Bergman’s first indisputably great film—and his first collaboration with Nykvist—Sawdust and Tinsel (also known as The Naked Night) explores themes of sexual humiliation and domestic and professional wretchedness. The setting is the world of lowly traveling circus performers, condescending legitimate theater people, and a small town’s middle class. The use of landscape is striking, especially in the famous opening dream/flashback sequence, shot silent and in glaringly bright light, in which the pathetic clown Frost (Ek) drags his wife along the beach after he has discovered her bathing nude in front of a troop of soldiers. Critically rejected in its own time, this dark but haunting film, which James Baldwin once called “one of the most brutally erotic movies ever made,” is now considered a landmark in the Bergman oeuvre.