The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Ingmar Bergman · a film for television in five parts · 1982 · 312 minutes · in Swedish, as Fanny och Alexander · with a theatrical version of 188 minutes made alongside it
Mode
Family chronicle on film; ghost story, fairy tale and an argument about God inside one household
Mythos
Hamlet turned inside out, a ghost who asks nothing and a revenge done by another’s magic; the wicked stepfather, the locked house and the witch’s fire; the little world of play against the house where play is forbidden
Phase
From Christmas 1907 to a christening feast in the years after, in a prologue, five acts and an epilogue, framed by a toy theatre’s curtain and a reading from A Dream Play
Presentation
Television film in five parts, 312 minutes, in colour, Swedish dialogue with some German; photographed by Sven Nykvist, designed by Anna Asp, costumed by Marik Vos, produced by Jörn Donner; a theatrical version of 188 minutes made with it
Register
From Uncle Carl’s farce with candles in the nursery to a death wished into being in a locked room; red and gold by candlelight, then white, grey and black
Scale
Three generations of one family, its servants and its theatre, a bishop’s house and a dealer’s shop, in one cathedral town
Governing Proposition
A boy grows up in a family that keeps a theatre in a Swedish cathedral town. His father dies, his mother marries the bishop, and the children are held in a house where play is forbidden, until a dealer in old things carries them out in a chest and a wish burns the house down. The wager of the film is that a family survives by theatre, that tyranny is love starved into rule, and that a child who survives it by imagination carries the tyrant with him; framed between a toy stage and a dream play, it can admit the dead on the same footing as the living.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The film begins on a stage. A boy, Alexander, is alone in his grandmother’s apartment, and before him stands his toy theatre; its curtain rises on the title. He goes through the empty rooms. A statue seems to move. Across a room a figure with a scythe is glimpsed and gone. Before there is a story there is a child, a proscenium, and the suspicion that in these rooms what does not move may move. The film will close on a book that makes the same promise in words, and everything between is held inside that pair of frames.
Fanny och Alexander was written and directed by Ingmar Bergman and made in Sweden in 1982, in two forms at once. A theatrical version of 188 minutes was released in Swedish cinemas in December 1982; a television version of 312 minutes, in five parts, was shown afterwards. The longer is Bergman’s own fullest form, and everything the shorter holds lies inside it. Both run from a prologue through five acts to an epilogue: the Ekdahl family celebrates Christmas; the ghost; the dissolution; summer events; the demons. Sven Nykvist photographed it, Anna Asp designed it, Marik Vos made the costumes, and Jörn Donner produced it. The theatrical version received four Academy Awards, for foreign language film, cinematography, art direction and costume design, and Bergman was nominated for his direction and his screenplay.
The action runs from Christmas 1907 into the years after and ends at a christening feast, in a Swedish university and cathedral town drawn on Uppsala, where Bergman was born in 1918. The Ekdahls keep a theatre. Oscar (Allan Edwall), son of Helena (Gunn Wållgren), leads its company; Emilie (Ewa Fröling) is his wife; Alexander (Bertil Guve) and Fanny (Pernilla Allwin) are their children. Oscar’s brothers are Carl (Börje Ahlstedt), whose wife Lydia speaks German, and Gustav Adolf (Jarl Kulle). Helena’s old love is Isak Jacobi (Erland Josephson), a Jewish dealer in old things. Elsewhere in the town stands the house of the bishop, Edvard Vergérus (Jan Malmsjö).
Movement II
The first act is Christmas, and the long form gives it at length. There is the nativity play; then the Ekdahl apartment in reds and golds under candlelight, family and servants at one table, the feast. The household runs hand in hand through Helena’s rooms in a procession. Gustav Adolf has an arrangement with Maj (Pernilla August, then credited as Pernilla Wallgren), and his wife accepts it. Carl, in debt, performs his trick with candles and wind for the children in the nursery. After midnight Helena and Isak sit together, old, and speak of what they were to each other. In the nursery Alexander works the magic lantern and throws its picture onto the dark.
Oscar speaks to the company at Christmas. The playhouse, he says, is the little world, “lilla världen” (“the little world”), a lit place where for a time the large world outside may be forgotten. It is the film’s first statement of its law. The Ekdahls survive by theatre: by feasts, by appetite, by tolerated folly, by a play put on for one another in rooms full of light. Oscar is tired, and Edwall plays him so: the speech is a man’s defence of the shelter he has made, and it claims no more than shelter.
What the long Christmas establishes is a counter-order. Appetite and play are allowed there, the comedy of the uncles is played as warmth, and servants and masters share the table for a night. The film knows the refuge is a refuge. But it sets it first, and at length, because the house the children will be taken to is measured against it: seen briefly, the Ekdahl world would be a backdrop; seen at this length, it is a whole way of living. The boy at the lantern is the film’s eye, and what follows is seen as he sees it.
Movement III
Oscar collapses at a rehearsal of Hamlet, in which he is playing the Ghost, and dies. Alexander stands at the doorway and hears his mother’s cry over the body, a long animal sound. The film shows only what it needs: a boy outside a room, and the sound. Nothing is staged as spectacle, and the terror is in its plainness.
Oscar comes back. He appears to his son as a ghost, and Helena talks to her dead son as to someone in the room. But unlike the Ghost he was rehearsing he asks nothing: no command is given and no revenge laid on the boy. The play that killed him has lent its shape to his family, and the shape is turned inside out. The father who played a ghost has become one, and he asks nothing where Shakespeare’s commands.
Then the dissolution. Emilie, widowed, marries the bishop, Edvard Vergérus, and the son hates him. The Hamlet structure is now in place inside a Swedish household: the mother has married the son’s enemy. The children leave the red rooms with her for the bishop’s house, and the colour goes out of the film. Northern daylight, bleached to white, grey and black, falls on bare walls. Play is forbidden there.
Movement IV
Alexander tells a lie, a story of daughters drowned, laid at the bishop’s door. It reaches the bishop. He questions the boy with patience and courtesy, and canes him, and Malmsjö makes the courtesy more frightening than the cane. Then, in the attic of the house, the drowned daughters of the lie come to the boy. What the child invented to wound has become a visitation, and the film does not say whether it is real.
The bishop is not a monster made for the occasion. His house is a household too, with its own people and its own order, and the film will let him say at the end what his rule has cost him. Two worlds are felt apart before they are stated: the warm disorder of the Ekdahl rooms and the cold order of this one. Summer comes, and the fourth act opens a window on the natural world, a summer house, the one place in the film where the household gives onto open air.
Isak comes to the bishop’s house to buy a chest. He pays, and the chest is carried out with the children hidden inside it; and at the same time the children are seen on the floor of the room, lying where they were. They are in the chest and on the floor at once. The film makes the illusion by the plainest means, a double image, and never says how it was done. The money that buys the chest buys the children, and the dealer in old things carries them out of the house.
Movement V
In Isak’s house, among the old things, the children are hidden. In the puppet workshop a great figure looms behind a door, and Alexander takes it for God until Aron (Mats Bergman), Isak’s nephew, shows him a puppet. Behind a locked door lives the other nephew, Ismael (Stina Ekblad), androgynous, kept apart because he is dangerous. In that room Ismael reads Alexander’s wish, which is the bishop’s death.
In the bishop’s house, in his last talk with Emilie, the bishop confesses that he wears masks and that he believed he was loved. Cruelty and need are one man. At the same hour as the wish in Ismael’s room, the bishop’s house burns, and he dies. The death is willed, magical and unproven at once: a murder by wish, for which no one can be charged, and the child who wished it carries it.
The epilogue is a christening feast, and the family is back in its rooms. Gustav Adolf answers his brother’s Christmas speech: the family’s feasts, he admits, are a refuge in the little world, not an explanation of the large one. Then the dead bishop comes to Alexander, tells him that he will never be rid of him, and knocks him down. The film ends on Helena reading the note Strindberg set before A Dream Play, with Alexander’s head in her lap: “Allt kan ske, allt är möjligt och sannolikt. Tid och rum existera icke.”
“Anything can happen, everything is possible and likely. Time and space do not exist.”
The curtain that rose on a toy stage closes on a dream play, and between them the dead have stood in the room with the living.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test has been run by the maker. The theatrical version lifts out about two hours and the work stands: that is the plainest evidence on the desk that much of the unit can be removed without the work ceasing, and it is what holds the axis lowest. What the cut loses is not ornament. The long Christmas is the argument’s first term: at length the Ekdahl world is a counter-order against which the bishop’s bare house is measured; shortened, it is a setting. The prologue, five acts and epilogue are compelled, each act turning the world by a death, a marriage, a captivity, a rescue and a release. Carl and Lydia’s scenes and parts of the bishop’s household are the parts most easily spared.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The film states three things and holds them. A family survives by theatre: Oscar calls the playhouse the little world, a lit place where the large world may for a time be forgotten, and Gustav Adolf’s christening speech claims as much for the family’s feasts, admitting they are a refuge, not an explanation. Religious tyranny is love starved into rule: in his last talk with Emilie the bishop confesses that he wears masks and that he believed he was loved, and cruelty and need are one man. Deepest, the tyrant is taken inside: the dead bishop tells Alexander that he will never be rid of him. A child’s formation under abuse, survived by imagination and not ended by the abuser’s death, is a condition stated, not a mood.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Elevation is frequent and varied in kind. Emilie’s cry over Oscar’s body, heard by Alexander from the doorway as a long animal sound, is terror without spectacle. The attic of the bishop’s house, where the drowned daughters of the boy’s lie come to him, is cold dread. In the puppet workshop a figure looms behind a door and Alexander takes it for God until Aron shows him a puppet: the uncanny turned to comedy and back. The height is Ismael’s locked room, where a wish is read and the bishop’s house burns at the same hour. Warm elevations answer these: the Christmas procession through the rooms, the red of the apartment by candlelight. Held from the top by the ordinary stretches: the height is gathered more than sustained.
Score: 8.9 / 10
The archetype is built, not evoked. Oscar collapses rehearsing the Ghost in Hamlet, dies, and returns as a ghost to his son; the mother marries a man the son hates; the son wishes him dead, and the wish is fulfilled. The Hamlet structure carries the plot, inverted: the ghost asks nothing, and the revenge is done by another’s magic. Over it lies the fairy tale, also load-bearing: the wicked stepfather, the locked house, the rescue in a chest, the witch’s fire. Under both lies the theological question, the bishop’s Lutheran God against Isak’s Kabbalistic house, where dangerous Ismael is kept apart. Each layer stays particular: a real Swedish Christmas, a real bishop’s house. The ceiling is that the patterns are inherited and combined, not founded.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Within Bergman’s own work the turn is large. After two decades of chamber films on islands and in bare rooms came a period saga of a whole family, warm in colour, crowded with servants, food and comedy, with the supernatural admitted on equal terms with the real. The stake was real: one work made in two forms at once, for two media, a serial in five parts and a feature, by a director whose name rested on austerity. What holds the axis a tenth below the bar is the direction of the turn. It runs from Bergman toward his inheritance, Ibsen’s household drama, Strindberg’s dream play, Dickens’s childhood under a cruel stepfather, the Scandinavian family chronicle. Persona broke the medium; this extends a tradition with mastery.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Change the form and the film loses what it knows. The prologue opens on Alexander’s toy theatre, its curtain rising on the title, and the epilogue closes on Helena reading Strindberg’s prefatory note to A Dream Play. Framed so, the whole can admit ghosts without asking whether they are real, and the frame is the knowledge: the little world is a made world. The colour law carries the argument, the Ekdahl rooms in reds, golds and candle warmth, the bishop’s house bleached to white, grey and black. The five parts give a novel’s time, in which the household is lived in, not visited, so that the bare house is felt as loss. The cost is plain: parts of the chronicle are a novel’s matter.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Forty-four years of return, and a large body of Bergman scholarship, have not closed the central questions. Is the magic real, Isak’s illusion of the children on the floor and Ismael’s fire, or the projection of a child whose medium is the magic lantern he works in the nursery at Christmas? Is the bishop’s death murder by wish? Is Ismael Alexander’s double, the boy’s rage given a body? Is the epilogue a resolution or a sentence, since the bishop’s ghost stays? None is settled by the film. The autobiographical layer, a grandmother’s apartment, a pastor father, the account Bergman later gave in Laterna magica, keeps yielding readings, and the two forms, the long version and the maker’s own cut, let each be read against the other. What holds it at the figure, below the films whose surface is itself the riddle, is that much of the meaning lies in the open: return deepens the household more than it overturns the reading.
Score: 8.8 / 10
Released in 1982, so force and reach are scored together. The intrinsic force is high within its field: the film made the case that the art film could hold the scale and warmth of the nineteenth-century novel without loss of seriousness, and it joined the television serial and the cinema feature in one work of an auteur, after Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980). Forty-four years have let the reach show, and with the force it clears the bar. What holds it there and not higher is that it crowned a career more than it redirected a medium; the films that changed what cinema could do came earlier, Bergman’s among them. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the film became the reference for the European family-gathering film, with Arnaud Desplechin’s Un conte de Noël (2008) its plainest descendant, and it stands behind the later idea of a director’s long version for television.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Survival is demonstrated across forty-four years. The form is wholly legible: both versions survive complete, restored and in circulation, issued together with Bergman’s documentary of the shoot. The fabric is the smallest charge: the photochemical original survives and has been restored, and the film was already an image of 1907 when it was made, not fixed to the look of 1982 as a contemporary drama is. Presence is continuous, the film screened and studied since 1982, and it is what holds the figure, since the long form was less seen than the cut for much of its life. It stands level with Blood Meridian, three years younger, below Raging Bull, older and more widely seen, and far below what has lasted centuries.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Command of the medium is complete and load-bearing. Sven Nykvist’s light is the argument made visible: candle and lamp in the Ekdahl rooms, northern daylight blanched in the bishop’s house, the blue dark of the nursery where the lantern throws its picture. Anna Asp’s design and Marik Vos’s costumes build two worlds felt apart before they are stated. The ensemble is among the finest in cinema: Allan Edwall’s tired Oscar, Gunn Wållgren’s Helena talking to her dead son, Jan Malmsjö’s bishop, whose courtesy frightens more than his cane, Jarl Kulle’s Gustav Adolf, Erland Josephson’s Isak. The children are directed without sentiment. The impossible is handled by the plainest means and shows no seam. Some passages run at the length of life, by choice, and mostly earn it.
Score: 9.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Uncle Carl’s farce with candles and wind in the nursery, and Ismael’s locked room, where a death is wished into being. One law governs both, the little world. Everything in the film is play, from the bawdy to the sacred: play is how the Ekdahls survive and how the Jacobis practise their magic, and the bishop’s house is the one place where play is forbidden, which is why it is the place of death. The toy theatre shows the law and Strindberg’s note states it; inside it the real and the supernatural do not contradict. The strain is in the moral weather: the uncles’ comedy is played as sanctioned warmth, and the film’s judgment softens there more than its form admits; and Isak, though given his own age, love, anger and house, stands near the old type of the magical rescuer.
Score: 9.0 / 10
Many orders are held in one structure: a child’s consciousness, given as the work’s point of view; a family over three generations, with its marriages, adulteries and legitimacies; servants and masters at one table at Christmas; trade, in the restaurant, the shop of old things and the money Isak pays; the theatre as institution and livelihood; the established church as household and as power; Jewish mysticism and its house; sexuality; death, and the dead who remain; the question of God. They are integrated: the money that buys the children, the church that holds them and the theatre that receives them back are one plot. What holds the axis here: the state, history beyond the household, labour outside the house and the natural order, one summer house aside, lie outside the frame.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.8 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Made at 9.3, then The Living Form and The Inner Law at 9.0. A making in which Nykvist’s light, two designed worlds and an ensemble of the first rank carry the argument and the impossible shows no seam; a form framed between a toy theatre’s curtain and a dream play, in which the colour law and the time of five parts do the work of knowing; and one law of play, from Carl’s farce in the nursery to the death wished in Ismael’s room.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 8.2: the maker’s own theatrical version lifts out about two hours and the work stands, though what it loses is the counter-order the bishop’s house is measured against. Next above it, The Swerve at 8.4: a large turn within Bergman’s work, made toward his inheritance rather than away from it.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears with room: The Living Form at 9.0, The Made at 9.3, The Inner Law at 9.0, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on one axis alone: The Unconcealment at 8.8, The Archetypal Deep at 8.8, The Imperishable at 8.6 and Pressure on Tradition at 8.6 clear the bar of 8.5, but The Swerve at 8.4 falls a tenth short. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis falls below 8.2, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.6. Four of the five summit conditions are met, and the aggregate of 8.8 holds the work in Tier IV.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Fanny och Alexander (Fanny and Alexander), written and directed by Ingmar Bergman, Sweden, 1982: photographed by Sven Nykvist, produced by Jörn Donner, with production design by Anna Asp and costumes by Marik Vos. The work judged is the television version of 312 minutes in five parts, Bergman’s fullest form, from the toy theatre’s curtain to the reading from Strindberg. The theatrical version of 188 minutes, released in December 1982, is not a second work: everything it holds lies inside the long form, and it is used as evidence, above all of what its maker judged could be lifted out and what he judged could not. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. Every axis is judged on the Swedish film; English renderings are a reader’s aid, every English gloss is the desk’s own, and nothing is charged to a subtitle. Words are quoted only where they are certain: two words of Oscar’s Christmas speech, and Strindberg’s prefatory note to A Dream Play as Helena reads it; no published translation is quoted. Bergman’s documentary of the shoot, Dokument Fanny och Alexander, the published screenplay and his later account in Laterna magica stand outside the unit. Details that could not be verified, among them the Swedish titles and running times of the five parts, the date of the first broadcast, the year of the epilogue, the editor, the cost of the production and the shot and scene counts, are not given.