The Magic Lantern: An Autobiography

ISBN: 0226043827

Author: Bergman, Ingmar

Condition: Used

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 ReviewJoan 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 TimesWhat 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