Bet you haven't seen a headline like that lately. Yep, times surely have changed. Why, in my day, sonny, you couldn't open a film magazine without reading some highbrow critic's solution to the latest Ingmar Bergman conundrum. Would Death have beaten Bobby Fischer at chess? What did it mean if God was a spider (Through a Glass, Darkly), or indifferent to man's prayers (Winter Light) or not there at all (The Silence)? Was the relationship of Art (Liv Ullmann) and Humanity (Bibi Andersson) symbiotic or parasitic in Persona? Why did the morally constipated characters in Bergman's films always wear glasses, and how come so many of them had the surname Vergerus? Back then, we all took ourselves, the cinema, and Bergman much more seriously. Andrew Sarris wrote a long analysis of The Seventh Seal for Film Culture and, upon completion, came down with choking spells. That sort of thing doesn't happen when you're writing about Tootsie.

For a lot of us—well, for me and a few other premature geezers—the discovery of Ingmar Bergman in the late Fifties was as exciting as the arrival of the Beatles would be a few years later. Suddenly we could see the difference between movies and film, between the Hollywood product we assimilated like so many White Tower hamburgers and the haute cuisine food-for-thought of European cinema. Bergman was an exhilarating night school: he showed the Silent Generation that films could be considered with the seriousness previously reserved for the poems of Wallace Stevens. Long before Structuralism hit film academe, Bergman provided "texts" to be explicated only by readings in literature and psychology. You could get a liberal education trying to find appropriate references to even the jolliest of his films: Marivaux (not Molière) for Smiles of a Summer Night, Casals for All These Women, Shaw for The Devil's Eye. I remember looking at Sarris' program notes for a Bergman retrospective in which he alluded to Ernst Lubitsch's Heaven Can Wait as one analogue for The Devil's Eye, and thinking, "Compare Bergman to a Hollywood director? Never!"

"Never" came soon enough—in the next decade—as Sarris and Pauline Kael and Robin Wood offered strong arguments for the legitimacy of the American cinema. Old Hollywood was a yawning unconscious open to almost any interpretation, as art, entertainment, or industry; New Hollywood was throwing off its training wheels to become every bit as sophisticated and salacious as the toppled gods of Europe. Though all three of those seminal critics continued to address Bergman films with measures of enthusiasm and respect, not many of their followers did. Compare Bergman to Lubitsch or Ford or Hitchcock or Hawks, and his concerns seemed too ethereal, his mise en scène too stodgy, the problems his films posed simultaneously too tough and too easy to solve, like a British-style crossword. In the rush to embrace the physical and dump the metaphysical, all the art-house European filmmakers suffered. And Bergman, as the most prominent, suffered the most.

Fashions in celebrity move, not with a steady pendulum swing, but with the ricochet of a drunken jaywalker. So it's hard to predict whether Bergman will again be hot, either with this summer's release of his domestic epic Fanny and Alexander, or in the next few years, or posthumously. At the moment, prospects don't look good. The Zeitgeist has turned away from him and his kind of films. The Strained Seriousness of High Hollywood and Old Europe may reassert itself at Oscar time, with Gandhi knighted for its plodding nobility, but at the box office and in the critical columns Strained Frivolousness reigns. Ask today's brightest American directors to pick a mentor, and they would choose Walt Disney or Hitchcock or even Harvey Kurtzman over Bergman.

And why not? American masters for American filmmakers, even if the elect are limited to manipulators of Masscult. Bergman's solemnity, his insularity, his largo pacing, his insistence that viewers work for their pleasure, all are aspects of a temperament foreign in every way to the passionate proficiency of the new Hollywood technocrats. When Bergman is cited in a movie these days, it is in a mixed spirit of homage and parody; and it comes from filmmakers (Woody Allen, Monty Python) working from an older sensibility, one that grew up with a subtitle squint in the eyes and the linger of cappuccino in the nostrils. To see Death stalk a modern suburban dinner party in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life is to realize that satire can also function as nostalgia for the avant-garde of one's youth.

Is it that same upscale nostalgia, on the part of authors and editors, that fuels the scholarly engine of Bergman books? In the face of popular indifference toward their subject—indeed, toward the notion of serious film studies—they keep coming: Vlada Petric's symposium on Bergman and dreams, Lise-Lone Marker and Frederick J. Marker's study of Bergman's extensive and crucial theatre work, Paisley Livingston's analysis of Bergman as social critic, Peter Cowie's biography of the filmmaker. This last book—brisk, thorough, fastidious—is catnip to the unregenerate Bergmaniac. By detailing the seismic rumbles of Bergman's not-so-private life, with five wives and at least three longtime colleague-mistresses enlivening the story, Cowie gives the Bergman viewer evidence of what he has always suspected: that the films are a species of emotional autobiography, in tone if not in content. Look at Bergman's 40-year, 40-film career, and divide by conquest.

THE HARRIET PERIOD. "There's never been a girl in Swedish films who radiated more uninhibited erotic charm," says Bergman of Harriet Andersson (in Bergman on Bergman, a conversation, with Swedish critics Stig Björkman, Torsten Manns, and Jonas Sima, that runs a close second to Hitchcock/Truffaut as insider chat, and surpasses the earlier colloquy for access to the filmmaker's spirit). Bergman had cast Andersson, just turning 20, as the wanton lead in Summer With Monika, and he tumbled to her charms as quickly as the film's hero. "I was no little infatuated with Harriet," Bergman recalls merrily. "Oh yes, we took our time when trying out costumes!" They stayed together for three years.

Bergman has noted that the mood of his scripts often complements his own disposition while writing them—that the gay and wise Smiles of a Summer Night, for example, was composed during a period of black depression. If this is so, Bergman must have been ecstatic with Harriet. Monika, despite a midfilm lovers' idyll, is as brooding and sultry as the sky before an August rainstorm; and the strong, splendid Harriet is renounced for her character's amorality. Their next film, The Naked Night (Sawdust and Tinsel in Britain, and Clowns' Twilight in Swedish), would be Bergman's most merciless screed on human companionship until The Silence a decade later. He cites E.A. Dupont's silent film Variety as his model, but The Naked Night is even more starkly Teutonic. The circus-performer couple at the film's core must slog through life on pity instead of love, and the only character with a poetic vision is a clown who dreams of finding warmth and solace in his wife's womb. The Harriet films suggest that, as much as he was attracted to her robust sexuality, the parson's son needed to distance himself from it—to punish himself and her for the uncomplicatedness of young lust.

THE BIBI PERIOD. "Just take a girl like Bibi Andersson. You can never get her to do anything she doesn't want to!" Another teenage Andersson came into Bergman's life in 1954; she played a tiny role in Smiles of a Summer Night. And starting with The Seventh Seal, Bibi incarnated the careless optimism of youth that Bergman now chose to allow into his films. She could cozen a smile out of craggy old Victor Sjöström in Wild Strawberries and, with the help of flashbacks, reconcile him to life and death. She was a merry maid in The Magician and a rebellious mother-to-be in Brink of Life. The later Bibi Andersson—the mature actress of Persona, The Touch, and Scenes from a Marriage—would provide self-criticism for these young women. A frown would cross her sunny features, and then a cynical rictus. But in 1955-58, the great years that brought Bergman to international acclaim, Bibi sat alone on the "healthy" side of the filmmaker's weighted scales, and then jumped gaily off, friskily eluding the swinging scythe.

THE KÄBI PERIOD. Käbi Laretei was not an actress; she was a wife, Bergman's fourth, and the first he might consider an artistic equal. A renowned pianist, Käbi would have an important influence on her new husband's films. These are the chamber plays: the "God trilogy," with few characters, desolate settings, and scenarios that enclose the actors like an adult fist around a child's finger. To perform these rituals of a dying faith, Bergman employed three of his strongest actresses: Harriet Andersson, with a burning intelligence behind her dark, feral eyes, in Through a Glass, Darkly; Ingrid Thulin, the aristocratic avatar of worldly-wise common sense in his Fifties films, now daring to play homely, tortured women whose only expression of self-love is self-abuse, in Winter Light and The Silence; and Gunnel Lindblom, dark-skinned, flashing-eyed, rangy and powerful, as a pathetic parishioner in Winter Light and Thulin's sulfurously sexy sister in The Silence.

As a vacation treat after the trilogy, Bergman made a colour comedy, All These Women, based on an anecdote of Käbi's; but its mood of airy burlesque soon turned flat and sour as curdled sorbet. The word at the time (1964) was that the seven actresses who starred in the film as the mistresses of a randy cellist were all former mistresses of Bergman's: among them, Harriet and Bibi Andersson and the magnificent comedienne Eva Dahlbeck, who had brought her Lombardian grace to a half dozen Bergman films of the Fifties. Considering how poorly all these women are used, one would like to think the rumour was false.

THE LIV PERIOD. Liv Ullmann accompanied Bergman through some of his most harrowing and beautiful films, and through the years that revealed the first cracks in the statuary of his reputation. Some say Ullmann wielded the chisel. She has been attacked for choosing to appear in perhaps the most meretricious handful of English-language movies made by a major actress in the Seventies; her autobiography earned sniggers, her good deeds sighs. Recently David Denby criticized Ullmann for lacking "that saving grace of any actress, a sense of humour." He may be right; certainly her characters lack it. But, after her smashing debut in Persona (1966), Ullmann was cast by Bergman as the harried housewife—harried by her husband's demons (Hour of the Wolf) or her own (Face to Face), ravaged by the onset of war (Shame) or fascism (The Serpent's Egg), crippled by remembrance and remorse (The Passion of Anna), gutted by the rapier masochism of family life (Cries and Whispers, Scenes from a Marriage)—and, withal, trying heroically to cope, like Irene Dunne in an Ibsen role. Not a lot of laughs for any actress to mine there.

And yet there is in Liv Ullmann a softness—something that wants to surrender—not evident in other Bergman heroines. Harriet Andersson went mad in Through a Glass, Darkly, but she fought that madness. Bibi Andersson developed, against her brighter instincts, an arsenal of invective. Lindblom and Thulin were two more tigresses of the spirit. Ullmann's beauty—her Technicolor blue eyes framed by white, almost translucent skin—is passive, childlike, more traditionally feminine. And her strength as an actress is to find the black hole of desperation in the "average" woman. It was her and Bergman's rotten luck that they chose to investigate The Old Woman just as a new one was emerging in Western consciousness—one closer to the fiery goddesses of Bergman's, and our, youth.

Now, just before he turns 65 (on July 14), Bergman has offered what he promises/threatens (which side are you on?) to be his last film. In a way, Fanny and Alexander represents a conciliatory move by Bergman toward the appetites of the new movie audience: it is airy and bawdy in its first part, spooky and magical toward the end. It means to send viewers away happy and a bit misty-eyed. And for the remaining Bergman stalwarts, it offers a concordance of referents to his earlier films. (I do wish that Fanny and Alexander had reunited some of the director's favourite actresses of days gone by. There are roles here that would have been perfect for Dahlbeck, Thulin, Lindblom, and Bibi Andersson. As it is, the lead roles are played mostly by Bergman's B team.) Its three-hour running time begs the moviegoer's indulgence—but who deserves that indulgence more than Bergman? No contemporary filmmaker has tried as hard, aimed as high, made as many challenging works of art.

If Fanny and Alexander restores Bergman's cachet, good for him. It if doesn't, bad for the churls. In any case, the new film is just an exclamation point to the career of this solemn Swede, who has earned our respect and gratitude for wrestling with God, art, and fickle us.