We have had many requests for a subtitledprint of the complete Fanny and Alexander which was made by Bergman for Swedish television. Fanny andAlexander will be continued on Sunday evenings, October 9 (Parts 2 and 3) and October 16 (Part 4) at 7:00p.m. Bergman's beautiful, dreamlike family chronicle has the feel ofliterature-perhaps a sprawling nineteenth century novel-though in fact it is based on an original screenplay.In the film version, the sense that there is somehow more to this Ekdahl family than we are given isfrustrating. All the characters and nearly all the scenes are there, but in Bergman's original televisionmini-series they are fleshed out, scenes and characters-and thus motivations-given time to develop. If the1983 film was "lumpy," as critic Michael Sragow noted, in this original format those narrative lumps aresmoothed out. Bergman said that Fanny and Alexander was his final movie, but hemade no such claim for his work in the theater, his first and continuing love. In Fanny and Alexander hefollows the fortunes of an upper middle class theatrical family who are sheltered from the deepening chaosof the outside world by their own theatrics. Bergman has the grace, in this most graceful film, not to viewtheir histrionics and eccentricities as neuroses. One tumultuous year in the life of the Ekdahl family isviewed through the eyes of 10-year-old Alexander, whose imagination fuels the magical goings-on leadingup to and following the death of his father, the actor Oscar Ekdahl. His mother's remarriage to a sternprelate banishes Alexander and his sister Fanny from all known joys, and thrusts them and the movie into akind of gothic horror. In the mini-series, not only do we comprehend Emilie Ekdahl, and thus her attractionto the Bishop Edvard, better, but Edvard, given his own scenes, becomes less a tyrannical figure out ofDickens than a very Bergmanesque character whose severity has gone awry. He has become sinister. Thefilm's round rejection of Edvard in favor of "kindness, affection, and goodness" is perhaps Bergman'sfondest farewell to his own cinema.