Committed to an Uppsala asylum in the mid-1920s for attempting to murder his fiancée, an eccentric inventor obsesses on death and Schubert. Once released, he schemes to make the first sound film, basing it on his obsessions and on a melodramatic fairy tale told to him by another inmate. Bergman made this dark tragic-comedy for television, and it plays as a kind of valedictory to the cinema, Bergman's look back at his own career, and an homage to the silent cinemas of Sweden and Germany.