The Cinematheque

Original Full-Length Version

One of the great films of the 1970s, Bergman’s brilliant and brutally honest dissection of the disintegration of a marriage was originally made in six parts for Swedish television, then chopped by almost two hours for its worldwide theatrical release. It screens here in the complete, original version. Unfolding in episodic fashion, and spanning the course of a decade, Scenes from a Marriage features Liv Ullmann, in one of her finest performances, as Marianne, a woman struggling to cope with the infidelity of her husband Johan, played by Erland Josephson. Bibi Andersson co-stars as the younger woman with whom Johan is having an affair. The work is shot in claustrophobic close-up by Sven Nykvist, and rivals Dreyer’s silent classic The Passion of Joan of Arc in its masterful mining of the expressive potential of the human face. The divorce rate in Sweden is said to have skyrocketed after the series aired! In a surprise, Bergman revisited the characters of Marianne and Johan three decades later in 2003’s Saraband, his final film, also starring Ullmann and Josephson.