Fanny and AlexanderEpilogue |
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When shooting was over it was time to go through the accumulated material, some 25 hours of film that was to be edited first into five episodes for television, then to a cinema version with a maximum length of 150 minutes. On 31 March 1982 Bergman wrote in his workbook: "At last I am reviewing the rushes. The first day we sat through four hours of material. The result was indeed a mixed bag. At times I was rather shocked by what I saw. What I had thougt worked well, turned out to be bad, uneven, deplorable. Other things, I suppose, were passable. But nothing, except Gunn Wållgren, was really good."
When Bergman and the editor Sylvia Ingemarsson had seen it all, they went through the 25 hours again and things started to feel better. The TV version turned out to be over five hours long, 326 minutes. Then it was time for the cinema version.
"The idea was that we would quickly, in a few days, design the theater version that I already had planned out in my head. I knew rather clearly what I wanted to cut, and my goal was to end up with a two-and-a-half-hour film. We worked at a rapid pace. When we had finished, I discovered to my horror that I had a film almost four hours long. What a shock! I had always given myself credit for having an excellent sense of time and timing. There was nothing to do but start over from the beginning. It was extraordinarily troublesome, since I now had to cut into the vital parts of the film. I knew that with each cut I reduced the quality of my work. We finally ended up in a compromise: the film was three hours and eight minutes long."
He wrote this in Images: My Life in Film some seven or eight years later. He also claimed that it is the TV version that he wishes to stand for, since the cinema version was merely a fragment, albeit for obligatory reasons. The shooting itself had been filmed by Arne Carlsson. From this behind-the-scenes material he and Bergman put together Dokument Fanny och Alexander.
In April 1984 Fanny and Alexander was awarded no fewer than four Oscars: for best foreign language film, best cinematography (Sven Nykvist), best art direction/set decoration (Anna Asp), and best costume design (Marik Vos). The award was received on his behalf by Bergman's wife, Ingrid, who, according to Nykvist, was very keen to meet Gregory Peck at the ceremony.
Fanny and Alexander marks the beginning of a new era in Bergman's artistic output. Admittedly, he never completely abandoned filmmaking, but he did concentrate instead on his writing, where he had begun his career. And thematically Fanny and Alexander was to be the first part of an ongoing family saga that with time came to assume almost epic proportions. A few years after the film's release he made a film for television called Karin's Face, based around photographs of his mother.
At the same time he began to write his autobiography The Magic Lantern, followed in 1991 by the novel about his parent's marriage The Best Intentions (also filmed for television). The very next year saw a new film with a Bergman screenplay, this time about the relationship of Bergman as a young boy and his father. The director of Sunday's Children was Bergman's own son Daniel Bergman. Sunday's Children was first published as a book in 1993, after the film had appeared. A few years later came both a novel roman and TV version TV-versionen of Private Confessions, which like Karin's Face was about Bergman's mother.
When it was announced in 1999 that Liv Ullmann was to direct a film for television, Faithless, based on a screenplay by Bergman (also published as a book bok) Bergman felt obliged at the press conference to stress that it wasn't "about my parents, aunts and uncles". This time it was about himself!
Press material Swedish Film Institute
"Bergman berättar om Fanny och Alexander", Aftonbladet 26 december 1984.
"Jag har försökt att ta kål på barnet i mig – men det lever", Vi 15 april 1982.
Jörn Donner,
"Rätt ta risken och trotsa alla", Svenska Dagbladet 15 december 1982.
Med mera…….