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Displaying the Magician's Art: Theatrical Illusion in Ingmar Bergman's The Magic Flute (1975)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 May 2022
Abstract
Ingmar Bergman's The Magic Flute is a film that not only represents a performance of Mozart's opera but also reflects on the experience it generates in the theatrical audience. The opera becomes the means through which Bergman explores the magic of theatrical illusion by displaying the artifice behind it. I examine the film's take on the representation of theatrical illusion from two perspectives. First, with reference to the famous sequence of the overture, I demonstrate the crucial role of the audience's imaginative engagement. Second, I zero in on Bergman's role as omniscient director who not only uncovers the artificiality of the theatrical source but also plays tricks with the film audience. Yet our observing the ‘constructed naturalness’ of the magic flute and Papageno or the theatricality of the Queen of the Night's performance does not hinder the film's ability to engage us. Rather, witnessing the workings of illusion strengthens its grip on us.
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References
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11 Bergman cut numbers 11, 16 and 19 from the original opera, as well as some text from several spoken scenes. For a detailed comparison of the plot development in Mozart's opera and Bergman's film, see Burns, ‘An Exploration of Post-Aesthetic Analysis’, 135–7.
12 In my view, the fact that the film starts with a pre-title sequence rather than the operatic overture is just one detail that corroborates this idea.
13 Esslin, Martin, The Field of Drama: How the Signs of Drama Create Meaning on Stage and Screen (London, 1987), 29Google Scholar. Esslin does not deny the ‘technical, technological, and psychological differences that arise from the different modes of conveying … dramatic features’, but he also contends that this division between theatre and film ‘has become anachronistic and inhibits clear critical thinking about the very considerable number of essential and fundamental aspects that the dramatic media have in common’ (31). In my opinion, his strongest argument is that ‘in the real world the practitioners of drama have not made and do not make these rigid distinctions … they regard their work in all the different dramatic media as basically the exercise of a single type of skill that can be readily adapted to the specific differences and demands of the different media’ (35). Bergman is a clear case in point.
14 Giorgio Biancorosso, ‘Beginning Credits and Beyond: Music and the Cinematic Imagination’, Echo: A Music-Centered Journal 3/1 (2001), www.echo.ucla.edu/article-beginning-credits-and-beyond-music-and-the-cinematic-imagination-author/, par. 63.
15 Apart from this cameo, Bergman also appears in Secrets of Women/Waiting Women (Kvinnors väntan, 1952), A Lesson in Love (En lektion i kärlek, 1954), Dreams/Journey into Autumn (Kvinnodröm, 1955), Brink of Life/So Close to Life (Nära livet, 1958), The Ritual/The Rite (Riten, 1969) and In the Presence of a Clown (Larmar och gör sig till, 1997).
16 Quoting Koskinen, Bergman ‘contributed to his own legend with full awareness of the difference between Bergman the biographical person of flesh and blood and “Bergman” the brand name with quotation marks’. Maaret Koskinen, ‘Ingmar Bergman, the Biographical Legend, and the Intermedialities of Memory’, Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 2/1 (2010), www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.3402/jac.v2i0.5862.
17 I agree with Staiger in that ‘[t]he point here is not that one story or the other … is more authentic to Bergman's persona but to point out the ease with which he and we use such stories to create for him a persona to use to construct his author-function’. Staiger, Janet, ‘Self-Fashioning in Authoring a Reception’, in Ingmar Bergman Revisited: Performance, Cinema and the Arts, ed. Koskinen, Maaret (London, 2008), 95Google Scholar.
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19 This notion of experience and its connection to expression and reality was first articulated by Wilhelm Dilthey and later on developed by Victor Turner in his formulation of an anthropology of experience. See Turner, Victor and Bruner, Edward, The Anthropology of Experience (Urbana, IL, 1986)Google Scholar.
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21 Wolf, ‘Illusion (Aesthetic)’, italics mine.
22 Despite holding this inclusive view, Wolf's reading of Gombrich does not include Gombrich's other main contribution to the theory of representation, namely ‘Meditations on a Hobby Horse or the Roots of Artistic Form’. In that famous essay, Gombrich argues that ‘“representation” does not depend on formal similarities, beyond the minimum requirements of function. … All art is “image-making” and all image-making is rooted in the creation of substitutes.’ Gombrich, Ernst, ‘Meditations on a Hobby Horse’, in Meditations on a Hobby Horse and Other Essays on the Theory of Art (London, 1985), 4, 9Google Scholar. It is function (use) rather than form (verisimilitude) that matters in artistic representations.
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25 Frederick Burwick: ‘The controversy over dramatic illusion … still becomes entangled in the seemingly paradoxical simultaneity of the consciousness of artifice and participation in illusion.’ Frederick Burwick, ‘Stage Illusion’, 693, quoted in Foakes, Reginald A., ‘Making and Breaking Dramatic Illusion’, in Aesthetic Illusion: Theoretical and Historical Approaches, ed. Burwick, Frederick and Pape, Walter (Berlin, 1990), 217Google Scholar.
26 Wolf, ‘Illusion (Aesthetic)’.
27 Biancorosso, ‘Beginning Credits’, par. 18.
28 Walton, Kendall, Mimesis as Make-Believe (Cambridge, 1990)Google Scholar.
29 Biancorosso, ‘Beginning Credits’, par. 23.
30 The idea of a new production of The Magic Flute had been in Bergman's mind for a long time when, in 1972, the Swedish Broadcasting Corporation commissioned him to film Mozart's opera for television to celebrate their golden anniversary; see Steene, Ingmar Bergman, 428. Swedish Television broadcast the film on New Year's Day 1975. Jeongwon Joe points out that ‘[t]he original production was shot in 16mm negative in 1974, but in the next year it was blown up to 35mm for a cinematic release at the Cannes Film Festival in May’. Jeongwon Joe, ‘Opera on Film, Film in Opera: Postmodern Implications of the Cinematic Influence on Opera’ (PhD diss., Northwestern University, 1998), 96. Marcia Citron rightly identified certain specific features that make television different from cinema – a sense of intimacy, informality and reality, for instance. She also mentioned the specific technical needs of the medium, such as the use of multiple cameras and intensified lighting. Yet, as she also observed, ‘the boundary between television and cinema can be blurred, as in Ingmar Bergman's The Magic Flute, originally produced for television (1975) and subsequently shown in movie theatres’. Citron, Marcia, Opera on Screen (New Haven, CT, 2000), 41Google Scholar.
31 Marcia Citron offers a different interpretation of the relationship between film and theatre in this film. According to Citron, Bergman thematises a distinction between these two media through the film's sound practices. She claims that ‘these practices help to form a contrast between theatrical and cinematic segments’. Marcia Citron, ‘Vococentrism and Sound in Ingmar Bergman's The Magic Flute’, in Voicing the Cinema: Film Music and the Integrated Soundtrack, ed. James Buhler and Hannah Lewis (Urbana, IL, 2020), 93. Her idea of a contrast gives way to ‘a gentle passing from one to the other that may barely be noticed’ (93).
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35 Cited in Morrison, ‘Digital Diva’, 102.
36 Senici, ‘Porn Style?’, 66.
37 Bergman, Ingmar, Images: My Life in Film (New York, 1994), 353Google Scholar.
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39 McAuley, Space in Performance, 20.
40 Fawkes, Opera on Film, 169; Tambling, Jeremy, A Night at the Opera: Media Representations of Opera (London, 1994), 128Google Scholar; Joe, ‘Opera on Film, Film in Opera’, 95; Citron, Opera on Screen, 57.
41 Citron, Opera on Screen, 57.
42 On Mozart's universality, see Einstein, Alfred, Mozart, His Character, His Work (Oxford, 1962), 103–7Google Scholar; Brophy, Brigid, Mozart the Dramatist: The Value of His Operas to Him, to His Age and to Us (London, 2013)Google Scholar. As for Bergman's universal message in The Magic Flute, see Törnqvist, Bergman's Muses, 65–79; Dean Duncan, ‘Adaptation, Enactment, and Ingmar Bergman's Magic Flute,’ Brigham Young University Studies 43/3 (2004), 229–50; Jaume Radigales, ‘Aproximación cinematográfica a “La Flauta Mágica”: El “caso Bergman”, treinta años después’, Revista de Musicología 28/2 (2005), 1079–89.
43 I am considering here what Sven Nykvist (Bergman's main cinematographer) identified as an overlooked area in Bergman studies: ‘One of the most exciting and inspiring things about Ingmar is that he has never been afraid to experiment and that he has always wanted to develop the language of film. An immense amount has been written about his films – of which it is perhaps easier for a critic to have an opinion – but it seems to me that you then miss something important, the way in which Ingmar narrates, how he delivers his message.’ In Duncan, Paul and Wanselius, Bengt, The Ingmar Bergman Archives (Cologne, 2008), 425Google Scholar.
44 Robert Graves provides the following short description of this particular episode of the myth: ‘On leaving Delos he [Apollo] made straight for Mount Parnassus, where the serpent Python, his mother's enemy, was lurking; and wounded him severely with arrows. Python fled to the Oracle of Mother Earth at Delphi, a city so named in honour of the monster Delphyne, his mate; but Apollo dared to follow him to the shrine, and there despatched him beside the sacred chasm. Mother Earth reported this outrage to Zeus, who not only ordered Apollo to visit Tempe for purification, but instituted the Pythian Games, in honour of Python, over which he was to preside penitentially.’ In Robert Graves, The Greek Myths (Baltimore, 1992), ch. 21.
45 This girl has sometimes been identified as Linn Ullmann, daughter of Bergman and Liv Ullmann (see Joe, ‘Opera on Film, Film in Opera’, 125; and Citron, ‘Vococentrism and Sound in Ingmar Bergman's The Magic Flute’, 92). I, however, follow here Steene's Ingmar Bergman, which is the most comprehensive and updated source for Bergman scholarship. Among the cast for The Magic Flute, Steene identifies the ‘Girl in the audience’ as Helen Friberg (Steene, Ingmar Bergman, 308).
46 All the musical references are based on Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, The Magic Flute (Die Zauberflöte): In Full Score (New York, 1985), www.dlib.indiana.edu/variations/scores/vaa0618/large/index.html.
47 Miriam Sheer provides a detailed account of the girl's appearances during the overture in relation to the bars of the score. The girl appears ten times corresponding to bars 4–9, 10, 11, 12, 14, 47, 94–6, 103, 171 and 226. For a more detailed elaboration see Sheer, Miriam, ‘Bergman's Cinematic Treatment of Mozart's Overture to “The Magic Flute”’, Israel Studies in Musicology 6 (1996), 62–3Google Scholar.
48 Sheer, ‘Bergman's Cinematic Treatment of Mozart's Overture to “The Magic Flute”’, 62.
49 Duncan, ‘Adaptation, Enactment, and Ingmar Bergman's Magic Flute’, 231.
50 I am elaborating here on the quote cited earlier: ‘Here lies the noble, magical illusion of theater. Nothing is; everything represents. The moment the curtain is raised, an agreement between stage and audience manifests itself. And now, together, we'll create!’ In Bergman, Images, 353.
51 Georgina Born, ‘Listening, Mediation, Event: Anthropological and Sociological Perspectives’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 135/1 (2010), 80.
52 Born, ‘Listening, Mediation, Event’, 83.
53 Richard Evidon, ‘Bergman and “The Magic Flute”’, The Musical Times 117/1596 (1976), 131.
54 On operatic conventions, see Rosand, Ellen, Opera in Seventeenth-Century Venice (Berkeley, 1991)Google Scholar; Fabbri, Paolo, Il secolo cantante: per una storia del libretto d'opera nel Seicento (Bologna, 1990)Google Scholar; Baker, Evan, From the Score to the Stage: An Illustrated History of Continental Opera Production and Staging (Chicago, 2013)Google Scholar.
55 Rose R. Subotnik, ‘Whose “Magic Flute?” Intimations of Reality at the Gates of the Enlightenment’, 19th-Century Music 15/2 (1991), 132–50.
56 Marianne Tettlebaum, ‘Whose Magic Flute?’, Representations 102/1 (2008), 76–93.
57 Tettlebaum, ‘Whose Magic Flute?’, 78.
58 Subotnik pointed out the ‘new sound’ that pervades this opera due to the extensive use of wind instruments. She observed that this emphasis on different timbres ‘must be experienced in their particularity, giv[ing] the Magic Flute a hint of a connection to the here-and-now’. Subotnik, ‘Whose “Magic Flute?”’, 147.
59 Tettlebaum, ‘Whose Magic Flute?’, 80.
60 Before the last trial, Pamina (Irma Urrila) tells Tamino that her father carved it from an ancient oak in the midst of a thunderstorm, revealing that the magic flute is indeed made of wood.
61 Tettlebaum observed that, in the opera, the magic flute ‘plays set pieces, a folksy dance tune and a lightly orchestrated march’. Tettlebaum, ‘Whose Magic Flute?’, 88.
62 The only exception in the film is during the first quintet, after one of the Ladies gives the magic flute to Tamino: the flute flies in circles in front of the five characters on stage.
63 I follow here Uvedale Price's notion of the picturesque based on the original Italian term pittoresco, which refers to a particular psychological stance on the part of the viewer in the process of sense perception. Price identifies pittoresco with an aesthetic view of reality that results in an enhanced experience of it. The ability to see through appearances does not disrupt, but intensifies the ensuing experience. See Price, Uvedale, Essays on the Picturesque, as Compared with the Sublime and the Beautiful; and, on the Use of Studying Pictures, for the Purpose of Improving Real Landscape (London, 1810)Google Scholar; and Isis Brook, ‘Reinterpreting the Picturesque in the Experience of Landscape’, in The Place of Landscape: Concepts, Contexts, Studies, ed. Jeff Malpas (Cambridge, MA, 2011), 165–81.
64 This duality is rooted in the fact that although art is by definition a construct based on conventions – and conventions are social and historical – the main drive of most Western art since antiquity has been to imitate nature as accurately as possible. Depending on the degree of verisimilitude achieved by artists, representations were seen as more ‘natural’ (i.e., endowed with a high level of accuracy in the rendition of nature or reality, which entailed the medium or the conventions and techniques used not being clearly noticeable). Or more artificial (when the medium or the conventions and techniques used are evident). Thus, dealing with artistic representations, the division between natural/popular and artificial/artistic ultimately depends more on the recipient's culture, knowledge and attitude than on the representation itself.
65 Subotnik sees this ‘naturalness’ in how Papageno is introduced in this aria as ‘a spontaneous man at one with organic nature’. She mentions different elements that contribute to this image, among others, Papageno's panpipes, some stage props and also the tonality of G major, which creates a world in which ‘there are no signs of conflict, no threats of disorder’. According to Subotnik, ‘[f]rom an Enlightenment perspective, this structure can readily be imagined as part of a natural order, accessible to all, without the intervention of culture or reflection, and grounded on a natural condition of reason’. Subotnik, ‘Whose “Magic Flute?”’, 134.
66 Subotnik, ‘Whose “Magic Flute?”’, 140.
67 This particular sequence can be watched in the following YouTube video: ‘Mozart: Die Zauberfloete (The Magic Flute): “Der Vogelfaenger” (Papageno) Hakan Hagegard’, YouTube, 01:57, posted by Roberto Mastrosimone, 5 October 2009, www.youtube.com/watch?v=qLeYCS0iXnY.
68 Joe, ‘Opera on Film, Film in Opera’, 93.
69 Susan Sontag, ‘Bergman's Persona’, in Ingmar Bergman's Persona, ed. Lloy Michaels (Cambridge, 1999), 62–85, at 78.
70 Halliwell, Stephen, The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems (Princeton, 2002), 373CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
71 Guthrie, Tyrone, A Life in the Theatre (London, 1959), 313Google Scholar, quoted in Styan, John L., Drama, Stage and Audience, (Cambridge, 1975), 181–2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
72 Joe, ‘Opera on Film, Film in Opera’, 128.
73 Marvin A. Carlson, ‘The Resistance to Theatricality’, SubStance 31/2 (2002), 240.
74 According to Burns, ‘behaviour can be described as “theatrical” only by those who know what drama is … . It is an audience term just as the theatron was originally a place for viewing, an audience place. Behaviour is not therefore theatrical because it is of a certain kind but because the observer recognizes certain patterns and sequences which are analogous to those with which he is familiar in the theatre.’ Burns, Elizabeth, Theatricality: A Study of Conventions in the Theatre and in Social Life (New York, 1972), 12–13Google Scholar.
75 Unlike the theatrical audience, the film audience has access to two different levels of reality regarding the operatic performance. One level is the dramatic actions represented on stage; the other level is the highly mediated representation of these actions on film. These two levels of reality are not as clearly defined as it may seem. Bergman adds a new twist that blurs their boundaries by imbuing them with a quality that suggests they could be considered dreams. This detail applies to both the dramatic actions of the opera (the characters themselves wonder whether what they experienced was a dream or reality) and to their audio-visual rendering. I posit that the idea of the dream is a way for Bergman to represent the internal processes of the characters on screen. The notion and presence of dreams pervade Bergman's work; for example, dreams play a key role in Wild Strawberries (Smulstronstället, 1957), Persona (1966), Hour of the Wolf (Vargtimmen, 1968), Shame (Skammen, 1968) and In the Presence of a Clown (Larmar och gör sig till, 1997).
76 For more on the relevance of rhetoric in eighteenth-century music, see James Webster, ‘The Analysis of Mozart's Arias’, in Mozart Studies 1, ed. Cliff Eisen (Oxford, 1991), 101–99.
77 This is one of the most precious features of the Drottningholm Court Theatre. For a virtual tour of the Drottningholm Court Theatre in which this particular characteristic is clearly displayed, see ‘Drottningholms slottsteater’, YouTube, 01:54, posted by Johanitornet’, 16 February 2009, www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=EdRUdoKfPvo. For more information about the Drottningholm Court Theatre, see ‘Drottningholms slottsteater: About the Theatre’, Drottningholms slottsteater, https://dtm.se/aboutthebuilding.
78 Alexis Luko refers to the technical difficulties of the sound recording for this production as follows: ‘The opera singer Håkan Hagegård, who played Papageno in the production, explained that during the filming of The Magic Flute Bergman experimented with syncing by putting an antenna on the floor and supplying each singer with a wireless earpiece. A piano was situated in a room next to the film studio with a glass window so that the pianist could see the conductor in the next room. According to Hagegård: “the conductor would use headphones and the picture and add the orchestra in afterwards. It was tested with a small orchestra. This did not work and was not used for one single reason: we could not hear the piano when we were more than two singers on the floor. Too bad, I think, because bad lip syncing is so irritating.”’ In Luko, Alexis, Sonatas, Screams, and Silence: Music and Sound in the Films of Ingmar Bergman (New York, 2016), 15Google Scholar.
79 According to Kristi Brown-Montesano, G minor is ‘Mozart's favorite key for portraying grief and sadness’, in Kristi Brown-Montesano, ‘Feminine Vengeance II: (Over)Powered Politics The Queen of the Night’, in Understanding the Women of Mozart's Operas (Berkeley, 2007), 81–106, at 90. For more on the use and meaning of this key in Mozart's operas, see Allanbrook, Wye J., Rhythmic Gesture in Mozart: Le nozze di Figaro and Don Giovanni (Chicago, 1983)Google Scholar.
80 Bruner, Jerome, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge, 1986), 46CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
81 I borrow the term from Darrell W. Davis, who grounds the notion of ‘objectified spectatorship’ in the fact that ‘spectatorship exists and is represented objectively in the film, but also because spectator activity is turned into an object for aesthetic effect’. Davis, Darrell W., Saving Face: Spectator and Spectacle in Japanese Theatre and Film (Hong Kong, 2004), 3Google Scholar.
82 See Heath, Stephen, Questions of Cinema (London, 1981)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; The Cinematic Apparatus, ed. Teresa de Lauretis and Stephen Heath (London, 1980); Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York, 1999), 833–44; and Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film, ed. Linda Williams (New Brunswick, NJ, 1995). For a criticism of this theory, see Carroll, Noël, Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory (New York, 1998)Google Scholar.
83 That ‘situatedness’, as Biancorosso argues, ‘like that of a participant to a ritual, is shared with others whom the representation summons as a collective before an ideally joint, albeit staggered and scattered, effort. … Joint directedness to shared artifacts or expressive gestures does not imply agreement, but it ensures that a meaningful debate about them is possible.’ Biancorosso, Situated Listening, 218.