In the Presence of a Clown
(Larmar och gör sig till)

Free Admission

Directed by Ingmar Bergman.
With Borje Ahlstedt, Marie Richardson, Erland Josephson.
Germany/Denmark/Italy/Norway/Sweden, 1997, video, color, 119 min.
Swedish with English subtitles.
Copy source: SVT Drama

Although Bergman announced his retirement from film with Fanny and Alexander (1983), he continued to write screenplays, which others have directed (Sunday’s Child, Private Confessions). Recently, however, he wrote and directed a new film for television. Set in the 1920s, it presents the story of an aging man, a surrogate for the director himself, who has a sexual encounter with Death during a stay in a mental hospital and then struggles to produce a film about the last years of the composer Franz Schubert. Austere in style, Bergman’s film carries on his lifelong exploration of the chaotic emotional sources of art and the process of fashioning these sources into a finished work.