INGMAR BERGMAN
The Magic Lantern, An Autobiography
Translated by Joan Tate
New York: Viking, 1988
288 pp. $19.95
“My life has been a futile pursuit, a wandering, a great deal of talk without meaning. I feel no bitterness or self-reproach because the lives of most people are very much like this. But I will use my reprieve for one meaningful deed."
Not a quotation from Ingmar Bergman’s spell-binding autobiography, but a speech by the Knight in his finest film, the medieval drama The Seventh Seal (1956). The "reprieve" in question is the right to live as long as he is not defeated in his chess game against Death. The Knight tells his opponent: "I want to talk to you as openly as I can, but my heart is empty. The emptiness is a mirror turned towards my own face. I see myself in it, and I am filled with fear and disgust. Through my indifference to my fellow men, I had isolated myself from their company. Now I live in a world of phantoms. I am imprisoned in my dramas and fantasies."
As spoken in the film by the austere Max von Sydow, the lines are poignant enough. But they express a key facet of Ingmar Bergman, weaver of dreams and fantasies--and a prisoner of lonely self-doubt. "I had decided that a guilty conscience was an affection, because my torment could never make up for the damage I had done." That remark really does come from the autobiography, and it refers to Bergman's tortured and tortuous relations with the many women in his life. Married five times, and partnered in life by a number of his leading ladies, Bergman at seventy can look back on a baffled quest for permanence, which seems only now to have come to rest. “I find women friends easier," he says, than men. "Together we have danced every imaginable turn: suffering, tenderness, passion, foolishness, betrayal, anger, comedy, tedium, love, lies, joy, jealousies, adultery, overstepping boundaries, good faith." Such a life seems like a mirror of Ingmar Bergman’s films.
In 1963, in response to critics who had called some of his work morbid. Bergman produced a broad and impudent comedy. For att inte tala om alla dessa kvinnor -a title better rendered in the Untied Kingdom as Now about These Women than in the United States as All These Women. His first film in color, it not only lampooned film reviewers but also paraded his favorite repertory actresses in outrageous parodies of their usual screen roles. It was, he now admits, "a convincing and well-deserved fiasco . . . I was desperately ashamed."
He had far more success with the critics and the public when eleven years alter he treated connubial misery as tragedy rather than farce. Scenes from a Marriage ran for five hours on television, in six episodes of fifty minutes each; later, Bergman edited it into a three-hour cinema film. Even at that length, it sometimes sagged. As the errant, baffled, indecisive husband, Erland Josephson seemed now and then inadvertently comic--a whiskery wimp whose indignity was enhanced by the singsong, worried impression that Swedish speech tends to make on foreign ears. It was a masterly, unselfish performance in a mammoth, self-knowing film.
All this anguish, as in many of Bergman's later
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