The Magic Lantern of Ingmar Bergman: The Silence
April 24, 2025
Presented by The Swedish Club and Greg Olson Productions
The Magic Lantern of Ingmar Bergman
Like Jean Cocteau and David Lynch, Bergman is a visionary of subjective consciousness and dream logic. A young boy (Jorgen Lindstrom), his mother (Ingrid Thulin) and her sister (Gunnel Lindblom) come to a strange country, where erotic and aggressive currents flow in a shadowy hotel. Mystery abides, but the boy receives three meaningful words.
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Thursday, April 24, 2025
In his earlier films Bergman clearly presented a character’s self-contained dream within a context of recognizable naturalistic reality. In the early 1960s, when Fellini was evolving from cinematic realism to expansive inner reveries, Bergman plunged into the borderless subjectivity of character consciousness, mysterious, sometimes surreal realms that Jean Cocteau and David Lynch explored from day one. Beyond a finite dream episode, their entire films are dream-like. A ten-year-old boy (Jorgen Lindstrom), his mother Ester (Ingrid Thilin) and his aunt Anna (Gunnel Lindblom) are traveling in a strange country. The locals speak some unintelligible language, things seem subtly off-kilter, meanings are out of reach. The only other hotel guests are a troupe of dwarfs, who dress Johan as a woman. Currents of eroticism unsettle the air, and both sisters act on them. Bergman sees the sickly, intellectual Ester and the lusty, vibrant Anna almost as a single character, and he juxtaposes their separate faces into one. This iconic image, which he expands upon in Persona, has been echoed by Lynch and other filmmakers. Ester writes three words on a piece of paper for Johan. Bergman shows them to us.
—Greg Olson
- Director: Ingmar Bergman
- Principal Cast: Ingrid Thulin, Gunnel Lindblom, Jorgen Lindstrom, Hakan Jahnberg, Birger Malmstein, Performing Dwarfs, Eduardo Gutierrez
- Year: 1962
- Running Time: 96 min.
- Screenplay: Ingmar Bergman
- Cinematographers: Sven Nykvist
- Editors: Ulla Ryghe
- Music: Ivan Renliden
- International Sales: Svensk Filmindustri