The Magic Lantern by Ingmar Bergman

The Magic Lantern by Ingmar Bergman

When a film is not a document, it is a dream. . . . At the editing table, when I run the strip of film through, frame by frame, I still feel that dizzy sense of magic of my childhood. Bergman, who has conveyed this heady sense of wonder and vision to moviegoers for decades, traces his lifelong love affair with film in his breathtakingly visual autobiography, The Magic Lantern.

More grand mosaic than linear account, Bergman's vignettes trace his life from a rural Swedish childhood through his work in theater to Hollywood's golden age, and a tumultuous romantic history that includes five wives and more than a few mistresses. Throughout, Bergman recounts his life in a series of deeply personal flashbacks that document some of the most important moments in twentieth-century filmmaking as well as the private obsessions of the man behind them. Ambitious in scope yet sensitively wrought, The Magic Lantern is a window to the mind of one of our era's great geniuses.

Bergman] has found a way to show the soul's landscape . . . . Many gripping revelations.--New York Times Book Review

Joan Tate's translation of this book has delicacy and true pitch . . . The Magic Lantern is as personal and penetrating as a Bergman film, wry, shadowy, austere.--New Republic

Bergman] keeps returning to his past, reassessing it, distilling its meaning, offering it to his audiences in dazzling new shapes.--New York Times

What Bergman does relate, particularly his tangled relationships with his parents, is not only illuminating but quite moving. No 'tell-all' book this one, but revealing in ways that much longer and allegedly 'franker' books are not.--Library Journal

INGMAR BERGMAN (1918 - 2007) was one of the world's great film-makers. The son of a Lutheran pastor he worked in the theatre before directing his first film, Crisis, in 1945. His powerful films are often marked by bleak depictions of human loneliness, although one of them, Smiles of a Summer Night, was the basis of Stephen Sondheim's celebrated musical A Little Night Music.

JENNY WORTON is the Artistic Associate at the Almeida Theatre. She was previously the literary manager at the Tricycle Theatre and worked for the literary departments of the Bush Theatre and the National Theatre.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780241121474
ISBN 10	0241121477
Title	The Magic Lantern
Author	Ingmar Bergman
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Penguin Books Ltd
Year published	1988-05-19
Number of pages	320
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.