Thomas Hibbs has produced a strong defense of Ingmar Bergman’s works, for National Review Online. I tend to agree with Diane Keaton’s eponymous character in the Woody Allen film Annie Hall, who said, as Hibbs notes,

his view is so Scandinavian, it’s bleak, I mean all that Kierkegaard, right? It’s really adolescent, you know, fashionable pessimism, I mean The Silence, God’s silence, OK, OK, OK, I mean I loved it when I was a graduate student but I mean alright, you outgrow it, you absolutely outgrow it!

Hibbs, on the other hand, agrees with Allen’s character, according Bergman a place in the pantheon of great artists of the past century. He makes the case about as well as it can be made.

Hibbs writes:

What marks Bergman’s explorations of characters afflicted by nihilism is his unflinching honesty. Indeed, at a time and place (mid-20th-century Europe) when atheistic existentialism was being promoted as a great liberating force, and in advance of the similar sort of celebration of deconstruction, Bergman demonstrated the horror that results from the loss of any divine, natural, or human orientation, the terrifying splintering of the self into a series of disconnected masks.

That’s true, all right, but isn’t the paucity of what is good, pure, and noble a big flaw in Bergman’s art? St. Paul would say so:

Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatver is admirable—if anything is excellent or praiseworthy—think about such things.

I agree with Paul. 

Hibbs claims that "Alongside guilt and humiliation, Bergman was also capable of humor and hope, as is evident in numerous scenes from the rich depiction of childhood in Fanny and Alexander and in the lush imagery and narrative unity of Wild Strawberries." The presence of occasional dashes of humor and beautiful images, however, does not qualify Bergman’s work as satisfying, even in part, St. Paul’s wise exhortation.

Bergman’s achievement was a basicaly negative one, a vivid depiction of the hopelessness of atheism.

Such a vision is edifiying only when taken with a strong dosage of positive messages as well.

Woody Allen’s assimilation of the negative message of Bergman without the positive message of the Gospel shows where such a vision leads: philosophical confusion, hedonism, and a tendency toward depressiveness.

That’s not enough, in my view.