Few film directors have received so many column inches in the quality press as did Ingmar Bergman on his death on 30 July, just a few weeks after his 89th birthday. By contrast the television news coverage (clips from a limp French and Saunders parody, a sneering Jeremy Paxman deriding the Swede's lack of box-office clout) felt like the desperate protestations of a losing side. Bergman and high culture won the day with dignity. He was honoured as a master of the medium and praised for his uncompromising analysis of the human condition.

No one would question that Bergman was the true cinema auteur, writing his own films and directing them exactly as he wished, keeping himself well apart from the vanities and commercial obsessions of the industry. But as a child he not only cranked away on a silent projector he named his "Magic Lantern," but also played with a puppet theatre, a preoccupation beautifully evoked in his semi-autobiographical epic Fanny and Alexander (1982). Some 50 films is a huge output by any film-maker's standards (at least since the collapse of the Hollywood studio system), but Bergman also directed more than twice that number of stage productions. Later in life he would refer to the theatre as a "loyal wife" and to cinema as an "expensive mistress." And such productivity took its toll on his real wives and mistresses, not to mention his many children.

Beginning with Crisis (1945), Bergman's earliest films tended to be dark stories about troubled souls, but international recognition came with the trio Summer Interlude (1950), Summer with Monika (1952) and Smiles of a Summer Night (1955). The Swedish summer is short and intense, and Bergman responded to this phenomenon by highlighting how warmth and light bring sexual abandon and fervent love, only for the darkness and cold of winter to plunge his protagonists back into introspection and disillusion. The director's own lack of shame in this territory was hugely attractive to a postwar audience emerging from material and moral austerity and these films prepared the way for the tougher, more challenging works that followed. Wild Strawberries (1957), with its folding of dreams into self-examination, and The Seventh Seal (1957) which drew parallels between a plague-ridden medieval landscape and a contemporary world under nuclear threat, were both timely and timeless in their power and preoccupations.

With his arthouse credentials secure and his theatrical experience giving him both dramatic fluency and a troupe of extraordinary actors, Bergman was free to expand his use of the camera. But instead of demanding larger budgets, he and cinematographer Sven Nykvist preferred to plunge further into depicting the interior world. In his trilogy of human anguish–which could be crudely defined as mental illness (Through a Glass Darkly, 1961), loss of faith (Winter Light, 1962) and sexual torment (The Silence, 1963)–he accentuated the use of the close-up; for Bergman, the human face was the greatest landscape available to a filmmaker. With Persona (1966) he went for broke, the film frame itself burning up when words were no longer sufficient. But following the haunting use of colour in Cries and Whispers (1972) Bergman relaxed his style into the deceptively plain images of the television series Scenes from a Marriage (1973), in which the acting (Erland Josephson and Liv Ullmann) was everything. His aim to reach a larger audience through television met with great success in Scandanavia, where the transmissions reportedly pushed up the divorce rate.

Bergman announced a premature retirement after Fanny and Alexander and went on to excuse his final efforts as television pieces. But even his swansong Saraband (2003) held surprises, not only in the subtle deployment of high-definition video but in the sheer anger and honesty of the script. In his last years, isolated on his island, his legs and sight failing, he would sit listening to classical music, for him the most mysterious and greatest of artforms and the only sign of a divine presence he could accept. How fitting that one of his greatest films should have been of Mozart's The Magic Flute (1975), an opera that combines childlike wonder, adult uncertainties and sublime music.