Wound in eye, blood in mouth,
fingers off, neck broken. He calls you down, he calls you forth, beyond
the dead, the living, the living dead. —The Magician A demon is haunting the movie world.
It looks, as many have remarked, like a brilliantly personable werewolf.
The figure is tall, bony and shambling. The green eyes burn with
strange intensity in a high, narrow skull. The teeth are long and
peculiarly pointed. The smile is a little twisted, evoking for the
nightmare-prone the grimace of a hanged man. The demon is in effect an
immensely creative spirit which has seized for its habitation the son
of a Swedish parson, and for its instrument the motion-picture camera. In 16 years of labor this spirit has driven Sweden's Ernst Ingmar
Bergman to produce an enormous canon of cinema, comprising 22 feature
films and at least four other scripts, that merges into a single vast
and violent masterpiece, a work of volcanic profundity and sometimes
tumid pretentiousness, of snorting pornography, sly comedy and ripe
ironic wisdom—a sort of serial Faust. What is more, Bergman's work is all Bergman, and few film directors can
make a similar claim. He creates his own pictures from the first line
of the script to the last snip of the cutting shears, working with
concentrated fury; in spring he customarily collapses in a Stockholm
hospital, nurses an imaginary ulcer, and dictates two screen plays in
about six weeks.
Apart from his film work, Bergman has established himself as the top
director of the Swedish stage by a long chalk, was recently named
manager of Stockholm's Royal Dramatic Theater. He also finds time to
direct dozens of plays for Swedish radio and television—and to live a
private life that most men would consider a career in itself. Says a
Hollywood admirer: “Bergman is Sweden's Zanuck, Kazan, Tennessee
Williams and Playhouse 90 rolled into one.” Visions at the Box
Office. In the last four years the films of Ingmar Bergman , almost unknown outside Sweden before 1956, have captured
an impressive amount of screen-time in more than a dozen countries. One
after another—Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild
Strawberries, Brink of Life, The Magician—they have carried off top
prizes at the big film festivals and set the turnstiles twirling on the
commercial circuits as no Scandinavian film has done since Garbo was a
girl. And last week Stockholm was looking aghast at the latest product
of Bergman's imagination, a religious horror picture called The Virgin
Spring that contains “the most terrible rape and
murder scenes ever seen in a film.” A Stockholm critic called it
“Bergman's best.”
