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, it is the warmest and most autobiographical film combining the director’s melancholy and emotional intensity with immense joy and sensuality.

I. Prolog / Akt.1 : Familjen Ekdahl firar jul

philipdavies@imdb wrote:
Perhaps the most impressive feature of this wonderful film is the humility with which its creator presents it to the world, as if it were no grander than the old-fashioned Nativity-play shown in the early scenes at the Theatre.

At the end of this experience – to term it with any mere technical tag, like ‘movie’, would be inadequate – Bergman’s profoundly grown-up disillusionment has transformed into the pure spirituality of abnegation and acceptance. His intellectual pilgrimage, through possibly the greatest career in films, finds the director arriving back where he began, with the great simplicities of life. But there is a difference with his return, which is that his prodigality over the years has burnt the rage out of him, and finally allowed him to ‘enjoy what may be enjoyed’ (as one of the Ekdahls says), without further fretting over the puzzle of human existence. From all this human folly (he clearly feels) comes the only wisdom, which is – simply – to be human.

II. Akt. 2 : Vålnaden + Akt. 3 : Upbrottet

philipdavies@imdb wrote:
It is, indeed, a film like no other for allowing the pieces of experience to settle into their appointed places. There is a beautiful quality of selfless resignation, in this last of his works for cinema, which finally and forever excels the sadistic disciplines of The Bishop.

This perverted creature confesses, to the new wife whom he has lost, how it is impossible to ‘tear off the mask’ as it is ‘burned into my face’: He is become an authoritarian ‘… a rite, a law, a custom – not a man’. [Shelley] Having put the notional love of God before that of humankind, there is nowhere for his personality to be re-enacted in the bosom of any kindly recollections that will survive him. Except in that of Alexander/Bergman, where his two, each-in-their-own-way terrifying, fathers, both the White and the Black opposites of an imagination flickering with the director’s haunted vision, will project forever onto his Cinematic arena of stark absolutes the inner strife where each of us is locked away, struggling to endure the turmoil of these eternally irreconcilable truths.

III. Akt. 4 : Sommarens händelser

philipdavies@imdb wrote:
Death, in the end, is not a calamity, but the choice of all who have truly known Life. In other words, to choose Life is to accept its Dark partner, Death. And to accept each as part of the family group, even though they seem complete misfits there.

The old lady, with Strindberg’s Dream-play in her lap, knows at last that the whole history of her family is only a personal reverie. And yet how much more real it seems than her son Carl’s immature and somewhat absurd, angst-ridden railings against ‘cruel Fate’!

Had he only accepted his patient wife’s gently sympathetic injunction to ‘Never mind’ the Professor would have been both wiser and happier, enduring with patient fortitude the oceanic inconsequentialities of life’s real Mystery, and attending far less to the trivial pseudo-mysteries of his solipsistic men’s club. All his morbid rationalising is precisely as much use in real life as the usual state of alcoholic befuddlement which is the only serious pursuit of this club.

Reason as befuddlement; The sleep of reason as deliverance. With saint-like humility, Bergman gives us back our ordinary human life, as he surrenders his exceptional life in films. But he knows that the ghost of this life will always be with us. His anguished worldliness will haunt us – as the Ghost of Hamlet’s father must haunt Alexander – forever.

IV Akt. 5 : Demonerna

Fanny och Alexander Ep.1 - Prolog & Act 1.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 36 min
Size: 	9.77 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1828x1080 ~> 1828x1096
Aspect ratio:  	5:3
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	14.2 Mb/s
BPP: 	0.301
Audio
#1:  	1.0ch FLAC @ 284 kb/s (Swedish)

https://nitro.download/view/4378B468CFD663E/Fanny_och_Alexander_Ep.1_-_Prolog_&_Act_1.mkv https://nitro.download/view/BBD419988E95920/Fanny_och_Alexander_Ep.2_-_Act_2_&_3.mkv https://nitro.download/view/02B6F8720AE1CBE/Fanny_och_Alexander_Ep.3_-_Act_4.mkv https://nitro.download/view/09725E9B6D9DF5A/Fanny_och_Alexander_Ep.4_-_Act_5.mkv

Language(s):Swedish
Subtitles:English, French

The post Ingmar Bergman – Fanny och Alexander [Extended TV Version] (1983) (HD) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

A child’s ruminations take form in fantasies of colour, during the last of the innocent summer holidays in the archipelago.

1.09GB | 1h 10m | 720×572 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/5990788F0E1817E/Manen.Ar.En.Gron.Ost.1977.DVDRip.x264-KG.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/3A2A3393EA1CF89/Manen.Ar.En.Gron.Ost.1977.DVDRip.x264-KG.en.srt

Language:Swedish
Subtitles:English

The post Mai Zetterling – Månen är en grön ost AKA The Moon Is A Blue Cheese (1977) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

“It started with a murder of a prostitute, a small matter, really…”

A stripper from Club Chez Nous is murdered. The killer contacts a newspaper to whitewash himself. Two journalists start to investigate the case and stumble on other crimes along the way.

1.56GB | 1h 40m | 654×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/9FA381F8DB5AB22/Chez.Nous.1978.DVDRip.x264-FuFu.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/9B806CEBCDF9DE7/Chez.Nous.1978.DVDRip.x264-FuFu_v2.srt

Language:Swedish
Subtitles:English,Swedish muxed

The post Jan Halldoff – Chez Nous (1978) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Sally, a 28-year-old social worker who has just broken up from a ten-year marriage. She seeks freedom, but has trouble living alone. She soon finds a new man, lawyer Jonas, but Sally knows that the past is chasing her and do things more difficult for her freedom quest.

Quote:
The difficult balancing act between the desire to have a career and enjoy a full family life at the same time, and the tendency of feelings of freedom to lead to a feeling of rootlessness, pervade [Gunnel Lindblom’s] second film, Sally and Freedom (Sally och friheten, 1981). Even though this film, with its screenplay by Margareta Garpe, is more than 30 years old its themes are just as relevant now as they were then. What characterises Lindblom as a filmmaker is the fact that she wants to take up important current issues that she feels strongly about without preaching to her audience about what is right or wrong. Instead, she provides a complex picture of difficult and life-changing decisions in a thought-provoking way.
nordicwomeninfilm.com

1.65GB | 1h 41m | 1280×720 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/6AE4F697BAF6FCF/Sally.och.Friheten.1981.720p.WEB-DL.AAC2.0.H.264.mkv

Language(s):Swedish
Subtitles:None

The post Gunnel Lindblom – Sally och friheten AKA Sally and Freedom (1981) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

A drama about love, divorce, identity and feminism, made for Sveriges Television.

Note: though this is taken from a dvd, the master is obviously a video tape, and there are some distortions present.

920MB | 53 min 25 s | 768×576 | mkv

https://nitroflare.com/view/14FB47AEA6BB000/We.Have.Many.Names.1976.DVDRip.x264-KG.mkv
https://nitroflare.com/view/D0A6FFAD0609B21/We.Have.Many.Names.1976.DVDRip.x264-KG.sv.srt
https://nitroflare.com/view/14C0647486D2CFB/We.Have.Many.Names.1976.DVDRip.x264-KG.en.srt

Language(s):Swedish
Subtitles:English,Swedish

The post Mai Zetterling – Vi har många namn AKA We Have Many Names (1976) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Engaging, suspenseful, well-acted, atmospheric, and technically well-made Swedish thriller, based on the first book in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy (which I have not read; Amazon.com/AdLibris.se). Clichés and little originality notwithstanding, there is a certain freshness to the proceedings, and the film is one of the better Swedish entries in the genre. The movie contains a couple of very disturbing and intense scenes that linger in the mind. While the ending makes the film feel slightly too long, it also ties up a few loose ends quite nicely. Michael Nyqvist convincingly portrays Mikael Blomkvist, but his character is underdeveloped; Noomi Rapace is excellent and memorable as Lisbeth Salander; in a smaller role, Peter Andersson is appropriately disgusting and slimy as Nils Bjurman. Sure-handed direction by Niels Arden Oplev.
Peter Ericson

Quote:
While Cannes frenzy was slowly building up and talk of cinema brought a spark to the eyes of even the most laid-back average French person, one film had crowds lining up in Paris. Following drumbeats, Niels Arden Oplev’s “Millennium” opened mid-May on thousands of screens nationwideFor once, the hype isn’t hype. Wow! The film based on the first of the Stieg Larsson Swedish thriller trilogy, is a miracle of taunt filmmaking and perfect casting. Clocking in at two hours and twenty minutes, it’s still far too short as you want it to go on and on. Investigative journalist Mikael Blombvkist (Michael Nykvist) has just been sentenced to a three-months jail stint for having written about a financier’s offshore tax shelters. Still free while waiting for the set date, he is contacted by an industry tycoon, now retired and reclusive, who wants the journalist, now admired by the public for his ethics and professionalism, to see if he can find clues to the forty-year old unsolved murder of the tycoon’s niece. Blombvkist is helped in the strange quest on a strange island by a troubled girl, a goth hacker with piercings and tattoos, played by the absolutely extraordinary Noomi Rapace.
[…]
Saideh Pakravan@Screen Comment

http://nitroflare.com/view/68F209D428688B7/M%C3%A4n.som.hatar.kvinnor.2009.DVDRip-OwL.avi
http://www.nitroflare.com/view/6891F5D356E6F9B/M_u00e4n_som_hatar_kvinnor_%282009%29.srt

Language(s):Swedish
Subtitles:English srt

The post Niels Arden Oplev – Män som hatar kvinnor AKA Men Who Hate Women AKA The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009) first appeared on Cinema of the World.