The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography

The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography
by Ingmar Bergman

The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography
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Book Summary Information

Author: Ingmar Bergman
Translator: Joan Tate
Edition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2007-05-15
ISBN: 0226043827
Number of pages: 314
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press

Book Reviews of The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography

Book Review: "Sixty years have gone by, but the excitement is still the same"
Summary: 5 Stars

One Christmas, when Ingmar Bergman was 10 years old, a wealthy aunt gave his older brother a magic lantern--a low tech projector. Little Ingmar was overwhelmed by the contraption, and he traded 100 tin soldiers for it from his rather indifferent brother. That night he crept into a closet with the lantern, fired it up, and gazed in wonderment at the images flashed against the closet wall. He was enchanted, and in his memoir, aptly titled after that memorable experience, he tells us that he still is.

The Magic Lantern is as intriguing as Bergman's films. Anyone who has seen his films will immediately appreciate just how many scenes in them are pulled from Bergman's own life--or at least his memories, accurate or not, of his life: the spanking scene in "Fanny and Alexander," the locked-in-a-closet scene in "Hour of the Wolf," the infidelity in "Faithless" (Liv Ullmann directed, but Bergman wrote the script), the death fear in "Seventh Seal," and so on. Bergman truly is a confessional artist. As both writer and director, his personal life, both inner and outer, is the raw material for his films.

The Magic Lantern isn't written in a linear style. Memories of childhood dance with more recent ones--e.g., rehearsing Strindberg's "Dream Play" or being arrested on false charges of tax evasion. What's important for Bergman throughout is his inner life: the incredibly rich psyche that serves as the magic lantern that projects his art into the world, both on the screen and the stage.

Bergman wrote his memoir after he'd "retired." He still had several films ahead of him, including what I think turned out to be one of his best, "Saraband." The themes that haunted him throughout his life, including ones that he thought he'd laid to rest involving God and death, and which he wrote about in The Magic Lantern, remained with him for the final two decades of his life. Like his movies, there is no final resolution. Perhaps that's simply the human condition.

Summary of The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography

?When a film is not a document, it is a dream. . . . At the editing table, when I run the strip of film through, frame by frame, I still feel that dizzy sense of magic of my childhood.? Bergman, who has conveyed this heady sense of wonder and vision to moviegoers for decades, traces his lifelong love affair with film in his breathtakingly visual autobiography, The Magic Lantern.

More grand mosaic than linear account, Bergman?s vignettes trace his life from a rural Swedish childhood through his work in theater to Hollywood?s golden age, and a tumultuous romantic history that includes five wives and more than a few mistresses. Throughout, Bergman recounts his life in a series of deeply personal flashbacks that document some of the most important moments in twentieth-century filmmaking as well as the private obsessions of the man behind them. Ambitious in scope yet sensitively wrought, The Magic Lantern is a window to the mind of one of our era?s great geniuses.

 

?[Bergman] has found a way to show the soul?s landscape . . . . Many gripping revelations.??New York Times Book Review

 

?Joan Tate?s translation of this book has delicacy and true pitch . . . The Magic Lantern is as personal and penetrating as a Bergman film, wry, shadowy, austere.??New Republic

 

?[Bergman] keeps returning to his past, reassessing it, distilling its meaning, offering it to his audiences in dazzling new shapes.??New York Times

 

?What Bergman does relate, particularly his tangled relationships with his parents, is not only illuminating but quite moving. No ?tell-all? book this one, but revealing in ways that much longer and allegedly ?franker? books are not.??Library Journal


Ingmar Bergman is perhaps the greatest living filmmaker, having written and directed the masterpieces "The Seventh Seal," "Wild Strawberries," "Through a Glass Darkly," "Cries and Whispers," "Scenes From a Marriage," "Fanny and Alexander" and many others. In this autobiography, Bergman focuses more on his personal than his professional life, offering the reader an unusually intimate portrait of a troubled and prolific artistic psyche.

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