A Film Canon

With The Magician, Bergman achieves the first fully-fledged incarnation of the chamber that haunts his subsequent work, as well as his most satisfactory fusion of cinema and sideshow, in the form of the "nerve stimulation and mind animation" that a group of travelling players perform with the aid of "devices, mirrors, projections". At the same time, he exhibits his most concentrated fascination with the moment of death, and most sustained horror at the face's continuity with the rest of the body to date, such that the players' claim to offer a disembodied, otherworldy spectacle - against the claustrophobic embodiment of the scientific determinism insisted upon by their sceptical audience - ultimately becomes a promise to detach the face from the body, or, at least, to chart the passage of death with sufficient precision to identify the moment at which the face is cut off from the body that has withered beneath it: "You wish to record the actual moment. Look carefully, I will keep my face open. Now death has reached my hands...my arms...my feet...belly...I can no longer see." From this perspective, the trick played upon the hosts - the lead player inexplicably 'dying', allowing a full autopsy to be performed on him, and then haunting the doctor from beyond the grave, entrapping him in the mirrored chamber that culminates his performance, and forcing him to accept the supernatural through attacks on his visual literacy, credulity and orientation - is less significant than his own latent desire to be present at his own autopsy; or, alternatively, to designify and detach himself from his own face, as evinced in his renunciation of speech, and his partner's renunciation of gender, prompting one of the audience members to observe that "there's something unusual about conjurors...their faces irritate you...it's special, a face like that..."