Sawdust and Tinsel

15 yrs 93 minutes • 1953 • 7.4

Ingmar Bergman was finished with the 1940’s and his learning time as a director and had made films like Summer Interlude (1951) and Summer with Monika (1953) when he, still some time before his work would blossom into the modernistic and poetic film art that has made him one of the greatest in film history, made the visually powerful and suggestive Sawdust and Tinsel. The film tells the story of the traveling, not very successful, circus troupe Circus Alberti, who roams through towns at the beginning of the 20th century. Through the story of their touring, bitter living and the many arguments in the group, a story of the excluded artist and its vulnerability comes forward, in a film which Bergman himself described as a film version of a broadside ballad, and which is now considered as one of his key productions.