Word: bergman
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...INGMAR BERGMAN HAS left the New Wave and its tormented pessimism far behind. His light-hearted, sunny, extraordinarily intelligent film version of Mozart's The Magic Flute proves that the judicious egotism of one master can actually enhance the genius of another. Bergman has gotten both practical and romantic all of a sudden; having perceived all the traditional problems of staged opera, he has pretty much solved them all, making room for his own rose-tinted theatrics. To make the story move more smoothly he shuffled several scenes out of their original order, omitted a few, altered the plot...
...MAGIC FLUTE. Mozart and Ingmar Bergman: a combination made somewhere in the higher celestial regions. An ebullient and quite ravishing version of Mozart's morality tale that is part recreation, part reinterpretation...
Thanks again to Bergman's usual collaborator, Cinematographer Sven Nykvist, The Magic Flute is ravishing to look at. The acting is exceptional, partly be cause the performers have been allowed to concentrate on nuance rather than volume. The music was recorded separately, so that when the sing ers open their mouths to sing, the action is as natural and spontaneous as if they were speaking. During the overture and between scenes, Bergman cuts to faces in the audience, returning continually to one, the wondering, wise countenance of a girl who seems ageless. Recalling the director's childhood memories...
Purists may be disconcerted to hear The Magic Flute sung in Swedish instead of German. The music is well per formed, but it is never quite as effective as Bergman's dramatic conception, which is to stage the opera like an 18th century production. Many scenes take place within the confines of a proscenium arch. Bergman even emphasizes the theatricality of the occasion by providing a few glimpses of the performers off stage: Sarastro studying Parsifal, Papageno asleep in his dressing room and almost missing his en trance cue. Curtains rise and descend, flats rumble away to be replaced...
Blithe Innocence. Far from being just directorial legerdemain - though they are that - such touches reflect Bergman's continual preoccupation with the stuff of illusion. This obsession links such disparate films as The Magician (1959) and Persona (1966). There are soft shadows of many other Bergman scenes and themes: Papageno and Papagena's indomitable exuberance recalls the peasant couple at the end of The Seventh Seal (1956); the air of blithe innocence and sudden mystery evokes the elegant reveries of Smiles of a Summer Night...