Placeholder text
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
