Thus Bergman’s life becomes, effectually, an attempt to create love for himself-a love apart from the God of his father, a love extant most fully in the dream-life of the theater and, later, the cinema. From reminisces of his father emerge a portrait of a man who was able, week in and week out, to deliver sermons on the topic of love, but never have those words carry over into his behavior beyond the pulpit.

Much has been made of the influence of his upbringing as the son of a Lutheran pastor, and with good reason: he references it a lot. This is true of many artists, but in Bergman’s case-the Bergman presented here, at least-the whiplash between art and life is especially excruciating. The life mapped out in his memoir The Magic Lantern is one of a man constantly oscillating between the wildings of a rich interior world and the rigorous discipline involved in turning them into film. Balzac is more exact, the saint exacter still: in essaying the extremes of our emotional lives, bouts of self-denial and self-indulgence can both bring us to the same, self-surrendering place. Three quotations constellate in my mind when I think of the subject of “excess.” There’s William Blake’s “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom” then Balzac’s “All excesses are brothers,” which finds its rhetorical forebear in Saint John Cassian’s “Excesses meet.” One of the “Proverbs of Hell” in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, the Blake line is often bumper-stickered into a general defense of hedonism-a misreading on par with the selective omission of the word rational in Rimbaud’s “rational derangement of the senses” by the (often) young and (usually) stoned.

It is one part of three in his series on filmmaker’s memoirs. This guest post comes from Michael Centore.

The magic lantern bergman