In the Presence of a Clown

Bergman’s eccentric made-for-television drama is both a fond tribute to Swedish silent cinema and an autumnal look back at the director’s own career. In a Swedish insane asylum in 1925, a lunatic engineer teams with another patient to create a film, a “living talkie,” based on their own obsessions. Soon they have a cast, a crew, and even a tour across the country. All of Bergman’s great themes—theology and spirituality, marriage and solitude, death and creativity—are worked through in this modest late-career gem.