The Cinematheque

“One of Bergman’s most powerful and troubling explorations of this atomic fission in the human soul. He should be the first filmmaker to win the Nobel Prize.”

Jack Kroll, Newsweek

No surprise that Michael Haneke (Benny’s Video, Funny Games) admires Bergman’s much-neglected, German-language feature, made just before Fanny and Alexander; From the Life of the Marionettes, a work of devastating psychological violence, could be a prototype for much of the Austrian director’s own transgressive work. Bergman’s film opens with a shocking crime: an affluent young businessman’s brutal murder of a prostitute in a tawdry Munich peepshow parlour. It then proceeds to analyze the background to this seemingly inexplicable act, detailing the protagonist’s superficially happy marriage to a successful fashion designer, his relationship with his wife’s gay business partner, and the emotional aridity and alienation of their comfortable, materialistic lives.