Ingmar Bergman

Call Me Ishmael: Fanny and Alexander (1983)

245 Call Me Ishmael Fanny and Alexander Bergman’s statement that Fanny and Alexander will be his last film is doubtless to be understood more rhetorically than literally: he has already completed another. Admittedly he speci- fied that it would be his last theatrical film, and the new one, After the Rehearsal, was made for Swedish television—but so was Fanny and Alexander in its original, longer form and the new film has already been bought for theatrical distribution outside Sweden : the distinctions blur. The declaration, however, remains useful in drawing attention to Fanny and Alexander’s particular nature: that of an artistic testament and summation, the kind of work any filmmaker might wish his “last film” to be. It is also the most generally accessible film Bergman has made for many years, perhaps since Wild Strawberries, and it is in striking contrast to the immediately preceding From the Life of the Marionettes . Yet its accessibility and deserved popularity with both critics and public do not necessarily guarantee that it has been fully understood; I am struck by the fact that the majority of reviews have ignored or been very vague about precisely those aspects of the film that seem to me most interesting, aspects 246 robin wood centered on Ishmael. Our critics either don’t know what to make of Ishmael or don’t want to make anything of him (her). A long article on the film by William Wolf in Film Comment, for example, can offer no more than “The rescued Alexander . . . meets Isak’s mysterious nephew Ishmael, who introduces him to the supernatural [which, by the way, Alexander has already encountered on several occasions] with mesmerizing talk of magical powers.”25 Actually, Ishmael’s most significant communication to Alexander is that he is supposed to be very dangerous , which is why he is kept locked up; we may deduce that our critics find him very dangerous too. I shall return to Ishmael, who seems to me the culmination not only of this film but of all Bergman’s work to date. First, I want to consider the two levels on which Fanny and Alexander can be seen as a “summation.” First, on the personal level, numerous anecdotes from Bergman interviews connect him with Alexander, most notably the punishments inflicted on him in childhood by his Lutheran pastor father. Compare Hour of the Wolf, in which the male protagonist (Max von Sydow) recounts similar memories. Asked why he didn’t dramatize these in a flashback, Bergman replied that the experiences were still too close, that to do more than have the character narrate them would be unbearable.26 In Fanny and Alexander not only are they fully dramatized but the “father,” significantly distanced as stepfather , is created with understanding as a rounded character fully believing in the goodness and justice of his actions. (To understand, however, is not necessarily to forgive: there is no hint of sentimental exoneration.) Bergman’s self-identification with a male child on the verge of puberty is not new; it was anticipated in The Silence and, crucially, Persona. What is especially Call Me Ishmael 247 interesting here is the way the identification becomes divided: the film moves toward the moment when the children’s mother, Emilie, having at last exorcised her need to be dependent on a man, accepts the management of her first husband’s theater and plans to produce A Dream Play—a work with which Bergman has been particularly associated. An active, independent woman and a boy not yet indoctrinated into patriarchy but who has learned all about fathers: in the dual identification Ishmael is already implicit. Second, on the historical level the personal progression from abused child to producer of Strindberg is counterbalanced with a much wider though related progression, realized in the audacious aesthetic leaps of the film: from nineteenth-century realist novel to twentieth-century symbolic drama, Dickens to Strindberg , David Copperfield to A Dream Play. The aesthetic progression encapsulates in microcosm an essential social/sexual progression from confidence in a “reality” built upon the traditional organization of sexual difference to the collapse of that confidence , with the emergence of Ishmael as the logical—the only possible—movement toward further progress. In retrospect, it now appears that the turning point in Bergman ’s career was Persona or, more precisely, the somewhat mysterious “illness” that preceded it...