"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
