Bergman's Magic Flute

...When Tamino and Pamina, after their trial, run sprightly through layer after layer of scenery to emerge at last on the stage of the film proper, the arts of any criticism at all become useless...

...But this Caliban is altogether necessary to Sarastro's plan, since he is the inversion of society, and of all order, who negatively defines the value of those things...

...but it is hopeless to look for anything really similar: one must be there and see it...

...One point of interest that none of the reviewers, I think, has noticed is the staging of Scene 3 in the film...

...Here, in a moment as concise as Prospero's renunciation of his own rough magic, is the last and resigned praise of one utopia, filled, as Sarastro leaves it, with his generosity and purpose, and utterly released from the thrall of magic...

...It seems an odd complaint...

...It may be that Bergman himself is uneasy about the sublimity of the moral life, a life without art, which Sarastro offers...

...For magic read art...

...The helmets of the Queen of Night and her crew are weapons steeled for war...

...That Bergman is no less gifted with this faculty than Mozart his film adequately demonstrates...

...On a different level, the opera, among the few one hears of in childhood, is an initiation by magic into the universe of good and evil...

...In any case Tamino is here seen as a silhouette in the middle distance, a pose that connects him with a great many questers in other Bergman films...

...Above all, and despite the fact that one does not meet remarkably imaginative characters in the story, The Magic Flute is about imagination and power...

...Perhaps the libretto is to blame...

...Yes and no...

...If his solicitude for Pamina looks, subtly and for a moment only, like the repressed sexuality of an abductor, the final emphasis of the scene, once it is plain he is her father, manages to be disturbing in a whole new key...

...With its suggestion of heroic growth within a family, and the faintest hint of incestuous feeling, this is an extremely Wagnerian moment, and one of many in the film...

...Indeed the quest may seem wanting in emotional 213 depth or complication...

...Pa-mi-na," the voices answer, in an echo whose sounds contain yes and no, "Pa-mi-na is alive...

...Yet the shift of sympathy from the Queen to Sarastro, the sudden bend of the story to cover an unexpected area of feeling, belongs appropriately enough to Quest Romance...

...Whether Brecht's plays actually work like that is another matter...

...And here Bergman has been wonderfully clever, at that furthest reach of the imagination where wit becomes inseparable from feeling...

...At this juncture the situation for all of them is queer: the lovers are Sarastro's latest novices but also his captives...

...In fact Sarastro's brotherhood of priests represent one political vision among others, and they are connected, by various tricks of costume, with the party of rebellion led by the Queen and Monostatos...

...For a pervasive concern of the genre is order: the sense of a hierarchy that is everywhere in action even though its workings and laws remain obscure...

...One thinks of Siegfried testing the newly forged blade before the astonished dwarf...

...The screenplay for Hour of the Wolf is not available to me and I go by memory alone, but was it not the strongest vampire of that film—a Sarastro as he might at first seem to Tamino— who gave an enthralling analysis of the scene from The Magic Flute, relating it to the artists's perpetual quest for some corresponding voice in nature...

...Like a number of profoundly grown-up works it can indeed be enjoyed by children...

...A spectacular tableau at the close of the first act—"theatrical" in a way possible only to film—shows an exchange of longing and sorrowful glances between Pamina and Tamino, Sarastro and Pamina...

...For his part Sarastro brings the sociable and serious gifts of culture...

...Single-state, like the familiar and depressing theory of the universe, Monostatos is the wicked servant of Sarastro who must be cast out before the Golden Age can begin...

...Come to the temple, happy pair,/Advance...

...And is not the "bird-man," among Von Sydow's sketches in Hour of the Wolf, a nightmare Papageno...

...Later, in a playful touch Mozart would have appreciated, the actor playing Sarastro is seen behindscenes reading Parsifal...

...Having shown Tamino fall in love with Pamina's image, Bergman allows the picture of her to grow magical and strange, as a night-mirror of Tamino's imaginings, and, when the Queen gives an unflattering description of Sarastro, Tamino in the glass beholds Monostatos...

...The lasting and singular joy of this production is of course that it is obviously Mozart's opera and just as obviously Bergman's film...

...The imagination now, at any rate, will be directed to pure use, and it has no need for the conjuring instruments of a quest...

...Bergman's staging of the trial by fire and water, for example, with twisted human forms moving among the shadows, alludes to The Ring's pattern of Orphic descent and triumph...

...All this is to say that Bergman knows exactly what he is doing: an absurd enterprise that seemed to me worth taking seriously, on one or two points of detail, because of some critical and personal reactions I have encountered...

...WHY, IF it is a lie, does this judgment of Sarastro carry such force in Bergman's film...

...Here, as in other respects, it breathes a common air with The Tempest, where the shipwrecked sailor's dream of governing and Prospero's own abdication are moments in a dialectic: from the imagination of power to the power of imagination...

...For some reason, which has never yet been satisfactorily explained, the whole plot was completely changed at this stage...

...of Pip, at Magwitch's bedside in Great Expectations to tell the dying man his daughter is living, "a lady and very beautiful...

...This is Tamino's dialogue with the darkness, and it was discussed at length in an earlier Bergman film, Hour of the Wolf...

...and she is, by the same token, a sorceress of art, unconditioned art, art without civilization: it is from her that Tamino receives the magic flute...

...And Bergman strengthens this impression with a lively piece of invention, when the Queen's three ladies, asked for directions on the quest, are silenced by the falling of a black veil, to make room for the three male spirits more nearly associated with Sarastro...

...The result is quite the reverse of Brecht's "alienation-effect," which called for titles or emblems or slogans to be featured onstage at a play, to jolt the audience from its merely spectatorial slumber and increase its political awareness...

...The episode is central to Tamino's assumption of the heroic role...

...The queen represents creative or instinctive energy in its darker aspect...

...what lies before them is the ascetic and heroic ordeal, separately endured, the trial by fire and water, and finally their recognition in the world of light...

...Thus the enchanter Sarastro turns into the presiding force of good...

...the rebellious crew, wanting to be more than human, make themselves less...

...To be able to engage the question of good and evil in the universe with a certain childlike naivete or ingenuousness is one mark of sublimity in art...

...His virtues are less clearly appealing than the Queen's vices, even after Bergman has softened the masonic-ritualist tones of his religion, and what Tamino must learn therefore is to see past appearances...

...SO THROUGHOUT Bergman's Magic Flute the moral complexity of the story is sharpened...

...At such intervals Bergman lets his actors hold up placards or somehow indicate their complicity in the fact that the words are being printed onscreen as slogans...

...Sarastro is human and good...

...It has an Olympian grandeur of image—never an embarrassment for this music—which sets it beyond the reach of ordinary pleasure and pain and the plain accustomed dreariness...

...But the distinction is never blurred...

...Bergman chose to heighten this element in the drama by making Sarastro Pamina's father...

...He then demands to know if Pamina is alive...

...Unlike many quest heroes (yet this is an Enlightenment Quest), he succeeds without apparent difficulty...

...Bergman is, simply, congenial...

...But an interpreter is not without honor save at the hands of those lesser interpreters, the critics: and several of them, otherwise enthusiastic, could make nothing of that attentive little girl...

...I cannot imagine that the film will displease anyone except those who believe that close-ups and montage are inappropriate for opera, on the argument that the theatrical illusion requires the viewer at a steady distance from the stage...

...The initial idea of Die Zauberflote [I am quoting Edward J. Dent's account as cited in Joseph Kerman's splendid Opera as Drama] was to be more or less as follows: the hero makes the acquaintance of the fairy queen, who gives him a portrait of her daughter and sends him to rescue her from captivity in the castle of the wicked magician, which he will be able to do by the help of the magic flute...

...But the irony remains that the flute was fashioned originally by Pamina's father, and in the film this means Sarastro himself...

...q 215...

...Advance./ Gods and men your triumph share...

...and they are sent to hell or its Mozartian equivalent...

...These touches alone would be enough to indicate that Bergman's is an intelligent and carefully meditated interpretation...

...At the start of an opera immensely concerned with truth and lies—from Papageno's lie about slaying the dragon to Pamina's oath to follow "the truth, let come what may"—the Queen, in Bergman's version, speaks a half-truth that is the most terrible lie of all: Sarastro is like, imaginatively is, Monostatos...

...And it is a very moral tale...

...He asks when the darkness will lift and is told: soon—or never...

...But when two guards salute the glorious couple who are about to enter on their final trial, they take off their helmets and sing...

...To stress the function of the opera as rite de passage, he cuts now and then to shots of his daughter, who is watching the performance from her place in the audience...

...Again I think of the costumes: the helmet worn by a guard, when Sarastro first appears in his bright chariot, is shutting out the face and, without meaning to be, looks vaguely threatening...

...he is ready—almost unreasonably— to establish the reign of Tamino and Pamina...

...As for the story, "do not forget," wrote Shaw, "that an allegory is never quite consistent except when it is written by someone without dramatic faculty, in which case it is unreadable...

...And his separation of levels, with the dogmatic meaning of an episode isolated from the narrative meaning, is a 214 MOVIES light-hearted acknowledgment of the power of moral statement: only something serious can afford to be joked about...

...The cinematic phrasing of all this is beyond praise...

...Bergman's decision to make Sarastro Pamina's father has meant an enormous gain in the ambiguity that surrounds his tenderness for her...

...Every cut or change Bergman introduces is proper to the widening circle of meaning that has at its center the most deeply moving gesture in the film: Sarastro, as he steps away to inaugurate the reign of Tamino and Pamina, setting the flute to his lips and deciding, no, it is not magic for him, and not his to play...

...He seems almost confiding...

...Rich men, poor men, all agree," goes a typical passage, "So do men of learning,/ Music, Love and Sympathy/ Keep our green world turning...

...It has, certainly, a plot so rambling that it can seem to ward off all but the most relaxed attention...

...By the end of The Magic Flute one feels that the Queen, however involuntarily, has been Sarastro's agent from the start...