Word: bergmanic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Magic Flute is traditionally considered an exaltation of the power of love. It is also about the transcendence of art and the liberating force of imagination - themes Bergman underscores...
Papageno's bells, Tamino's magic flute are talismans against the darkness. For Bergman, they are forces, as certain and necessary as love, to hold back the night...
When Tamino and Pamina embrace at the end, Bergman has the magic flute fly from Tamino's hand into Sarastro's, a lovely metaphor of universal regeneration, both of life...
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...