To what extent can the cinema function as a confessional art? The question occurred to me a few weeks ago at a screening of Vincent Gallo’s “The Brown Bunny,” a film written, directed, produced, shot and edited by its leading man. Even before seeing the movie, I thought the charges of narcissism leveled against Gallo seemed exaggerated, if not off the mark entirely. After all, this wasn’t the first time an individual attempted so many tasks in a single feature (Steven Soderbergh’s “Schizopolis” is one recent example). Besides, novelists and painters have had total control over their output for as long as their media have existed—and few would deny these media close relationship to cinema. That a man can now make a movie almost single-handedly demands a momentary reverence, not an attack overshadowing timeless questions of artistic intent.

Advancements in technology have recently made a more intimate brand of filmmaking possible. Abbas Kiarostami proved with “Ten” (2002) that a spellbinding movie can be made with only a car, two cameras and a pair of actors—director barely required. “Ten” offered a new path to a cinema of confession (Certainly, his performers were encouraged to confess their characters as much as embody them); “The Brown Bunny” offers another.

Reports of the film’s making detail how the final act was shot with remote cameras, enabling Gallo and Chloe Sevigny to create their scene in virtual solitude. Far from feeling voyeuristic—or, rather, more voyeuristic than the extent to which all movies are—the climax represents the apotheosis of one of cinema’s ideals: the immortalization of unguarded intimacy. Perhaps there are films that can only be achieved with their participants alone in a room, their emotions guided by no interlocutor.

Whether the intimacy captured by “The Brown Bunny” is worthy of great art has already prompted a divisive critical debate; I see little need to further it here. What interests me is the impulse driving this type of art, as it is at least as old the cinema itself and one that continues to grow as we become more symbiotically related to the medium.

The great paradox of the movies is that they attempt to discover the heart of people and things through the contemplation of their exteriors. If some hearts are more deeply concealed than others by design, then a different set of tools is required to extricate them. And these tools invariably remain visible upon the construction, guiding us to the secrets of another heart: that of the architect.

Ingmar Bergman, currently the subject of a 17-film retrospective at the Oak Street Cinema, is one of the cinema’s most important and contested architects. Important, because he introduced a passage to interiority more direct than the movies theretofore had known; contested, because he has seemed to show little concern with his art’s other dimension, exteriority. To continue with the architecture metaphor, Bergman’s doors have always doubled as windows, which can make for a most peculiar house. “The film in fact consists of a series of very dull speeches spun on very simple themes,” wrote Dave Kehr—one of the director’s earliest outspoken detractors—about “The Seventh Seal.” “Bergman barely tries to make the material function dramatically.”

Yet drama can be secondary in movies if the emotion is genuine, a lesson taught by directors as early as Murnau and as recent as Kiarostami. What makes Bergman unique in this lineage is his degree of personal investment in his films’ emotions. Many have noted the parallels between his characters’ internal crises and his own—and Bergman himself would be the last to deny the accusation.

Throughout his career he has toed the line between confessional art and the desire for personal retribution, a rift most nearly broached in the “Silence of God” trilogy of the early 1960s: “Through a Glass Darkly,” “Winter Light” and “The Silence” (All three will screen at the retrospective next Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday). Bergman wrote these chamber dramas shortly before deciding the only way he could communicate with God was through creating art. For better or worse, they represent an extreme case of a filmmaker trying to break down the boundaries between his audience and his innermost feelings; it is a struggle which continues to leave viewers passionately divided.

I was first drawn to Bergman’s films in high school, and I watched them with a solemn devotion I imagined they were meant to evoke. At the time I saw nothing pretentious or selfish in them: their unburdening of desires validated a lot of what I myself was feeling. The high-angle shot of Max von Sydow’s knight in “Seventh Seal” attempting to pray in an empty church, regarded—like so many of Bergman’s characters—as though waiting to be judged, had a large influence on my own spiritual development; I still have parts of his monologue committed to memory. (“Are we to make an idol of our fears and call it God?” he asks bluntly, with nothing in the editing or mise-en-scene to suggest a response. It may seem trite to say so at present, but this is still one of the great treatments of religion on film.)

In spite of these memories, or more likely as a result of them, I approach this current retrospective conflicted. Thinking about Ingmar Bergman now, I’m reminded of the old saw about Jack Kerouac: that the highest compliment one could pay him was not to re-read his work after turning 30.

Bergman, too, invites such trepidations. I remember John Haiman telling me that he hadn’t watched a Bergman film since “Cries and Whispers” (1973) came out because he didn’t want to ruin his memories of the ones he’d liked. Indeed, the later works have a certain pattern to their catharsis that suggests a Freudian Punch-and-Judy—the characters take a lot of beatings but never register as more than puppets—or a sense of entitlement to soul-searching that some have labeled hopelessly bourgeois.

While detractors tend to focus on his heavy symbolism and soliloquies, there is nonetheless a more delicate strand to Bergman’s work. (For an example of how he fared at romantic comedy, check out “Smiles of a Summer Night,” screening tomorrow and Sunday.) In fact, there are times when the films exhibit a high degree of selflessness; it’s at these moments, I’d argue, when Bergman came closest to reaching redemption through his art. Forming close professional relationships with cinematographer Sven Nykvist and actors such as von Sydow, Harriet Andersson, Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson, he created a filmic language of confession tied closely to these individuals’ talents and physicalities.

Bergman has often said the most fascinating thing to put before the camera is the human face. Attending a screening of “Fanny and Alexander” (1983) last weekend, with its uncharacteristic shots of children sucking their fingers, I began to remember what he meant. Bergman’s actors—even the elderly ones—rarely appear to be anything less than beautiful and their secrets vast. This truth emerges most clearly for me during the final confrontation between the professor and his maid in “Wild Strawberries,” though I have faith that the validation comes for everyone when it does.

Go to www.mnfilmarts.org for film listings and directions.