When she reviewed The Seventh Seal, Dylis Powell wrote "Whenever Scandinavian cinema has five minutes to fill, it burns a witch." Ingmar Bergman doesn't show the witch in The Seventh Seal being burned. Blok, the knight played by Max von Sydow, stops to question her before a monk tells him to clear off. When The Magician was released to audiences hungry for more from Bergman, it took them by surprise. It is as close as Bergman got to real gothic. Here was a film that played out as a black comedy, but that opens with mystery and ambiguity. We meet what appears to be a troupe of players travelling by coach in a forest shot with much chiaroscuro (supplied by Gunnar Fischer). Looking at the scene in a high contrast print, it's only figuratively dark. Despite everyone acting frightened by the strange noises and their inability to make out what is spooking them, the whole scene is well enough illuminated: the coachman Simson halts the horses and jumps down from his seat, joining the others inside the coach. Only Albert Emanuel Vogler (Max von Sydow) is unafraid, and he leaves the coach to investigate. He finds a man on the ground with tattered clothes and a broken hat who identifies himself as Spegel (the same Bengt Ekerot who played Death in The Seventh Seal) admittedly incapacitated from drink. "Brandy is my disease, but also it's cure," he tells Vogler, who gives him a dram from his flask. Spegel claims to be near death, and lying back (after falling in the water) he says, "I have always yearned for a knife. A blade with which to lay bare my bowels. To detach my brain, my heart. To free me from my substance. To cut away my tongue and my manhood. A sharp knife blade which would scrape out all my uncleanliness. Then the so-called spirit could ascend out of this meaningless carcass."
Vogler helps him to the coach. Vogler, the "magnetist" in The Magician, is as troubled at the meaning of it all as Blok in The Seventh Seal. Inside the coach, when Spegel announces that he feels the approach of death, Vogler looks intently at him. But just as he is telling him, "Death is ..." Spegel - seemingly - expires. Disappointed, Vogler leans back in his seat, another opportunity to discover the truth about life and death missed. The troupe arrives at a border crossing, where the coach is stopped and redirected into the courtyard of a grand house. Vogler and his entourage are ordered out of the carriage and into the house where a local dignitary and the chief of police are anxious to meet the famous magnetist. Also among them is Dr. Vergerus (Gunnar Björnstrand), who seems determined to debunk the supposed "powers" of Vogler.
Bergman's title for the film was The Face - Ansiktet. The Magician is a more descriptive title, perhaps too programmatic, but it's an improvement, I think, on Bergman's, which makes it sound like a horror film.(1) Bergman admitted that he intended to make a much funnier film, "but then during the filming I suppose I must have gone rancid." The film is generally regarded as a statement about the role of the artist in society. Bergman advanced the argument that the respectable, unfriendly audiences he directed plays for in Malmö in the Fifties were represented in The Magician by Consul Egerman (who becomes alarmed when his wife throws herself at Vogler), the police chief occupied the place of his critics, the worst of whom was Harry Schein, on whom Bergman took his revenge by representing him as Dr. Vergerus, who antagonizes Vogler to the extent that Vogler takes his revenge on him by ripping off his smug rational face and terrifies him with his "hocus-pocus."(2)
Bergman placed great emphasis on the ambiguous role played by Ingrid Thulin. When we first meet her she is "Aman," Vogler's apparently male assistant. She is, in fact Manda, Vogler's wife. When Vergerus catches her with her hair down (so to speak), and tries to blackmail her, Vogler thrashes him. Bergman so subtly stages what appears to be Vogler's death when the "stableman" Antonsson reacts violently to Vogler's attempt to mesmerize him and he tries to choke him, that some inattentive viewers actually believed that Bergman was suggesting that something supernatural has occurred. Vogler's concentration on Antonsson is interrupted by a chiming clock. Vogler's momentary "spell" broken, Antonsson grabs him by the throat. Vogler falls, Antonsson tears out of the room, Vergerus's wife screams and faints, and when everyone leaves the room, Simson, on cue, locks the door. A handy coffin is moved beside Vogler, lying motionless on the floor and Tubal and Manda begin to strip his "body." The coffin is the giveaway. Earlier, Spegel, who wasn't quite dead, sneaks into the house and finds Vogler in his room. Holding Vogler close, he delivers one of Bergman's telltale lines: "Step by step by step we go into the dark. Motion itself is the only truth." Then Spegel steps dutifully into the trick coffin that Vogler uses as a prop for his act and dies. When Antonsson strangles Vogler, the same coffin, containing Spegel's body, is slid beside Vogler. We don't see them do it, but Manda and Tubal switch Vogler with Spegel's dead body before Simson unlocks the door and Vergerus enters. Vergerus examines the body and pronounces him dead. Starbeck orders an autopsy - with Vergerus presiding, and Bergman has successfully - cleverly - set us up to witness the undoing of Vergerus. Later, left alone with the corpse of Spegel, which he selectively dissects, Vergerus is astonished when he is confronted with a living Vogler - and scared half out of his wits.
Bergman satirizes not just the sometimes impossible feats that we expect from the artist, but he satirizes the artist as well, who performs his tricks knowing how stupid the audience is, but goes on performing them, all the same. When Vogler plays with life and death to scare Vergerus, he fails again because Vergerus refuses to admit that he was taken in by Vogler's illusion and that he was genuinely afraid. We - the viewer - saw the terror in his eyes and laughed. But it was nothing but smoke and mirrors. Bergman spoke eloquently about the illusions that the filmmaker exploits:
And even today I remind myself with childish excitement that I am really a conjurer, since cinematography is based on deception of the human eye. I have worked out that if I see a film which has a running time of one hour, I sit through twenty-seven minutes of complete darkness - the blankness between frames. When I show a film I am guilty of deceit. I use an apparatus which is constructed to take advantage of a certain human weakness, an apparatus with which I can sway my audience in a highly emotional manner - make them laugh, scream with fright, smile, believe in fairy stories, become indignant, feel shocked, charmed, deeply moved or perhaps even yawn with boredom. Thus I am a conjurer. I perform conjuring tricks with (an) apparatus so expensive and so wonderful that any entertainer in history would have given anything to have it.(3)
Yes, Bergman is Vogler - but a Vogler whose conjurings have given us so much more than facile laughs and frights. He has shown us with the film apparatus the truth about human beings. Through artists like Bergman, the film medium is fulfilled.
(1) Think of the schlocky Fiend Without a Face, but also the art-film creepshows like Franju's Eyes Without a Face and Teshigahara's The Face of Another.
(2) Images: My Life in Film (New York: Arcade Publishers, 1995).
(3) Four Screenplays: Smiles of a Summer Night, The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, The Magician (New York: Touchstone, 1969).
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