Fanny and Alexander

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Movie
German title Fanny and Alexander
Original title Fanny and Alexander
Country of production Sweden , France , Germany
original language Swedish
Publishing year 1982
length Theatrical Version: 188 minutes;
TV version: 326 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
Rod
Director Ingmar Bergman
script Ingmar Bergman
production Jörn Donner
music Daniel Bell
camera Sven Nykvist
cut Sylvia Ingemarsson
occupation

Ekdahl family

Bishop's household

More figures

Fanny and Alexander (Original title: Fanny och Alexander) is a Swedish - French - German drama by Ingmar Bergman from 1982 . The international co-production, Bergman's last official feature film, was shown in a three-hour theatrical version and a five and a half hour television version.

action

It tells an excerpt from the life of the upper-class Ekdahl family in Sweden in the early 20th century . The head of the family is the grandmother Helena, whose marriage with her deceased husband resulted in three sons: Oscar, Gustav Adolf and Carl. Oscar runs the family-owned theater where his much younger wife, Emilie, also plays. They have two children, Fanny and Alexander.

Oscar collapses during a rehearsal; he dies shortly afterwards, mourned by his young wife. She finds comfort in Bishop Vergérus, whom she eventually marries. Alexander, to whom his dead father appears at regular intervals, does not agree with his mother's decision. Emilie moves into Vergérus' residence with her two children, who lives with his mother, sister and a bedridden aunt. Vergérus asks Emilie to move in not only to leave behind her but also the worldly belongings of her children.

Emilie, Fanny and Alexander soon suffer from the severity and asceticism in which their husband and his relatives live. The siblings are repeatedly trapped, and Alexander corporally punished after he claims that the bishop's first wife and her children were killed trying to escape him. When Emilie asks for a divorce despite a new pregnancy, the bishop threatens to withdraw custody of her biological children.

Isak, a friend of the Ekdahl family and former lover of grandmother Helena, kidnaps Fanny and Alexander from the bishop's domicile and places them in his house. Emilie also wants to flee and gives Vergérus a sleeping pill. At night, Alexander meets his nephew Ismael in Isak's house, who confronts Alexander with his hateful thoughts against his stepfather. That night, a fire broke out in the Vergérus family's apartment after their bedridden aunt knocked over a kerosene lamp. The bishop is killed in the fire.

Emilie returns with her children to the Ekdahl family, where she gives birth to her third child. On the occasion of the celebration, Gustav Adolf, who has just become a father himself, gives an eulogy for life that one should enjoy because of its brevity. Alexander appears to his late stepfather, who announces that from now on he will visit him regularly. Finally Emilie tells her mother-in-law, Helena, that she would like to record a new piece and win Helena as a contributor. Helena begins to read from the planned play, August Strindberg's Ein Traumspiel : “Anything can happen, anything is possible and probable. Time and space do not exist. "

background

Fanny and Alexander was Bergman's first film made in Sweden since he left for Germany in 1976. It was made between September 1981 and March 1982 in the “Filmhuset studios” of the Swedish Film Institute in Stockholm with a budget of 35 million Swedish kronor (1982 about 14 million Germans Mark ). The decision of the institute to co-finance the film to a large extent met with criticism because of the alleged discrimination against other directors and their projects.

Bergman had announced in advance that this would be his last movie. Despite the participation of many of his regular actors such as Erland Josephson , Harriet Andersson and - in a small role - Gunnar Björnstrand , a number of important actors such as Liv Ullmann , who should play the mother Emilie, and Max von Sydow , who was intended for the role of Vergérus, are also missing was. However, Ullmann was currently shooting the multi-part television series Jenny in Norway . One could not agree on his fee with von Sydow.

In his film music, composer Daniel Bell relied on music by Frans Helmerson , Marianne Jacobs , Frédéric Chopin , Benjamin Britten and Robert Schumann, among others .

The film ran in a three-hour version on December 17, 1982 in Swedish cinemas, on October 8, 1983 in the Federal Republic of Germany and on December 21, 1984 in the GDR . The TV version, conceived from the beginning for a longer running time of 5½ hours, started exactly one year later on December 17, 1983 in Sweden and was broadcast for the first time on German television between December 30, 1984 and January 6, 1985 on ZDF .

In 1984 Bergman released the documentary The Fanny and Alexander Document about the making of the film. In it he showed Gunnar Björnstrand's fight against his Alzheimer's disease on location . Although Björnstrand himself released it, this passage had to be removed later under pressure from his widow.

reception

source rating
Rotten tomatoes
critic
audience
Metacritic
critic
audience
IMDb

“As often as the piece has already been played: One likes to see it again, is happy about small variations of the familiar, maybe even recognizes some new marking lines and positional fires in the hermetic landscapes of the imagination. […] Like a lord of a castle, [Bergman] leads us through his world once more, alluding to all of his leitmotifs, performed by many of his favorite actors: a 'mural', as he calls it himself, an epic request concert for the Bergman community A film that requires an infinite amount of patience, which is becoming increasingly dense and exciting, but which sometimes also provokes a kind of discomfort due to the feudalistic gesture of its creator. "

- Hans C. Blumenberg , Time

"Bergman's reckoning with the apparently past, his memory of happy and fearful moments of childhood is no less bitter and sharp-sighted than in earlier works, but here it takes the form of a magnificent, sensual and detailed drama that is not accidentally set in the theater environment. Many motifs and styles are interwoven into a cinematic fresco: references to Strindberg and Shakespeare , satirical approaches such as in Fellini's Amarcord , a logic of dreams and fantasy reminiscent of Buñuel - and again and again Bergman's old passion for metaphysical and religious questions of meaning. [...] the shortened theatrical version shows some dramaturgical breaks, but still allows the brilliance of the production and the actors to come into their own. "

- Lexicon of international film

In 2012, the film magazine FLM organized a vote for the “best Swedish film of all time” among 50 critics and film scholars, in which Fanny and Alexander took Bergman's fifth place as the highest-placed directorial work.

Awards (selection)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Currency conversion according to the Pacific Exchange Rate Service of the University of British Columbia
  2. ↑ a b Fanny and Alexander on the website of the Ingmar Bergman Foundation , accessed on July 21, 2012
  3. ^ A b c Hauke ​​Lange-Fuchs: Ingmar Bergman: His films - his life, Heyne, Munich 1988, pp. 253–262 and pp. 307–309
  4. ↑ Fanny and Alexander on the Swedish Film Database page, accessed July 21, 2012
  5. ^ A b Fanny and Alexander in the Lexicon of International FilmsTemplate: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used
  6. ↑ 326 minutes according to the website of the Ingmar Bergman Foundation , 340 minutes according to Hauke ​​Lange-Fuchs: Ingmar Bergman: His films - his life, Heyne, Munich 1988, p. 309. The difference in the information results from the different frame rate of 24 fps (frames per second) for movies and 25 fps for television broadcasts in Western Europe (see PAL format). A 340-minute long movie therefore only has a running time of 326 minutes on TV broadcast in Europe (340 * 24/25 = 326).
  7. ^ Ingmar Bergman: Bilder, Kiepenheuer and Witsch, Cologne 1991, ISBN 3-462-02133-8 , pp. 279-280
  8. ↑ a b Fanny and Alexander at Rotten Tomatoes , accessed on November 5, 2015
  9. ↑ a b Fanny and Alexander at Metacritic , accessed on October 18, 2014
  10. ↑ Fanny and Alexander in the Internet Movie Database (English)
  11. ↑ On the evening of the jugglers in Die Zeit No. 38 of September 16, 1983, accessed on September 1, 2012
  12. ↑ ”Körkarlen” utsedd till bästa film at svd.se, August 30, 2012 (accessed on September 9, 2014)