Word: magician
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...agree. For me it was Wild Strawberries. Then The Seventh Seal and The Magician. That whole group of films that came out then told us that Bergman was a magical filmmaker. There had never been anything like it, this combination of intellectual artist and film technician. His technique was sensational...
...rights to most of his pictures, ran Ingmar Bergman festivals in theaters around the country. Full-length studies of his work appeared in English, French, Swedish. In 1960 Simon & Schuster published a book of four of his screenplays (Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Magician). For a generation of budding cinephiles, that settled it. Film was literature. Movies were art. And Bergman was the Shakespeare of the cinema...
...scholarly types fell in love with these preoccupations: with his view of men as weak connivers and women as the wise life force; with the trickery of art (in his dark, delightful comedy The Magician); with his studies of sexual alienation (The Silence), his inside investigations of minds tumbling into madness (Through a Glass Darkly) or muteness (Persona); with his trips into the poignant past (Wild Strawberries); especially with his long battle with God, to which he devoted an entire trilogy. Bergman made anguish sexy, emotional neediness a turn-on. We had no reservation in naming him the world...
...turns violent and moving, the book includes tales of a hapless jobbing magician who can't help conjuring up severed rabbits' heads at birthday parties, a dithering hard-boiled hit man, and the goddess Venus working as an office temp. Thrown into the mix alongside a clutch of tragically distant fathers is a string of treacherous girlfriends - one of whom demands her beau deliver her the heart of his mother, to prove his love...
...luminosity only a matter of gaslight spreading into every dining room and parlor and respectable street. There were also the laughably large new panes of plate glass that amounted to architectural magician's tricks, erasing the old boundary between indoors and out. And the unearthly rays of light beaming from burning lime that transformed any actor on a stage into a shining angelic or demonic figure; the magic-lantern shows of Halley's comet; the new, exceptionally yellow yellow paints and bright red printer's inks, all mixed up by chemists in laboratories; the telegraph wires that sparked and blushed...