Word: bergmanic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Bergman's wandering camera makes any stage-audience formality vanish. He roves freely onstage with close-ups of the singers and pans of the set, follows them backstage and finds Papageno asleep, late for his cue, and darts into the audience to record the listeners' rapt faces. Sven Nykvist's extraordinary lighting and framing pours new layers of fantasy onto the story--hands appear out of nowhere, portraits come alive, and airy scenes like Renaissance paintings dissolve into somber, feverish settings lit by stark, bluish fires. The film keeps the quality of a live performance because...
PAPAGENO the bird-catcher was clearly Bergman's favorite character, and his comic part has been so embellished that he could almost be taken for the drama's protagonist. His innocent lust for talk, food, sex, and a wife get him into all kinds of trouble; all he really wants is a woman, and he often gazes warmly into the audience, begging someone out there to be his mate and threatening suicide when no one complies. As Taminos's companion he is given a chance to endure the Trials, but he has neither the courage nor the reticence to keep...
...Mozart was not a nobleman, and his comedies often satirize aristocratic pretension. It is more likely that Mozart meant to celebrate the common man's virtues as well as the prince's, to suggest that a certain kind of lofty nobleness of character is not for everyone. Bergman took this view so much to heart that he ended the film with his own vision: Papageno and Papagena embracing in a circle of lively, tow-headed kids...
...Bergman is obviously infatuated with the opera; he hasn't been so playful since he made Smiles of a Summer Night. His animals look as though they were stolen from a children's nursery. The dragon in the first act struts on breathing fire and smoke, minces aggressively across the stage like Milton Berle in the wrong costume, and rolls his eyes soulfully as he is speared by the Queen's three ladies. Later, Tamino and his flute charm a whole stageful of forest creatures who look like plush Walt Disney cartoons. Bergman interpolates respectful self-assertions wherever...
There is no trace of the oppressive, gaunt quality of Bergman's earlier films. The Magic Flute is a work of such magic and belief that Bergman's agonized mysticism seems to have found a total release in the expression of another artist's orderly, God-filled universe. The film is sensitive, joyful, full of serious wit. One hates to say it, but classical opera is rarely so sexy or so much fun as this...