Fanny and Alexander

In his 1988 memoir The Magic Lantern, Ingmar Bergman wrote: “No form of art goes beyond ordinary consciousness as film does, straight to our emotions, deep into the twilight room of the soul… At the editing table, when I run the strip of film through, frame by frame, I still feel that dizzy sense of magic of my childhood.” With his semi-autobiographical masterpiece Fanny and Alexander—the director’s would-be swan song—Bergman put this philosophy into virtuosic practice, dazzling and moving audiences worldwide with the saga of the Ekdahl family, operators of a successful local theater in early-20th-century Sweden. Caught between the spirit of life-affirming wonder embodied by their vibrant, loving mother on the one hand, and the physical abuse of a tyrannically strict stepfather on the other, young Alexander Ekdahl must navigate the unstable boundary separating a far-from-rosy reality and the fantastical world of his imagination.