Images - My Life in Film - Hardcover

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Swedish

Warmly appealing, indispensable review of all his films by Swedish filmmaker Bergman as he sits down to look at each one, many of which he's not seen for 30 or 40 years. Bergman begins by dismissing 1973's Bergman on Bergman--in which he answered questions put to him by three Swedish interviewers--as being full of defensive lies by himself. Fans familiar with that work may be put off by the early pages here, as well as by other stretches, which wobble with head-stuff and as writing are inferior to the more keenly detailed verbalizations in the earlier work the director now intends to outstrip. Today's Bergman has less to say about the nuts and bolts of his filmmaking, focusing instead on motives for his screenplays and on how he wove threads of his own character through different characters from film to film. His strongest moments come when pointing out his failures, fears, and shortsightedness in various works, huge humiliations he brought on himself by not following his first instincts--sometimes by settling too quickly for a smooth surface, at other times by deluding himself for years that he'd created strong works (The Serpent's Egg, Shame, and others) that he now joins his critics in dismissing, at least in part--though not without the keenest eye for what went wrong and what seduced him into his delusions. One feels Bergman's pain as he edits his 312-minute Fanny and Alexander, filmed for Swedish TV, down to a three-hour theatrical release for the rest of the world. More amusing: his take on his famous trilogy, Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, and The Silence. Bergman now finds no reason to call it a trilogy: ``It was a Schnaps-Id‚e...an idea found at the bottom of a glass of alcohol....'' One of the century's greats looks at the bugs under his rocks. All told, stronger than his autobiography, The Magic Lantern (1988). (More than 200 b&w photographs) -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.