The Magician [VHS]

The Magician [VHS]
by Ingmar Bergman

The Magician [VHS]

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Actor: Bengt Ekerot, Gunnar Bj?rnstrand, Ingrid Thulin, Max von Sydow, Naima Wifstrand
Director: Ingmar Bergman
Edition: VHS Tape
Audio: Swedish (Original Language), Analog
Format: Black & White, NTSC
Release Date: 1985-01-01
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Publisher: Hollywood Movie Classics
Studio: Hollywood Movie Classics

VHS Movie Reviews of The Magician [VHS]

Movie Review: Yawn...
Summary: 1 Stars

Ever wondered why the films of Ingmar Bergman are often considered "arty" and don't achieve much mainstream success? watch this and you'll know. But do yourself a favour and read a couple of reviews as well - the ones in which it is hailed as a "gothic horror masterpiece" or, "hilarious".

I saw one in which it was called (with no irony) "semi-comic". That means, to me, "not very funny." And it isn't. The jokes are very poor indeed and revolve around busty serving wenches and conjuring tricks gone wrong: imagine Tommy Cooper in a bad Carry On film.

The supposed "horror" is lamer than anything I have ever seen: just not even slightly horrific. One review I read called it "genuinely gruesome". Well, unless Amazon are posting out heavily-edited versions, then I can only conclude that the reviewer should get out more. Or maybe a rubber hand being animated by an assistant out-of-frame really IS gruesome, and I'm the twisted one...

God, it's rubbish. Bad dialogue, hammy acting, clunky editing, dated music, stupid implausible plot. It looks nice, I'll give you that: the B&W is well-lit and atmospheric. And one of the serving wenches is pretty.

Movie Review: The Intersection of Magic and Reality
Summary: 4 Stars

Ingmar Begman's The Magician (Ansiktet) is perhaps Bergman's most telling and autobiographical film deals with the subject of humiliation. It also gives Bergman's view on the place for magic and superstition in an increasingly modern world ruled by logic and science.

Max von Sydow gives a terrific performance as Volger a 19th century magician whose world is crumbling with the onset of modern logic. Volger and his wandering magic troupe have been chased out of Denmark and arrive in Sweden where they are the forced guests of Consul Egerman (Erland Josephson). Egerman has made a bet with the local health minister, Vergerus (Gunner Bjornstrand) and Chief of Police Starbeck that all things can be proven by science, that there is no longer a place in the world for magic and superstition. Over the course of a night and a startling performance the next day, Bergman proves that there may be a place yet for magic.

Winner of the Special Jury Prize at the 1959 Venice Film Festival the film features outstanding performances by von Sydow and Ingrid Thulin as the magicians cross dressing wife, Manda Volger. The film creates its own creepy feeling of suspense and the surprise ending leaves you thinking long into the night after seeing this "thinking man's horror film."

The film is only available in this country on VHS from Embassy Video. While the quality is watchable its not great and this is yet another film screaming for a good DVD treatment. This is a Bergman film that is not seen as often as it should be. Do yourself a favor and check it out. Worth a rental but it would be better to purchase this sort of lost gem if you can find it even if you are not a great Bergman fan. You never know you could become one as if by magic.

Movie Review: Facing Reality
Summary: 5 Stars

The correct title of this film is The Face. Since it partly deals with the way that artistic truth has to be packaged and promoted by hucksters it is not surprising that whoever distributed it in the US monkeyed around with Bergman's original title. More surprising is that an exceptionally stimulating, well-directed, well-written and finely acted work like this has only collected 3 Amazon reviews in the last 5 years. The actor's trade is here presented as closely akin to religion. Does the miraculous actually happen? Has it ever happened, even if only just once? Pleasure in art requires a suspension of disbelief: anyone, therefore, who has enjoyed a story, a picture, a film, has replaced reason with faith --- if only for an hour or so. There are certainly some people, entire sects of the puritanically minded (including groups of scientists, rationalists, and so on) who hate art, presumably seeing it as inherently fraudulent. At the same time, as Holly Hunter has remarked, actors are only beggars and gypsies; beyond the bounds of respectable society. When this theatrical tale ends the god appears from the machine, nevertheless, and the suggestion is that miracles do occasionally happen. Anyone at all interested in this subject owes it to him/herself to see this subtle film, by an acknowledged master of the medium, and one of the greatest of the C20th.

Movie Review: Witty, engrossing, but ultimately unpleasant.
Summary: 3 Stars

Ingmar Bergman's film "Ansiktet" (translated as "The Magician") is about a group of travelling magicians in nineteenth-century Sweden. They go from town to town and put on a show involving various magic tricks; they also sell quack medicines to gullible people, thus incurring the wrath of authorities in Denmark as well as Sweden. When the film begins, they're trying to get to their next performance when they're apprehended in some town. It appears that the local prefect and his wife made a bet with their friend Dr. Vergerus on the subject of whether or not magic really exists, and they agreed to decide this issue by having the magicians perform for them. Because the local police inspector is also their friend, they get to force the magicians to stay in the town overnight, against their will.

This innocuous little plot quickly turns dramatic, thanks to Dr. Vergerus, who exhibits such grotesque extremes of malice toward the magicians that he enters comic-book villain territory. During the first scene he appears in, he threatens the magician Vogler with prison time (he knows that the magicians are in trouble with the law), accuses him of lying, literally pries his mouth open to look at his vocal cords, and proclaims that he would like to dissect Vogler in an anatomical theatre. What a guy! Later, we see him putting the moves on Vogler's wife, so we know that he's a dirty old man in addition to being a cruel sadist, and later still, he loudly ridicules the magicians while they're forced to go through their act. Then, an unemployed actor who met the magicians on their way to town dies of alcohol poisoning, and the magicians dress him in Vogler's clothes; Vergerus takes him for Vogler, and proceeds to dissect his body, as he threatened to do. Just in case we hadn't been assured of his total repulsiveness by that point, when he finds out that he had been tricked, he first orders the magicians to leave without compensation for their time, forcing them to beg for money, then throws one coin of low value on the floor in front of Vogler, forcing the magician to get on his knees to pick it up.

Now, I can see how a highly educated man of reason, a man who lives by the scientific method, might view the travelling magicians with some disdain, on the grounds that they make their living by taking advantage of ignorant people's superstitions. But Dr. Vergerus has no problem with this; on the contrary, his greatest fear is that the magicians really do have supernatural powers. When he sees that their act is a fraud, he is clearly relieved. He constantly tells the officials about how he doesn't believe in magic, and repeats this so often and so insistently that it's pretty clear that he's lying. What are we to make of this?

Well, Vergerus seems to be Bergman's symbol for atheism. When the doctor flaunts his disbelief before his rich friends, he states that he refuses to believe in magic because society would perish if magic were to exist (I'm not sure why), and then equates the existence of magic with the existence of god. The connection to religion is not even implied, but stated outright by the director. Bergman also seems to be equating science with atheism, by playing up Vergerus' scientific background, and having the doctor glorify "reason" and conduct dissections "in the name of science." So, Bergman's message seems to be that science and atheism, which are one and the same, are arrogant, because they deny the existence of god, and dishonest, because they are secretly afraid that god does exist, and malicious, because they seek to stamp out all those who call their authority into question. Unfortunately, Bergman makes Vergerus so hateful, and piles so many vices onto his character, that the film is manipulative, and thus unconvincing, in making this argument. More than that, the magicians themselves are hardly blameless: in their retaliation against Vergerus, they drive a hired hand to suicide, even though he hadn't really done anything bad, whereas even Vergerus doesn't succeed in killing anybody.

But overall, the film is not as grim as all that. After receiving the initial ultimatum from Vergerus and the officials, the magicians settle down for the night in the officials' household. In several ensuing scenes, the different members of the troupe meet the servants of the household, who are more superstitious and less cynical than their masters, and thus more susceptible to the magicians' illusions. First, Tubal the magician cons a young servant into buying a fraudulent, and apparently very bad-tasting, love potion. With this potential rival out of the way, Simson, the youngest member of the troupe, macks on a pretty servant girl and ends up having quite a fun time with her in a laundry basket. Meanwhile, the old woman, claiming to be a powerful witch, assures another servant girl of a happy future. These scenes are all very entertaining and cleverly written; anyone who's seen "Smiles of a Summer Night" knows how funny Bergman can be, when he wants to. The scene with Simson, when he brags to the girl about his romantic conquests, then gets weak in the knees when the time comes to prove his prowess, is absolutely hilarious.

So, the film isn't all bad by any means. All the actors are good, especially the one playing the charming con man Tubal. Even Vergerus is played just about as well as possible (by Gunnar Bjornstrand, a recurring face in Bergman films). The second half of the film, where Bergman's message is contained, seems disjoint from the first, which is much lighter and far more enjoyable. Nonetheless, the ultimate effect is not a good one.

Movie Review: Bergman's most enjoyable battle between reason and ...?
Summary: 5 Stars

Ingmar Bergman's best films give the viewer the feeling of participating in a rite. Its rhythms are less those of conventional narrative, than of theatre or a religious procession, say. As with rites, the appeal is not to the viewer's intellect; their effect is both sensual and spiritual, troubling precisely because we can't put our finger on that appeal.

Of course, this requires a kind of faith, and is open to charges of manipulation, precisely the theme of 'The Magician', a splendid slice of unnerving Grand Guignol horror, where a rather academic argument between the Enlightenment values of sceince, reason and empiricism confront those of superstition, magic and the inexplicable. These latter values might be called medieval, pre-Renaissance, and we are reminded that the modern theatre developed in this period from the Church, from rites and passion plays. this is the kind of effect 'The Magician' has, visually and tonally.

The argument is not between the doctor and the mesmerist, but between the film's surface narrative (which, as an argument, promotes the predominance of reason) and the film's form (which destroys every attempt at argument). Everything within the film that seems to derive from supernatural forces can all be ascribed, more or less, to rational causes, for example psychological weakness; even if it is this very weakness, that border between what we know and what we can't know, in which the mesmerist exists. Although we might say 'Ah, it's only a delusion', the very fact that these self-generated delusions can convincingly take the place of safe, everyday reality, can become that reality, suggests the limits of rationality, without any recourse to the supernatural.

The shams of actors, con-men, misanthropes pretending to be mute, women pretending to be men might all be illusions which, once exposed, can restore the status quo; but once the idea has been suggested that a boundary can be crossed, that an illusion can be real, than a system based on those boundaries is undermined.

In a film where actors pretend to be what they're not, whose narrative proceeds like theatre and climaxes with a theatrical spectacle, Bergman's technique can be called a charade - e.g. the haunting trip through an eerie forest, the fog streaming in the sunlight like a magical gateway; the terrifying attack on the doctor in a surrealist attic, are all an illusion to give us a sensation, but they also undeniably reveal a world for us that lives with us and which we never acknowledge. As ever with Bergman, it is only with acting, deception and illusion, not ational argument and empirical evidence, that we can even begin to approach the truth.

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