René Clair, Vittorio De Sica, William Wyler, Arthur Penn–film history is littered with rueful reminders that critical taste is fickle and fame fleeting. But among those once fashionable auteurs who have unpredictably fallen from grace, no case is more instructive than that of Ingmar Bergman. It doesn't seem like so very long ago that his name was practically synonymous with art cinema. From the late '50s until at least the mid '70s Bergman represented for many the screen's highest claim to be taken as seriously as literature, painting or music. The godhead in the subtitled holy trinity completed by Fellini and Antonioni, he wrestled frontally with all the big modernist themes–alienation, despair, faith, doubt, Eros, Thanatos, the artist's vocation and the quest for meaning in an absurd universe. Starting with Crisis (Kris) in 1945, Bergman put his individual stamp on more than 40 features, and devotees could see him making leaps in stylistic refinement almost from film to film. By the time of the first trilogy–Through a Glass Darkly (Sasom I en spegel, 1961), Winter Light (Nattvardsgasterna, 1963) and The Silence (Tystnaden, 1963)–he had achieved such concentrated intensity that the camera became an X-ray (or better, a polygraph) machine, piercing the defensive masks of the characters and disclosing their innermost states. The portrayal of mental and spiritual life was often judged to lie beyond the capacity of so physically oriented a medium as cinema. That Bergman succeeded in photographing thought seemed to confer on him the status of an absolute master.

The consequence was that articles, books and monographs rolled off the academic assembly line–the frequently abstruse nature of Bergman's subjects calling forth exegeses like nectar attracts industrious bees. The vogue for the director climaxed around 1972, when Persona (1966) was listed in fifth place in the Sight and Sound critics' poll of all-time best films and Wild Strawberries (Smultronstället, 1957) came in tenth. The following year Cries and Whispers (Viskningar och rop, 1972) was improbably nominated for five Academy Awards (including Best Picture). After that, Bergman's reputation suffered a gradual eclipse for reasons which can only be guessed at.

It may be that he was upstaged by Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders and other directors of the emerging New German Cinema, whose trenchant social observation made his confirmed solipsism look impossibly decadent. Then there was the more material factor of unsettling changes in professional conditions and their likely impact on his inner-directed aesthetic. It remained a sizeable part of the Bergman mystique that he drew around him a steadfast team of collaborators who laboured in selfless unison to fulfill the great man's vision. An acclaimed stock company of actors (Max von Sydow, Bibi Andersson, Harriet Andersson, Gunnar Björnstrand, Ingrid Thulin, Liv Ullmann, et al) and two regular cinematographers (Gunnar Fischer, then the celebrated Sven Nykvist) helped to give Bergman's world the claustrophobic intimacy of all such tight-knit family groupings.

In 1976, however, he underwent the indignity of being slapped with a charge of tax evasion and left Sweden in high dudgeon. Sundered from his artistic ensemble (save for a few tenacious souls like Ullmann and Nykvist who joined him in exile) and even more crucially from his native roots, Bergman appeared to founder. He was forced into disastrous international co-productions such as The Serpent's Egg (Das Schlangenei, 1977) where the logistics of scale ruled out his usual finicky control. Bergman's later films bore the mark of creative entropy, as if his powers needed focusing in a very narrow groove and got dispersed across any wider channel. Even the compact Autumn Sonata (Herbstsonate, 1978) starring the other Bergman, Ingrid–felt like an obligatory retread of material that had once been handled far more acutely. Returning home, he ended his official career on a triumphant note with the lavish domestic melodrama Fanny and Alexander (Fanny och Alexander, 1982), which was universally loved. Still, some among his most ardent admirers thought it a little too eager to please frothy Bergman-lite for people who couldn't stomach the hard stuff.

Most film-making giants, of course, experience strange ebbs and flows in their prestige. Antonioni spent years in the critical wilderness then bounced back, and there's no reason to suppose that Bergman won't also reclaim his laurels. In the case of Bergman, though, it sometimes seems amazing that he ever caught on. In any number of films this Lutheran minister's son brooded over his lapsed faith and God's stony silence amid the horrors of modern civilisation–not a theme calculated to grab the liberal cognoscenti by the throat. But in another sense, Bergman's dark nights of the soul were tailor-made for his audience. Even flat atheists might entertain spiritual suffering as a fantasy and one whose formidable gravitas categorically set them apart from the ordinary consumers of Hollywood drivel.

The golden age of international film coincided with the politique des auteurs, but if anything, the traditional arthouse view of filmmaking was the more swooningly romantic. Not only did the art object bear the imprint of the author in style, personality and content–it was as though each film had been torn painfully from its creator's loins. Small wonder that Bergman became the patron saint of highbrow cinema, for as an auteur he was marvellously overdetermined. A writer-director employed by a forward-looking studio, Svensk Filmindustri, on enviable terms of total artistic freedom, Bergman could with justice put his signature to every foot of celluloid. A Bergman product was unmistakable in its visual austerity, its emotional opacity and its magisterial command over form. But most importantly, he appeared to use the film medium as an instrument of personal catharsis. For whatever names the characters went under, a Bergman drama was always really about him–his psychological, moral or intellectual crises, his provisional solutions. (The hideous spousal bickering that features in so many films from Wild Strawberries to the 1973 television mini-series Scenes from a Marriage / Scener or ett Aktenskap comprised a virtual cinema a clef of the director's half a dozen failed attempts at domesticity.) It was this private, therapeutic dimension of Bergman's work that rendered him the complete auteur for a generation, since one seemed to be vouchsafed a privileged glimpse of the creative agony as it transformed life into art.

Bergman's lofty, remote yet strenuously confessional masterpieces were, in short, auratic -bearing the traces of the storyteller "the way the handprints of the potter cling to the clay vessel" (to quote Walter Benjamin). By definition all masterpieces radiate an aura in that they are (or we believe them to be) the unique and irreplaceable outgrowths of an elite soul. So if one wants to understand the root causes of Bergman's descent into comparative oblivion, one could do worse than consult the fate of the aura, the masterpiece–and their enabling agent the art-house–in contemporary film culture. Benjamin claimed that cinema and other modes of mechanical reproduction would overthrow the repressive aura by eliminating the singularity of the artwork. But things didn't go according to dialectical plan. For as fast as that occult authenticity was eroded by the mass media, the auteurist hagiography clawed it back. Now the director as superstar flourishes as never before, and yet Benjamin is after all proved right–if not quite in the manner he expected. At a time when the notion has been so thoroughly democratized that the maker of Lobotomy 4 or some such opus can obtain an auteurist credit (for marketing purposes at least), it ceases to possess any vital meaning.

This commercial attenuation of the aura finds its corollary in the demotion of the great work. Few artists these days retain the hubris–or for that matter, the pomposity– needed to mount a full-blown masterpiece. Arguably, the last Olympian effort of this sort was Kieslowski's Three Colours trilogy (whatever one may think of it), though films by Kubrick and Angelopoulos might also be adduced. Even the best recent auteurs–say, Wong Kar-Wai or Pedro Almodóvar–are somehow too airy and sportive for their works to answer to the title.

Point the finger at the usual suspect, postmodemism, which in its chronic distrust of metanarratives and high seriousness refuses all traffic with masterpieces. If the artwork is little more than a jerrybuilt contraption of odds and sods lifted from earlier sources, then the mysterious promptings of genius can be nothing but ideological bunk. Filmmakers have yielded to the prevailing cynicism by luxuriating in pastiche, parody and impish spot-the-reference games. Art is increasingly downsized from sacred calling to leisure activity, just as the arthouse (where it survives) has less the aspect of an ersatz temple than a lifestyle option.

It's admittedly an occasion for relief as much as for regret that the newer auteurs have shrugged off the sometimes heavygoing earnestness of their ancestors. Bergman for one was an artist unblessed by a single shred of irony–and not for want of trying. In his middle period he alternated sombre concertos like The Seventh Seal (Det sjunde inseglet, 1957) with divertimenti such as A Lesson in Love (En lektion i karlek, 1954) and The Devil's Eye (Djdvulens öga, 1960)–capering sex comedies populated by straying husbands, coy mistresses and philosophical wives. However, apart from the genuinely scintillating Smiles of a Summer Night (Sommarnattens leende, 1955) his lighter forays exhibit the grace of a Scandinavian ox.

And if giddy self-reflexivity is what you're after, Bergman strikes out again on the postmodern score card. It's true that he habitually exercised the venerable trope of art as life, life as theatre: for instance, in The Magician/The Face (Ansiktet, 1958), where the charlatan mesmerist Vogler figures the conjuring artist and by extension the director. But instead of revelling in his master illusionism Bergman shouldered it like an existential millstone. A masochist of the first order, he continually berated himself for casting spells that were no more than fraudulent sleight-of-hand. The most extreme statement of Bergman's lacerating doubt (and indisputably his finest work) is Persona, which takes the shape of film within a film. In one mind-boggling moment the passions of the interior story grow so heated they literally melt a hole in the screen. Many critics insist that the viewer is thereby jolted out of dramatic involvement, but that's not how one is apt experience the scene. Its overwhelming power would seem to arise rather from Bergman's desolate recognition of his impossible desire–to reach beyond the film frame and touch reality itself.

So what can Bergman, the melancholy Hamlet of film history, conceivably offer our jaded sensibilities? Quite a lot, I think, though the gauging of his heroic virtues and no less heroic vices demands more particular corroboration. The films composing the first trilogy (the second is formed by Persona, Hour of the Wolf / Vargtimmen, 1968, and Shame / Skammen, 1968) have the advantage of being among his most representative works. Indeed, their portentousness, banked intensity and recondite symbolism come near to embodying one's stereotype of the Bergmanesque. Together they mark a shift from the relatively broad canvases of the '50s films to the impacted chamber dramas for which the director is perhaps best known.

Each deposits a restricted group in an eerily isolated setting. In this emotional crucible the characters' suppressed resentments bubble up and the mutual accusations multiply until one by one their cherished illusions are stripped away. Through a Glass Darkly strands a fraught family quartet on a Baltic island in the eternal glare of a northern midsummer. With the white sky beating down on them night and day, the people stand cruelly exposed and they duly learn the unblinking truth about themselves. Novelist and patriarch David (Gunnar Björnstrand) discovers that terrible sliver of ice in the artist's heart which allows the suffering of others to be used as so much grist for the imagination. He is the clearest surrogate for Bergman, who once again ventriloquises his own self-hatred: "Have you ever written a true word? Do something decent." David's diffident teenage boy Minus (Lars Passgárd) similarly comes to realise how his supposed innocence conceals the vilest instincts–as when he is enticed into a bout of incest with his schizophrenic sister Karin (Harriet Andersson). As for brother-in-law Martin (Max von Sydow), he soon finds out that the flip side of his saintly patience is a longing for the death of his burdensome wife.

But the darkest insight is left for Karin, who in her lunacy hatches the idea that God awaits her in an upstairs closet. As a helicopter arrives to remove her to the sanatorium, she catches sight of it in a window and finally comprehends: God is a spider. That's Bergman's slightly garish way of saying that the benevolent divinity he grew up with is no longer adequate to the world's barbarism. In this most affirmative (if also didactic) segment of the triptych, a reprieve is nonetheless granted through love. A coda shows the aloof father chastised and struggling to bond with his neglected son.

Yet by the second installment, Winter Light, that possibility is punctured as a hopeless chimera. Here the locale is a remote village where, in another attack of the pathetic fallacy, a snow-blasted landscape connotes the freezing in human relations. Delivering the liturgy robotically from his pulpit, Pastor Tomas Ericsson (Björnstrand) presides over an ever dwindling flock (while Bergman employs massive alternating close-ups to anatomise the soul of each member). The story concerns Tomas gnawing scruples about whether such heavenly bromides will avail–redoubled when he fails to console a parishioner who is obsessed with the atomic bomb and later commits suicide. Far from imitating Christ, Tomas recoils at affliction, unable to choke back his abhorrence of the disfiguring eczema of his former mistress Märta (Ingrid Thulin). Spurning her proffered love, but in the same stroke made aware of his bottomless selfishness, Tomas ends the film by intoning those barren supplications once more. Only this time he has accepted the void both inside and outside, which may paradoxically be the first step towards genuine liberation.

The concluding film of the cycle, The Silence, is easily the most mature because Bergman's overt theological grousing in the first two has surrendered to–silence. Now God is so divided from man that he's scarcely even a memory, but if his absence can't be known, it may be felt. Always a virtuoso at moods, Bergman summons up a vaguely Eastern European city called Timoka whose denizens speak an unintelligible language and wander about on baffling errands. It's a vision of stark absurdity–of a world lacking connection or meaning that just goes through the mechanical motions. Or so it appears to two sisters marooned in a cavernous hotel, whose weirdly symmetrical antagonism might lead us to conjecture that they represent split halves of a single psyche. Anna (Gunnel Lindblom), the sensualist and pragmatist, has less trouble adapting to the deracinated circumstances, since all she seeks is aimless, transient pleasure. But Ester (Thulin), one of Bergman's recurring idealists without faith, is succumbing to an unspecified illness and desperately needs to believe that her spasms of atrocious pain have a purpose. She dies pathetically alone, her sparse final testament a list of inscrutable foreign words bequeathed to Anna's son Johan. In the last moments, he mouths the gibberish silently–a faint, oblique gesture towards communication which is the sole hope this relentlessly black film allows.

From the secular postmodern point of view, Bergman's transcendental gloom is naturally laughable. Yet even his partisans will probably admit (more in affection than derision) that elements–the arachnid-deity business in Through a Glass Darkly, the circus dwarves lifted from some misfired expressionist pageant in The Silence, not forgetting the legendary game of chess with Death in The Seventh Seal–lie on the cusp between the sublime and the ridiculous. As early as 1968 the American short De Duva featured actors talking in pidgin Swedish and a tennis match against the Grim Reaper. I also have fond memories of a Persona spoof on the late-'70s Canadian television show SCTV where the famous merging of the two lead characters' faces was reprised with the actresses going cross-eyed.

There was always something of the impresario in Bergman, with all the strengths and limitations that word implies. Partly through a bravura talent for composition (especially in close-up) and partly because of his superb skill with actors (especially women), few film-makers could pack such an emotional punch. Yet that trademark intensity was often a bit melodramatic and specious. One can't help noticing how at critical points–Ester's ghastly death throes or Tomas' heartsick invocation "God, why hast Thou forsaken me?"–the camera closes in as if to stage a Big Moment that will leave the viewer suitably devastated. It wouldn't be entirely unjust to label Bergman a showman of angst, cooking up fear and loathing for the arthouse as ritually as old Hollywood manoeuvred happy endings. And Bergman knew it–the lying, self-serving nature of his artifice was one of the sundry items of dirty laundry he hung out on the screen. Yet that merely added another layer to his compulsive exhibitionism. Like Fellini, Bergman placed himself at the center of the universe. But if the Italian was a ringmaster of bawdy private fantasy, the Swede (as Pauline Kael observes wryly) erected a cathedral to his own mind. All of which indicates why he must finally be denied the foremost rank among the auteurist seraphim. Even so, Bergman's guilt-ridden desire to crack open his narcissistic shell and face reality strikes a distinct chord in our newly troubled times. Perhaps he is only just beginning to speak to us.