Bergman has been working with high-definition digital video (DV) for the last few years, and those who have doubted that DV could ever deliver the depth and loveliness of celluloid now, I think, have their answer. The simplicity and precision of the camerawork, from the subtly alarming zoom-ins on a character's face to the elegant stillness of the two-character setups, is vintage Bergman. And some of the shots here -- Ullmann listening to a Bach organ work in one of those rural Lutheran churches Bergman cannot resist, Dufvenius and Ullmann laughing and drinking wine, burnished with an almost Renaissance glow -- are so beautiful you want to stop the movie and spend a day or two in them. If Bergman really is the first artist to make DV look great, there's nothing especially ironic in that. Despite his reputation as a creator of talky darkness, he's always had a painter's eye for composition -- and used the technology then available to break down the wall between narrative and experimental film in 1966, with "Persona."

Whether or not "Saraband" is the final work of his extraordinary career (and as long as he's still breathing, I remain unconvinced), Ingmar Bergman can never again be what he once was. From the late 1950s through the early '70s, one could speak of him, utterly without irony, as the most important filmmaker in the world, and maybe the most important artist, period. But the movie universe, along with the universe in general, has shifted on its axis since then. The art-house audience that made "Smiles of a Summer Night" and "The Seventh Seal" and "Persona" famous around the world was essentially an extension of the high-culture market of symphony halls, art museums and modernist drama, and has withered away. The new art-house audience has been nurtured instead on a pop-culture smorgasbord of music videos, '70s and '80s sitcoms, horror movies and mock-serious cartoons. It belongs to either the big, sweeping gesture or the arched eyebrow (or to both at once) -- to Scorsese and Tarantino, to Wes Anderson and the Coen brothers. Bergman's demanding and often painful dramas -- stemming, as they do, from Strindberg, Sartre and the A-bomb, from the 20th century's existential and spiritual crisis -- are now dreaded as much as respected.

But what goes around comes around, in movies as in anything else. Who would have predicted a generation ago that Luis Buñuel, the inscrutable surrealist and practical joker, would prove to be the defining influence on a new generation of European directors? Bergman's influence is not now a dominant strain, but you can still see it all over the place, in younger Scandinavians from Lars von Trier to Thomas Vinterberg to Christoffer Boe (the entire Dogme movement could be described as a method for making imitation Bergman films), in American Cheerios-realism like "In the Bedroom" and "You Can Count on Me," in the television universe of Alan Ball's "Six Feet Under" (perhaps the best and most vital example). There's no way to know what forms Bergman's legacy will take in the future and where it will lead. As with any really important artist, though, the real thing is inimitable. "Saraband" is here now, and it's prickly, electrical, alive.

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