The Making of Fanny and Alexander (1984, Ingmar Bergman) (Patreon)

55/100

Figured I might as well watch this while the film itself was fresh in memory. Bergman's fascinating to watch on set because he knew exactly what he wanted from every detail—of performance, of lighting, of napkin placement—and just kept relentlessly tweaking until the shot finally matched his imagination and/or memory*; there must have been Swedish actors who didn't care to be micromanaged like that and declined to work with him as a result. Certainly this is a valuable lesson for film students about how much exhausting precision must be expended upon simple timing, with take after take ruined because someone enters or exits frame a hair too early or too late. (I was reminded of my one experience on an indie film, and a particular shot for which my task was to lie on the floor, out of frame, and tap the actor's ankle at the right moment, so that she knew when to rise from a reclining position.) Always absorbing, but there's no shape whatsoever to its behind-the-scenes anecdotes, and that inevitably makes Making Of feel more like a bloated home-video supplement than a proper movie, even though it predates that phenomenon by several years. I also felt somewhat uneasy with the sheer amount of time devoted to Gunnar Björnstrand and his cognitive struggles, even though Björnstrand signed off on the footage—he's not that impaired, honestly, so the emphasis on his occasional lapses starts to seem unseemly. Still, any intensive look at the filmmaking process holds some inherent interest for me, and you could probably keep me engaged for a couple of hours with judiciously selected highlights from the set of Hubie Halloween. 

* Too lazy to do any proper research, but I find it curious that Fanny and Alexander, though fairly autobiographical (we here see the director painstakingly and very explicitly re-create a moment from his childhood, with Alexander as his stand-in), is set a decade before Bergman was born. Why are we in 1907-08 rather than 1926-27? There doesn't seem to be any historical event he wanted to include. Was there one he needed to omit? Wish that were an easier google.