Review: Ingmar Bergman’s Sawdust and Tinsel on Criterion Blu-ray

This is a more wallet-friendly option than Ingmar Bergman's Cinema to owning one of the director's finest early works.

Sawdust and TinselIngmar Bergman and Federico Fellini were both attracted to the metaphoric image of the circus, though the meanings the clowns and trapeze artists held for the two filmmakers could scarcely be more different. While Fellini’s La Strada envisioned the circus as a gaudy yet all-embracing setting for the fundamental comedy of the human condition, Bergman’s Sawdust and Tinsel saw it as a mocking version of the theater stage that would become his recurring motif—a place where, costumes and makeup notwithstanding, people and their emotions are at their most exposed. When American distributors released Sawdust and Tinsel under the bawdy title The Naked Night, they fortuitously hit the film’s theme: the ruthless stripping of the characters’ dreams and illusions by Bergman’s increasingly invasive camera.

Trumpeted in the credits as a “broadside ballad on film,” this is an actively painful picture. There’s a surplus of (most often sexual) humiliation built into just about every relationship here, a concept Bergman brings to the fore in a heavily symbolic but vivid sequence early on, in which the flashback of the clown Frost (Anders Ek) seeing his wife, Alma (Gudrun Brost), bathing naked before a regiment of chortling soldiers is visualized as a nightmare of overexposed brightness and cacophonous jeering. “That’s a woman and love for you,” the storyteller tells Albert (Åke Grönberg), the circus owner who will, in the next day, experience a painful tale of his own. Weary of life with his troupe of itinerant performers, Albert hopes to settle down with his estranged wife; afraid of being ditched, his sexy, petulant mistress, Anne (Harriet Andersson), sleeps with a vain actor, Frans (Hasse Ekman). Pain and degradation follow, inevitably before the eyes of a derisive crowd.

The escape into lyricism, however transitory, that marked Bergman’s Summer with Monika the previous year is completely absent here; this is a world, one character says, of “misery, lice, disease,” where a disdainful theater director’s insults sting as much as physical blows. It’s easy to see why the film became one of Bergman’s popular early successes: There’s still a reliance on ponderous metaphors—phallic cannons, a scurvy old bear, a return-to-the-womb dream—that Bergman would prune as he moved toward the asceticism of his 1960s work, but there’s also a new intensity and directness of feeling, expressed in a series of powerhouse one-on-ones.

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Sardonic moments lighten the gloom: the dark comedy of an emancipated clown carrying his buxom wife as if she were a cross, the liberating cut from Albert’s claustrophobic, suicidal contemplation to the spacious overcast countryside, Anne’s sumptuous sensuality even while arm-wrestling her lover. Ultimately too narrow and stingy to work as the universal parable it sets out to be, Sawdust and Tinsel is nevertheless a fierce example of souls made brutally bare by Bergman’s scrutiny under the big top of life.

Image/Sound

This Blu-ray boasts a significantly sharper image than the Criterion Collection’s 2007 DVD, providing a more enriching presentation of Sven Nykvist’s high-contrast cinematography. Blacks, so dominant in the film’s interior scenes, amplify the effects of the expressionistic shadows that are often employed throughout. The new transfer is from a recent 2K digital restoration and it also offers far more detail in Sawdust and Tinsel’s numerous close-ups, breathing new life into Anders Ek’s distorted expressions and scenes where Åke Grönberg’s oft-sweaty visage is starkly contrasted with Harriet Andersson’s soft, unblemished facial features. The uncompressed monaural soundtrack is nearly as impressive, keeping the dialogue clear and consistent throughout while richly filling out the background with the crisp noises of the traveling circus and other ambient outdoor sounds.

Extras

Critic and Bergman scholar Peter Cowie’s commentary track does an excellent job of contextualizing Sawdust and Tinsel, which was not well-received upon release, within Bergman’s canon. Cowie provides ample evidence of the ways the film echoes Bergman’s struggles as an artist, particularly with officials and money men, and with Andersoon, his then-girlfriend. The influence of German Expressionism and Russian montage on Sawdust and Tinsel’s visual style is also discussed at several points, and most effectively so in a fine reading of the aforementioned flashback to Frost’s humiliation at the beach. Critic John Simon’s essay, included in a fold-out booklet, also homes in on the film’s persistent argument that humiliation is “a painful, nearly universal phenomenon” and convincingly contends that Sawdust and Tinsel laid the groundwork for Bergman’s unique melding of the “bleak and wryly comical” throughout his oeuvre. The disc also comes with a short introduction by Bergman from 2003 where he briefly discusses his sensitivity to the negative reviews the film received upon release.

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Overall

This is the same 2K transfer and extras included on Criterion’s Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema set, but for those not looking to shell out the big bucks for that massive set, this beautiful standalone release presents a more wallet-friendly option to owning one of the director’s finest early works.

Score: 
 Cast: Åke Grönberg, Harriet Andersson, Hasse Ekman, Anders Ek, Gudrun Brost, Annika Tretow, Erik Strandmark, Gunnar Björnstrand, Curt Löwgren, Kiki  Director: Ingmar Bergman  Screenwriter: Ingmar Bergman  Distributor: The Criterion Collection  Running Time: 92 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1953  Release Date: December 19, 2018  Buy: Video

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