I was an impressionable age twelve when I first saw Ingmar Bergman‘s "Fanny and Alexander." 

Perhaps the power of Bergman’s storytelling in this film comes from the bleak psychological landscape the two children occupy and the interior life they must create, a daydream to escape the nightmare. 

When we leave the theater, it’s inevitable that we’ve taken along some of Berman’s personal ghosts. Fanny and Alexander is a ghost story then, and hidden within is the narrative of Bergman’s harrowing childhood and it’s stored emotion. 

The scene most vivid for me occurs when Alexander, caught stealing a fig, is beaten by his new step-father, the town Bishop.

This sequence was later fleshed out for me in Alice Miller’s "Drama of the Gifted Child." ¹

She writes:

Disregard for those who are smaller and weaker is thus the best defense against a breakthrough of one’s own feelings of helpessness: it is an expression of this split-off weakness.  The strong person who – because he has experienced it – knows that he, too, carries this weakness within himself does not need to demonstrate his strength through contempt.

Many adults first become aware of their feelings of helplessness, jealousy and loneliness through their own children, since they had no chance to acknowledge and experience these feelings consciously in childhood….

The suffering that was not consciously felt as a child can be avoided by delegating it to ones own children…

Ingmar Bergman spoke on a television program with more understanding and greater –although only intelectual– awareness about the implications of his own childhood, which he described as one long story of humiliation….

Bergman, the younger son of a Protestant pastor, described in this television show interview a scene that often occured during his childhood:  His older brother has just been beaten by his father. Now their mother is daubing his brothers bleeding back with cotton, while he himself sits watching. The adult Bergman described this scene without apparent agitation, coldly. One could see him as a child, quietly sitting and watching. He surely did not run away, or close his eyes, or cry. One has the impression that this scene did take place in reality, but was at the same time a covering memory for what he himself went through. It is unlikely that only his brother was beaten by his father.

Sometimes people are convinced that it was just their siblings who suffered humiliation. Only in therapy can they remember –with feelings of rage and helplessness, of anger and indignation– of how humiliated and deserted they felt when they themselves were mercilessly beaten by their beloved father.

Ingmar Bergman, however, had another means, apart from projection and denial, of dealing with his suffering: He could make films and thereby delegate his unfelt feelings to the spectator. We as the movie audience are asked to endure those feelings that he, the son of such a father, could not experience overtly but nevertheless carried within himself. We sit before the screen confronted, the way that small boy once was, with all the cruelty "our brother" has to endure, and feel hardy able or willing to take in all this brutality with authentic feelings; we ward them off.

Bergman also spoke regretfully of his failure to see through Nazism before 1945, although as an adolescent he often visited Germany during Hitler’s period.  I see this blindness as a consequence of his childhood. Cruelty was the familiar air he had breathed from early on, so why should cruelty and disdain for others have caught his attention…

If we want to avoid unconsciously motivated exploitation and disrespect of the child, we must first gain a conscious awareness of these dangers…

There are various means of developing this sensitivity. We may, for instance, observe children who are strangers to us and attempt to feel empathy for them in their situation. But we must above all, come to have empathy for our own fate. Our feelings will always reveal the true story, which noone else knows and which only we can discover.

 

^1. Miller, Alice. The Drama of the GIfted Child: The Search for the True Self. 1981. New York: Basic Books, 1997.

For more about this film, here’s the Wikipedia entry

Fanny and Alexander (Swedish: Fanny och Alexander) is a 1982, Academy Award-winning Swedish film written and directed by Ingmar Bergman. It was originally conceived as a four part TV movie which spanned 312 minutes. A version lasting only 188 minutes was created later for cinematic release.

Along with The Seventh Seal and Wild Strawberries, Fanny and Alexander is considered by many to be one of Bergman’s best films. He intended the film to be his last feature, although he wrote several screenplays afterward and directed a number of TV specials.

Plot

The story is set in the early twentieth century in Sweden and deals with a young boy named Alexander, his sister Fanny, and their well-to-do family the Ekdahls. Fanny and Alexander’s mother and father are both involved in theater and are happily married until the father’s sudden death. Shortly thereafter, the mother, Emilie, finds a new suitor in the local bishop, a handsome widower, and accepts his proposal of marriage, moving into his ascetic home and putting the children under his stern and unforgiving rule. He is particularly hard on Alexander, trying to break his will by every means. The children and their mother live as virtual prisoners in the bishop’s house until finally the Ekdahl family intervenes. With help from an old friend, a Jewish antiques dealer, as well as some magic, the children are smuggled out of the house, but the Ekdahls’ attempts to bribe or threaten the bishop into divorce fail. Emilie, by now pregnant, slips her husband a sedative and flees as he sleeps, after which a fire breaks out and the bishop is burnt to death. In the meantime, Alexander has met the Jewish merchant’s mysterious son and fantasized about his stepfather’s death – it is as if Alexander’s fantasy comes true as he dreams it. The story ends on a mainly happy, life-affirming note, with the christening of Emilie’s and the late bishop’s daughter and the illegitimate daughter of one of the Ekdahl men, but Alexander encounters the bishop’s ghost, signalling that he will never be completely free of him.

In addition to its themes of Christianity, repentance, and submission to authority, the film deals with love, estrangement, ghosts, and the paranormal, as well as the more common Bergman theme of existentialism. When the children’s father suffers his fatal heart attack, he is playing the ghost of the dead King in Hamlet; the figure of the Bishop, and what happens to him, are reminiscent of Claudius’ usurpation and the young Prince’s final revenge.