Word: bergmans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...MAGIC FLUTE Directed and Written by INGMAR BERGMAN...
...Ingmar Bergman treats Mozart's opera with spirit, reverence and understanding. In this adaptation of The Magic Flute, the director makes the work his own without ever violating it. Mozart is renewed, enhanced; Bergman is triumphant...
Exuberant Confusion. Bergman first saw the opera when he was twelve and was so enthralled that he wanted to mount a production in his marionette theater (an idea that was finally thwarted because he could not afford the 78 r.p.m. records). The Magic Flute contains some of Mozart's most glorious music but has a truly unmanageable libretto. Staunch knights, knot-headed serfs, mythological animals and cunning spirits amble around, stumbling over plot threads about thwarted romance and Freemasonry. One of Bergman's accomplishments is to take all this rich confusion, condense it by about 40 minutes...
That is just the trouble. The movie (lovingly shot in autumnal tones by Sven Nykvist, Ingmar Bergman's cinematographer) is a clutter of notes and notions. The elaborate panoply of symbolism is never transcended, and the young girl herself remains undiscovered. If Malle had hoped to reveal her by uncovering her fantasies, he has only further obscured her, made her a prisoner of her own dream...
Love and Death. In my opinion, Woody Allen's best and funniest film. Parodies of Bergman, Tolstoy and earlier films of his own are hilarious...