#0000A/#412: BERGMAN, Ingmar: Sawdust And Tinsel (1953)

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BERGMAN, Ingmar (Sweden)
Sawdust And Tinsel [1953]
Spine #0000A/Spine #412
Blu-ray/DVD



2007 synopsis

Ingmar Bergman presents the battle of the sexes as a ramshackle, grotesque carnival in Sawdust and Tinsel, one of the late master's most vivid early works. The story of the charged relationship between a turn-of-the-century traveling circus owner (Åke Grönberg) and his performer girlfriend (Harriet Andersson), the film features dreamlike detours and twisted psycho-sexual power plays that presage the director's Smiles of a Summer Night and The Seventh Seal, works that would soon change the landscape of art cinema forever.

2018 synopsis

Bergman presents the battle of the sexes as a ramshackle, grotesque carnival in Sawdust and Tinsel, one of the master’s most vivid early works and his first collaboration with cinematographer Sven Nykvist. The story of the charged relationship between a turn-of-the-century circus owner (Åke Grönberg) and his younger mistress (Harriet Andersson), a horseback rider in the traveling show, the film features dreamlike detours and twisted psychosexual power plays, leaking for an accomplished study of physical and spiritual degradation.

92 minutes
Black & White
Monaural
in Swedish
1:33:1 aspect ratio
Criterion Release 2007/2018
Director/Writer


Ingmar Bergman was 35 when he wrote and directed Sawdust and Tinsel.

Other Bergman films in the Collection:


The Film

The circus is in town!

Its leader, Albert (a wonderful, plump Åke Grönberg) can’t sleep and climbs up the wagon to sit next to the coachman, Jens (Erik Strandmark). Perhaps to keep them both awake, Jens narrates a story concerning Frost, the clown (Anders Ek) and his flirt of a wife, Alma (Gudrun Brost). Bergman flashes back to tell the story.

These two minor characters, fleshed out (literally) in this preamble, create a real feeling for what is to come. For Albert and his young protégé, Anne (the gorgeous Harriet Andersson), the tensions of life and art (high or low brow) are about to explode upon the screen.

Bergman’s attention to detail is captivating. We see the enormous effort in setting up the circus tent and feel for the troupe — who really are down and out.

Albert — taking Anne along for enticement — calls on Mr. Sjuberg (the great Gunnar Björnstrand), a theatre director with whom Albert apparently has some acquaintance. The essence of their meeting is described below by John Simon … it is a well-crafted scene which seems to encompass Bergman’s feelings about the pomposity of certain theatre people and the earthy humbleness of the circus.

The only real villain in the piece is the actor, Frans (an appropriately chilly Hasse Ekman) … yet his character’s actions are what sets the wild denouement onto the screen.

Bergman is just now using lots of close-ups, of Frost, for example, Felliniesque … and shooting certain characters from very low camera positions (Sjuberg’s introduction, for example).

Of course, no sunlight … except for that initial flashback sequence, which is wonderfully overexposed.

**

The score by the great composer Karl-Birger Blomdahl is wonderful. A single stroke from the bass drum illuminates an image. A solo bass clarinet creeps around the scene where Anne goes looking for Frans.

Bergman was lucky to get him. This was the only full-length film he ever scored.

Film Rating (0-60):

55

The Extras

The Booklet

#0000A:

250-page book featuring an essay by Wesley Brown.

“Ingmar Bergman had recently suffered the humiliation of having an offer to work at the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm rescinded, and he was weighed down by guilt over his third failed marriage and an affair with actress Harriet Andersson, when he began writing the script for Sawdust and Tinsel in a hotel in that city that shared a building with another theater. At night, he could hear the actors performing and partying below, and he drew inspiration from this, and from certain memories of the Swedish countryside. As he would later recall, ‘there were some circus caravans traveling at dawn one late winter day in the neighborhood of Gimo. The Uppland landscape there, in all its wretchedness, has a uniquely ghoulish quality that captivated me.’”

#412:

Twenty-four page booklet featuring an essay by John Simon and an appreciation by filmmaker Catherine Breillat.

Simon:

“Only a consummate artist could have written, as an argument for superiority, the astoundingly paradoxical ‘you only risk your lives. We risk our pride.’ Isn’t life more precious than vanity? Not to the supercilious artist, who would rather gamble with his life than risk losing the adulation of his public and his self-esteem. And yet this shrewd insight may cloak an error in judgment: life is more essential than art, and its sacrifice greater than that of pride. In the deepest sense, we must have here the conflict between art and life. As Bergman certainly must have known, the theater actor is an artist whose vanity can be humbled by bad reviews and poor audience response. Life is what the circus artist gambles with. Which is more important? If the former, then art is superior; if the latter, then life.”

Breillat:

“She has short brown bangs, abrupt and sophisticated, in the middle of her broad domed forehead. The hairstyle of a child or a she-devil: in my home, in my family, bangs are vulgar … in reality, that means sensual, perhaps enticing. In spite of that — in spite of the bangs — the actress has the childlike face of pure virginity, where no history of human belonging is written, with the inviolability of a statue; eyes like fissures cracked open by the light, purpurine lips discernible in the contrast between black and white. She stands to the left of the bed, in the foreground, and he is relegated to the background, despised, trivial, and yet desirable (because what can a statue desire if not to fall from its pedestal). This marmoreal beauty is coupled, badly of course — with Bergman, young girls are the pearls that are given to the swine.”

Commentary

By Bergman scholar Peter Cowie.

Cowie — one of the greatest of all the Bergman scholars — rides through the film with a continuous stream of information. To name a few:

The film was obviously heavily influenced by 1925 Dupont film Variety, starring Emil Jannings. Bergman alternately affirmed and denied this.

Also an important influence is August Strinberg. A gloomy outlook on life, and — as in the Japanese expression mono no aware — the struggle towards an acceptance of all, with at least a glimpse of a smile on your face.

Video introduction

By Bergman from 2003.

Ah, the bad reviews. He took them seriously, back then …
Extras Rating (0-40):

34

55 + 34 =

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