Displaying the Magician’s Art: The Workings of Illusion in Ingmar Bergman’s The Magic Flute (1975)

Abstract

Following a traditional perspective, most of what has been said about Ingmar Bergman’s The Magic Flute (Trollflöjten, 1975) focuses on the content, a performance of Mozart’s opera on stage. However, little attention has been paid to questions of representation itself, which, I argue, is the crucial element in the film and a core idea in Bergman’s work: not much conveying meaning, but delving into the process of meaning making as such. Bergman’s The Magic Flute is a film that not only represents a performance of Mozart’s opera, but also reflects on the experience it generates and how it does so for the theatrical and the cinematic audience. The opera becomes the means through which Bergman explores the magic of the experience of aesthetic illusion by displaying the artifice behind it. In my presentation, I will focus on how aesthetic illusion articulates this film from two perspectives. First, the audience, whose imaginative engagement becomes crucial for the artistic experience to take place, as the two opening sequences of the film –the prelude and the overture– disclose. Then, the artist himself, who, knowing how illusion works, not only plays with its tricks in order to guide the audience’s perception of the artwork, but also displays their artificiality in the film. I will center on the first entrance of Papageno and the two interventions of the Queen of the Night to show how the awareness of the artificial nature of the artwork does not affect the audience’s experience, but quite the opposite. Instead of disenchantment, knowing the workings of illusion takes you even further.