Bergman: why are the great director's women all tragi-sexual goddesses?

Ingmar Bergman’s spellbinding films made his female stars immortal. But they weren’t all grateful. Could this famously manipulative genius have survived in the #MeToo era? In 1971, Ingmar Bergman had just completed his first English-language film, The Touch. It starred Elliott Gould as an American archaeologist in Sweden, who has an affair with a beautiful, troubled woman, played by Bergman regular Bibi Andersson. To promote it, Bergman and Andersson made an extraordinary appearance on America’s Dick Cavett Show – an unimaginably rare TV outing for this director, rather like seeing Jean-Luc Godard pop up on Trevor Noah’s The Daily Show.