Ingmar Bergman

Fanny and Alexander: Theatrical Version

Fanny and Alexander: Theatrical Version

Through the eyes of ten-year-old Alexander, we witness the delights and conflicts of the Ekdahl family, a sprawling bourgeois clan in turn-of-the-twentieth-century Sweden. Ingmar Bergman intended Fanny and Alexander as his swan song, and it is the director’s warmest and most autobiographical film, an Academy Award–winning triumph that combines his trademark melancholy and emotional intensity with immense joy and sensuality. Bergman described Fanny and Alexander as “the sum total of my life as a filmmaker.”

Share

Film Info

  • Sweden
  • 1982
  • 188 minutes
  • Color
  • 1.66:1
  • Swedish
  • Spine #263

Special Features

  • Digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
  • Audio commentary featuring film scholar Peter Cowie
  • Theatrical trailer
  • Optional English-dubbed soundtrack
  • PLUS: An essay by novelist Rick Moody

    New cover by Eric Skillman

Purchase Options

Collector's Sets

Collector's Set

Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema

Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema

Blu-ray Box Set

30 Discs

$239.96

Collector's Set

Fanny and Alexander

Fanny and Alexander

Blu-ray Box Set

3 Discs

$47.96

Collector's Set

Fanny and Alexander

Fanny and Alexander

DVD Box Set

5 Discs

$47.96

Special Features

  • Digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray edition
  • Audio commentary featuring film scholar Peter Cowie
  • Theatrical trailer
  • Optional English-dubbed soundtrack
  • PLUS: An essay by novelist Rick Moody

    New cover by Eric Skillman
Fanny and Alexander: Theatrical Version
Cast
Börje Ahlstedt
Carl Ekdahl
Pernilla Allwin
Fanny Ekdahl
Allan Edwall
Oscar Ekdahl
Ewa Fröling
Emilie Ekdahl
Bertil Guve
Alexander Ekdahl
Jarl Kulle
Gustav Adolf Ekdahl
Mona Malm
Alma Ekdahl
Christina Schollin
Lydia Ekdahl
Pernilla Wallgren
Maj, Emilie's nursemaid
Gun Wållgren
Helena Ekdahl
Marianne Aminoff
Blenda Vergérus, the bishop's mother
Harriet Andersson
Justina, the kitchen maid
Jan Malmsjö
Bishop Edvard Vergérus
Kerstin Tidelius
Henrietta Vergérus, the bishop's sister
Gunnar Björnstrand
Filip Landahl
Per Mattson
Mikael Bergman
Erland Josephson
Isak Jacobi
Stina Ekblad
Ismael
Mats Bergman
Aron
Credits
Director
Ingmar Bergman
Script
Ingmar Bergman
Executive producer
Jörn Donner
Cinematographer
Sven Nykvist
Assistant director
Peter Schildt
Production manager
Faragó Katinka
Film editor
Sylvia Ingemarsson
Sound and mixing
Björn Gunnarsson
Sound and mixing
Lars Liljeholm
Sound and mixing
Bo Persson
Sound and mixing
Owe Svensson
Art director
Anna Asp
Set decorator
Susanne Lingheim
Costume designer
Marik Vos-Lundh
Music
Daniel Bell

Related Films

1/9
2/9
3/9
4/9
5/9
6/9
7/9
8/9
9/9

Current

Fanny and Alexander: The Other Side

Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema

Fanny and Alexander: The Other Side

This sensuous, sprawling epic, which Ingmar Bergman intended to be his swan song, offers an effortless summing up of the themes—among them family, identity, and mortality—he'd spent a career exploring.

By Molly Haskell

Essays — Nov 19, 2018
Fanny and Alexander:Bergman’s Bildungsroman
Fanny and Alexander:Bergman’s Bildungsroman
Upon its release in the U.S. in 1983, the theatrical version of Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander generated a wealth of controversy. Bergman has always seemed to breed conflict among cineastes (Phillip Lopate, for example, has written recently a…

By Rick Moody

Essays — Nov 9, 2011
Fanny and Alexander:In the World of Childhood
Fanny and Alexander:In the World of Childhood
With the very first shots of Fanny and Alexander (1982), director Ingmar Bergman announces his perspective and signals his intentions. Here, we find the ten-year-old Alexander gazing into a puppet theater, lifting layer after layer of skillfully pain…

By Stig Björkman

Essays — Nov 9, 2011
Beak>’s Top 10
Beak>’s Top 10

The acclaimed band’s three members each choose a selection of favorites, with an emphasis on movies that have haunted them since childhood.

— May 1, 2019
Ari Aster’s Top 10
Ari Aster’s Top 10

The director of Hereditary writes on the filmmakers who get him excited about making movies.

— Jun 13, 2018
Sloane Crosley’s Top 10
Sloane Crosley’s Top 10

Sloane Crosley is the author of the New York Times best-selling essay collections I Was Told There’d Be Cake and How Did You Get This Number, and the novel The Clasp.

— May 25, 2018
A Bergman Christmas

Repertory Picks

A Bergman Christmas
If you’re in Vancouver for the holidays, stop by the Cinematheque for the theatrical version of Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander, which screens as part of the weeklong series Essential Cinema! Essential Big Screen! Seen through the eyes of th…
In Theaters — Dec 22, 2016

Explore

Sven Nykvist

Cinematographer

Sven Nykvist
Sven Nykvist

Few cinematographers have been as influential as Ingmar Bergman’s close collaborator Sven Nykvist, who helped create such visual tours de force as The Silence, Cries and Whispers, and Fanny and Alexander. A painter whose medium was natural light, a capturer of souls, Nykvist made every human portrait an X-ray, and every interior—whether austerely white or lavishly chromatic—an expressive canvas. Nykvist first worked with Bergman in 1953, when he was one of three cinematographers assigned to the director’s gloomy, twilit circus tale Sawdust and Tinsel. But their union truly began with The Virgin Spring—that savage medieval folk tale ushered in the new era of unsparing, gorgeously shot psychological portraits and open-air location photography that would take Bergman from the devastating God’s Silence trilogy to the richly life-affirming Fanny and Alexander. His work with Bergman made Nykvist an in-demand industry figure, and he would go on to shoot movies in Hollywood and beyond, for directors like Bob Rafelson, Bob Fosse, Philip Kaufman, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Woody Allen. Nykvist died in 2006.

More Sven Nykvist View All