Ingmar Bergman: The Swedish master who hides away on a small island

Don't expect to reach Faro in a hurry. To get to this small windswept island in the Baltic sea, you have to fly first from Stockholm to Visby Airport in Gotland, and then drive 30 miles or so past thatched houses and old churches to the ferry at Farosund. You arrive in a remote, windswept place with a landscape that appears flat and barren. There are countless pine trees, fields with ancient stone walls, a succession of sand and shingle beaches, and more sheep than humans. You are a little closer to Sweden than you are to Russia.

This is where the 88-year-old Ingmar Bergman, one of the legends of world cinema, is spending his last days. He first came to the island more than 40 years ago, scouting locations for Through A Glass Darkly (1961) and fell in love with Faro. Within moments of arriving, he had decided he wanted to live here. It was to be the location for several of his greatest films (Persona, Scenes From A Marriage and Shame among them) and also to be his his retreat. Three years ago, after he finished his final film, Saraband (2003), he declared that he never wanted to leave the island again.You can see why he decided to stay. Faro is a magical place, full of myth and history. The light and atmosphere are constantly changing. The island can seem austere and very forbidding but, when the sun shines, it suddenly becomes idyllic. Residents tell colourful stories about buried Viking princesses, pirates, boat-wrecks and fishermen on daredevil trips. Despite the thousands of tourists who visit here in mid-summer, the 600 or so locals face a fierce struggle to survive. The fishing industry is all but dead. This is a harsh place on which to farm and there are few jobs outside tourism. That is one of the reasons why the residents are so protective of Bergman. It is as if they have struck an informal pact together. He has poured investment into Faro. He used many local craftsmen on his films and made angry documentaries – Faro Document 1969 and Faro Document 1979 – about Sweden's neglect of the island. In return, the islanders go to extreme lengths to preserve Bergman's privacy. When visitors ask where Bergman lives, they either say they have no idea or point them in the wrong direction.

We are here for the fourth Bergman Week, a series of screenings, talks and special events – many featuring the master's closest collaborators – in his back yard. At first, Bergman was hostile to the idea of a mini-festival in his honour. He grudgingly allowed it to go ahead, but vowed he would never attend. Last year, he surprised attendees by turning up at several talks and seminars. Sadly, this year, with his health growing ever frailer, he is less in evidence.

He made more than 50 films, and is one of the last of the great old-style European auteurs. As Kenneth Branagh, a guest on the island, says, it would be well-nigh impossible for any director to be as prolific or as adventurous today, when financing even a single feature is a Herculean struggle. More startling is the fact that his film-making ran in tandem with an equally distinguished career as a theatre director.

As a guest at Bergman Week, you can't help but feel like a naturalist hoping to catch a glimpse of a rare and near-extinct breed. This impression is reinforced by one of the week's main events – the Bergman Safari. On a blustery Saturday evening, when the light is grey and overcast (just as Bergman and his cinematographer Sven Nykvist used to like it), we clamber aboard an old bus and set off round the island. Our hosts are Arne Carlsson, a bluntly-spoken islander who worked as his truck driver and cameraman for Bergman, and the formidable Katinka Farago, who was an assistant and production manager on many of his films. We wander across "Persona beach," are shown where Liv Ullmann and Max Von Sydow's farmhouse was burned down in Shame ("Bergman's only action movie") and drive past various houses that he has built for his family and collaborators. We also stop briefly on the north side of the island for a "Bergman burger".

En route, there are anecdotes about Bergman's reckless driving, his rivalry with Tarkovsky, his plans to make a film about Jesus on the island and also – by way of contrast – his attempts to make an erotic portmanteau film with Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa. (The project fell through when Bergman was the only one to finish his screenplay.) The guides testify to his perfectionism and to his ferocious temper. If someone was late or let him down in some way, he would rage.

Bergman's photographer Bengt Wanselius, who has photographed 24 of Bergman's stage productions and TV films, is also on the safari. He takes some pictures of me standing by the craggy Easter-Island-like rocks that loom over the northern shore of Faro. As you stand under the stones, staring out at the sea, you share precisely the view that the film-maker experienced when he first came here.

Much of Bergman's work remains as fresh and as startling as ever. Later in the week, watching Persona in the Sudersand Cinema is a disquieting experience. This theatre – a tiny wooden building in a picture-postcard setting – was where he used to view his rushes. The film is a long-acknowledged classic and yet it still induces a sense of queasiness and disorientation. You forget just how experimental and confrontational it is. It's not just the relentless way that Bergman hones in on and eventually merges the faces of Liv Ullmann (the actress who has lost the will to speak) and Bibi Andersson (as the nurse tending her.) It's the sense of barely suppressed violence and erotic tension that is found throughout the film.

The Swedes don't quite know what to make of Bergman. His international fame is a source of huge national pride, but also of some vexation. He casts such a long shadow across the Swedish film industry that subsequent generations of Swedish film-makers have sometimes struggled to find their own identity. Meanwhile, he has helped to fix the image of Swedes abroad. Films like The Seventh Seal, Fanny and Alexander and Wild Strawberries have become an immediate point of reference for the outside world.

Whether they are gloomy knights playing chess with Death, or wild and defiant women (like Harriet Andersson in Summer With Monika), Bergman has provided a series of characters who are seen by outsiders as national archetypes. As the film-maker Marie Nyrerod (who has recently made an excellent series of documentaries based on 30 hours of interviews with the legend) remarks: "We Swedes are so often described through the eyes of Ingmar Bergman that we have to say, 'no, we're not like that.'" She also points out that Bergman is "at a very sensitive time when he is not any longer a film-maker and he is not dead."

Like any figure with such immense influence, Bergman has always been subject to attack. At times, he has even joined in the rite himself. In the 1960s, when Cahiers Du Cinéma published a series of anti-Bergman articles, he contributed a piece himself under the pseudonym of Ernest Riffe (apparently the name of his then wife's hairdresser.) "It was severe and well-written," the Bergman expert Stig Bjorkman remembers of Bergman's attack on himself.

There some on the island who have known the auteur from the outset of his career, long before he became the national icon that he is today. The actress Barbro Hiort af Ornas first met him in 1939, when she was a 16-year-old amateur actress and he was a 21-year-old would-be stage director.

"He was just the same as he is today," she insists. That famous temper was there at the outset. So was his inspirational quality and his sense of mischief. "He was very attractive because he was so talented and he made life so interesting."

On Sunday afternoon, I take tea with Bergman's former wife Kabi Laretei in the house in which much of Scenes From a Marriage was shot. When Bergman married Laretei, in 1959, she was an up-and-coming pianist. He credits her with teaching him about music. She still plays for him regularly.

"He is really depending on music. It is the most essential of all arts for him now," she says. In his films, especially in Wild Strawberries, Bergman has been one of the great chroniclers of old age. He probes away at the vanities, dreams and regrets of protagonists who know that their days are numbered. Now he is an old man himself, living alone on his island, mulling over the past.

He used to keep to a very strict routine. As he told Marie Nyrerod in her documentary, he would take a 45-minute walk every morning and then sit down at a fixed time and write for three hours. He would eat his lunch, read and then go to his cinema. As he grows frailer, it is becoming increasingly hard to maintain this routine.

How has he found old age? Laretei says that it has taken him by surprise. "He has said often in the last 10 years, 'why did no-one tell me how difficult it was to get old?"

She suggests that he decided "a bit too early" to stop directing theatre and film. "I think that he didn't realise how much he would miss it. People would propose ideas, and I very often asked: 'Why don't you do it?' He said: 'I don't want to become less good.'"

'Encountering Bergman: Arena' is on BBC4 at 8.30pm tonight. 'The Seventh Seal' is re-released on 20 July. Geoffrey Macnab is working on a book about Bergman to be published next year