“The Magic Lantern” consistently violates the sacred first principle of autobiography by eschewing the glories and triumphs in favor of the failures, embarrassments, shortcomings, cruelties and humiliations of the author’s life. He is candid but tactful, telling tales on no one but himself. It may, in fact, probably be unique in its confessional, self-deprecating and even self-lacerating honesty. Then again, one would not expect the man who made “Wild Strawberries,” “The Seventh Seal” and “Cries and Whispers” to do an autobiography quite like any other arising in the world of film. It is an enchanting litany to the film maker’s vision. Most of all I miss working with (cinematographer) Sven Nykvist, perhaps because we are both utterly captivated by the problems of light, the gentle, dangerous, dreamlike, living, dead, clear, misty, hot, violent, bare, sudden, dark, springlike, falling, straight, slanting, sensual, subdued, limited, poisonous, calming, pale light. “Sometimes,” Ingmar Bergman says, “I probably do mourn the fact that I no longer make films.
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