Any discussion about The Magic Flute and film will quite naturally concern itself with Ingmar Bergman’s celebrated 1975 production. The Magic Flute is a very distinct entry in Bergman’s oeuvre. Further, it is a distinct, distinguished example of a very rare and particular kind of movie. It stands with so much of Georges Méliès, with the first Marx Brothers features, with René Clair’s Le Million, Sacha Guitry’s Story of a Cheat, Laurence Olivier’s Henry V, Carné/Prévert’s Children of Paradise, Powell and Pressburger’s The Red Shoes and Tales of Hoffman, Chaplin’s The Circus and Limelight, and Jean Renoir’s The Golden Coach as one of the preeminent and most beautiful examples of what we might call the theatrical film. The theatrical film is no simple adaptation, no mere derivation, nor is it a case of cinema subordinating itself to a parent art. In his Images, Bergman himself describes and celebrates this merging of the theatrical and the cinematic as he recollects his own youthful visit to Stockholm’s eighteenth-century Drottningholm Court Theater, and a dear ambition that was seeded there.

The theatrical film, like its ancestor the Singspiel, can be simultaneously heightened and plain, artificial and conversational. It emphasizes equally the tale and its telling. In doing so it contemplates and integrates notions of artifice and reality, creation and reception, even nature and culture.

Bergman’s Magic Flute does all that, and more. Mozart’s Figaro and Così stand as supreme examples of a comic tradition that boasts countless other supreme examples. His last opera is much more singular. For many, it is the preeminent specimen of its genre, and as such it has been performed and celebrated through the centuries. But Theodor Adorno, famously, makes a case for a more complex view: “The Magic Flute, in which the Utopia of the Enlightenment and the pleasure of a light opera comic song precisely coincide, is a moment by itself. After The Magic Flute it was never again possible to force serious and light music together.”²

In this oft-cited quotation lies much of the melancholy burden of modernity, and of Adorno’s and the Frankfurt School’s intractable integrity. And yet, as is well known, Adorno never really accounted for so much of the post-WWII popular culture that might have challenged this brave, dire assertion. It may indeed be that the Utopias of Enlightenment, of reconciled binaries, and of the Brotherhood of Man, are forever beyond our reach. (Were they ever really within it?) Still, The Magic Flute, and Bergman’s theatrical film version of it especially, most certainly did manage to combine noble seriousness and joyful lightness, even going so far as to bind up some of our most painful historical and cultural wounds.

On the face of it, Ingmar Bergman is an unlikely contributor to this conciliatory project. His early films were angst-ridden melodramas, drawing upon the inspiration of his spiritual forebear, August Strindberg, to portray the painful incompatiblities that so often exist between men and women. As Bergman gained confidence, as he found his voice and style, these conflicts went on to reflect and represent a deeper alienation, speaking to what he saw as the fundamental solitude of life, the irreducible suffering of the human condition.

Bergman would extend these explorations into the arenas of faith and religion, going on to hold forth on the subject of God’s silence, or outright nonexistence. As he did so, he established and refined a more rigorous set of cinematic strategies. This particular brand of modernism would become emblematic of the period’s sense of discontinuity, anxiety, and absurdity. Bergman was an articulate witness to anguished times, and to the existential agony that transcends time.

But if Bergman’s sensibility was compelling and resonant, it also invited – even demanded – interrogation and critique. He lacked ideological concern, and even awareness.³ And at times his morbidity and defeatism seemed to border on the pathological. A young Bergman planned for his staging of a Strindberg play to be “a vision of toiling, weeping, evil-smitten humanity … in all its grotesqueness, its terror and its beauty.”⁴ In middle age, upon receiving a major award at the height of his power and influence, he had this to say about the world and the artist’s place in it:

Bergman’s very sympathetic critical biographer, Peter Cowie, quite justly observed that his “rigid, some would say inflexible, view of the world leads to a certain repetition of themes, doubts, and aspirations. The unremitting obsession with death and betrayal, belief and disillusionment, produced in the fifties and sixties a style ripe for parody … .”⁶ The American film critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who had very much admired many of Bergman’s films, could still, finally, look back at and characterize his work as “solipsistically self-pitying, spiritually constipated, and utterly without interest in overcoming these flaws.”⁷

All that said and given its due, it is important to note that Bergman’s films are not without their infusions of high spirits, humor, and, especially, tenderness. These latter episodes (i.e., the clown Jof’s luminous vision of the Virgin and Child in The Seventh Seal, the sisters’ placid walk through the park at the conclusion of Cries and Whispers, etc.) are the more uncommonly affecting because of their comparative infrequency and because of the way they leaven the darker films, which in turn brighten the dark times that produced them.

With remarkably few exceptions, Bergman’s Magic Flute is a celebrated, beloved film. It is also quite strikingly distinct from the rest of his oeuvre. On a number of occasions Bergman gave exquisite expression to impulses and impressions that provide a context for understanding what drew him to this opera and what connects this film to moments in his other films. For example, he wrote the following during the production of The Seventh Seal (1957): “I believe a human being carries his or her own holiness, which lies within the realm of the earth; there are no other-worldly explanations. So in the film lives a remnant of my honest, childish piety lying peacefully alongside a harsh and rational perception of reality.”⁸

A decade later he wrote the following in a notebook while preparing for the production of Persona (1966):

In another passage he expresses his hopes for what would in many ways be his testament film, Fanny and Alexander, but this statement might also be applied to his entire work:

These seemingly atypical, wonderfully refreshing comments indicate qualities that are also important parts of Bergman’s sensibility, and of his work. And as it turns out, music – and Mozart – are crucial to the implementation of these ideas.

Alexis Luko provides a thorough study of Bergman’s extensive, detailed, and purposeful use of previously composed classical music in the films.¹¹ Luko had observed, of course, that the intense close-ups for which Bergman has been so noted are very often rife with confrontation, alienation, and agony. She contrasts these familiar qualities with what she calls the “aural closeup,” which is generally marked by the featured, foregrounded presence of classical music on the soundtrack.¹² These aural close-ups often run counter to the harrowing nature of so much of Bergman’s work, featuring as they do these same characters now courteously listening, experiencing brief, incandescent moments of comprehension and connection.¹³

In Bergman’s films these moments are powerful, but glancing. Significantly, they constitute the near entirety of The Magic Flute, which is the only completely concentrated, utterly unmitigated example of harmonious concord in his entire oeuvre.¹⁴ Since Bergman was such a lightning rod, such an uncommonly versatile, prolific, acclaimed, and excoriated artist, his Magic Flute ended up being more than just a striking contrast to the main body of one individual’s film output. It would emerge as a galvanizing contrast to, and even a bright beacon for, international film in general, as well as for the tumultuous decade that it bisected.

Writing toward the end of Bergman’s active career as a film director, Peter Cowie said that “The Magic Flute may well take its place among the five or six greatest films that [he] has directed,”¹⁵ in part because “Bergman’s own predilection for chilly metaphysics had been tempered by Mozart’s sense of wonder.”¹⁶ Jeremy Tambling (in a generally critical analysis) saw the film as an attempted “corrective to the tortured mind of the twentieth century.”¹⁷

All of this was by design, and a consequence of a very particular attitude and process. As mentioned earlier, the theatrical film is not simply a matter of cinematic subordination to a parent art. Bergman’s Magic Flute, for instance, is precisely aware of, and becomes a sophisticated essay about, the relationship between theater/opera and film, and of film’s early grammatical evolution.

That said, Bergman’s Magic Flute is also, decidedly, a modest adaptation, in which its brilliant, morose, and often seething adaptor submits to the sensibilities of the original authors (Schikaneder and Mozart), their inspirations, and the institutions that allowed them to communicate.

The Magic Flute’s opening montage sets the tone for this important, encouraging act of obeisance, and it does so in a couple of important ways.¹⁸ Eight serene, sunsetting establishing shots of the Drottningholm Court Theater¹⁹ and its environs give way to an image of the spectators whom we presume to be sitting inside, and to a shot of one spectator in particular. The camera frames and then zooms in on a red/golden-haired girl of some eight or nine years. It comes to, and holds on, a close-up of her face, which lasts for a full forty-five seconds.

This is Bergman and Liv Ullmann’s daughter, Linn,²⁰ to whom we will return with some frequency throughout the course of the film. She is listening to the opening Adagio of Mozart’s overture. She is also looking, off-frame. Presently, the camera cuts to what she is looking at – namely, an eighteenth-century winged putto painted on the closed curtain at the front of the stage. We cut back to Linn, who now glances over to a draped and helmeted Muse figure seated in billowing clouds. To Linn, again, and now a last cut to the expanse of the curtain in its entirety.

This back-and-forth is known as cinematic suture, and The Magic Flute establishes Linn Ullmann as the site thereof. Suture is a standard technique through which classical (commercial) film spectators are brought into the film space and under the conventions and assumptions that inform and structure it.²¹ It is accomplished by shot-reverse shot sequences in which we see a person looking, cut to what or who she is looking at, then return for her response to the thing she has just seen. In this construction we are introduced to the character with whom we will identify, come to share her space and perspective, see through her eyes, and feel as she feels.

To a degree, Linn is looking at, and about to bear witness to, “the noble, magical illusion of theater.”²² But there is something more, something much more, to her presence here. The deeper significance of this first suturing in The Magic Flute is that we are not completely, or even primarily, being invited to identify with a character in the opera proper. Instead, we identify with a spectator, and with a child at that. This is the sensibility that our suddenly, surprisingly humble director expects or perhaps invites us to assume, at least for the duration of this film.

At a basic level, Bergman’s The Magic Flute is a story for children, and a reflection of the guileless, hopeful spirit of childhood. As in:

And again:

These moving statements, combined, evoke childhood’s exemplary qualities and redemptive, paradisiacal power. These are manifest as Mozart’s serene expository Adagio gives way to the electrifying Allegro, and as the last close-up of this beloved child resolves into what could well be her own bright vision. Now comes The Magic Flute’s celebrated assembly of attentive faces, juxtaposed and multiplying, comprising an impressive, practically comprehensive litany of bone structures and expressions, ages, and ethnicities. This striking, raptly listening legion of facial types is all bound together by the score on the soundtrack.

Motion picture soundtracks are traditionally tasked with binding together a film’s disparate and often disharmonious images. In the nature of its production and assembly, film is a very fragmented medium. Conventional film music, so smooth and flowing, distracts the spectator from this fact. And it has further labors to perform. Most film music is subordinated to the narrative, as well as to the other ideological and commercial functions that motion pictures perform.²⁵ The overture sequence in The Magic Flute reverses this standard hierarchy: its images actually accompany the music and serve to secure and exemplify the story that the music tells.

In some ways, Mozart himself is the story in question. He has not only written this score, but he also represents the musical and cultural ideal that embraces and unites all of these spectators. Since viewers of the film have seen in this opening sequence almost every kind of person that they might imagine – since they have almost certainly seen someone who looks like them – then they too are invited to become part of this communion.

A waggish commentator once suggested that “Ingmar Bergman presented the overture to The Magic Flute (1975) as if it was a Coca-Cola commercial … .”²⁶ This is quite funny, but it is not quite fair. In the context of Bergman’s customary alienation, not to mention 1968, absurdism, Allende, Baader-Meinhof, the cataclysmic end of the Vietnam War, constant clouds of nuclear threat, the FLQ, intractable instability in the Middle East, the implosion of an American presidential administration, if not of American democracy itself, the Khmer Rouge (and East Timor, and on and on), Munich, the OPEC oil embargo, rampant industrial pollution, and the threat of environmental cataclysm, rapacious capitalism with its resultant recessions and oppressions, revolutions, and totalitarianisms all around – surely, in this calamitous context (to say nothing of Bergman’s constant, perpetual sickness unto death), a modest measure of sentiment and even calculated simplicity is not just to be dismissed.²⁷

It is in part because of the tortured twentieth century that Bergman stages his Magic Flute as a story for children. But his staging is not merely escapist, nor at all childish. As its Masonic traces suggest, the opera also contains lessons that both youthful spectators and guileless protagonists can share as together they trace its archetypal passage from guileless innocence, through fiery trial and abiding love, to outright exaltation.

Once again, Ingmar Bergman has with some justice been taken to task for the consistent lack of political engagement in his films. Better, say some, the artist hit nails right on the head, fashioning narratives and even making outright declarations that directly address some aspect of social reality, that raise awareness and lead to needful change. But it could just as much be argued that Bergman left ideological interrogation in other capable hands as he ably explored his own alternative courses for illuminating the human condition.

In his autobiography he describes what he felt to be the opera’s central scene, the one that moved him most profoundly, the one that most motivated him to undertake this adaptation. Tamino, the protagonist, the aspirant, the young hero who is passing through necessary trials on the way to his eventual, glorious apotheosis, is downcast (in the Act 1 finale). He has encountered deceit and dishonor, is discouraged by all the gaps that exist between appearance and reality, between his ardent aspiring and the obstacles that stand in his way:

Bergman had previously used this very sequence in his 1968 horror film, Hour of the Wolf. There, it is performed on the stage of a marionette theater, witnessed by a disintegrating artist and the group of demons who will ultimately consume him. This 1968 quotation was sincere and unsarcastic. It provided a real respite, real refreshment, and it ended, and gave way once again to, despair.

Following this Magic Flute’s bright ascendence, Bergman would in some ways do the very same thing, returning in part, or at least alternatingly, to his dire and even demonic melancholy. The Mozart film was preceded by the exquisite dissolutions of Scenes from a Marriage (1974; also, subsequently, adapted for the stage), succeeded by the marital entropy of Face to Face (1976). On the stage, it was back to Ibsen’s A Doll’s House and Strindberg’s Miss Julie.²⁹

But no matter. The Magic Flute provided a refreshing contrast to its director’s deeply resonant but sometimes burdensome output. It provided a refreshing contrast to the troubled films that abounded during that troubling decade. Since that time, The Magic Flute has been continuously available and has become only increasingly visible.³⁰ This is so much the case that it really has begun to pose a serious challenge to Adorno’s previously quoted statement about the Mozart/Schikaneder original. If the opera, as originally produced, was “a moment by itself,” then Bergman’s modest and self-effacing theatrical film has become an ever-renewing, ever-present moment of reconciliation and pleasure.