... and the icing is...
Greetings from deep inside Fanny and Alexander. It's the "full, five-hour" version; I feel as if I should be keeping a log (a Yule log, perhaps). The impressions fly swift and thick as snow, as the feathers in the Christmas bedtime pillow-fight scene, like the way Alexander just throws a handful of them up and swirls under them as they fall - something the camera doesn't even dwell on.
The internet is great for pictures but it never has the still you want. For me the important moments - certainly of the part I've just watched - are when Alexander gets up in the night to light his magic lantern, and when his father comes in and tells the story about the empress' chair, creating, as he does so, the real empress' chair out of an ordinary nursery chair. When he does that, Bergman is the father and we are the children, and we believe him too. I'd have loved one of those dark, intimate images of glowing things. Someone asked me recently what were the films that made an impression on me when I first saw them - meaning, when young - and this was definitely one of them. Bergman's autobiography, The Magic Lantern, was arguably just as big an influence: it blew me away. But then I must have read it after I'd seen this film.
There's more - always more feathers in the pillow - but I won't bore you.
9 comments:
All best wishes for 2008.
Hi Mopsa, and you too! A happy, healthy, profitable and amusing one.
I love this film so much that it's hard to pick stills from the many I have. The first ones that come are actually from the house of the dreadful bishop: the obese and silent daughter of the house being spoon-fed; the moment when the kabbalistic magician uncle clenches his fists and roars and makes the children disappear so as to rescue them.
I watched "It's a Wonderful Life" yesterday - a family gathering round the television hearth for some life-affirming heart-warmth - but at the end my son complained that he'd been bored because "jack shit happens" most of the time. Sneakily I felt myself agreeing with him - but then perhaps it's because I'm out of practice watching films of that sort that take their time.
RTS, yes, all wonderful. So many - and so many in the course of five hours! I'm interested to note how my reactions have changed since the first time I saw it, in the cinema when it was new, and I was young enough (or maybe I mean, and haunted enough) to be scared STIFF by the ghosts...
Ahem. I think pace isn;t the problem. Lots of people loved, eg, Brokeback Mountain, and that's a slow film. Your son hated It's a Wonderful Life because it's FAKE. I find Fanny & Alexander, for all its horror, far more of a celebration of what life is, and can offer us in the way of love. If you want vintage, b&w "life-affirming," I'd go for for Miracle on 34th St, the ORIGINAL with Natalie Wood, every time.
Hope you had a splendid XMas!
xx
It's far too much for me. My idea of classic Christmas movies embraces "The Muppet Christmas Carol" and "Die Hard." "Fanny and Alexander" is obviously the work of a master, but it makes me feel as though someone--the Ghost of Mothers Past, perhaps--is saying, "Eat it all: it's good for you." Pace, scale, and pity for one's audience are artistic virtues, too; and Bergman too often forgets I'm there.
Thanks for the ridiculous comments of mine you've published, and those you haven't.
I'm wishing you a lovely new year.
-Robert.
Hi Richard, not really sure I get this. It's clearly something about perception and reception etc, because I have all my life felt, watching Bergman, that he and I were in a dark room and he was whispering something directly into my ear while showing me pictures. To me his films seem intensely intimate and personal, and certainly not like "eat your greens."* F&A just blew me away when I first saw it: I hadn't known anyone else understood - something - I'm not even sure what, but I needed him and I needed that film.
But of course nothing is the same for everybody!
Robert, many thanks to you and here's to a very happy new year to you too!
* On which note I have always, from earliest infancy, loved my greens, and felt a bit oppressed asa child by this assumption that I shouldn't. Why not!
PS - I can't even imagine what would happen to me if I tried to sit through "The Muppet Movie" and "Die Hard." If I were with other people, maybe, but it wouldnt be about the movie. Alone? I can't see the point... anyway, chacun a son gout, and have a very Happy New Year!
Not "The Muppet Movie," "Muppet Christmas Carol." The latter has Michael Caine and Charles Dickens. Well, Dickens isn't exactly in the movie, but I see nothing in the Muppet sensibility altogether alien to his spirit. Surely the man who created Flora Finching could have invented Miss Piggy, too.
I have always been comfortably preferred high-brow books and low-brow movies. I take my Proust in Proustian form and my Bruce Willis cinematically. I am one of those who thinks that movies function best when they just barely transcend their masscult nature and that art-film is almost an oxymoron.
God bless us, every one. Pigs and frogs, too.
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