Title of film : Fanny and Alexander
Director Name : Ingmar Bergman
Cast & crew :
Producer : Jorn Donner
Editor : Sylvia Ingemarsson
Cast :
Synopsis : This is essentially a four act play. In the first act we meet the Ekdahl family -- large, joyous, prosperous. Then Oscar (Allan Edwall), father of Alexander (Bertil Guve) who might be 11 and Fanny (Pernilla Allwin) who might be 7, dies. In act two, Oscar appears to his children. Alexander asks why he doesn't go off to Heaven. Oscar replies that he doesn't want to leave those he lived with. The children's mother remarries in less than a year, going to a strict Bishop Edvard Vergerus' (Jan Malmsjö) house with none of her furniture, none of the children's toys, and an optimism that she can make a good thing of it despite his powerfully controlling personality. Alexander learns from the ghost of the Bishop's first wife that she and her children died trying to escape after having been locked up for days. They climbed out a window but failed to make it across the cold fast-flowing stream that separates the back of the house from the town. Alexander tells this to a servant who repeats it to the Bishop. The Bishop must discredit this story, and demands retraction. Then he locks up the boy. In act three, Isak (Erland Josephson), a family friend, arrives at the house, ostensibly to buy a chest, but actually to smuggle the children out of the house (in the chest!). During this escape, the ghosts of his former family appear to the Bishop. The children are kept for the moment in Isak's house, where Alexander meets Ismael Retzinsky (Stina Ekblad) whose paranormal abilities help Alexander start a fire in the Bishop's house, a fire that is fatal to the hated step-father. In the final act, mother (Ewa Fröling) and children are back in the warm comfort of their extended family's house. Gustav (Jarl Kulle), the late Oscar's brother, gives a toast in which he summarizes the play. Without mentioning ghosts explicitly, he says there are things we know and should enjoy, such as food and dance, and many more aspects of life of which we are ignorant.
Director Bio : Ernst Ingmar Bergman was born July 14, 1918, the son of a priest. The film and T.V. series, The Best Intentions (1992) is biographical and shows the early marriage of his parents. The film 'Söndagsbarn' depicts a bicycle journey with his father. In the miniseries Private Confessions (1996) is the trilogy closed. Here, as in 'Den Goda Viljan' Pernilla August play his mother. Note that all three movies are not always full true biographical stories. He began his career early with a puppet theatre which he, his sister and their friends played with. But he was the manager. Strictly professional he begun writing in 1941. He had written a play called 'Kaspers död' (A.K.A. 'Kaspers Death') which was produced the same year. It became his entrance into the movie business as Stina Bergman (not a close relative), from the company S.F. (Swedish Filmindustry), had seen the play and thought that there must be some dramatic talent in young Ingmar. His first job was to save other more famous writers' poor scripts. Under one of that script-saving works he remembered that he had written a novel about his last year as a student. He took the novel, did the save-poor-script job first, then wrote a screenplay on his own novel. When he went back to S.F., he delivered two scripts rather than one. The script was Torment (1944) and was the fist Bergman screenplay that was put into film (by Alf Sjöberg). It was also in that movie Bergman did his first professional film-director job. Because Alf Sjöberg was busy, Bergman got the order to shoot the last sequence of the film. Ingmar Bergman is the father of Daniel Bergman, director, and Mats Bergman, actor at the Swedish Royal Dramatic Theater. Ingmar Bergman was also C.E.O. of the same theatre between 1963-1966, where he hired almost every professional actor in Sweden. In 1976 he had a famous tax problem. Bergman had trusted other people to advise him on his finances, but it turned out to be very bad advice. Bergman had to leave the country immediately, and so he went to Germany. A few years later he returned to Sweden and made his last theatrical film Fanny and Alexander (1982) (A.K.A. 'Fanny and Alexander'). In later life he retired from movie directing, but still wrote scripts for film and T.V. and directed plays at the Swedish Royal Dramatic Theatre for many years. He died peacefully in his sleep on July 30, 2007.
Filmography :
