Beginning this week, IFC center will show the original 312-minute version of “Fanny and Alexander” (1982) the picture Ingmar Bergman called “the sum total of my life as a filmmaker,” in a new high-definition restoration shown in two parts. Bergman intended “Fanny and Alexander” to be his final film, and in order that the full range of autobiographical underpinnings and thematic summations get their due, his 1982 opus was to be a multiple-part series produced for Swedish Television.

“Our time on earth is brief” goes a toast during a holiday celebration depicted early in “Fanny and Alexander,” “full of toil and grief.” The upside, according to Bergman, is that the more toil and grief there is to endure, the more that coincidence and imagination will conspire to liberate those able to see beyond the existential clock-punch of the day to day grind.

The film that was a lifetime in the gestating went before the cameras for seven straight months of toil, during which grief made featured on-set appearances at regular intervals. The director fell out with his long-time actress collaborator, Liv Ullmann, when she turned down the role of Emilie Ekdahl. Bergman’s otherwise strong bond with cinematographer Sven Nykvist became understandably strained when Bergman refused to give Nykvist time off during shooting to attend a family funeral. Bergman stock company star Gunnar Björnstrand was so sick when he arrived on set that scenes over which he and the director unsuccessfully labored had to be abandoned during editing. Bergman himself took ill during production and turned over directorial supervision of some of the script to his assistants in order to keep the mammoth production on schedule.

But the peculiar alchemy that can spin troubled productions into finished film gold prevailed. Björnstrand’s screen time has the unfortunate truthful poignancy that comes from actors nearing the ends of their lives playing characters nearing the ends of their lives. Nykvist’s color photography coaxes luster out of shadow. And Ms. Ullman’s replacement, Ewa Froling, is stunning in the role of Emilie, a woman who allows lacking emotional depth to put the needs of her own heart ahead of her children.

“We draw the theater over our heads like a wedding gown,” Emilie says to the fellow members of a stage troupe she co-heads with her husband Oskar Ekdahl (Allan Edwall). What remaining spell the theater casts over Emilie vanishes upon Oscar’s sudden death. To the horror of her children — Alexander (Bertil Guve) and Fanny (Pernilla Allwin) — Emilie takes up with and marries a Calvinist bishop (Jan Malmso), and draws religious austerity rather than the trouper’s life over her eyes. What follows is a three-way war of the households among Oskar’s family (eager to welcome Fanny, Emilie, and Alexander back into the fold), the Bishop (who takes an increasing interest in tormenting Alexander) and Isak (Erland Josephson), a magician and antiques dealer who plays host to enchanted artifacts, eccentric relatives, Alexander, and Fanny with equal affection.

After its run on Swedish television, the heavily hyped and quite expensive film was grudgingly cut down to 188 minutes by Bergman for an international art-house run that yielded Oscars and accolades from some quarters, and suggestions that the director of “Through a Glass Darkly” had slipped into sentimental artistic irrelevance from others. In paring “Fanny and Alexander” down to exhibitable length, “I had to cut into the nerves and lifeblood of the film,” Bergman later wrote. Much of the detail and emotional reasoning of the film’s first half, and the dark magic and guilt associated with Alexander’s growing powers of imagination in the second half, vanished under the cutting room shears.

“The theater is my wife and the cinema is my mistress,” Bergman once observed. Dealing as it does with the changing nature of performance and theatrical artifice at the dawn of the 20th century, “Fanny and Alexander ” might be described as an effort by its creator to seat wife and mistress at the same table. At 312 minutes, there is once again room enough for both muses. Restored to its rightful length for a two-week run at IFC, “Fanny and Alexander” proves that, at least as far as late-period, introspective, meditative, and unapologetically presentational filmmaking is concerned, sometimes more is more.