On January 30, 1976, the Swedish film and television director Ingmar Bergman was rehearsing Strindberg's The Dance of Death at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm when he was arrested without warning, by representatives of the State Tax Authority. Accused of tax evasion, he was subjected to four years of harassment before he was fully exonerated. "It was an attack on my existence," he says. "I was hit by a reality I couldn't manoeuvre and I couldn't manipulate and I couldn't master."

In immediate reaction to the shock of being arrested, the suicidal Bergman was heavily sedated and confined to the Karolinska Hospital psychiatric clinic. He was there for three weeks until, in sheer fury, he broke free from his medication and regained a grip on his life and career. His first step was to announce his self-exile from Sweden: it became—by his reckoning—an 'absence' of some nine years (although with frequent visits to his home on Fårö) until in 1984 his production of King Lear confirmed the restoration of his links with the Royal Dramatic Theatre.

It might be expected that the outcast Bergman would promptly turn to international filmmaking with stories of appropriate bitterness and disgust. Certainly, The Serpent's Egg (filmed in 1976) and From the Life of the Marionettes (filmed in 1979) are among the bleakest of his films—and both conclude with scenes of hospitalized mental breakdown that seem directly to reflect Bergman's own experience. But the course of Bergman's career was seldom predictable. In fact, he had already ventured into international production with The Touch (1971), had almost been recruited by Barbara Streisand in 1972 for a remake of The Merry Widow, and had been backed by Dino De Laurentiis for Face to Face (filmed in 1975).

His script for The Serpent's Egg, his first film made in exile, was written before he left Sweden, and within a year he was filming Autumn Sonata and writing Fanny and Alexander, works in which kindness and nostalgia successfully counterbalance the inevitable moments of cruelty and regret. While it is clear from his updated documentary study The Fårö Document 1979 (his first version was made a decade earlier) that he gave constant thought to his homeland, his extraordinary output of scripts and stage productions showed that, in terms of his trajectory as an artist, the taxman had merely confirmed his worst fears about bureaucracy and could, like a minor ailment, be kept largely at bay.

Even so, From the Life of the Marionettes is constructed from interrogations and confessions, more Kafka than Collodi (who wrote, in The Adventures of Pinocchio, "Most unfortunately, in the lives of the marionettes there is always a BUT....that spoils everything"), and suffused in a Bergmanesque paranoia in which everyone is guilty of something. It was derived partially from a discarded script about West German life (Love with No Lovers), and partially from the party guests Peter and Katarina in Scenes from a Marriage (1973), who squabble mercilessly at the dinner table. "I wonder if there is anything more horrible," says Peter, quoting Strindberg, "than a man and wife who hate each other?"

By contrast, another inspiration according to Bergman was the Greek myth of Philmon and Baucis, in which the joy and contentment of an old married couple so impresses the gods that death is not permitted to separate them: instead, they are transformed into trees and grow side by side for eternity. At first thought strikingly at odds with the apparently irredeemable conflicts of Marionettes, the myth actually offers something more positive: an intense love lies at the root of Peter and Katarina Egerman's difficulties, and could yet be their redemption.

The film was made in Munich, where Bergman within a matter of weeks after he left Sweden had a contract with the Residenztheater and, by his own admission, was soon making himself unpopular for his autocratic behaviour and unorthodox treatment of the classics. The budget for Marionettes was smaller than for The Serpent's Egg (which had been a commercial failure), but with the assistance of the faithful Sven Nykvist and Oscar-winning (for Cabaret) production designer Rolf Zehetbauer, remarkable scenes were created out of remarkably little. The drama unfolds in comfortless rooms where the dusk of marital breakdown hangs heavy with monologue. Where décor is required, it appears without fuss or clutter—a blandly modern apartment, a portentous corporation office, a chintzy bachelor den, a tattily vulgar seduction parlour. Brief glimpses of the angular geometry of motorways and office blocks provide occasional punctuation points—but the film's main landscapes are facial, confiding to themselves against simple backgrounds of walls and shadows.

Suspended before us, Bergman's marionettes kick and struggle in their terminal ballet, a puppet theatre reflecting all the pathetic absurdity of the contemporary experience. It would be an intolerable encounter if Bergman were not, as ever, such a dazzling showman, or if his cast, as ever, did not seem to have been plucked from some secret international confederacy of blazing talent. Continuing the strategy that worked so effectively for him in Stockholm, Bergman assembled in Munich, a company of players who suited him equally well on the stage and in front of the camera. As it had been in Stockholm, the result was a mutual loyalty. Several members of both cast and crew for The Serpent's Egg were employed for Marionettes, including Heinz Bennent (father of Tin Drum star David Bennent), Walter Schmidinger, and Gaby Dohm, who then played 'Marianne' in Bergman's 1981 stage version of Scenes from a Marriage.

Recruited from Bergman's production of Ibsen's Hedda Gabler in 1979, the Austrian actress Christine Buchegger followed her starring role in Marionettes by appearing as 'Mrs. Borkman' in Bergman's staging of Ibsen's John Gabriel Borkman, which later toured Europe. And Rita Russek (the luckless prostitute 'Ka' in Marionettes) not only helped Bergman to condense Scenes from a Marriage into a two-hander but also won the right to supervise all future productions of the play. Closest of all to Bergman was his co-producer on Marionettes, his wife Ingrid. They were together for 24 years until her death in 1995.

The language of From the Life of the Marionettes is German, but the vocabulary is unmistakeably Bergman, and his new players possess to such an extent the haunted vulnerability of their earlier Swedish counterparts that they seem like old acquaintances—the anguished doubter, the dry inquisitor, the squabbling husband-and-wife team, the ingratiating parent, the matter-of-fact seductress. A triumph of soliloquy, the film is also fascinating for its construction: the narrative switches back and forth in time around the climactic killing to demonstrate that the old rules of chronological sequence need never be heeded again. Instead, each switch in time contributes to an underlying linear development that reaches its logical destination in the film's closing shot (unexpected as it at first seems) and completes one of the most detailed portraits in all Bergman's work.

Peter Egerman, the killer/victim, may not be so far removed from the sufferer in Hour of the Wolf (1968) who also had his lethally erotic fantasies, but we are certainly able to understand him more thoroughly (the scene in which he dictates an intricate business memo is worth a film in itself). Trapped and exhausted, he is the puppet on innumerable strings—an obstacle to the psychiatrist who desires his wife, a possible conquest for the homosexual who plots to destroy his marriage, a status-symbol for the mother who claims to have sacrificed her career to raise him, an enigmatic failure for the wife who had hoped for consummation and children....

His brief lifespan is presented in colour—the rest is in monochrome. It's Bergman's answer, take it how we may, to Peter's demand: "Am I alive or was the dream, in the shape it took, my one brief moment of life, of experienced reality?" As he did with Persona (1966), Bergman illustrates how our heads provide all the phantoms we need to fear, and the result is both tender and horrific, a work of hypnotic anguish. "It belongs," he says, "among my best films."