Fanny and Alexander, and Bergman: A Year in a Life

Ingmar Bergman lurks in the back of my mind as I write about Scandinavian literature and film, however quotidian or removed from his work the particular story I’m considering may be. As Wendy Lesser points out, Bergman usually offers the introduction to this realm for an English speaker. He certainly did for me. Although I find it hard to think chronologically about my own introduction—since it gets lost in the gauzy images and emotions of childhood—I think I can place it in the summer of 1983, when Fanny and Alexander came out in the U.S.

I have some recollection of seeing the film with my dad, which chimes with the date of the reviews in the Washington Post, from late June. I was twelve and had recently finished seventh grade, and as a child of divorce usually spent summers and holidays with my non-custodial parent. My dad had lived in the DC area for about five years at point, and moved to Arlington, VA the year before. The Post review tells me the film was playing at the “Jenifer 2,” near the Friendship Heights Metro station. Though I doubt we took the Metro. Most of my memories of Arlington involve looking out the rear window at the lights along the Potomac as we drove home across the Key Bridge.

What I remembered from this initial viewing of Fanny and Alexander was the rich and colorful background of the theatrical family’s house and how that contrasted with the spare, frosty interior of the bishop’s residence. It was easy to connect the loving and cheerful atmosphere of the former to its sumptuous furnishings, just as it made sense that the man presiding over the colder house had the forbidding personality to match. On reviewing, the difference between the two households struck me as so extreme as to be almost comical. No wonder it made an impression.

Even at twelve, I understood that there was an autobiographical element to the story. I assumed it was a rough translation of Bergman’s own childhood—which I have since learned it is not. For one thing, the film takes place in the early 1900s, before Bergman was born. In the film, the bishop becomes a step-father to the children, while in reality the character was based on Bergman’s biological father. As far as I can tell, he never had a period of living in the convivial setting conjured by the first part of the film. His own childhood appears to have been all bare floors and crucifixes and tyrannical patriarchy.

Before taking another run at the film, I watched a documentary by Jane Magnusson about the most productive period for the director, called Bergman: A Year in the Life. It narrates his projects of 1957 one by one, fleshing out a larger portrait of the man and his work as it ambles along. In this one short stretch of time, Bergman had a premiere for The Seventh Seal and was able to direct and release another major film, Wild Strawberries. In and of themselves, these two works would be a feat for any director in the whole of a career—let alone one year—but Bergman also managed to direct a stage production of Molière’s The Misanthrope as well as several TV and radio shows in this time frame. The argument of the documentary is that 1957 is the year Bergman became the towering figure of Swedish and world cinema we recognize today, tapping into the current of his own psyche to find themes both transcendent and lasting.

Despite the recognition of the power of his work, the documentary is not hagiography. Apart from noting the insomnia and workaholic nature such a schedule implies, Magnusson explores Bergman’s ambivalent and sometimes cruel treatment of the women in his life, as well as that of his co-workers and underlings. Magnusson points out that Bergman was, according to his own autobiography, an ardent admirer of Hitler prior to and during World War II. He only became disenchanted at age twenty-eight, following the revelations about concentration camps after the war. During the war, Bergman dated a woman, Karin Lannby, who was secretly working for the Swedish intelligence services. As Magnusson drily notes, Bergman’s jealous nature and his girlfriend’s undercover activities did not mix well. In an early draft of his autobiography, Bergman admitted to raping and beating Lannby during one of their fights—though he later removed this passage from the text.

Picking up on Fanny and Alexander’s autobiographical notes would lead one to believe that Bergman was beaten by his father. The young boy at the heart of the story, Alexander, who gets viciously hit with a cane by the bishop, has recognizable traits of Bergman’s, such as his fascination with an early image projector, a magic lantern. Indeed, Bergman uses the Latin term for this device—Lanterna Magica—as the title of his autobiography. However, Magnusson says that the evidence suggests that it was Bergman’s older brother, Dag, who bore the brunt of their father’s wrath. Similarly, the scenes of harsh school discipline in another of Bergman’s films, Torment, were taken from Dag’s life, not Bergman’s. According to Dag:

When asked if the student character tormented by the sadistic Latin teacher was Ingmar, Dag says:

Presumably, there would be more witnesses at school to corroborate this state of affairs than inside the Bergman home. Yet it never became a subject of general debate in Sweden, because Bergman used his influence to get this televised interview with Dag suppressed. Dag did not get to give his interpretations of the films to a wide audience in his lifetime. Bergman’s instinct to block him, similar to his erasure of his own account of the incident with Lannby, suggests that Dag’s is the accurate interpretation. Magnusson points out that Bergman’s own role in the household may be closer to that of Fanny, who has to stand by and watch as her brother takes the full force of the bishop’s anger. It’s notable, in this context, that Fanny gets top billing in a story that otherwise revolves completely around Alexander. (This is true in the Swedish title as well; I checked.)

Though Bergman clearly has some guilt about borrowing his brother’s story, and Magnusson seemed to fault him for it, I don’t think it matters much in terms of the appreciation of the work. It doesn’t strike me as much different from pushing back the chronology of childhood twenty years, or adding in a sumptuous apartment to create a contrast with austerity. Art has its reasons and mysteries. Dates change, names change, a family of three children gets cut down to two, the characters all reflect their creator while borrowing from other people in the vicinity. None of this strikes me as strange.

Magnusson seems to imply that Bergman is stealing Dag’s valor by conflating his story with his brother’s. But I don’t see it that way. This may be where my memory of seeing the film with my father becomes important for me. I’m trying to send myself back to our seats in the Jenifer 2, imagining what seeing that film was like for my dad—who also came from a highly religious, abusive family, with a tyrant of a father who regularly beat him. I doubt my dad had much sense of valor about having survived that. I know that on occasion he argued that, if anything, it was worse for his younger brother, since he had to watch and imagine himself going next.

If there is one thing I have grasped from inheriting this predicament of my dad’s, it’s that families are an ecosystem. There is not a straight one-to-one correspondence between the act of a perpetrator and the reaction of the victim. Witnessing has its costs. Silence has its costs. Even participating in the family myth and the associated gaslighting has its costs.

Bergman’s family trauma and his flirtation with fascism reminded me of the work of those postwar middle-European psychologists and social theorists who posited the authoritarian personality and its association with child abuse. Particularly, what comes to mind is the concept of identification with the aggressor. Sándor Ferenczi’s idea was that in a suffocating, traumatic system like the abusive family, options seem to narrow so that the situation becomes a zero-sum game. Either you are a victim, or you side with the aggressor. There is no in-between. Bergman certainly seems to have episodes of being a sadist or the perfect disciple to a sadist—even on the world-historical scale—so it is not entirely surprising and in some ways moving to me that he allowed himself in his art to identify with the victim. The tragedy for Bergman is that he does not appear to have escaped the confines of that early box. Even as he had the means to try on different versions of himself and express himself through various characters, and at times finds solace in self-expression, he stills comes off as trapped. He produced great work, but the enormous ego he developed in tandem with his success provided no check for his crueler impulses. Lannby is not the only woman he physically attacked; the documentary suggests his relationship with his wife Gun Grut was punctuated by incidents of domestic violence. Nor did he reserve that cruelty for women. Instead of acting as a mentor to the up-and-coming director, Thorsten Flinck, he publicly humiliated him in a meeting that made everyone present squirm, shooting his volcanic temper at the hapless young man, in a way that affected his whole life and career. He did this at the end of his own storied career, when it would have cost him nothing to be generous.

As I watched Fanny and Alexander again, I wondered about the artistic and personal reasons Bergman chose to change the autobiographical details—without judging them. I believe he moved the dates up to coexist with his beloved Strindberg, who died before he was born. At the end of the film, the warm family plans to put on Strindberg’s A Dream Play, to mark a new direction for their theater. Being set in 1908, that leaves the door open for Strindberg himself to attend. Why Bergman’s father became a step-father instead has to do with all the references to Hamlet in the film. At one point Alexander’s mother says directly to him that he is no Hamlet and she no Gertrude. Alexander’s father even wanders around as a ghost, and Alexander does finally strike back at his step-father. Bergman clearly wanted to give his hero a Shakespearean glow.

I thought the film indirectly addressed some of the documentary’s criticisms of Bergman. Alexander’s lies and distortions within the film make perfect sense. Imagination and even lies are a form of rebellion to the bishop’s fake rectitude. Alexander is haunted by the ghost of his step-father as well as his real father, and by implication carries some of the former’s violence around with him. My interpretation of the wonderful apartment and the loving family within is that this represents the family that Bergman was able to make for himself later in life, among theater people. Like the family in the film, they provide him with joy and a place of refuge, but are unable to blot out the worst effects of his childhood captivity.