After the Rehearsal

With this spare chamber piece, set in an empty theater, Ingmar Bergman returned to his perennial theme of the permeability of life and art. Lingering after a rehearsal for August Strindberg’s A Dream Play (a touchstone for the filmmaker throughout his career), eminent director Henrik (Erland Josephson) enters into a frank and flirtatious conversation with his up-and-coming star, Anna (Lena Olin), leading him to recall his affair with Anna’s late mother, the self-destructive actress Rakel (Ingrid Thulin). The sharply written and impeccably performed After the Rehearsal, originally made for television, pares away all artifice to examine both the allure and the cost of a life in the theater.

Sweden
1984
72 minutes
1.66:1
Swedish

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Cast & Credits

Cast

Erland Josephson: Henrik Vogler
Ingrid Thulin: Rakel Egerman
Lena Olin: Anna Egerman
Nadja Palmstjerna-Weiss: Anna (younger)
Bertil Guve: Henrik (younger)

Credits

Director: Ingmar Bergman
Producer: Jörn Donner
Cinematographer: Sven Nykvist
Editor: Sylvia Ingemarsson
Production design: Anna Asp
Costume design: Inger Pehrsson
Makeup: Anna-Lena Melin
Assistant director: Eva Bergman
Sound: Bo Persson

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Explore

Ingmar Bergman

Director

The Swedish auteur began his artistic career in the theater but eventually navigated toward film—"the great adventure," as he called it—initially as a screenwriter and then as a director. Simply put, in the fifties and sixties, the name Ingmar Bergman was synonymous with European art cinema. Yet his incredible run of successes in that era—including The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, and The Virgin Spring, haunting black-and-white elegies on the nature of God and death—merely paved the way for a long and continuously dazzling career that would take him from the daring “Silence of God” trilogy (Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, The Silence) to the existential terrors of Cries and Whispers to the family epic Fanny and Alexander, with which he “retired” from the cinema. Bergman died in July 2007, leaving behind one of the richest bodies of work in the history of cinema.