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The Play of Shadows
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14991 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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9 / 1988 |
2,910 Words |
| Author
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Richard Mayne
Richard Mayne is coeditor of Encounter (London) and his film
critic of the Sunday Telegraph (London). His most recent books
include Postwar and Western Europe: A Handbook. |
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
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