Alexander at home alone, that starts everything … And what kind of house it is – an upper-class domicile from the turn of the century, wide rooms with heavy furniture and plushy wallpaper and crammed with vases and playful decor of all kinds and figures, which sometimes a can develop a ghostly life of their own. From this point, out of this house, Ingmar Bergman developed his film “Fanny and Alexander”, the story of a boy and his sister and her family. Little Alexander puts a cardboard figure in a puppet theater, then he calls for the others, the servants, the mother. There is no one to answer him. For a moment he seems all alone …
The story of a boy, his sister and her family: Bergman’s “Fanny and Alexander”.
(Photo: ARTE)
“Fanny and Alexander” is Bergman’s big excursion into childhood, into that realm between security and a thirst for adventure, where everything familiar has a magic of indeterminacy. The film was made in 1982, there is a long version for television and a shortened version that went to the cinema (also with us). The film is now being presented in the Arte media library, together with Bergman’s second major TV work, which he shot in 1973, with Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson. These are the two main works of his later years, in which many moments of his earlier films are reflected again, the agonizing, psychotic as well as the cheerful. In between lies the traumatic phase of his life – he is pilloried for tax evasion, picked up for interrogation from a theater rehearsal, leaves Sweden, goes to Munich, staged at the Residenztheater, shoots for Bavaria.
Many of his earlier films are reflected in Bergman’s TV work
“Scenes of a Marriage” shows a separation, a falling apart, a divorce in so many meticulous twists and turns, in details that today, almost half a century later, are banal or almost comical. And yet it continues to be shockingly up-to-date, especially when it comes to the role of the (wife) woman. The man is a professor, he is hoping to get an appointment at a foreign university, does it with a young student, and when that doesn’t work out, he’d like to go back to the old state. Becomes violent. The woman opens up to life, puts her problems on paper – if she reads them to her husband, he falls asleep. Millions of married people are said to have decided to divorce after seeing this film.
“Fanny and Alexander” also shows scenes from a marriage, between opulent family celebrations with touching and funny family figures and servants. Fanny and Alexander’s parents are theater people, when the father dies, the mother remarries, the unfathomable Bishop Vergerus, one of Bergman’s enigmatic characters. He leads a listless, strict regime in his house. Alexander is desperate, his dead father appears to him in this abandonment.
There is a documentary film about the shooting of “Fanny and Alexander”, where you can see how lovingly and carefully Bergman gets involved with childhood again. “The magical theater shows”, he writes in his work diaries for the film, “children who are exposed to horrific, mysterious experiences … dreams, fears and hopes”. So it’s kind of a puppet show. Marionettes, living figures and cinematography of the good old, funny kind. Even the “Scenes of a Marriage” are made with that loving eye for detail that makes Bergman’s cinema so unique, gentle and relentless at the same time.
“Scenes of a Marriage” in the Arte media library, “Fanny and Alexander”, available from December 24th in the Arte media library.