Film Screening: THE MAGICIAN

Ingmar Bergman: A Tribute in Film continues with The Magician (1958), an engaging, brilliantly conceived tale of deceit from one of cinema’s premier illusionists. Max von Sydow stars as Dr. Vogler, a nineteenth-century traveling mesmerist and peddler of potions, whose magic is put to the test in Stockholm by the cruel, eminently rational royal medical adviser Dr. Vergérus. The result is a diabolically clever battle of wits, shot in rich, gothic black and white.

Illusion, the basis of cinema and the theatre, is one of Bergman’s constant themes in this devious and dark melodrama, set in 1848 Sweden, as the question of what is and is not real is presented in all its existential ambiguity.