I don’t want to be the little boy who has something to ask about the Emperor’s fancy suit, but have you ever seen a Bergman film? I mean actually paid good money to sit in a darkened room or to rent a DVD, sat down, watched it, got up from your seat, turned to your companion and said: “Wow, wasn’t that wonderful?”, thought about it afterwards, recommended it to your friends, rung up your parents, made sure that they go out for a special treat to see it? In fact, do you know anyone who has ever seen a Bergman film?

Well, have you? Until you’d read the tributes today, could you even name a Bergman film (other than Fanny and Alexander, which is the one everyone has heard of but no one has ever been known to have seen)? Thought not.

Bergman is one of a large category of “important artists” whose defining quality is an almost total absence of public acclamation or popularity. Every art form has its equivalent – think James Joyce or Sir Harrison Birtwistle – but cinema is exceptional in its preponderance of such “important artists”. The latest is Lars von Trier, a maker of terminally dull films that are, nonetheless, lauded by cineastes (they have their own word, signifying that they’re a cut above bog-standard moviegoers).

It’s tempting to think that Bergman’s films were treated with such awe by critics because he was Swedish and the Swedes are, you know, deep. Like the Danish von Trier. So even if they’re yawnathons, they should be revered because they must mean something important.

But it’s not as simple as that. Even if Ingmar Bergman had been born plain old Terence Davies from Liverpool, cineastes would have been as likely to sing his praises. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you . . . Terence Davies, a Liverpudlian whose mind-numbingly dull accounts of his childhood in Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992) have led to him being revered as “one of the most original British film-makers of the late 20th century” (as the British Film Institute puts it).

It goes on that Davies’s uniqueness lies in the way he conveys “the fragmented nature of memory and the partial knowledge of his young protagonist. Instead of using a smooth narrative, we receive a succession of loosely connected episodes, with no dominant story line.” So nothing happens in no particular order. But it’s important art because it’s dark, worthy and dull.

But much as I think Bergman is overrated, I hold only one thing against him: ruining Woody Allen. Somewhat bizarrely, Allen has long revered Bergman and made a series of films – September, Another Woman and Shadows and Fog – modelled on Bergman’s style. And although he has made some decent films since, Allen’s decline started with the Bergman hommage films. And for that the Swedish director can never be forgiven.

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