Ingmar Bergman’s Sawdust and Tinsel (aka The Naked Night) [Gycklarnas afton] (1953) offers a spectrum on types of human performance: aesthetic, social, and individual. Set in 1910 in a small town in Southern Sweden, this skillingtryck (penny print ballad) of a film tells the story of a traveling circus troupe on the skids.30 Compelled to borrow costumes from a provincial theatre company, harassed by the local constabulary, and obliged to perform before the local populace, the world in which this circus troupe operates is one of stratified social groups, each marked by elements of costuming: soldiers, citizens, constabulary, actors, and circus folk. When an individual exceeds or strays from the norms of their group, this typically results in a spectacle, and any one of these groups, or a combination of them, then serves as audience and chorus to the drama of the individual. For example, a regiment of soldiers and contingent of circus performers are witnesses to the humiliation of a clown, Frost, whose discovers his wife, Alma, swimming naked with some of the officers. A theatre rehearsal is disrupted by the arrival of the circus owner, Albert, and his mistress, Anne, who come to borrow costumes and in turn become objects of ridicule and amusement to the director, Sjuberg, while standing onstage surrounded by the full company. The circus performers mount a parade in full costume, drawing the attention of the citizenry, only to be halted by uniformed constables who
29 States, Bert O. States, Great Reckonings in Little Rooms: On the Phenomenology of Theater (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985) 46.
30 The skillingtryck is a melodramatic ballad form popular in Sweden ca. 1900 typically concerning a lurid tale. Cf. Frank Gado, The Passion of Ingmar Bergman (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1986) 165.
2 confiscate their horses and reduce the parade into a forced march. And the circus performance itself, with Albert as ringmaster, the clowns Frost and Jens, Alma and her dancing bear, and Anne as a
“Spanish” rider, draws an audience from every social stratum. But it then exceeds its program of rehearsed acts by devolving into a brutal fistfight between Albert and an actor, Frans, a battle royal that serves as the film’s ultimate spectacle. Human performance has a doubled potential in the world of Sawdust and Tinsel: it defines one as belonging to a particular social group, and it is a means by which to mark one’s individuality. Performance is a way to conform or stand apart.
Sawdust and Tinsel premiered in Sweden on 14 September 1953. Contemporary popular reception by Swedish critics was largely unfavorable. The most notorious review is often cited, namely that by
“Filmson” in the Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet: “I refuse to inspect the vomit Ingmar Bergman this time has left behind him.”31 Bergman would maintain that the film is “relatively honest and
shamelessly personal.”32 The film received such scathing reviews that the leading actress (Harriet Andersson) recalled, “Ingmar and I wept when we read the reviews.”33 Critics hesitated before “this mixture of elements” held to be incompatible, such as “a ruthless naturalism, simplifications of morality, psychology, and anti-psychology” that, in combination, “makes the final result differ completely from the sources” of Bergman’s inspiration, namely “nineteenth-century melodrama, Strindberg, and film expressionism of the twenties.”34 The film fared better internationally, in keeping
31 Qtd. in Stig Björkman, Torsten Manns, and Jonas Sima, Bergman on Bergman: interviews with Ingmar Bergman by Stig Björkman, Torsten Manns, Jonas Sima (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1973) 81-82.
32 Ingmar Bergman, Images: My Life in Film (New York: Arcade Publishing, 1994) 185.
33 Qtd. in Robert Emmet Long, Ingmar Bergman: Film and Stage (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 1994) 57.
34 Jörn Donner, The Personal Vision of Ingmar Bergman (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1972) 101.
3 with producer Rune Waldekranz’s expectations.35 Historically, it is considered by many to be
Bergman’s first auteur masterwork.
The performances-within in Sawdust and Tinsel distill the philosophical concerns of the film, and capture a specific set of histories that demonstrate the links between theatre and film through the figure of the actor.36 The film is set primarily within a series of different performance-oriented work-worlds:
a circus troupe, a theatre company, a constabulary, an army regiment, a street corner occupied by an organ-grinder and his monkeys. There appears to be no “real world” separated from performance activities of one sort or another; the closest we come to this is the domestic “backstage” space of a tobacco shop run by the circus owner’s estranged wife, Agda. All “life” in the film is related to some strata of working performance.37 The film is organized primarily around groups, or troupes, that provide collective identities: circus performers, theatre performers, soldiers, constabulary, townsfolk, and even animal performers. The nature of this world and its social organization reflects the historical collectivism of post-war policies and the counter-movement toward individualism expressed through the arts.38 It also distills a timely concern in existential phenomenology and performance theory: the individual’s relationship to social identity and the question of “authentic” existence.
35 Paul Duncan and Bengt Wanselius, eds., Regi Bergman (Stockholm: Bokförlaget Max Ström, 2008) 160.
36 Cf. Leslie Fielder, “The Defense of the Illusion and the Creation of Myth,” English Institute Essays 1948 76. Fielder asserts that the play-within preserves “a history of itself, a record of the scruples and hesitations in the course of its making, sometimes even a defense or definition of the kind to which it belongs or the conventions which it respects.” Qtd in Robert J. Nelson, Play within a Play: The Dramatist's Conception of His Art: Shakespeare to Anouilh (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1958) 10.
37 This work-world is highly comparable with sociologist Erving Goffman's ideas concerning the presentation of self in everyday living. These are taken up in the analysis of Through a Glass Darkly (1961) in the third chapter.
38 Donner 12. “On the social level, an uninterrupted series of reforms took place; they had been inaugurated when the Social Democrats came into power in the early thirties. Simultaneously, movements appeared in the art world that seemed to oppose in every way the social reforms and the collective ideals of society.”
4 Sawdust and Tinsel evidences overlapping interests with acting theorist Konstantin Stanislavski (1863-1938) and existential phenomenologist Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) with respect to the phenomena of social conformity, anxiety, and an individual’s potential for “authentic” action. The various social groups in Sawdust and Tinsel function similarly to Stanislavski’s analysis of acting conventions and Heidegger’s idea of the “they-self”; the function of “anxiety” in the film is similar to that found in both Stanislavski and Heidegger; and the notion of “authenticity” raised by film is elaborated with respect to artistic performance by Stanislavski and is fundamental to Heidegger’s analysis of actual existence. These concerns are practical and not merely theoretical, and were vital topics in Swedish and Western culture in the 1940s-1960s. This is significant to Bergman scholarship, in particular, and theatre and film studies, in general, because it is human performance, in most cases acting, that provides a bridge between the media of theatre and film, and to philosophy.