page_title: From the Life of the Marionettes
section_title: Development
hierarchical_section_title: From the Life of the Marionettes / Production / Development
caption_attribution_description: English: Austrian actress Christine Buchegger about 1980 in Salzburg.
context_page_description: From the Life of the Marionettes is a 1980 television film directed by Ingmar Bergman. The film was produced in West Germany with a German-language screenplay and soundtrack while Bergman was in "tax exile" from his native Sweden. It is filmed in black and white apart from two colour sequences at the beginning and end of the film.
  Set in Munich, the film charts the disintegration of the relationship of Katarina and Peter Egermann, based on the unhappy couple of the same names briefly featured in Bergman's 1973 miniseries Scenes from a Marriage. In a reimagining of the characters, Peter and Katarina's unhappiness and unfaithfulness culminates in Peter's murder of a prostitute.
context_section_description: Ingmar Bergman wrote From the Life of the Marionettes after being arrested in Stockholm in 1976 and subsequently leaving for West Germany. He stated:
  I found myself in a difficult situation, far away from my homeland where I did not want to return. I had already tried to express my pain and suffering in The Serpent's Egg, but without succeeding ... But in From the Life of the Marionettes I found a way, a form, a very definite and distinct form to which I could transfer my pain, my anguish and all my difficulties and reshape them into something concrete.
  He based the lead characters after Peter and Katarina in his 1973 miniseries Scenes from a Marriage. Bergman's initial conception for the project was titled Love for No Lovers, but in the rewrite culminating in From the Life of the Marionettes Peter and Katarina were reimagined as a German couple distinct from the Swedish characters in Scenes from a Marriage. Bergman explained the final title:
  I think we are all manipulated, more or less, and From the Life of the Marionettes is about the manipulation of human beings, by forces outside and beyond them — forces you cannot control, and you cannot define. The personalities of Pete and Katarina, who appear in the first episode of Scenes from a Marriage, have always fascinated me. In a way, they existed long before [Scenes from a Marriage protagonists] Johan and Marianne, so I wanted to tell more about them. This is their story.
  In casting, the filmmakers recruited all actors from the Residenztheater.
caption: Christine Buchegger starred as Katarina Egermann. All of the cast was drawn from the Residenztheater.
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