Good summary here:

The worst of his crises came in 1976 when, at the height of his career, he was arrested at the Royal Dramatic Theatre during a rehearsal of Strindberg’s “Dance of Death,” hustled off to a tax office and grilled about an alleged 1971 tax violation, which — after Bergman’s nervous collapse three days later and a public outcry — was dropped by the public prosecutor. Miffed, the tax representatives of Sweden’s Social Democrat welfare state (which Mr. Bergman supported) tried again, focusing on a dubious 1974 case.

This time, Mr. Bergman responded by announcing his self-exile from Sweden (though he vowed to pay all taxes and penalties) and the closing of his studio, leaving for an unhappy sojourn in Germany. The resulting scandal helped cost the Social Democrats the next election, followed by a 1979 settlement of Bergman’s case in which he paid 7 percent of the original demand and the government was ordered to cover all court costs.

“forced”?

Pseuds the world over have had a bad week, with the almost simultaneous deaths of film directors Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni. While their families have my deepest condolences, I never saw the merit in either of them. The Seventh Seal I regarded as about six too many and as for Bergman’s alleged masterpiece, Fanny and Alexander, I lost the will to live shortly into the third hour. I recall watching Blow-Up with complete mystification about 30 years ago. Thinking I had been too young and had missed the point, I tried again a few years later: I then realised it had no point. I can do arthouse with the best of them, I hasten to add, but the conspiracy to regard this pair as geniuses is beyond me. Give me Carry On Up The Khyber any day.

Don’t you just love that “conspiracy”? I suppose I must be part of it myself as a regular contributor to Sight & Sound, but I don’t recall ever being invited to one of the conspirators’ meetings. They’re probably held in the BFI basement after hours, with all sorts of painful initiation rituals for newcomers.

Mind you, Pollard and Podhoretz aren’t the only ones making fools of themselves - a rather surprising colleague of theirs was Jeremy Paxman, who asked a toe-curlingly crass question along the lines of “Bergman wasn’t exactly big box-office, was he?”

Sadly, although Richard Eyre’s answer was a good one (he pointed out that the producers of the ultra-low-budget The Seventh Seal would hardly have been slitting their wrists over its performance), he could have gone further - because in fact virtually all Bergman’s post-1955 films turned a very healthy profit, and Cries and Whispers was a hit of such unlikely proportions that it was the catalyst for the notorious tax difficulties that forced Bergman to leave Sweden for a few years in the late 1970s.

Granted, we’re not exactly talking Pirates of the Caribbean, but then again Bergman probably made his entire output for less than the catering budget of one of those films.

Have you seen http://jonswift.blogspot.com/2007/08/antonioni-and-bergman-bite-dust.html ? (The update is classic.)