Bergman 15: The Magician (1958)

Well and truly in the midst of a purple patch for Bergman at the moment. In a sense this film revisits The Seventh Seal, with Gunnar Björnstrand again the cynical debunker and Max von Sydow the tortured "believer". But I would even be inclined to say that this is the richer film, with the question of faith tied in to a wider variety of other thematic material, particularly the question of just what it means to believe in something, or what it is that makes a trick a trick. (As is thematised at the end of the film with the joke that the magician's troupe can't be recognised - can't be who they are - when they're not in disguise.) It's also pretty irresistible to read the film as an allegory of the cinema, what with the references to magic lanterns, visions, and so forth. The climatic confrontation between von Sydow and Björnstrand shows that visions can be generated even when we know (or rather, should know) exactly what's going on. I also like the alcoholic actor who says that he is more convincing as a ghost (when he reappears after being taken for dead) than he was on the stage. Perhaps this explains something of the power of old films - does their loss of "life" make what Mark Fisher might have called their "hauntological" power all the greater? (A couple of shots of a carriage passing through an archway, by the way - the film is magnificently photographed by Gunnar Fischer - put me in mind of Murnau's Nosferatu.)