The New Cinema History tradition has been crucial in how we think about audiences in the past as they approach cinema as a cultural and social institution. A recent study in this tradition, on cinema-going in Britain in the 1960s, has revealed that art film directors – auteurs du cinema – are mentioned surprisingly often (Stokes et al., 2017). This illustrates the need to trace how audiences perceive these auteurs du cinema and what the social and cultural meaning was/is of these art film directors in the everyday lives of people. In this article, I make use of oral history interviews to explore the meaning of Ingmar Bergman and his films comparatively, between Sweden (from a domestic perspective) and Belgium (from an international perspective). Findings show that the reception context plays a crucial role in how films are evaluated and how they are perceived through time. Swedish participants evaluate more in terms of identification while Belgian participants evaluate within their own frames of references, annexing the film in a different religious context. In general, the canonization of Ingmar Bergman as an auteur du cinema has a larger influence on reception in Belgium than in Sweden.