Word: bergmans
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Click click click. The central figure in all these vignettes is the real- life Ingmar Bergman, and never has an autobiography been more aptly titled than The Magic Lantern. For it is as if the great director, whose passion for the transforming power of the vividly projected image was first stirred by the paraffin-lamp projector that was his favorite childhood toy, is rummaging through a boxful of old slides and throwing them on memory's screen in the order they come to hand, without pause or transitional comment...
Whether confronting the deep past -- his bourgeois childhood as the son of a stern Lutheran minister and dutifully repressed mother -- or his adult past, where wives, mistresses and children drift almost anonymously through the shadows of his theaters and sound stages, Bergman rarely strikes the customary autobiographical notes of nostalgia and the tranquil acceptance of fate. To him, middle-class morality is a cloak for madness, family life an invitation to distraction and guilt. Neither helps one come to grips with decay, eroticism, violence -- those irrational torments by which the unseen world insists on its presence in our lives...
...first one is astonished and dismayed by his disregard for the convention of chronological recall. For Bergman's films, no matter how deeply they plunge into the dank depths of his characters, have always been severely, intricately logical in structure and cool, almost objective, in tone. But one comes to see that this is the most profound point of this ruthless book. What Bergman is saying is that however acutely his art reflected his sense of life, it was much more important to him as a refuge from life. It was the place where he could at least briefly impose...
...first five minutes, the teams looked evenly matched. Vermont came out strong, forcing Harvard goalie Michael Bergman into making three tough saves on its initial possession...
...each time they shot the sequence, Bergman was dissatisfied. Finally, 13 omelettes later, Josephson grew so weary and upset that he gave the performance the director wanted...