After establishing his alienation from God and all His religious reassurances, Bergman anecdotally fills the void in his soul with a passionate, almost mystical commitment to Art. The effect on the relatively disinterested reader is one of being trapped in an exceptionally gloomy Ingmar Bergman movie.īut there is a method to his seemingly excessive morbidity. He mentions his siblings' deaths only in passing, and many of his colleagues are introduced on their deathbeds. The deaths of his parents precede his lucid insights into their lives.

He describes in painful detail an abortive attempt to strangle his baby sister, who was claiming too much attention from his mother.

What he records mostly are scenes throbbing with intimations of mortality. 'I suffered from several indefinable illnesses,' he writes, 'and could never really decide whether I wanted to live at all.' Nonetheless, Bergman has lived his biblically allotted three score years and 10 despite all his afflictions, a fact somewhat disguised by the shifting flashback structure of his autobiography. Little Ingmar was a spectacularly sickly child perched precariously on the edge of eternity. His first sentence sets much of the clinical tone: 'When I was born in 1918, my mother had Spanish influenza.' It is not merely that he presents himself, warts and all for long sections of the book there is nothing but warts, sores, ulcers, incontinent bowels, shattered nerves, and many other forms of physical and psychic stigmata. Indeed, Bergman's relentless self-flagellation comes to resemble that of his doomsday penitents in The Seventh Seal, one of his earliest breakthroughs to American art-house audiences. Thalberg Award), film-festival prizes, honorary degrees, and innumerable critical accolades, not to mention the steady stream of theological monographs pouring out of academe, The Magic Lantern is remarkably free of the self-congratulatory and self-justifying gush one might anticipate from the genre.

Yet though he has made 40-odd films, directed more than 100 plays, received several Oscars (including the incongruous Irving J.

Since then, on stage, screen, radio and television, Bergman has achieved international fame with his angst-ridden vision of life and death, the latter always lurking in the shadows of his mise-en-sce`ne. $19.95īY HIS OWN account in this artfully harrowing autobiography, Ingmar Bergman has been a magic lantern worshipper ever since a Christmas in his early childhood when he exchanged presents - 100 tin soldiers for a primitive cinematograph - with his older brother, Dag. THE MAGIC LANTERN An Autobiography By Ingmar Bergman Translated from the Swedish by Joan Tate Viking.

The magic lantern ingmar bergman