The Scrivener: Fanny And Alexander - 8
…Anything can happen... imagination spins and weaves new patterns. Bergman's and perhaps Alexander's imagination produces the ghosts and magic we see throughout the film. In some cases, they are antidotes to sadness, anger and despair. Imaginative spinning and weaving occurs with captivating beauty…
Brian Barratt concludes his eight-part exploration of Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny And Alexander, one of the greatest films ever made.
To read the first seven parts of Brian’s tribute to the film, and sparkling columns on many other subjects, please click on http://www.openwriting.com/archives/the_scrivener/
And do visit Brian’s Web site The Brain Rummager www.alphalink.com.au/~umbidas/
From Angst Into Imagination
'Anything can happen, anything is possible and likely. Time and space do not exist. Against a faint background of reality, imagination spins out and weaves new patterns.' These are words from the Swedish novelist August Strindberg, read by Grandmama Helena Ekdahl to the boy Alexander at the end of Ingmar Bergman's masterpiece 'Fanny and Alexander'.
Anything can happen... imagination spins and weaves new patterns. Bergman's and perhaps Alexander's imagination produces the ghosts and magic we see throughout the film. In some cases, they are antidotes to sadness, anger and despair. Imaginative spinning and weaving occurs with captivating beauty in two particular scenes.
In Episode 1, Scene 7, 'Bedtime' (on the Artificial Eye set of two DVD's), Oscar Ekdahl comes into the bedroom where his children Fanny and Alexander and their two small cousins are supposed to be asleep. He smells paraffin and knows that Alexander has just been playing with his magic lantern, showing slides of a fairy story. He picks up a chair, just an ordinary old nursery chair, and spins a wonderful yarn about it and where it came from. The children are entranced. Imagination shines. The acting in this sequence is superb, especially that of Allan Edwall playing Oscar.
In Episode 4, Scene 3, 'Telling Tales', Fanny and Alexander have been rescued from the bishop's prison-like house and are in the safe care of the wise magician Isak Jacobi. It is their first night in his home, and they don't want to go to sleep. He offers to read to them from an old book of stories, prayers and verses, explaining that it is in Hebrew and will take him a while to translate while he reads.
His quiet, gentle reading soon moves to story-telling. It is the tale of a youth who is on a long journey. He doesn't know what his destination will be. When he meets an old sage who is also on the journey, the camera shows us that Alexander identifies himself with the youth. Isak, played by Erland Josephson, tells his long and profoundly philosophical tale. Much of this sequence is done in a remarkable single camera shot. It is a masterpiece in every way.
To find out what the film is 'about', it could be helpful to view these two wonderful sequences before watching the whole film. They take us deep into Bergman's own imagination and his thoughts about childhood.
As flights of imagination they serve as an antidote to the angst, the sadness, anger and despair, which Alexander experiences and sees around him. He expresses his own anger in a very down-to-earth way when he mutters obscenities under his breath. At his father's funeral, 'Shit, arsehole, piss!' In response to his stepfather's cruelty, 'Bloody hell!' Only his sister Fanny hears him and quietly, almost passively, shares his anger. The children suffer deprivation, isolation and cruelty when they are forced to submit to the rules of Bishop Edvard Vergerus's household.
Maj, the nursemaid, suffers in her own way when Gustav Adolf Ekdahl more or less takes over her life. In spite of her love for him, and their delightful sexual activities, she tearfully admits that she wants to be free of his total control.
Uncle Carl lives in a state of neurotic sadness and despair, blaming it on his longsuffering German wife. She, in turn, accepts and tolerates his moods, but not with any passivity. She is frequently in tears, which angers him even more.
At the time of his collapse, Oscar Ekdahl is rehearsing his role as the ghost of Hamlet's father, calling for revenge on his uncle Claudius. Oscar himself, while alive, had no cause for revenge, despair or sadness. However, after his own death, he had cause for enormous sadness when his loving wife Emilie was trapped in the clutches of Bishop Edward Vergerus. He appears to the children as a sad and silent watchful presence.
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The two scenes described above, where Oscar and Isak inspire the children with their imaginative story-telling, could be clues to what this film is 'about'. With an observant, sensitive boy at the centre of the story, perhaps Ingmar Bergman is exploring the 'puer aeternus', one of the archetype (universal mythological figures) proposed by the analytical psychologist Carl Gustav Jung. Is Alexander the puer aeternus, the eternal boy, who forms part of Ingmar Bergman's personality? Is this eternal boy, or eternal child, the part of an adult which tries to retreat from the angst of daily life into the unfettered imagination of childhood? I don't know. The question is deep. The answer is complex. Instead of delving into it, I prefer to sit back and cherish 'Fanny and Alexander' as one of the greatest films ever made.
© Copyright Brian Barratt 2008
