nothing is true
by
Douglas Messerli
Ingmar
Bergman script (loosely based on the play by G. K. Chesterton, Magic) and director Ansiktet (The Magician /
The Face) / 1958
Ingmar Bergman’s
1958 film, The Magician (called The Face in Britain after the Swedish
original title Ansiktet), is both a
kind of ghost story and a comedy, but, in the end, is neither. The magician of
the title, Albert Emmanuel Vogler (Max van Sydow, sporting throughout the film an obviously false beard and moustache, and
for inexplicable reasons pretending throughout to be mute) travels about the
late 19th-century countryside with an odd assortment of performers,
his witch-like, spellcasting mother (Naima Wifstrand), a young male assistant
(Ingrid Thulin, who is actually a woman and his wife), his talkative publicist
Tubal (Åke Fridell), and the coach driver, Simson (Lars Ekborg). Along the way,
they add to their little gathering a former actor, an alcoholic who is near
death and dies within their coach, but later mysterious comes alive only to fall
back into his coffin. 
When the troupe arrives in a small city
where they hope to perform, they are instead taken by authorities to the home
of Consul Egerman (Erland Josephson), who with the Minister of Health, Dr.
Vergerus (Gunnar Bjönstrand) who, having heard rumors of the deleterious
effects in other cities after Vogler had hypnotized some, want to prove that
their show is both a sham and that it will not result in public panic. The
guests are put up in the Consul’s house for the night, but are fed, like
servants, in the kitchen.
The cook and the maids quickly
participate, a bit as in Bergman’s Smiles
of a Summer Night, in trysts of joyful lovemaking with Tuball and the coach
driver, while Granny Vogler signs the cross and utters secret spells upon the
walls of the house. Vogler and his wife prepare for the next day’s performance
and retire to bed, but not before the pompous and self-assured Vergerus,
discovering a beautiful woman in the place of Vogler’s male assistant, verbally
challenges her. She admits that “nothing” in their act “is true,” and later
summarizes Vogler’s magic performance:
It’s always the props and
the patter that must do
the work. The clergy’s in the same
sad boat. God
is silent while men
babble on.
Meanwhile
the Consul’s wife clearly is attracted to Vogler and offers him a late-night
visit in her bedroom, an invitation the Consul, alas, overhears.
In short, the film, at first, appears to
be nothing more than a group of performers being challenged by a group of
bourgeois yokels, and we wonder where Bergman might be heading with his nonetheless
enjoyable story.
Yet during the performance of the next
day, strange things do indeed happen. Using the local police-head’s wife as a
subject, Vogler easily mesmerizes her, as she openly describes to the small
audience how she hates her pig-like husband and deceives him.
Soon after, Vogler stages his own death,
immediately after which Dr. Vergerus insists upon an autopsy in the attic.
When, after he has completed the autopsy, Vogler reappears, for a short while
truly horrifying the nearly always skeptical and science-dedicated doctor.
Of course, Vogler has replaced his own
body with the corpse they have brought with them, and tricked the elderly man.
And the next morning the Consul and Vergerus demand the troupe members’
arrests, insisting that Vogler had “induced a momentary fear of death, nothing
more.”
Tubal, who has fallen love with the
cook, has already declared that he intends to leave the company, and Simson,
the driver has fallen in love with Sara (Bibi Andersson). So, it appears the
company is doomed—that is until they suddenly receive a summons by the Swedish
King to perform before him!
Some critics have speculated that the
film is a kind of parable, with Vogler, who is betrayed, dies and rises from
the dead, and whose middle name means “God with us,” is a Christ figure, whose
suffering is played out before the Pilate-like Consul and deniers such as Dr.
Vergerus. The consul’s servant, who hangs himself, is a kind of Judas, while
Manda is a disciple. Accordingly, his call from King, is a return to God the
Father. Certainly, the work might be read that way, yet that does not quite
explain Vogler’s mother; obviously the witch-like Granny cannot be Mary. And
Bergman fills his film with too many other unrelated events to allow us to so
simplify its message. We must also remember, moreover, that there are two resurrections
in this work, not merely one. And if Manda is a kind of disciple, she is also
his loving wife, long before scholar’s speculated that Christ might have been
married to Mary Magdalene.
Finally, if Manda is a strangely disloyal
disciple in insisting that everything is simply a trick or by suggesting the
repudiation of belief, “nothing is true.”
What I was struck by in this, my second
viewing of the film, is how similar it was, in some respects, to the other
innovative works of the 1950s such as Ionesco’s and Beckett’s plays. Indeed,
more than any other Bergman film of the time, The Magician seems to carry much with it that links it to the
theater of the absurd. And even Buñuel’s later work seems to share elements. If
nothing else, The Magician is not one
of Bergman’s brooding studies of God and doubt. In fact, Vogel as a kind of
God, wins out in the end, while the doubters are sentenced to the hell of their
small-town lives and ambitions.
Los Angeles, May
21, 2016
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