Scenes from a Marriage was first released as a TV mini-series of 6 episodes spanning 295 minutes. It was cut down to 168 minutes for cinematic release. The film was made on a $150,000 budget and was shot mostly in Fårö, Gotlands län in Sweden. The film won several accolades including BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations for Liv Ullmann (Best Actress - Drama), and a Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In 2008, a theatrical adaption by Joanna Murray-Smith was performed at the Belgrade Theatre in Coventry, directed by Trevor Nunn and starring Imogen Stubbs and Iain Glen.

This plot summary is for the 295-minute, TV miniseries version of the work (the feature film retains the episode names as chapter titles). Each episode concludes with long, quiet, comforting shots of Fårö landscapes, as a "relief" from the up-close, tense and claustrophobic episodes.

In the 1984 SCTV skit/commercial parody 'Scenes From An Idiot's Marriage', Martin Short plays Jerry Lewis playing a writer who goes through a comedic version of what goes on in Scenes from a Marriage, complete with Lewis's pratfalls and constant mistakes in pronunciation of Swedish names (he constantly mistakes the name Sven Gunderbloom as Sy Worthenson when his wife (Andrea Martin) announces that she is divorcing him and giving him Gunderbloom's name as her lawyer) and his later pratfalls serving drinks at a dinner party when he gets carried away with using a seltzer bottle, spraying the water everyplace.

Woody Allen's similarly realist film Husbands and Wives includes several nods to Scenes from a Marriage, including a wife who will not show her poetry to her husband.