Review: FANNY AND ALEXANDER

by Lucy Johns, Art and Film mentor

“Fanny and Alexander,” Ingmar Bergman’s final film, delights not only for its artistry but also for its revelations about the great director’s frame of mind. The consummate explorer of angst affirms here that evil can be punished and fears vanquished. The result is a film more affectionate than analytical, more hopeful than tormented. In the context of Bergman’s body of work, marked by ever more inventive agonizing over the human condition, this shift is an unexpected joy.

The transformation means a new theme, a new dramatic focus, and a new directness. Rather than transmuting his doubts and questions into characters, Bergman delves behind character to explore its origins in the family. In “Fanny and Alexander,” family is the lead and family dynamics is the story. The film conjures scenes of goodness and evil notable for the director’s lack of ironic distance. It radiates a reconciliation with women, typically portrayed by Bergman as the force behind most of man’s anxieties. These explorations wrap around a traditional Bergman assumption: that salvation lies in the creation of illusion. Theater, puppets, magic, even deranged people who see and feel more than normal ones do, can save the most wounded victim. All this in three hours structured almost as a play that echoes “Hamlet” at many points.

“Fanny and Alexander” divides into two long acts. The first follows a boisterous Swedish family celebrating Christmas a century ago in the sumptuous home of grandmother Helena (Gunn Wållgren, one of Sweden’s greatest actors). Helena is beautiful, rich, and empathetic, unencumbered by class snobbery (the servants eat and play with the family) or ethnic prejudice (an elderly Jew is Helena’s treasured companion in her widowhood). Her three sons embody familiar Bergman crises beneath the brilliant surface. Their financial, sexual, and existential dilemmas are presented, however, with some welcome warmth and humor. Each son is sustained by a much younger wife who shares his anguish and tolerates his avoidance strategy – alcohol, sex, theater - with old-world feminine grace. Fanny and Alexander are energetic siblings in the swirl of humanity filling the house. When their father collapses while playing Hamlet’s ghost, the stage is set for the next act. A life of color and glamour darkened only by typical existential conflicts descends into a hell created by their mother’s remarriage to the local bishop.

Alexander detests this cleric from the first moment. The boy intuits a polished hypocrite, played to perfection by Jan Malmsjö. Alexander and Fanny shrink from his unctuous voice, controlling hand, and barely concealed malice. Alexander spins tales of escape and felonies that are heard by his stepfather as lies, a transgression subject to severe discipline. He gets a horrific beating. The scene evokes inspired film-making. Only female faces are shown: the bishop’s mother, complacent; his sister, complicit; the tattle-tale servant, fearful; and Fanny, powerless. Only the wallops of a willow wand are heard. Alexander is not shown and makes no sound. His repentance, coerced by torture, is smugly accepted as evidence that violence can teach morality. The conflict between these males goes beyond Oedipal. The young Alexander doesn’t so much challenge his father’s usurper as he embodies an innocence that evil, camouflaged in religious rectitude, is determined to destroy.

 The use of sound during the beating is one of several scenes where fortissimo noise nails emotional identification to the visuals. A village creek roars, portending catastrophe. Four great draft horses thunder to the rescue over cobbled streets – not quite the Lone Ranger and Silver, but suited for the purpose and time. Screams resound through a silent house, blasting children out of bed to witness uninhibited grief. The crack of elastic branch on bare flesh signifies fearsome brutality. Sound imbues imagery with a power that marks a master at work.

The resolution of the central drama between a boy and his male nemesis is not the only struggle overcome in “Fanny and Alexander.” Several women in the film suggest that Bergman has surmounted some primal male phobias patent in his previous work. An independent grandmother, a redeemed mother, a devoted sister, a ribald servant who yearns to control her life all transcend the patriarchal stereotypes that haunt his films. Grandmother Helena presides over a household whose tolerance and rituals are represented as the only reliable solace there is. Alexander’s uncle affirms this in a long monologue that veers towards maudlin but still seems heartfelt. Alexander’s grandmother and mother murmur happily, “It looks like we’re in charge now.” These scenes convey a peace that feels real for their author. No longer a threat, the women in “Fanny and Alexander” are merely fascinating. The Alexander who grew up and brought so many unhappy females to life on the screen here presents women as beneficent as they are complex. If they signal an evolution of Bergman’s consciousness, they may explain how he produced this masterpiece of indelible, and not at all predictable, humanity.

2017 Tarkovsky Prize 1st Place: Owen Reese

The Dark Journey of FANNY AND ALEXANDER by Owen Reese (16)
2017 Tarkovsky Prize 1st Place

The colorful, haunting 1983 Ingmar Bergman epic Fanny and Alexander dramatizes the battle between two ways of understanding the world: the way of magic, mystery and freedom, against rigid, rule-driven Christianity. The two children at the center of the film, Fanny and Alexander, live happily with a warm, spirited, extended family until a disaster turns their world upside down. They’re thrown from one world into another, each world being represented by the different houses they find themselves in over the course of the film. The story is their odyssey back to the peaceful, balanced world where started.

The film opens with Alexander alone, wandering around his family’s large, lavish home, a place that seems endless, without boundary, and full of mystery. Alexander is imaginative, perceptive and curious about his world. When he looks up at a statue of a nude woman, she begins to move. The moment is interrupted by his grandmother walking in, and asking him if he wants to play cards. He doesn’t respond, just looks startled and so she leaves him alone because although she didn’t see the statue, somehow she understands. (The grandmother is the film’s most dignified and thoughtful character, though she is always on the sidelines.) The moving statue is the first moment of magic we see. It’s an image of something natural, sensual, human. But it’s also unpredictable and startling. It could represent the spirit of magic, passion and freedom.

Alexander’s father and mother are introduced to us on Christmas Eve when the whole extended family comes together for a big, joyful party. The grandmother hosts, and we learn that she is a wise and caring woman who watches over her children. At the party, everybody – Alexander’s uncles, the kind maids, other family members – are singing and running through the house together, and the children experience this as an entirely sweet, innocent event of family life, Christianity in this house is a warm, celebratory faith about community, love, and safety. Unlike magic, it isn’t unpredictable or startling. It provides security in an otherwise chaotic world. Some unspecified amount of time after the festivities end, Alexander’s father is on stage rehearsing Hamlet, playing the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and Alexander is watching. Suddenly his father freezes, forgets where he is, and collapses on the floor. He dies – but comes back to as a ghost, exactly like Hamlet’s father. Both children see their father whenever their lives are about to change drastically (he also once appears to his mother, the children’s grandmother). They have a special connection to their father that isn’t strictly Christian.

The death of their father has serious consequences. After losing her husband, their beautiful, angelic mother marries an icy old bishop, a God-fearing man who wants control and order, nothing else. The mother and her children move into the old man’s plain, gray house, and bring none of their personal belongings with them. No piece of the humanism and spirituality from their previous life. The house is full of boundaries, rules, and barriers. The doors are locked, the windows are barred, and the children are not allowed to have toys. The grandmother’s house was full of soft furniture, warm colors, warm people. Everything here is hard and cold. There’s magic in the house, but it’s restricted by the tight walls of uncompromising Christianity, and God is used as a tool to scare the children into submission. When Alexander speaks of ghosts, he’s punished severely and told never to lie again. These are the horrors of an overly religious life. No freedom, no imagination, no color (quite literally). Everything is scraped back, tied up, clamped down, just like the hair of the women in the household.

The children are rescued. It’s hard to say how, but we know that a sorcerer, their great uncle Isak, a Jewish man (his religion is an intentional choice – it puts him outside the whole conventional Christian world) casts a spell and then takes them to safety. The children arrive at Isak’s house, and in it find marionettes lining the walls. They’re told never leave their room after dark for their own safety. Of course, Alexander wanders off that night in search of a toilet, and ends up exploring, just as he explored his family home at the beginning of the film. Unlike the Bishop’s barren house, this place is cluttered with magical relics and other strange items. And then the boy hears the voice of God. He cowers in fear. The booming voice comes from behind a door, slightly ajar. And just as God is stepping out to show Himself, He is revealed to be just the sorcerer’s nephew, holding a puppet of God. Just like God was previously used as a puppet by adults to scare children metaphorically, in this case, it was literal.

The nephew shows Alexander around the house, and introduces him to Ismael, a man (played by a woman, a large boundary that’s dissolved) who’s locked away for the safety of others, he’s told. Alexander spends some time with Ismael and begins to understand how dangerous and evil unbounded magic can be. Ismael asks him to write down his name. He writes ‘Alexander Ekdahl’ but upon second viewing, he sees he’s written ‘Ismael Retzinsky’ instead. Ismael says, “Perhaps we’re the same person, with no boundaries” It goes to show how uncontrollable this new environment is, and tells us that Ismael is simply the dark side of Alexander’s own mind, locked away for the safety of others.

The scene ends with Ismael teaching Alexander voodoo; he can tell Alexander wants to hurt the Bishop, but can’t admit it. “You won’t speak of that which is constantly in your thoughts” Ismael says. He describes the old man’s death and when Alexander says “Don’t talk like that” Ismael replies: “It is not I talking, it is yourself.” As he speaks, the Bishop’s bed bursts into flames and the Bishop burns to death.. Alexander’s mother is freed. The sorcerer’s house brought out Alexander’s power to make life-saving changes, but it also brought out the murderous hatred he held inside for one man, and caused that man’s death.

The film ends on a relatively happy note. It shows the extended family reconciled and back together for another party. It’s now springtime and the world inside the grandmother’s house is exceptionally bright. There’s an abundance of the color pink and everyone’s celebrating two new babies born into the family. The scene portrays a vision of rebirth. Life has found its order again both in the real and magical sides of the world. Now there’s balance.

The key to that balance is Fanny and Alexander’s grandmother. Throughout the film, she’s been strong and caring, a symbol of stability. She embraces the best parts of Christianity, the love, the ritual, the celebration, as we see in the beginning, but she’s also open to the world of magic and nature, and has a Jewish lover (Uncle Isak). The children aren’t the only ones who notice the ghost of their father, so does she. Her world is the one we see in the large, warm happy house. It isn’t dull and dead like the Bishop’s house, but it also isn’t a hellish, scary pit of mystical energy like the marionette home.

But to finish, we get one chilling reminder of recent events. Alexander walks down a hallway and behind him appears the Bishop’s ghost. He knocks Alexander to the floor and tells him he will never be free. It’s a reminder that he may feel safe in his cozy home, but there are things he’s learned that will haunt him forever. He can never regain the innocence he lost during his journey, and he will never forget how dangerous the world can be.

The Dark Journey of FANNY AND ALEXANDER

by Owen Reese (16)
2017 Tarkovsky Prize 1st Place Essay

The colorful, haunting 1983 Ingmar Bergman epic Fanny and Alexander dramatizes the battle between two ways of understanding the world: the way of magic, mystery and freedom, against rigid, rule-driven Christianity. The two children at the center of the film, Fanny and Alexander, live happily with a warm, spirited, extended family until a disaster turns their world upside down. They’re thrown from one world into another, each world being represented by the different houses they find themselves in over the course of the film. The story is their odyssey back to the peaceful, balanced world where started.

The film opens with Alexander alone, wandering around his family’s large, lavish home, a place that seems endless, without boundary, and full of mystery. Alexander is imaginative, perceptive and curious about his world. When he looks up at a statue of a nude woman, she begins to move. The moment is interrupted by his grandmother walking in, and asking him if he wants to play cards. He doesn’t respond, just looks startled and so she leaves him alone because although she didn’t see the statue, somehow she understands. (The grandmother is the film’s most dignified and thoughtful character, though she is always on the sidelines.) The moving statue is the first moment of magic we see. It’s an image of something natural, sensual, human. But it’s also unpredictable and startling. It could represent the spirit of magic, passion and freedom.

Alexander’s father and mother are introduced to us on Christmas Eve when the whole extended family comes together for a big, joyful party. The grandmother hosts, and we learn that she is a wise and caring woman who watches over her children. At the party, everybody – Alexander’s uncles, the kind maids, other family members – are singing and running through the house together, and the children experience this as an entirely sweet, innocent event of family life , Christianity in this house is a warm, celebratory faith about community, love, and safety. Unlike magic, it isn’t unpredictable or startling. It provides security in an otherwise chaotic world. Some unspecified amount of time after the festivities end, Alexander’s father is on stage rehearsing Hamlet, playing the ghost of Hamlet’s father, and Alexander is watching. Suddenly his father freezes, forgets where he is, and collapses on the floor. He dies – but comes back to as a ghost, exactly like Hamlet’s father. Both children see their father whenever their lives are about to change drastically (he also once appears to his mother, the children’s grandmother). They have a special connection to their father that isn’t strictly Christian.

The death of their father has serious consequences. After losing her husband, their beautiful, angelic mother marries an icy old bishop, a God-fearing man who wants control and order, nothing else. The mother and her children move into the old man’s plain, gray house, and bring none of their personal belongings with them. No piece of the humanism and spirituality from their previous life. The house is full of boundaries, rules, and barriers. The doors are locked, the windows are barred, and the children are not allowed to have toys. The grandmother’s house was full of soft furniture, warm colors, warm people. Everything here is hard and cold. There’s magic in the house, but it’s restricted by the tight walls of uncompromising Christianity, and God is used as a tool to scare the children into submission. When Alexander speaks of ghosts, he’s punished severely and told never to lie again. These are the horrors of an overly religious life. No freedom, no imagination, no color (quite literally). Everything is scraped back, tied up, clamped down, just like the hair of the women in the household.

The children are rescued. It’s hard to say how, but we know that a sorcerer, their great uncle Isak, a Jewish man (his religion is an intentional choice – it puts him outside the whole conventional Christian world) casts a spell and then takes them to safety. The children arrive at Isak’s house, and in it find marionettes lining the walls. They’re told never leave their room after dark for their own safety. Of course, Alexander wanders off that night in search of a toilet, and ends up exploring, just as he explored his family home at the beginning of the film. Unlike the Bishop’s barren house, this place is cluttered with magical relics and other strange items. And then the boy hears the voice of God. He cowers in fear. The booming voice comes from behind a door, slightly ajar. And just as God is stepping out to show Himself, He is revealed to be just the sorcerer’s nephew, holding a puppet of God. Just like God was previously used as a puppet by adults to scare children metaphorically, in this case, it was literal.

The nephew shows Alexander around the house, and introduces him to Ismael, a man (played by a woman, a large boundary that’s dissolved) who’s locked away for the safety of others, he’s told. Alexander spends some time with Ismael and begins to understand how dangerous and evil unbounded magic can be. Ismael asks him to write down his name. He writes ‘Alexander Ekdahl’ but upon second viewing, he sees he’s written ‘Ismael Retzinsky’ instead. Ismael says, “Perhaps we’re the same person, with no boundaries” It goes to show how uncontrollable this new environment is, and tells us that Ismael is simply the dark side of Alexander’s own mind, locked away for the safety of others.

The scene ends with Ismael teaching Alexander voodoo; he can tell Alexander wants to hurt the Bishop, but can’t admit it. “You won’t speak of that which is constantly in your thoughts” Ismael says. He describes the old man’s death and when Alexander says “Don’t talk like that” Ismael replies: “It is not I talking, it is yourself.” As he speaks, the Bishop’s bed bursts into flames and the Bishop burns to death.. Alexander’s mother is freed. The sorcerer’s house brought out Alexander’s power to make life-saving changes, but it also brought out the murderous hatred he held inside for one man, and caused that man’s death.

The film ends on a relatively happy note. It shows the extended family reconciled and back together for another party. It’s now springtime and the world inside the grandmother’s house is exceptionally bright. There’s an abundance of the color pink and everyone’s celebrating two new babies born into the family. The scene portrays a vision of rebirth. Life has found its order again both in the real and magical sides of the world. Now there’s balance.

The key to that balance is Fanny and Alexander’s grandmother. Throughout the film, she’s been strong and caring, a symbol of stability. She embraces the best parts of Christianity, the love, the ritual, the celebration, as we see in the beginning, but she’s also open to the world of magic and nature, and has a Jewish lover (Uncle Isak). The children aren’t the only ones who notice the ghost of their father, so does she. Her world is the one we see in the large, warm happy house. It isn’t dull and dead like the Bishop’s house, but it also isn’t a hellish, scary pit of mystical energy like the marionette home.

But to finish, we get one chilling reminder of recent events. Alexander walks down a hallway and behind him appears the Bishop’s ghost. He knocks Alexander to the floor and tells him he will never be free. It’s a reminder that he may feel safe in his cozy home, but there are things he’s learned that will haunt him forever. He can never regain the innocence he lost during his journey, and he will never forget how dangerous the world can be.

2018 Tarkovsky Award 3rd Place: Hannah Duane

Hannah Duane (14, Ruth Asawa School of the Arts)
Bergman’s Persona

Persona, a psychological drama, written and directed by Ingmar Bergman, follows two women, Elisabet and Alma, in their stay on a remote island. The film was released in 1966 and was shot in black and white.

The plot opens with Elisabet’s sudden decision to stop speaking and moving, which doctors have deduced is not the result of anything being medically wrong with her, and rather the result of her willpower. Alma is hired to be her nurse, and it is decided that the two should spend some time in the summer home of Elisabet’s doctor. With Elisabet’s silence, Alma finds herself talking almost non-stop, sharing profoundly personal truths. As the spend more time together, Alma begins to find it difficult to distinguish herself from her patient. Bergman uses imagery, plays with themes of identity and vampirism, as well as both subtle and explicit dialogue to create a textured and captivating film.

    The film opens with many images, among them a crucifixion, a spider and the killing of a lamb, and two figures in clown-like clothing playing a bed. Though these images are hard to relate immediately to the plot of the film, they set the eerie and surreal mood. This series is concluded by a young boy awakening in a hospital or morgue, with an enormous projection of the blurry face of a woman who may be Alma. These cold scenes bookend the film, perhaps symbolizing the disconnect between the characters and their psyche, as the images all reflect aspects of personality.

    Bergman shows the audience the characters’ increased closeness with a number of images climaxing in a long scene in which their faces are put together. Early in the film, Alma is asleep, and Elisabet enters her room and wanders the halls in a flowing white nightgown. She appears ethereal, ghostly. The shot then jumps to the two of them standing in a line, in an unreal and sexually charged dance-like sequence in which Elisabet guides Alma’s head in a circle near Elisabet’s face. In the morning, Elisabet claims not to have been in Alma’s room in the night. Then, in one of the climaxes of the film, Alma delivers an accusatory monologue in which she speaks from Elisabet’s point of view about Elisabet’s qualms in becoming a mother. We see this monologue twice, once from Alma’s perspective and once from Elisabet’s. By hearing the auditory and emotionally charged passage twice, the power and eeriness is multiplied. At the conclusion of the scene, one half of Elisabet’s face is placed next to the other half of Alma’s, creating one person. This images causes the viewer to question if there really are two women, or if they are two sides of the same person.

    If we take Elisabet and Alma to be one person, this leaves the question of who she is. Alma admiring an actress she loves? Elisabet in her descent into madness exploring the talkative and impulsive part of herself? Elisabet’s son attempting to discern who his mother is? Bergman gives the viewer few details to suggest who this woman is, while littering the film with the suggestion that only one woman exists. Though two women are seen arriving on the island, only one leaves, and it is unclear which one. In earlier versions of the film, it is said Bergman made it clear who left, however both options were done, leaving the truth ambiguous. The plot of the film only occurs because of Elisabet’s sudden disconnect from reality, so it is also possible that Alma is a part of Elisabet she was attempting to leave behind by not talking. However, one of the foci of the film is Alma going crazy as she has no one to talk to. Alma comes to loath Elisabet, breaking a glass and watching as she steps on a large shard and screaming at her, while also being dependent on Elisabet as a confidant, friend, and life purpose. Alma needs Elisabet to have meaning, to have someone to take care of.

    Persona also alludes to vampirism. Elisabet is seen drinking Alma’s blood—another suggestion that they may be one person, or of the same blood. This image mirrors one in the opening sequence—a spider and a sacrificial lamb. However, the details and feelings of the characters around this incident are artfully obfuscated. While Elisabet drinks Alma’s blood, Alma’s hand in clasped in Elisabet’s hair, but it is unclear whether the hand is pushing Elisabet towards her arm or attempting to pull her away. The incident is never brought up again.

    Elisabet only speaks twice, while Alma talks incessantly. The first is to beg Alma not to throw boiling water at her after they fight. This scene shows Elisabet’s vulnerability which she has attempted to rid herself of. On the second occasion, Elisabet says “nothing,” at Alma’s pleading. Alma curses Elisabet, telling her she is being evil by refusing to converse with Alma, and finally Elisabet gives in, muttering “nothing” as Alma begs her to repeat the word. Though Elisabet barely speaks, her expressive acting gives the viewer a well rounded view of who she is. Alma’s motivations remain clouded because it is unclear what matters to her. She is tangential and scattered, juxtaposing Elisabet’s composed and controlled personality.

    It is no wonder Bergman’s films are used as a symbol for constantly internalizing, repressed WASP. Bergman’s characters reveal exactly what they want you to know, until they break from the stress of holding everything in. I found it absolutely enchanting and thought provoking, as each scene introduced or built on symbols, ideas and theories of what it means to be human. Though simple on the surface, this film deals with the core aspects of personality and relationships. Elisabet and Alma are constantly struggling for power, and attempting to control aspects of themselves.