed—as is proved, shortly afterward, when they raise her body and water flows from the earth on which she lay. The title, we now realize, refers to a miracle.

From his earliest days, Bergman learned to set a scene with the minimum amount of dialogue. In the opening minutes of “Thirst” (1949), say, the camera prowls a cramped hotel room, keeping pace with a young woman as she sighs, smokes, brushes her teeth, tries to read a newspaper, and fails to wake her sleeping partner. We know almost nothing about her, so far, and yet, thanks to the prowling, we know all we need to know. The room could be a cage at the zoo. As the movies proceed, you start to wait, with a prickle of anticipation, for the instant at which the camera will suddenly, with a kind of suave intensity, glide at speed toward a character’s face, as he or she approaches a point of crisis, be it of clarity or mystification; Bergman reminds us that, when we are struck by a thought, or a memory, we are truly struck, as if by the slap of a hand. In the case of “Wild Strawberries,” not only do we home in on the old man who is the focus of the film as he sits, aghast, in the seat of a car, but everything around him goes dark, as if he were trapped on stage and pinned down by a single spotlight.

You don’t have to watch “Face to Face” (1976) to understand the primacy, for Bergman, of the human face. It emerges from his movies as the most special of effects: a living landscape, swept by squalls of emotion, and forever demanding to be mapped and remapped. Why else should we attend, with equal fervor, both to Alma (Bibi Andersson), the nurse who chatters incessantly throughout “Persona” (1966), and to Elisabet (Liv Ullmann), her patient, who utters not a word, but whose gentle features register everything from mirth to horror as she listens and looks? (A poignant addendum: the two stars are still alive, but Andersson, unfortunately, has had a stroke. She is now the mute one, and it is Ullmann who goes to visit her and talks. Nature and time have reversed the roles of art.) Both actresses return in “The Passion of Anna” (1969), a lesser-known yet formidable work, which finds Bergman shifting from black and white to color and, in snatches, to a freer handheld style. But the closeups are no less concentrated than they were in “Persona,” and, as usual, it is the female face at which we unflinchingly stare.