Synopses & Reviews
“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, Bergmans vignettes trace his life from a rural Swedish childhood through his work in theater to Hollywoods 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 eras great geniuses.
“[Bergman] has found a way to show the souls landscape . . . . Many gripping revelations.”—New York Times Book Review
“Joan Tates 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
Review
"Combined with the life-affecting astonishment that his brutal and beautiful films inspre, The Magic Lantern cultivates a sensitivity towards this film-loving, somethimes self-loathing, somethimes faith-avowing Ingmar Bergman."
Review
“[Bergman] has found a way to show the souls landscape. . . . Many gripping revelations.”
Review
“Bergmans minute recall is essentially, astonishingly, visual. Description after description stamp out scenes from his films. The man, his memory, his work are one. . . . It is wonderfully liberating to be made privy to the tangible relish in his craft . . . The Magic Lantern is no conventional autobiography, more a scalding stream of consciousness from the pen of a licentious puritan. . . . He is funny and crisp about several of the Famous and unstrainingly vicious about the dead and dismal critics.” —New York Review of Books
Review
"In its structure, its tone, its intent, Bergman's book asks to be judged, not as a factual account, however good, but as a work of literature. It succeeds--exactly as he wanted it to: The Magic Lantern is as personal and penetrating as a Bergman film, wry, shadowy, austere
About the Author
Ingmar Bergman is a Swedish filmmaker who has written and directed over fifty films. He is the recipient of three Academy Awards for Best Foreign Language Film for The Virgin Spring, Through a Glass Darkly, and Fanny and Alexander.
Joan Tate (1922-2000) was a prolific translator of Swedish works into English.
Table of Contents
The Magic Lantern
Ingmar Bergman: A Chronology by Peter Cowie
Index