Ingmar Bergman – Fanny och Alexander [Extended TV Version] (1983) (HD)

Through the eyes of ten-year-old Alexander, we witness the delights and conflicts of the Ekdahl family, a sprawling bourgeois clan in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Sweden. Ingmar Bergman intended Fanny and Alexander as his swan song, it is the warmest and most autobiographical film combining the director’s melancholy and emotional intensity with immense joy and sensuality.

I. Prolog / Akt.1 : Familjen Ekdahl firar jul

philipdavies@imdb wrote:
Perhaps the most impressive feature of this wonderful film is the humility with which its creator presents it to the world, as if it were no grander than the old-fashioned Nativity-play shown in the early scenes at the Theatre.

At the end of this experience – to term it with any mere technical tag, like ‘movie’, would be inadequate – Bergman’s profoundly grown-up disillusionment has transformed into the pure spirituality of abnegation and acceptance. His intellectual pilgrimage, through possibly the greatest career in films, finds the director arriving back where he began, with the great simplicities of life. But there is a difference with his return, which is that his prodigality over the years has burnt the rage out of him, and finally allowed him to ‘enjoy what may be enjoyed’ (as one of the Ekdahls says), without further fretting over the puzzle of human existence. From all this human folly (he clearly feels) comes the only wisdom, which is – simply – to be human.

II. Akt. 2 : Vålnaden + Akt. 3 : Upbrottet

philipdavies@imdb wrote:
It is, indeed, a film like no other for allowing the pieces of experience to settle into their appointed places. There is a beautiful quality of selfless resignation, in this last of his works for cinema, which finally and forever excels the sadistic disciplines of The Bishop.

This perverted creature confesses, to the new wife whom he has lost, how it is impossible to ‘tear off the mask’ as it is ‘burned into my face’: He is become an authoritarian ‘… a rite, a law, a custom – not a man’. [Shelley] Having put the notional love of God before that of humankind, there is nowhere for his personality to be re-enacted in the bosom of any kindly recollections that will survive him. Except in that of Alexander/Bergman, where his two, each-in-their-own-way terrifying, fathers, both the White and the Black opposites of an imagination flickering with the director’s haunted vision, will project forever onto his Cinematic arena of stark absolutes the inner strife where each of us is locked away, struggling to endure the turmoil of these eternally irreconcilable truths.

III. Akt. 4 : Sommarens händelser

philipdavies@imdb wrote:
Death, in the end, is not a calamity, but the choice of all who have truly known Life. In other words, to choose Life is to accept its Dark partner, Death. And to accept each as part of the family group, even though they seem complete misfits there.

The old lady, with Strindberg’s Dream-play in her lap, knows at last that the whole history of her family is only a personal reverie. And yet how much more real it seems than her son Carl’s immature and somewhat absurd, angst-ridden railings against ‘cruel Fate’!

Had he only accepted his patient wife’s gently sympathetic injunction to ‘Never mind’ the Professor would have been both wiser and happier, enduring with patient fortitude the oceanic inconsequentialities of life’s real Mystery, and attending far less to the trivial pseudo-mysteries of his solipsistic men’s club. All his morbid rationalising is precisely as much use in real life as the usual state of alcoholic befuddlement which is the only serious pursuit of this club.

Reason as befuddlement; The sleep of reason as deliverance. With saint-like humility, Bergman gives us back our ordinary human life, as he surrenders his exceptional life in films. But he knows that the ghost of this life will always be with us. His anguished worldliness will haunt us – as the Ghost of Hamlet’s father must haunt Alexander – forever.

IV Akt. 5 : Demonerna

Fanny och Alexander Ep.1 - Prolog & Act 1.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 36 min
Size: 	9.77 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1828x1080 ~> 1828x1096
Aspect ratio:  	5:3
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	14.2 Mb/s
BPP: 	0.301
Audio
#1:  	1.0ch FLAC @ 284 kb/s (Swedish)

https://nitro.download/view/4378B468CFD663E/Fanny_och_Alexander_Ep.1_-_Prolog_&_Act_1.mkv https://nitro.download/view/BBD419988E95920/Fanny_och_Alexander_Ep.2_-_Act_2_&_3.mkv https://nitro.download/view/DD990F17B915F41/Fanny_och_Alexander_Ep.3_-_Act_4.mkv https://nitro.download/view/09725E9B6D9DF5A/Fanny_och_Alexander_Ep.4_-_Act_5.mkv

Language(s):Swedish
Subtitles:English, French