I met Bergman at the beginning of the last month of the centenary, and it was too late to meet him. Last weekend I watched F&A for the first time and took a lot of notes. I think I will watch it 2 or 3 times.
It is more appropriate to describe the viewing process as "getting better". The first half is immersed in the wonderful movement of mirrors, the use of candlelight, the ingenious cutting of the curtain and the door opposite the scene, and the penetration of colors and emotions; when the time reaches the golden section of the film At the climax of the comparison, Bergman completely takes us into a safe and eerie dreamland, where he rubs poetry and clues into his lines, evoking thoughts and associations.
When the lengthy plot made me drowsy, these two lines instantly woke me up and brought a flash of inspiration. One is "Emotional ego rises in the body, and although I can control it, reality seems to be shattered by emotion. After you're gone, reality is already in pieces, but weirdly, it feels more real. So I don't bother to mend this reality anymore." The second is at the end of the old grandmother reading a verse from August Strindberg's "The Drama of a Dream," "Anything is possible, anything can happen. Time and space do not exist, and within the fragile framework of reality, imagination is spun like thread, interwoven with new patterns." The latter is my favorite line, and I think the core of the film, says Strindberg It is Bergman's spiritual father, which is slightly reflected here. Just when you thought the movie was going to end in your head, just when those clueless clues were swirling around in your mind, such a short poem came out, explaining all the strange phenomena in the movie, The previous doubts became a line. The time and space that are blended and lost their boundaries are folded in the film, the setting is like a dream, and the foreshadowing of coexistence is described in countless details. There are no difficult shots, but every simple push and pull is exquisite, creating an atmosphere of countless emotions.
At the end of the film, I still reminisce about this sentence, muttering to myself, "Time and space do not exist...". His father played Hamlet's ghost when he was alive, and exists in the world as a ghost in white after his death. Mummy died 4,000 years ago, but still has chest heaving. Fanny and Alexander can be in both the trunk and the upstairs room. Different forms of people can coexist, life and death can merge in time, and the concept of time can also not exist. The green house in Bergman's real childhood coexists with the red-hued house in the film, and the inspiration for the film is a reflection of his childhood experiences.
"Under the fragile framework of reality, imagination is like spinning threads, intertwined with new patterns." It even leads to a new understanding. Imagination makes everything seem to lose its boundaries and merge together. A way of interweaving, changing. The power of imagination freed Alex from the shackles of his stepfather, religion, time, and space, and he truly became his own master, a brand new god.
God, death, and human nature are Bergman's thoughts all his life, and his western-style torture was answered by an oriental-style answer in F&A. This answer speaks of the enormity of the invisible, the illusion becomes the real, the real becomes the illusion, and the real and the fake are blended together. A great work is not about the arc of stories and characters, but about a complete circle, where characters change shapelessly on different lines, but eventually converge to the origin. The way he found reconciliation with the world—imagination drives change in the world.
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