The Making of Fanny and Alexander (1984)

Not rated and it's pretty darned tame.  If the film Fanny and Alexander has some questionable content, it's not like the documentary that Bergman threw together was going to harp on that stuff too much.  While the movie does discuss the scene where the guardian angel has an uncomfortable moment with Alexander, it's not treated in an exploitative way.  If anything, the film could have gone a little harder into the some of the questionable content involved in shooting a movie with kids.  Still, this is probably the most wholesome content associated with Ingmar Bergman.

DIRECTOR:  Ingmar Bergman

I'm so glad that this is the last thing that I watched.   A little context (because that's what I always do as a warm-up paragraph), I normally don't write about what I consider to be special features.  I always thought it was weird that Criterion made The Making of Fanny and Alexander a separate spine number.  But, also, in the back of my stupid head, I think that there's a world where I will have written about every Criterion entry.  Like, we know that this is a fool's errand.  But I went as far as to make a Criterion page on this blog, so here I am writing about The Making of Fanny and Alexander.  

But I also have to mention that this is the last entry in the Ingmar Bergman mega box from Criterion.  It took me two years to watched everything in there.  I know.  That's not that much time.  I'm sure that with the sheer number of movies in that box set, there are people who will never finish it.  That being said, it felt like a really long time for me.  Maybe it is because I used to do entire directors' retrospectives within a weekend.  Those were the glory days of no responsibility.  Still, I'm proud of myself, you know?  Bergman was harder to get through than I thought that he would be.  I bought that mega box having mostly just seen The Seventh Seal and Fanny and Alexander, so I thought that they'd all be bangers.  And I know that most film fans probably liked a lot of the movies that I didn't care for.  (I just remembered that I had seen way more of Bergman's stuff than those two, but I think I was in the glorious limelight of two movies that absolutely destroyed me.) 

But I said that I was glad that this was the last movie that I watched in the box set.  This box set had me create a headcanon for Ingmar Bergman, simply because Bergman had a lot of these bummer themes pop up in a lot of his movies.  I have to say, after watching these movies, I started to get a healthy paranoia about the man.  I would rank all of these Bergman movies lower than most people on Letterboxd.  Not insanely lower.  But what other people would label as complete classics, I sometimes left with a sour taste in my mouth because I had just watched so many Bergman movies where men were simply expected to cheat. That healthy paranoia, by the way, also led me down so many Wikipedia rabbit holes where I tried to discover what made Bergman so obsessed with male infidelity.  I found out that he had multiple divorces and I simply assumed that he was this miserable and lecherous person.  Now, I'm not saying he's not that thing.  But this Making of Fanny and Alexander presented a very different person than I was prepped for.

I'm going to say something incredibly stupid right now.  That's probably par-for-the-course when it comes to my blogging about Ingmar Bergman.  The dumb thing is that he looked different than I thought he would.  I don't know why I imagined this emaciated guy who was pale and probably had bony fingers.  I expected this grumpy old turd who yelled at people until he got the shot he wanted.  Instead, we get this portrait of an older, but healthier guy.  He seemed to really enjoy making movies and liked hanging out with kids.  The rapport he kept on the set seemed welcoming and positive.  And here's these movies where guys tank their marriages and spit on religion.  Instead, we get a fun uncle vibe who makes movies sets fun to hang out on.  Now I don't know what to think.

I don't think that I'm going to have the longest blog about The Making of Fanny and Alexander.  I can force myself to see why Criterion made this its own spine.  Besides being directed by Ingmar Bergman, it isn't the structure of a traditional documentary.  Between this and Burden of Dreams, I can't think of any film in the Criterion Collection that is about another movie and how it was made.  This isn't exactly Burden of Dreams.  Instead, this honestly feels more like a home movie.  Bergman is open about that from moment one with his intertitles.  He says that this is more of a way to preserve a memory about a positive time in his life.  He's reflecting on his own footage not necessarily from an educational perspective, but more of an emotional moment.  He seems to watch the footage fondly, almost separating it from Fanny and Alexander itself.  Instead, we get a preservation of what it was like to work with the same people over and over again and the cameraderie that he builds on set.

It's not like Bergman has nothing to say.  (By the way, if he had nothing to say and this was just an emotional throwback to a happier time, that is also pretty fine. We just wouldn't really have this paragraph.)  A not-nothing percentage of the film is devoted to Gunnar Bjornstrand (I think!  I'm really doubting it, but I can't find out without rewatching the film and I'm not there at 12:07 am).  For the sake of argument, let's pretend I'm right about who its about.  The point is that there's a heartbreaking part of the film where an actor, who I think is Bjornstrand, struggling with a very difficult song to get out.  He's playing an actor who has to sing a portion from Twelfth Night with a lit candle on his head while a rain machine is hitting an umbrella over him.  For this, Bergman's got commentary.  He says as much.

It is heartbreaking. Bergman sees taht Bjonstrand is aging here.  He used to have things come easily to him and now we see that there's this desperate gratitude behind his performance.  By the way, every take that Bjornstrand does is fine.  From any stretch of the imagination, Bergman could have taken almost any one of those takes.  But it's not what Bergman was looking for and Bjornstrand never fights Bergman on any of these things.  And some of these takes are truly heartbreaking.  There's one take where Bjornstrand can't hold his hand still while he's holding the umbrella.  Like, it's a small moment, but it's the point of the entire sequence.  It's something that he used to be able to do comfortably and now, in his old age, its a chore to do something so simple.

The best thing about this is that I'm forced to reconcile my headcanon with reality.  Sure, Bergman is the guy who made this documentary.  If he really wanted to make something that would make people like him as a filmmaker, maybe this is the thing that he created to shape that narrative. Still, I don't get that.  Bergman, for all of my bemoaning of some of his films, is never one to avoid a challenge.  Instead, I think he's just a guy who liked doing what he did.  Maybe I was so prepped to apply an archetype to him that I forgot that he could just be a guy.  There was probably a reason that he had an acting troupe that he kept working with over and over.  They probably liked working with him and saw that he wasn't just talented, but a good dude.  It's nice.  I watched all these movies and this film finally let him take a bow for all the movies I just watched.