Research in the field of new cinema history has explicitly moved away from the traditional focus on film texts to focus instead on cinemagoing as social and cultural phenomenon, and on cinema as a social institution. Using the case of Swedish film director Ingmar Bergman, this paper aims to re-integrate the text and auteur into historical audience studies, aiming at a more comprehensive approach for understanding historical film reception than either traditional film studies or new cinema history offers. I will present key results from a comparative study of oral history narratives about Bergman and his films with respondents living in Belgium (n = 27) and Sweden (n = 21). A triangulated analysis involving also contextual features retrieved from archival research reveals both similarities and differences in the reception. Not surprisingly, the different national contexts play a role in how participants identify with both the auteur Bergman and the characters in his films. Specific to the Swedish participants in the study is that Bergman’s love life and his own persona-building are crucial to the reception of his films. However, a salient feature in both cases is that Sweden as a socio-cultural construct returns throughout the participants’ accounts, illustrating that “place” is relevant to cinema memory as communicated through the provenience and setting of the films.