Sawdust and Tinsel / Gycklarnas afton

1900. A troupe of carnies travels up and down Sweden’s towns and countryside. Their manager, Albert Johansson, is on the verge of a breakup. He wants to leave the circus, which is accumulating failures, and his mistress Anna, hoping to recover the security of the family home he abandoned three years earlier.

“Sawdust and Tinsel is a relatively sincere and shamelessly personal film, there are a certain number of variations in which eroticism and humiliation combine in several ways.” Sven Nykvist

“My encounter with Ingmar Bergman on Sawdust and Tinsel was one of the most important events in my life. … We are both obsessed with light, as an expression of feelings and atmosphere. What we started together was very interesting… The film was very difficult, but I learned a lot about light. I began to work with indirect lighting because I hate bright lights on faces and dark shadows in the background and everywhere else. I never later stopped using that technique, which also works very well for color.”  Sven Nykvist, interview with Hubert Niogret, Positif, février 1988, n°324