Slowly, he thought, he would lure Peter to him. When Peter met Ka at a Munich peep show, Ka told Peter her real name was Katarina, the same as his wife. He tearfully murdered her. Jensen concludes that Peter, having grown up under an aggressive mother and then lived with a similarly aggressive wife, was unaware of his own latent homosexuality and that meeting Ka disrupted Peter's daily routine and triggered an emotional blackout. Peter is confined to a mental institute, where he cradles a teddy bear at night. Cast Production Development Ingmar Bergman wrote From the Life of the Marionettes after being arrested in Stockholm in 1976 and subsequently leaving for West Germany. He stated: 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: In casting, the filmmakers recruited all actors from the Residenztheater. Filming The film was shot in the Bavaria Film Studios in Munich, and at Tobis Film Studios, beginning in October 1979. Bergman's regular cinematographer Sven Nykvist returned for the project. Nykvist and Bergman mainly shot in black-and-white, but at the insistence of television broadcaster ZDF, some colour was added and a red tint was given to the prologue for fear the black-and-white would lose viewers. German composer Rolf A. Wilhelm wrote the score, making use of timpani and glass harmonicas. Release The premiere took place in July 1980 at a minor festival in Oxford, with Tobis Film as the main distributor. The film was originally made for television and had its TV premiere on German ZDF on 3 November 1980; it went to German theatres on 6 November. It was subsequently released in Swedish theatres on 24 January 1981. On 28 January 1981, From the Life of the Marionettes screened on SVT1. The Criterion Collection released a Blu-ray on 20 November 2018, along with 38 other Bergman films, in the set Ingmar Bergman's Cinema. Reception According to author Birgitta Steene, Swedish critics were generally "respectful but not enthusiastic". Janet Maslin credited Bergman for a "forceful" work despite what she found to be "less articulate or analytical" characters, praised Nykvist's