Peter Egermann brutally kills a prostitute. The victim is known only as Ka, a nickname for Katarina which just happens to be Egermann´s wife´s name... Produced and directed for German television, Ingmar Bergman's From the Life of the Marionettes starts out in color and switches almost immediately to black-and-white. This cinematic self-indulgence is ideally suited to the subject matter: the horrible consequences of a rapidly disintegrating marriage. The husband, Peter Egerman (Robert Atzorn) is unable to articulate his frustration through normal channels. Warped by his repression, Egerman ends up raping and murdering a prostitute. This outrage occurs at the very beginning of the film, the rest of the footage is devoted to a semi-documentary study of the failed marriage, the police investigation, and the husband's twisted psyche.