Watching international art films from the 1950s and ‘60s can be tough going if you don’t love the circus. What a relief it was to find my own personal distaste for clowns, carnies and calliope music validated by the Criterion Collection’s La Strada disc, on which a shamefaced Martin Scorsese sheepishly admits, “I never liked the circus.” Yet it’s easy to see why these traveling bands of misfits, artists and freaks provided such a fertile metaphor for filmmakers of the era, themselves leading crews of outsiders to make careers out of what many at the time considered a frivolous distraction. (It’s the same kind of plug-and-play self-identification that fuels so many contemporary heist pictures. You can’t convince me that a lot of these young directors don’t fancy themselves as film school Neil McCauleys.)
However romantic the fantasy of running away to join the circus, the reality is something a bit grimmer. See, the thing about running away is that you’ve got to keep going. All that escapist excitement starts to sag when money’s tight and you and your mistress have fallen out of lust. Especially when your broke troupe’s fancy costumes all got ruined by the rain and the bear is starving. Such is the dismal scenario that begins Ingmar Bergman’s Sawdust and Tinsel, which despite its title, is most definitely not a Christmas movie. The film was originally released in the U.S. as The Naked Night, which tells you a thing or two about how foreign films were marketed back then.
Sawdust and Tinsel was Bergman’s 13th film. Though not a critical or box office success, it’s one the filmmaker felt was a breakthrough. In a videotaped introduction on Criterion’s Bergman box set, he says “I felt for the first time I’d made a good film.” He also recites a vicious review he still had committed to memory some 50 years later, in which the critic declared: “I refuse to perform an ocular inspection of Mr. Bergman’s latest vomit.”
It’s a tough picture, brutal in ways that presage the sexual humiliations and emotional violence that would come to define his later work, with the main couple locked in a masochistic dance of mutual self-loathing. The ringmaster Albert (Åke Grönberg) is a sweaty, corpulent wreck having paint-peeling, Strindbergian arguments with the voluptuous bareback rider Anne (Harriet Andersson) with whom he fled from his wife and children. Bergman was having an affair with Andersson at the time and his camera is positively in thrall to her fleshy sensuality and Bettie Page bangs.
Critic Jonathan Rosenbaum’s controversial 2007 New York Times takedown of Bergman (published while his corpse was still warm and titled “Scenes From an Overrated Career”) suggested that one of the only reasons the director’s grim, challenging films ever became popular was because the actresses in them were so sexy. Rosenbaum’s article may have been ugly-spirited and poorly timed, but he’s not wrong about how hot Bergman’s movies are. The fact that they can be so difficult to watch only adds to the erotic frisson.

Especially when a slimy, attractive stage actor named Frans (Hasse Ekman) sets his sleazy sights on Anne while Albert is in town visiting the wife and family he left behind. Bergman orchestrates these two devastating interludes – at one point dissolving between the women’s faces in a way that predicts the signature shot from Persona – as if conducting a symphony of misery. But everything harrowing that happens in Sawdust and Tinsel was already foretold in the film’s seemingly unrelated prologue.
It’s a secondhand story about the humiliation of a clown named Frost, whose wife was seen bathing nude by a randy army regiment. This is one of those nasty tales told late at night by folks on the road to pass the time, but visualized by Bergman as a silent-era expressionistic nightmare where the dialogue drops out and only the sounds of laughter and phallic cannon blasts remain. It’s an indelibly upsetting sequence, zeroing in on the frailty and helplessness of this wretched, laughingstock clown. The bullying is shot through with the crippling fear of female sexuality, especially when it’s aging.
Sawdust and Tinsel was Bergman’s first film with cinematographer Sven Nykvist, the beginning of one of the most durable and important artistic partnerships in cinema history. The two would work together for the next three decades, with the cameraman’s rich, Rembrandt lighting helping to define Bergman’s signature style. Nykvist only shot the interiors of Sawdust and Tinsel, but you can already see the start of their trademark closeups and a use of mirrors that leaves the characters with nowhere to hide.
In 2003, the Cinémathèque Française invited ten filmmakers to present a Bergman movie that had a profound effect on them. In what in retrospect should come as no surprise at all, director Catherine Breillat selected Sawdust and Tinsel. She wrote an essay for Cahiers du Cinema about Harriet Andersson’s bangs and how this was the movie that made her decide to become a filmmaker, claiming “This film invented me when I was twelve years old. It awakened me to myself.”
Not bad for “Mr. Bergman’s latest vomit.”
“Sawdust and Tinsel” is streaming on The Criterion Channel and Max.