When a film is not a document, it is a dream. . . . At the editing table, when I run the strip of film through, frame by frame, I still feel that dizzy sense of magic of my childhood. Bergman, who has conveyed this heady sense of wonder and vision to moviegoers for decades, traces his lifelong love affair with film in his breathtakingly visual autobiography, The Magic Lantern.
More grand mosaic than linear account, Bergman s vignettes trace his life from a rural Swedish childhood through his work in theater to Hollywood s golden age, and a tumultuous romantic history that...