Was the supernatural really called for?

I like supernatural films, but I didn't like the supernatural in this film. I feel Bergman should have spent more time establishing the supernatural if he really wanted to go that route. I found it not believable. I wasn't convinced that it belonged in the world constructed in the film. Personally, I think the film would have been better with out it.

I think it's much more appropriate to look at this film as an example of an "unreliable narrator." We are seeing a sequence of events as they are being related to us by a child. As such, these events contain embellishments and fictitious occurrences that are the result of the children's imagination and inability to either grasp, acknowledge, or willfully relate the reality of the situation.

In a sense, the supernatural elements of the film mirror Alexander's lies that he continually gets in trouble for telling. For example, at one point he relates a story about seeing the ghosts of two little girls. He is punished for this lie, and then we immediately see a scene where he encounters these two ghosts (assuming you've watched the 5 hr version). You could interpret this scene with the ghosts as supernatural, or just see it as a visual extension of his imagination. He is alone and afraid in the attic, and this fear is best related to the viewer through a supernatural metaphor; i.e., he is afraid, and this metaphor allows the viewer to feel afraid as well. If we simply saw the exact reality of the situation (him alone in a dark attic without any ghosts), we would likely not experience the level of fear that he is supposedly feeling.

If you watch the film again, try to see it as analogous to a story as told by a child (and by a child that is prone to lying and embellishing the truth). Just as lies can be more powerful and can often better express the reality of the situation than the truth can (similar to how a Monet painting can feel more "real" than a photograph), these supernatural elements are often very useful narrative tools. In this film, these lies/supernatural elements sometimes allow the viewer to feel what the characters are feeling, sometimes they allow us to really understand what they are thinking, sometimes they are used to cover up the truth, sometimes they are used to illustrate a lack of understanding, and sometimes they are used simply to make the story more entertaining. All fictional stories are inherently lies... this film just acknowledges this fact and exploits it in order to make a much more complex, engrossing, and interesting film.

The film needs the supernatural for mainly two reasons I think (and Bergman knows what he is doing with it). The key characters and some scenes have to possess a certain larger-than-life quality; many of the grown-ups are seen as large, impetuous, a bit omnipotent and mysterious the way children think of adults close to them. Most of the film is seen within the ambience of children's vision of the adult world, and even if not all the explanations and stories implied are those Alexander would tell you, the moods and way of seeing the big ones are steeped in the gazes of children. The supernatural element matches this sense of heightened, magic realism. Even where the film isn't overtly non-realistic, it goes beyond what would have been realistic in terms of an early 20th century upper-middle-class family. The way they celebrate Christmas is a Bacchanalia, it has an intensity, a jubilant disorderliness and devil-may-care exuberance that you wouldn't have found in that kind of family around 1910. And Gustaf Adolf's and Alma's adoption of his illicit baby at the end would have spelled absolute scandal at the time; it is completely off bounds in terms of those old days - but it works within the story.

Secondly, the film suggests an equation of art and magic. The artist (in the view of this film) operates in much the same way as a magician, though it's married to the skills of an engineer, a deceptionist. Alexander has known art at home before, and dabbles as a storyteller, something the bishop tries hard to dissuade him from, but during the critical night at Jacobi's house, and his encounters with Aron, Ismael and the "breathing mummy", he makes contact with the real, full power of magic, art and artifice. He suddenly gets in touch with new worlds that he knows he will have to take into account; sometimes, in the future, he may be able to make them follow his signs but he can never truly bend them, never make art (or the supernatural world) completely safe.



You are a lunatic, Sir, and you're going to end up on the Russian front. I have a car waiting.

To me the Jewish man rescue scene is Alexander's imagination and also Bergman's desire to fuse himself with Art (the circus house) and be rid of religious damnation conexts. The mother got them out of the priests house.

My 100 favorite movies http://www.imdb.com/list/Uvw_F2_GMx8/
What are your favorites?

Bergman put an Easter Egg in there to address folks like you.

Aron tells Alexander of a stage-magic performance he did where a real ghost showed up and ruined the performance for the audience, just like the possibilioty that there was real supernatural stuff in the film would ruin it for you. There are other choices that Bergman makes to underline the possibility or probability that some of the supernatural is "real."

I'll be doing a thread called something like "Real or Imagined?" at some point soon. The short version is that one of the key goals of the film is to force us to dissolve that distinction, to come to regard it, at least while watching this film, as not a meaningful one. As others have pointed out in this thread, that connects directly to the role of imagination in the creative arts.

Prepare your minds for a new scale of physical, scientific values, gentlemen.

Really now, I have to side with the OP here. Especially when it comes to the 5 hour version, which is what I'm watching right now (unless I'm much mistaken, the 3 hour version has most of the supernatural scenes removed).

Something like 85 % of this movie (well, the 5 hour version) is a compelling and fairly realistic drama about an upper middle class family in the early 1900s. And because I like the core of what this movie is about, I'm able to stick around and watch it to the end (which I couldn't do with the awful turd, that was "The 7th Seal"). But I feel that the supernatural scenes (even if they are just so typical of Ingmar Bergman and his tendency to make his movies weird for weirdness's sake, that I should have expected them) just don't bring anything positive to the story. Many of them destroy the pace of the movie, and they do nothing but remind me of why I generally don't like Ingmar Bergman and his works. He was just so damn over-pretentious and overrated, and it seems to me like he must have taken drugs to make most of his movies.

Some posters in this thread have argued that the supernatural scenes in "Fanny & Alexander" have a point to them, as an attempt to show us a kid's imagination and emotions or as "creative art". And that is all fair enough, I guess. But it won't change my opinion of these scenes, which is that they're mostly random and pointless fillers to what could have been a much better movie without them.

I thought the supernatural stuff worked against it.

The supernatural aspect is one way to dramatize the persistence of memory. When the bishop's ghost maliciously knocks Alex over and says 'you will never be rid of me', that's a fairly good proxy of how our memories, especially in encounter with evil, will haunt thereafter. I can't think of a more effective demonstration of that truth about us, the persisting power of our experiences.