THE MAGIC FLUTE

Kind of a metamovie day this last Saturday - reading the lovely essay "On Moonlight Bay", in which Jonathan Rosenbaum charts his responses to the same movie over four viewings over three decades, so do I head to Berkeley to see Ingmar Bergman's The Magic Flute, for the first time since its mid-70s theatrical run in the US.

At four years old I'm pretty sure The Magic Flute was my first arthouse movie (though considering my parents, who knows?) There were only a few images from the movie that I remember from my first viewing, but I do recall being as obsessed as a four-year-old could be with the opera, listening to the album while reading the libretto (my father told me that my position in the libretto was always where the music was). What could possibly have been firing my synapses with regards to either Mozart's opera or Bergman's film at that age is lost in memory. And yet even after four decades of learning more about both Mozart and Bergman, having seen the opera performed live at least once, and having revisited Amadeus earlier this year, there were a couple of resonances between my viewings, then and now.

I remembered this dragon, for example, though as you can imagine it seemed a mite more fearsome to my four-year-old eyes. (And the thing resonated in my dreams - at some point in my childhood I vividly dreamed the opening of Act I, played out in a light show across a closed theatre curtain, a square of projected light representing Tamino, a long line of projected light representing the dragon pursuing him. A fun conflation of opera, avant-garde theatrics, and 4-bit video game.)

The fairy tale aspect of the opera is beautifully amplified in the film - the whole thing feels pitched to four-year-olds on one level. But it's rife with the experimental touch Bergman brought to earlier movies. It takes in both the story of the opera and the lives of the singers and crew backstage. The audience of the opera is seen as well, and Helene Friberg (who was only a little older than I when I saw the film) appears in close-up throughout, her reactions serving as a chorus to the thing.

Bergman explodes the theatrical space as wildly as Busby Berkeley, though where Berkeley went macro, sending his musical numbers into a gigantic cinematic space, Bergman goes micro, framing his characters in closeup, rendering their props with more minute detail than any prop handler would muster. Perhaps as a nod to the opera's Masonic elements, an occult connection is played up through various images and the recurrence of prime numbers: there are three ladies (of the Queen of the Night) and three child-spirits, seven ladies in attendance, and Bergman ups the ante in act II by giving us thirteen priests.

Familiarity with both the opera and Bergman's work gave me many more ways into the film than I had at four. The story of the opera as presented in Milos Forman's Amadeus stuck with me, suggesting that Mozart's association with the Theater auf der Wieden began when he attended a parody of one of his operas the company presented. I mused that The Magic Flute was therefore Mozart's Dark Room opera (given my own association with that local, parody-driven but fun theatre), and I was pleased that the film did nothing to dispel this impression. The film also felt like Bergman's own "Lady From Shanghai," a sub-genre of movies, somewhat instinctively defined by me, modeled on Welles' film: a genre-driven film, sometimes compromised or on the cheap, in which a great filmmaker finds space to flex his/her aesthetic muscles.

Through this viewing, of a new DCP struck by Swedish cultural authorities, I found myself amused by the subtitles (by Annika Brant, I stuck to determine). They of course conveyed what the singers were saying, but I noticed that, unusually for subtitles, they were plotted to the meter of the music, placing character names exactly where they occurred in the lyrics. The subtitles added another layer of fun to the whole thing as I counted off beats with each syllable in the subtitles (which went truly above and beyond in making it all rhyme!). Once again, over four decades later, I found myself scanning the words closely, staying on point with the words and action on screen, resonating in mind and heart with the unfolding opera. The beat goes on.