[Peter666]

Bergman was not only a great director, but he was a prolifically great director.

It is hard and usually unfair to rank films and directors in an ascending or descending order of greatness. Too much relies on one's personal aesthetic opinion or current whims. I don't think anyone can say whether Bergman was better or worse than Welles, Mizoguchi, Renoir... etc.

But we can say that for sheer number of great films, Bergman is at the top of the list with Alfred Hitchcock. Of Bergman's 50 or so films, about a dozen are considered major works of cinema. Only Hitchcock can match or surpass this, followed by John Ford and Akira Kurosawa.