In
Ingmar Bergman’s prolific career, Persona (1966) is arguably his most
recognizable yet puzzling masterpiece.
It was 1965. Bergman was admitted to Sophiahemmet, the royal hospital in Sweden, for illnesses due to overwork. He nonetheless decided to keep his hands busy while convalescing. The hospitalization placed Bergman in a different world, segregating him from the hustle of several demanding roles. The hospital stay, while disabling the auteur, enabled him to reflect upon and question the nature of his works. This was when Bergman conceived the idea for Persona. The director claimed that he “went as far as he could go” for the film, and by doing so, the film “saved his life.” Some argued that this refers to Bergman’s artistry, but it would not be an exaggeration if one thinks of Bergman’s actual life, for his life depended on artistic creations.
This life-saving film chronicles the story of a stage actress Elisabet Vogler falling silent in the middle of a performance of the Greek tragedy Electra, subsequently being taken to a mental hospital and placed under the care of nurse Alma. Following Doctor Lindkvist’s advice, the two of them move to a remote island in hopes of a speedier recovery for Elisabet.
Persona―Theatrical Mask
Among all film critics, Jacques Mandelbaum’s descriptions perhaps best fit the theme of the discussion below: the film is about “the reversible nature of appearances, the porosity of faces and absolute deprivation.” The theatrical promotional posters of Persona, which advertised with the close-up shots of the lead actresses, confirm the importance of human face in the film. Human faces demonstrate the psychic processes of a human being, and in this connection, it brings us back to the title of the film, Persona. The word persona originated from Latin, meaning a “theatrical mask.” Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung developed and defined the concept persona as “the individual’s system of adaptation to, or the manner he assumes in dealing with, the world.” 3 In simpler words, “it is a kind of mask, designed on one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and on the other to conceal the true nature of the individual.” To Jung, the persona was not just individual, it was social, historical, interpersonal and collective. As a social construction, it does not only conceal the flaws of an individual to the world, but also possibly to the individuals themselves. On the other hand, the recognition of a person’s shortcomings and powerlessness necessarily requires the individual’s acknowledgement of the multiplicity of roles they play in their lives.
Naturally, any individual would wish to keep such grim part of themselves hidden from the world, but Bergman chose to use cinematography to expose this side of human beings on the silver screen. In fact, the film was originally titled Cinematography, only to be abandoned and took on the title Persona at the advice of a film company executive. Bergman wrote in his book Images: My Life in Film that, in Persona, he “touched wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover.” He recognized how important cinematography was to him, for it “transcended the words I [he] lacked, the music which I [he] could not master, and paintings which left me [him] cold.” In fact, the power of cinema lies in that, as a medium, it allows people to live through an experience, thus to understand the indescribable.
Through taking the audience on a journey through the shadow, Bergman unfolded the Jungian individuation process in front of the audience’s eyes. Jung’s individuation process works as self-healing mechanism by recognizing and accepting the darker qualities of an individual. Jungian shadow refers to the “aspect of our personality that does not relate to our cultural notion of ‘goodness’.” Bergman expert Hubert Cohen noted that through Elisabet’s role, Bergman portrayed “the worst side of his [Bergman’s] own personality” and by the worst side of one’s personality, we can infer it as the person’s shadow. Every light casts a shadow, so wherever goodness goes, wretchedness follows. And according to Bibi Andersson, who played Nurse Alma in the film and a frequent collaborator of Bergman, whenever Bergman wrote a film script, he wrote it according to the personality of the actor/actress he wanted to be cast for the role. She also revealed that, at the time Bergman asked her to play Alma, which, according to her, is a character full of insecurities, the actress herself struggled with her own insecurities. If we are to decipher what Bergman expressed through the film, one could easily come to the conclusion that the film showcased an exposure of the shadow, the dark side of human beings.
According to Jung, people who are fixated in one particular persona hinder their psychological growth. Therefore, in the film, both Elisabet and Alma undergo the process of recognizing and accepting each other’s shadows. Any explorations of the shadow benefits the psyche as it provides meanings, feelings and possibility of finding values in life, an aspect that shall not be overlooked. In addition, bringing up the shadow eradicates its looming destructive power. Letting the shadow take the lead creates the possibility of leading the psyche onto the road of health.
The Journey Begins
In Persona, such exploration of the dark side of humanity starts off with the filming process, with film rolling and filming equipment turning on. This scene echoes with the ending scene, in which the audience will again see the same filming process. Such matching works function as a hint to show that this film is about the filming of a film, that the audience is about to witness an artificial construction (i.e.: a film is built on elaborate acts and performances, hence falsehood). Soon after this scene we see an approximately five-minute long montage of seemingly unrelated images. They, however, all represent motifs to be seen again later in the film: an erected penis, signifying a functioning patriarchy; the killing of a lamb, connoting the sacrifice of lamb from the Bible; hammering of a nail through a human hand, a reminiscence of crucifixion of Jesus and the prior betrayal from Judas; a short clip of a silent comedy taken from a scene in Bergman’s 1949 film Prison, in which a man preparing for sleep is startled by a burglar, Death, a vampire and a police officer, ended with Death chasing the three humans off the windows; a spider, a reference to the reincarnation of an omniscient divinity Anansi, followed by a picture of pointed steel fence, implying segregation and prohibition of trespassing.
After the five-minute long montage, the scene changes to a morgue-like space. A shirtless boy lying on a bed wakes up, puts on his glasses, then reads the book placed next to him which is titled A Hero of Our Time. In Bergman’s 1963 film The Silence¸ the same child actor is also seen reading the same book 4. It is believed to be Mikhail Lermontov’s work, which tells the story of a talented man who cannot fit into social norms. If Bergman’s use of this book in Persona is any hint to the audience for what follows in the film, it would not be difficult to deduce his message: you are about to witness the journey of a cowardly hero, someone who is not as good as s/he would like to be.
The Individual
Segregation from the outside world begins at the beginning of the film, when the psychiatrist assigns Elisabet to nurse Alma in a mental hospital. Elisabet is then seen in her vast hospital room, equipped with nothing but a bed, a radio and a television. The radio and television shows are the only intrusions from the outside world in the all-encompassing room. In a sense, Elisabet’s hospitalization equates a solitary imprisonment. For Elisabet, however, as she shuts herself in and refuses to talk, it appears that she finds such a stay preferable.
It was 1965. Bergman was admitted to Sophiahemmet, the royal hospital in Sweden, for illnesses due to overwork. He nonetheless decided to keep his hands busy while convalescing. The hospitalization placed Bergman in a different world, segregating him from the hustle of several demanding roles. The hospital stay, while disabling the auteur, enabled him to reflect upon and question the nature of his works. This was when Bergman conceived the idea for Persona. The director claimed that he “went as far as he could go” for the film, and by doing so, the film “saved his life.” Some argued that this refers to Bergman’s artistry, but it would not be an exaggeration if one thinks of Bergman’s actual life, for his life depended on artistic creations.
This life-saving film chronicles the story of a stage actress Elisabet Vogler falling silent in the middle of a performance of the Greek tragedy Electra, subsequently being taken to a mental hospital and placed under the care of nurse Alma. Following Doctor Lindkvist’s advice, the two of them move to a remote island in hopes of a speedier recovery for Elisabet.
Persona―Theatrical Mask
Among all film critics, Jacques Mandelbaum’s descriptions perhaps best fit the theme of the discussion below: the film is about “the reversible nature of appearances, the porosity of faces and absolute deprivation.” The theatrical promotional posters of Persona, which advertised with the close-up shots of the lead actresses, confirm the importance of human face in the film. Human faces demonstrate the psychic processes of a human being, and in this connection, it brings us back to the title of the film, Persona. The word persona originated from Latin, meaning a “theatrical mask.” Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Jung developed and defined the concept persona as “the individual’s system of adaptation to, or the manner he assumes in dealing with, the world.” 3 In simpler words, “it is a kind of mask, designed on one hand to make a definite impression upon others, and on the other to conceal the true nature of the individual.” To Jung, the persona was not just individual, it was social, historical, interpersonal and collective. As a social construction, it does not only conceal the flaws of an individual to the world, but also possibly to the individuals themselves. On the other hand, the recognition of a person’s shortcomings and powerlessness necessarily requires the individual’s acknowledgement of the multiplicity of roles they play in their lives.
Naturally, any individual would wish to keep such grim part of themselves hidden from the world, but Bergman chose to use cinematography to expose this side of human beings on the silver screen. In fact, the film was originally titled Cinematography, only to be abandoned and took on the title Persona at the advice of a film company executive. Bergman wrote in his book Images: My Life in Film that, in Persona, he “touched wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover.” He recognized how important cinematography was to him, for it “transcended the words I [he] lacked, the music which I [he] could not master, and paintings which left me [him] cold.” In fact, the power of cinema lies in that, as a medium, it allows people to live through an experience, thus to understand the indescribable.
Through taking the audience on a journey through the shadow, Bergman unfolded the Jungian individuation process in front of the audience’s eyes. Jung’s individuation process works as self-healing mechanism by recognizing and accepting the darker qualities of an individual. Jungian shadow refers to the “aspect of our personality that does not relate to our cultural notion of ‘goodness’.” Bergman expert Hubert Cohen noted that through Elisabet’s role, Bergman portrayed “the worst side of his [Bergman’s] own personality” and by the worst side of one’s personality, we can infer it as the person’s shadow. Every light casts a shadow, so wherever goodness goes, wretchedness follows. And according to Bibi Andersson, who played Nurse Alma in the film and a frequent collaborator of Bergman, whenever Bergman wrote a film script, he wrote it according to the personality of the actor/actress he wanted to be cast for the role. She also revealed that, at the time Bergman asked her to play Alma, which, according to her, is a character full of insecurities, the actress herself struggled with her own insecurities. If we are to decipher what Bergman expressed through the film, one could easily come to the conclusion that the film showcased an exposure of the shadow, the dark side of human beings.
According to Jung, people who are fixated in one particular persona hinder their psychological growth. Therefore, in the film, both Elisabet and Alma undergo the process of recognizing and accepting each other’s shadows. Any explorations of the shadow benefits the psyche as it provides meanings, feelings and possibility of finding values in life, an aspect that shall not be overlooked. In addition, bringing up the shadow eradicates its looming destructive power. Letting the shadow take the lead creates the possibility of leading the psyche onto the road of health.
The Journey Begins
In Persona, such exploration of the dark side of humanity starts off with the filming process, with film rolling and filming equipment turning on. This scene echoes with the ending scene, in which the audience will again see the same filming process. Such matching works function as a hint to show that this film is about the filming of a film, that the audience is about to witness an artificial construction (i.e.: a film is built on elaborate acts and performances, hence falsehood). Soon after this scene we see an approximately five-minute long montage of seemingly unrelated images. They, however, all represent motifs to be seen again later in the film: an erected penis, signifying a functioning patriarchy; the killing of a lamb, connoting the sacrifice of lamb from the Bible; hammering of a nail through a human hand, a reminiscence of crucifixion of Jesus and the prior betrayal from Judas; a short clip of a silent comedy taken from a scene in Bergman’s 1949 film Prison, in which a man preparing for sleep is startled by a burglar, Death, a vampire and a police officer, ended with Death chasing the three humans off the windows; a spider, a reference to the reincarnation of an omniscient divinity Anansi, followed by a picture of pointed steel fence, implying segregation and prohibition of trespassing.
After the five-minute long montage, the scene changes to a morgue-like space. A shirtless boy lying on a bed wakes up, puts on his glasses, then reads the book placed next to him which is titled A Hero of Our Time. In Bergman’s 1963 film The Silence¸ the same child actor is also seen reading the same book 4. It is believed to be Mikhail Lermontov’s work, which tells the story of a talented man who cannot fit into social norms. If Bergman’s use of this book in Persona is any hint to the audience for what follows in the film, it would not be difficult to deduce his message: you are about to witness the journey of a cowardly hero, someone who is not as good as s/he would like to be.
The Individual
Segregation from the outside world begins at the beginning of the film, when the psychiatrist assigns Elisabet to nurse Alma in a mental hospital. Elisabet is then seen in her vast hospital room, equipped with nothing but a bed, a radio and a television. The radio and television shows are the only intrusions from the outside world in the all-encompassing room. In a sense, Elisabet’s hospitalization equates a solitary imprisonment. For Elisabet, however, as she shuts herself in and refuses to talk, it appears that she finds such a stay preferable.
Several scenes from Bergman’s final film before retirement, the 4-hour long Bildungsroman Fanny and Alexander (1982), can be borrowed for analysis here in Persona. In Fanny and Alexander, after being rescued from the attic lockup for disobedience in his abusive stepfather Bishop Edvard’s home to his protective Uncle Isak’s home, the nephew of protagonist Alexander’s uncle, Aron, brings breakfast with Alexander to his androgynous brother Ismael, who is incarcerated in the family home’s dungeon for being a threat to others for possessing extraordinary abilities. Ismael shows Alexander why he is being considered dangerous. By asking Alexander to put down his name (Alexander Ekdahl) on a piece of paper and read what is now written on it (Ismael Retzinsky), Ismael demonstrates how the two of them are actually “the same.” He says to Alexander,
“Perhaps we’re the same person, with no boundaries. Perhaps we flow through each other, stream through each other boundlessly and magnificently.”
This scene shares much similarity with a scene near the end of Persona and can be borrowed to understand its meaning. Alma confronts Elisabet about her indifference toward her son’s massive and unfathomable love for her. The sequence was shot from two perspectives: one showing the mute Elisabet with a narration from Alma, the other showing the narrating Alma and the back of Elisabet’s head. In both sequences, half of the actresses’ face are shrouded in their shadows.
The heated confrontation uncovers Elisabet’s unspeakable secrets. Alma’s abilities to analyze Elisabet’s treatment of her role as a mother akin to telepathy, an all-knowing ability similar to that of Ismael, who can read Alexander’s mind. As soon as Alma finishes her monologue, Elisabet and Alma’s faces are merged into one. Earlier in the film, Alma comments that she thinks she looks like Elisabet, only that Elisabet is more beautiful. “I think I could change myself into you if I tried” said Alma. Elisabet and Alma thus can be seen as the “same person,” who can exchange their roles and perform duties just like the other person.
What happens next in Alexander’s encounter with Ismael in Fanny and Alexander further proves this point. In the sequence, Ismael tells Alexander, “You bear such terrible thoughts. It’s almost painful to be near you.” He then narrates a scene in Alexander’s mind in which Bishop Edvard is slowly being burned to death by a fire started by the bishop’s ancient, bedridden aunt. When Alexander asks Ismael to stop talking about what is on his mind, Ismael replies it was not him talking; he is simply speaking Alexander’s mind.
Similarly, in Persona, Alma reveal the dark secret of Elisabet to her, to which Elisabet responds by turning away from Alma and remaining silent,
“You wanted to be a mother. When you knew it was definite, you became afraid, afraid of responsibility, afraid of being tied down, afraid to leave the theater, afraid of pain, afraid of dying, afraid of your swelling body.….When you knew it was inevitable, you started to hate the child and wished it would be stillborn. You wished that the baby would be dead….You looked with disgust at your screaming child and whispered, “Can’t you die soon? Can’t you die?”
This scene’s significance lies in the fact that Alma exposes Elisabet’s shortcoming and secret―mother is the one role that Elisabet is unable to play. Elisabet feels shameful for her inability, which is why she falls silent when performing Electra, for her realization of her own hatred for her mother, as well as her tearing up of her son’s photo. Bergman, in his autobiography The Magic Lantern, noted that, to him, cinema is “a powerfully erotic business” for “the mutual exposure is total.” As a result, following the mutual exposure―of Alma recounting a beach orgy resulted in an unwanted pregnancy, and Alma revealing Elisabet’s lack of motherliness, the mute patient slowly becomes more responsive.
After the heated one-way confrontation between Alma and Elisabet above, Alma gashes her wrist and forces Elisabet to drink her blood. This could be read as psychic vampirism – Elisabet feeding off Alma’s life force. But when viewing this scene together with the kiss shared between Aron and Ismael as Aron leaves Alexander alone with Ismael, Elisabet is not necessarily taking energy away from Alma; rather, Elisabet and Alma, and Aron and Ismael are merely exchanging a part of themselves with each other. If Aron in Fanny and Alexander, who can roam free in the house and thus enjoys a higher degree of freedom than Ismael, exchanges a part of himself with Ismael, who is being confined in a small room, Aron also exchanges a part of his freedom with his brother’s confinement. Aron bringing breakfast to Ismael with Alexander and subsequently breaking the rules by allowing Ismael to talk to Alexander alone serves as a good example of this exchange of freedom. Alma’s remark to Elisabet at the end, “I’ve learned a lot” can testify that the two of them exchange deep, unspoken knowledge about each other.
Again, Elisabet is a human being with an extraordinary understanding of the falsehood of human acts, while Ismael also possesses a super-human-like ability in understanding human beings’ thoughts. These human “vampires” do not actively inflict harm on others as they do not enervate; and what they do is to make the other person (Alma and Alexander) realize their own shadows. Unlike the unwilling victims of vampires, Alma and Alexander willingly go to Elisabet and Ismael and allow them to have power over them. The exchange of secrets thus foster understanding and growth.
If we compare Elisabet at the beginning of the film with Elisabet in this blood-sucking scene, her change is noticeable: the audience are witnessing the changing of roles between Elisabet and Alma. Elisabet’s unwilling, sudden utterance when Alma threatens to throw a bowl of boiling water at her is an immediate threat of death, which effectively initiated a starting point of verbal responsiveness (albeit forced) for her. And when she later drinks blood from Alma, that signifies another step forward for Elisabet, for her shredding of her silent role and her beginning of re-acceptance of her roles as a mother, an actress, and a wife.
At the end of Persona, a man is then seen facing the audience, filming with a camera, with the filming equipment slowly turning off. As mentioned above, this ending scene and the opening montage suggest that we could be in fact watching the making of a film. We can confirm that nothing, whether it is reality or illusion, is ever really certain, for no definitive explanation is given for the relationship between the opening and ending scenes with the rest of the film. Are we watching a film, or are we watching a film within a film, or are we audience part of the film (because the filming camera is facing us)? On the topic of illusion and reality, Jung reckoned “what we are pleased to call illusion may be for the psyche an extremely important life-factor” i.e.: reality and illusion are simply equally important. Even if we can distinguish reality from illusion, it can just be a misleading discovery, a futile endeavor. It is unlikely that Bergman agreed that dreams, thoughts and the shame that entailed from them shall be oppressed.
In the denouement of Persona, Alma tidies up the cottage house and prepares to leave. As she exits the house, a giant stone head sculpture with a sad expression facing the sky is stood in front of the house, occupying more than half of the camera frame – again, Bergman is known for shooting close-ups of human faces. We can almost interpret that this stone sculpture, one made of a formation of thousands of years, is telling us what we just saw in the film, this human tragedy, the porosity of façade, had been there since the beginning of time. And as Alma leaves the house with camera slowly turning off, it is suggested that Elisabet also recovers from her muteness and return to normalcy.
History
Earlier in Persona, Elisabet is seen pacing around her hospital room while the television shows a clip believed to be the self-immolation by Vietnamese monk Thích Quảng Đức in 1963 in protest of the government’s persecution of Buddhist monks, to which Elisabet recoils in a horrified facial expression. Elisabet will face similar human atrocities again: by her bedside, she stares at a photo of a Jewish boy raising his arms as a gesture of surrender in Warsaw Ghetto during the Second World War. Some argue that any mentions of real-world affairs in Bergman’s films were an oddity, for Bergman was once called “an artist in an ivory tower in an isolated country.” Bergman would continue to receive similar criticisms later, such as alleging him for not shedding lights on social issues with his new-found fame. The director in fact admitted that he could not grasp human catastrophes like the Holocaust. Nevertheless, the Vietnamese monk self-immolation and the iconic Warsaw Ghetto boy picture disprove the idea that Bergman was a secluded artist making his films in the ivory tower, for in Persona, Elisabet’s contemplative expression can explain not only Bergman’s own shadow, but also the nature of photos.
In the second time Elisabet witnesses a great human cruelty, she does not respond with a horrified expression like the first time; instead, she contemplates and stares long into the photo. This scene in Persona very subtly implies the unreliability of photo as evidence, and no one can be certain about the story that taken place in the photo. We can even take one step further and infer that a widely-recognized human catastrophe, like the Nazi’s Holocaust, can yield different interpretations other than being a one-sided devilish act perpetuated by the media and mainstream history course books.
In Bergman’s youth, he was fascinated by Nazism. While most European filmmakers from Bergman’s generation leans far left, Bergman went to the opposite and ran for the far right. He only “crushed with shame and guilt” for his Nazi admiration in 1946, when the war was over. In his interview with Jörn Donner in 1977, Bergman remarked that when he found out about the concentration camps during the Nazi’s reign, he felt like he “had discovered that God and the Devil are two sides of the same coin.” As Walter Benjamin famously remarked, “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism” and historical materialist ought to “brush history against the grain” i.e.: to view history from the perspective of the defeated, the aspect of Nazism that gained Bergman’s admiration is possibly not as grim as the media perpetuates , hence the photo showing the little boy with his arms up in the air might carry a different side to the existing, well-known story.
Social Order
As mentioned above, imprisonment does not only appear as a motif in Persona, it also appears in Bergman’s Fanny and Alexander. Alexander and his sister Fanny’s disobedience brought them punishments―being locked up in the attic by their stepfather Bishop Edvard. Ismael is also imprisoned on the lowest level of the house, for his possession of the exceptional ability to understand human beings. Alexander’s Uncle Isak, much like Ismael, appears to be in possession of magical power as well, who is even more “powerful” than Bishop Edvard. Disobedience, superior intelligence as well as Elisabet’s “great mental strength” in maintaining voluntary silence, all deemed as undesirable in patriarchy and shall be punished, repressed, and removed from the visible by all means.
Back to the questionable kiss shared between Aron and Ismael: in this scene, the brothers do not only exchange a part of themselves with each other, or like what Elisabet and Alma turn out to be at the end of the film, they also blur a distinction: social hierarchy. Alma in the scene in which she lets Elisabet drink her blood is related to vampirism. This scene is analogous to the blood-drinking scene of Elisabet and Alma: Alma is supposed to be the caretaker of Elisabet, but she breaks the order by allowing Elisabet to drink her blood. In a traditional setting, if Elisabet is a vampire, this would turn Alma into a vampire, changing her from the caregiver role to a role of peer.
At the beginning of the film, before Elisabet and Alma moves to the doctor’s summer cottage house, Doctor Lindkvist gives her monologue about her “diagnosis” on Elisabet:
“But you can refuse to move, refuse to talk, so that you don’t have to lie. You can shut yourself in. Then you needn’t play any parts or make wrong gestures. Or so you thought….I understand why you don’t speak, why you don’t move, why you’ve created a part for yourself out of apathy. I understand. I admire. You should go on with this part until it is played out, until it loses interest for you. Then you can leave it, just as you’ve left your other parts one by one.”
Understanding Elisabet’s situation requires the doctor putting herself into Elisabet’s shoes and her own recognition of role-playing, meaning the doctor is just as “mad” as Elisabet. A smoking doctor also does not command authority; rather, it proves that even the doctor herself is a character playing in the film/in real life. As for Nurse Alma, she breaks her role by deliberately leaving a shard of broken glass on the ground and let the unwitting Elisabet walks on it. When her first attempt to elicit a verbal response from Elisabet fails, she goes as far as threatening to pour a pot of boiling water to Elisabet. Although Elisabet gives in by yelling, “No! Don’t do it!” Alma’s act significantly undermines her role as a nurse and as a caretaker. If Dr. Lindkvist, nurse Alma and patient Elisabet are all performing their roles within a structure we called society, none of the hierarchical strata exist, resulting in dissolution of hierarchy.
As members of a society, we all act out our roles. Our assigned roles require us to perform accordingly, so that our society runs in order. The world in Persona is a secluded one, which is the opposite of our functioning society. Even though “[e]very inflection and every gesture a lie, every smile a grimace” and every light casts a shadow, as Jung argued, and we cannot live as recluses as Bergman himself did after retirement, and hierarchy, as a social construction, is not preferable, what we should do in this world, and how should we navigate this falsehood, how do we deal with the porosity of life? As we cannot be Elisabet, the only way forward, is to try to accept the unavoidable wretchedness of our roles, to perform as best as we can, on every stage of life.
Persona: A Journey through the Shadow in Ingmar Bergman’s Masterpiece. By Ka Man Chung. The Artifice, June 7, 2021.
Persona.
Ingmar Bergman's Psychological
Breakthrough
In this video essay Julian Palmer explores Ingmar Bergman's psychological masterpiece Persona - a white whale of film criticism. After seeing the innovations of the 60s, with French New Wave filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut, as well Italians like Michelangelo Antonioni and Federico Fellini, Bergman borrowed their radical, self-conscious cinematic language for his own wholly idiosyncratic purposes.
The Discarded Image, November 13, 2020.
When
Ingmar Bergman died in July 2007—on the same day as Michelangelo Antonioni—an
unexpected controversy arose. Among the obligatory eulogizing obituaries,
celebrating his towering achievements and itemizing the admiration for his work
by directors ranging from Woody Allen to David Lynch and Robert Altman to Lars
von Trier, there were also dissenting voices (most prominently, Jonathan
Rosenbaum in a New York Times op-ed) claiming he was overrated, lacked
stylistic originality, and merely inflicted personal psychodramas on awestruck
audiences. One might imagine this gainsaying simply reflected the longevity of
Bergman’s career and a certain iconoclastic impatience with some of the more
predictable hyperbole and praise heaped on the departed. But in fact it was a
repeat performance: controversy over Bergman goes back a long way, and in New
York was sparked by no less a film than Persona, his 1966 masterpiece. While
Susan Sontag wrote an enthusiastic and, as it turned out, seminal article on
Persona, another critical heavyweight, Andrew Sarris, wrote a dismissive
review, taking time out to attack Bergman as a filmmaker generally, arguing that
he had no talent for the medium (“His technique never equaled his sensibility”)
and that he should have remained a theater director. Sontag anticipated much of
the criticism of not only Persona when she wrote: “Some of the paltriness of
the critics’ reaction may be more a response to the signature that Persona
carries than to the film itself.” Evidently, by this point in his career,
Bergman’s name had acquired a fixed set of, often contradictory, associations:
“lavishly inventive” as well as “facile,” “sensual” along with “melodramatic.”
But as Sontag hinted, Persona was something else altogether, taking the
filmmaker’s stylistic and thematic repertoire to an entirely new level. Here,
for the first time, was an unapologetically avant-garde work by Bergman that
also dared to veer between vampire horror flick and hospital soap opera, all
the while posing ontological questions about the reality status of cinema
itself. Since that debate, writing about Persona has been for film critics and
scholars what climbing Everest is for mountaineers: the ultimate professional
challenge. Besides Citizen Kane, it is probably the most written-about film in
the canon. Raymond Bellour and Jacques Aumont, Robin Wood and Roger Ebert,
Paisley Livingston and P. Adams Sitney, along with Sontag and Sarris, have all
written with gravity and great insight about Persona, not counting several
books and collections entirely devoted to the film. In what follows, I shall
not undertake yet another all-out assault on the mountain that is Persona but
concentrate on what makes this film such an exemplary work of European
modernism, as well as one of the creative peaks of world cinema.
Persona is instantly recognizable thanks to two shots that have become its emblems: a boy touching a woman’s face on a giant screen and two women looking at each other (and us) across an imaginary mirror. Defining images for the film, they also stand for an idea of the cinema—in fact, for two distinct but complementary metaphors of what cinema is: a portal, a window, a passage you can enter or (almost) touch, and a mirror, a reflection, a prism that gives you back only what you project onto it. Persona is also cinema about cinema—a point that Bergman makes clear with his six-minute prologue montage sequence—which is one of the reasons it is such an irresistible challenge for writers.
The first of these shots is from the prologue. A young boy with thick glasses, lying on what looks like a hospital bed, closes the book he is reading, sits up, and reaches out toward the camera, before a reverse shot reveals this to be a translucent surface, on which appears the face of a woman. The close-up of the woman’s face projected onto the surface and tentatively touched by the boy visualizes the cinema as a window that both fuses and separates, that invites touch but keeps us (like the boy) isolated in uncertain anticipation. As it becomes larger and larger, this face is both too close to be recognized and too blurry to be grasped. Representing the archetypal maternal imago, it is at once immediately tactile and irredeemably virtual: the boy’s longing for his mother, for direct contact and physical fusion, must remain unfulfilled, for what could bridge the gap between the two planes of psychic reality? The cinema itself is here the father figure that demands renunciation of the primary love object, to enable the boy’s eventual selfhood and identity, just as the cinema demands the separation of the body from the image for there to be spectatorship. This parallel is underlined by the boy’s initial gesture toward the invisible fourth wall, thereby obliging the spectator to feel directly implicated in his longing and to experience the separation right from the start: we will always remain “virtual” to him, meaning that he, like indeed every character in the film, exists only to the degree that we are prepared to grant him “reality,” through the act of activating our empathy, our human touch, the intelligence of our bodies.
If the cinema is a tactile window in the first iconic image, in the second, another look into the camera/screen, it is imaged as a mirror: Elisabet (Liv Ullmann) and her nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson), face each other in the middle of the night in front of what may be the bathroom cabinet, where the two of them discover—or merely imagine?—an uncanny resemblance. As the scene unfolds and the lightly clad actresses move as if to kiss, their faces overlap, seem almost to be superimposed—anticipating a later shot where a split-screen image of the two women combines their faces, and making us wonder not only who but what is this face looking so intently at us.
•••
From the 1960s to the mid-1970s, film theory, influenced by Bertolt Brecht’s distanciation effect and modernist self-reflexivity in literature and the visual arts, often focused on a film’s “mirror construction.” In this, theory tried to catch up with the practice of European art cinema. Reference to other films and self-reference to the fact that you were watching a film became essential elements in the stylistic arsenal of New Wave directors in France and elsewhere—Godard’s Contempt and Fellini’s 8½, both from 1963, being Persona’s precedents. If Hollywood made sure you could enter the world of a film through a metaphoric window or door, the mirror construction was meant to block this passage, rendering the relationship of spectator to screen more complicated (and complicit), especially when it came to deciding what was “out there” and “for real” and what was “inside” and “subjective,” or even merely a dream or a hallucination. Persona is almost a textbook case, relishing these confusions; we can never be quite certain if what we see has actually happened, and if so, why and to what (narrative) purpose. Sontag, for instance, suggests that Elisabet and Alma may in fact be one person: “It’s correct to speak of Persona in terms of the fortunes of two characters named Elizabeth and Alma who are engaged in a desperate duel of identities. But it is equally pertinent to treat Persona as relating the duel between two mythical parts of a single self: the corrupted person who acts (Elizabeth) and the ingenuous soul (Alma) who founders in contact with corruption.”
Persona is instantly recognizable thanks to two shots that have become its emblems: a boy touching a woman’s face on a giant screen and two women looking at each other (and us) across an imaginary mirror. Defining images for the film, they also stand for an idea of the cinema—in fact, for two distinct but complementary metaphors of what cinema is: a portal, a window, a passage you can enter or (almost) touch, and a mirror, a reflection, a prism that gives you back only what you project onto it. Persona is also cinema about cinema—a point that Bergman makes clear with his six-minute prologue montage sequence—which is one of the reasons it is such an irresistible challenge for writers.
The first of these shots is from the prologue. A young boy with thick glasses, lying on what looks like a hospital bed, closes the book he is reading, sits up, and reaches out toward the camera, before a reverse shot reveals this to be a translucent surface, on which appears the face of a woman. The close-up of the woman’s face projected onto the surface and tentatively touched by the boy visualizes the cinema as a window that both fuses and separates, that invites touch but keeps us (like the boy) isolated in uncertain anticipation. As it becomes larger and larger, this face is both too close to be recognized and too blurry to be grasped. Representing the archetypal maternal imago, it is at once immediately tactile and irredeemably virtual: the boy’s longing for his mother, for direct contact and physical fusion, must remain unfulfilled, for what could bridge the gap between the two planes of psychic reality? The cinema itself is here the father figure that demands renunciation of the primary love object, to enable the boy’s eventual selfhood and identity, just as the cinema demands the separation of the body from the image for there to be spectatorship. This parallel is underlined by the boy’s initial gesture toward the invisible fourth wall, thereby obliging the spectator to feel directly implicated in his longing and to experience the separation right from the start: we will always remain “virtual” to him, meaning that he, like indeed every character in the film, exists only to the degree that we are prepared to grant him “reality,” through the act of activating our empathy, our human touch, the intelligence of our bodies.
If the cinema is a tactile window in the first iconic image, in the second, another look into the camera/screen, it is imaged as a mirror: Elisabet (Liv Ullmann) and her nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson), face each other in the middle of the night in front of what may be the bathroom cabinet, where the two of them discover—or merely imagine?—an uncanny resemblance. As the scene unfolds and the lightly clad actresses move as if to kiss, their faces overlap, seem almost to be superimposed—anticipating a later shot where a split-screen image of the two women combines their faces, and making us wonder not only who but what is this face looking so intently at us.
•••
From the 1960s to the mid-1970s, film theory, influenced by Bertolt Brecht’s distanciation effect and modernist self-reflexivity in literature and the visual arts, often focused on a film’s “mirror construction.” In this, theory tried to catch up with the practice of European art cinema. Reference to other films and self-reference to the fact that you were watching a film became essential elements in the stylistic arsenal of New Wave directors in France and elsewhere—Godard’s Contempt and Fellini’s 8½, both from 1963, being Persona’s precedents. If Hollywood made sure you could enter the world of a film through a metaphoric window or door, the mirror construction was meant to block this passage, rendering the relationship of spectator to screen more complicated (and complicit), especially when it came to deciding what was “out there” and “for real” and what was “inside” and “subjective,” or even merely a dream or a hallucination. Persona is almost a textbook case, relishing these confusions; we can never be quite certain if what we see has actually happened, and if so, why and to what (narrative) purpose. Sontag, for instance, suggests that Elisabet and Alma may in fact be one person: “It’s correct to speak of Persona in terms of the fortunes of two characters named Elizabeth and Alma who are engaged in a desperate duel of identities. But it is equally pertinent to treat Persona as relating the duel between two mythical parts of a single self: the corrupted person who acts (Elizabeth) and the ingenuous soul (Alma) who founders in contact with corruption.”
But Bergman does not keep the spectator merely guessing or at a (Brechtian) distance. On the contrary, Persona has an almost hypnotic pull; it draws the spectator in and never lets go, partly because, as demonstrated in the two iconic shots, the screen can be a window before it turns into a mirror. The film continually shifts between these modes, but ultimately it is the mirror that is its major structuring motif, both bringing us into the cinematic space as alternately copresent with the characters and cut off from them and defining the relation between the emotionally remote and psychically traumatized actress Elisabet and the younger, seemingly cheerful and good-natured Alma. Having suffered a nervous breakdown onstage, in the middle of a performance of Elektra, that leaves her unable (or unwilling) to speak, Elisabet is placed in the care of a warmhearted but practically minded chatterbox, at first in a rehabilitation clinic and then, just the two of them, in a country cottage on a remote island. The ensuing rapprochement between the women gives rise to moments of intimacy and the promise of mutual trust, but also leads to mounting tensions and open conflict, with the fluctuating relations depicted as a temporary blurring of their identities in the mirror shot described above.
This scene is so memorable because it relates profoundly to the inner movement and dramatic development not only of these characters’ journey of self-discovery but of the film itself, its narrative doublings and reversals—form and function perfectly coalescing in images of exquisite harmony and delicacy, which nonetheless leave room for extraordinary violence, both emotional and physical. The more unsettling, therefore, that the following morning Elisabet denies the very occurrence of the encounter. Yet this, too, has an inner logic, in that it corresponds to the two movements in Alma’s character and sensibility: the outgoing emotion, the desire that brings the vision into being and makes it materialize on the screen, and the self-doubting, mirrorlike apprehension that dissolves it again. In such scenes, Bergman brings out fundamental tensions between emotion, intellect, and perception—our separate ways of apprehending the world—if we allow ourselves to follow the characters’ actions and are willing to open ourselves to the conflicting emotional signals emitted by their often unexpectedly violent interactions. In this respect, Elisabet and Alma are stand-ins for those of us spectators who first have to sort out our complicated feelings after an intense film experience before we know what to make of it.
A look at Bergman’s filmography shows that several titles reflect the importance for him of the mirror and the face: The Face (1958, released in the U.S. as The Magician), Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Face to Face (1976), Karin’s Face (1984). But what are the effects of looking into the eyes of a face that is larger-than-life, or of being in the presence of two women’s faces, often in close-up, for some eighty minutes? Watching Persona is a draining and harrowing experience, which may explain why writers have sought explanatory assistance from phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and even the neurosciences, often with intriguing results.
I recall a paper at a Bergman conference that cited the latest research on mirror neurons—those that fire in mimetic, or empathetic, response when humans and animals observe an action performed by another member of the species—in a reading of Persona. This brought into focus for me a feature of the film that had always struck me as especially notable, as well as disturbing, namely the link Bergman makes between hands and the face, that is, the touch and the mirror (to a person’s soul). Once more, the emblematic shot of the boy touching the screen/face seems to say it all. Yet these connections are everywhere in Persona: hands reaching out to caress or slap faces, or covering their own faces; even the photo of the Warsaw ghetto boy with his hands raised is scrutinized by the camera for hands and faces. More generally, these movements are a surprisingly frequent motif in Bergman. One thinks of a scene in The Virgin Spring (1960) where an elderly woman caresses the face of the suffering girl, or a similar one in The Seventh Seal (1957). We find a woman touching another woman in Cries and Whispers (1972), in Autumn Sonata (1978), and in Fanny and Alexander (1982), where a hand approaching a face is brusquely rejected. A man and a woman touch each other’s faces tenderly in Summer with Monica (1953), and violently in The Passion of Anna (1969), and, of course, in The Touch (1971), we have to keep the title in mind all the time. On a biographical point, it shows that Bergman belonged to a generation where physical chastisement of children was still the norm—Michael Haneke’s The White Ribbon is something of a Bergman pastiche in this respect—but from a neurological perspective, the motif confirms that few gestures elicit as much empathetic mimicry as a hand touching a face.
Even if he would have probably dismissed such scientific findings as irrelevant to his films, there is little doubt that, for Bergman, extraordinary powers are stored and enclosed in the face. Yet such powers also underline its vulnerability and precarious status: between the openly visible and the smoothly impenetrable, between the lighting up of a spiritual essence and the merely material “surface” for deceit and disguise. In Persona, the face goes through all these permutations. Already in the prologue, the lightly contoured visage on the screen is contrasted with the darkly silhouetted face of an old woman lying on a table in a morgue. During the second half of the film, when Alma is desperate to differentiate herself as much as possible from Elisabet, she washes her face under a running tap as if to wash away with the nosebleed also the now dreaded likeness itself. After another nocturnal encounter, this time with Elisabet’s husband—perhaps a figment of her imagination—Alma decides to leave, shouting: “I’m not like you. I don’t feel the same way you do . . . I’m not Elisabet Vogler: you are Elisabet Vogler.” Following the scene of Alma’s passionate embrace of Elisabet’s husband—revealing just how far she will go to identify with Elisabet—this desperate outburst not only protests too much but amounts to a self-contradiction, made manifest in the composite image of the two women’s merged faces we see.
Early on in the film, Bergman plays another variation on the theme of the face in the way he juxtaposes the two women when they go to bed. Elisabet’s face, motionless and turned toward the camera, grows slowly darker and darker—an apt expression of her essentially reflective nature—while Alma, restless, switching the light on and off, comes across as temperamental and impulsive, qualities underlined by a soliloquy where just as important as what she says are her actions: rubbing on night cream, once more defining her across face and touch but where her insecurities and doubts are made to contradict, but also complement, her more resolute and self-assured daytime manner.
Something like a craving of the face for the charge and discharge of the touch is thus in Persona associated with Alma’s personality and her inner demons. It is contrasted with the mask (as makeup) that Elisabet wears when she is onstage and suddenly falls silent, but also with her often supercilious, ironic expression toward Alma, which she puts on like a mask. The very title Persona, of course, refers to this mask, so that one might think the film would proceed to a mutual unmasking, where fragile, unworthy, inauthentic selves are peeled away. And in a sense, this is the case, as both women are in turn stripped emotionally bare and have moments where they lose their composure, i.e., lose “face.” Opposite the mute and thus “closed” Elisabet, the seemingly carefree Alma several times “opens up” in the course of the film, sometimes verbally, at others more physically. But her fresh and open face never has the rigidity of the mask, which is what Elisabet’s enforced or self-imposed silence amounts to. Yet despite this drama of open and closed expressions, of tearing at each other’s protective surface, Persona is less about what is “behind” the mask and perhaps more concerned with what can and must pass through the mask, since besides questioning the ethics of stripping the soul naked of all pretence, Bergman also shows us both women’s wily and ingenious self-fashioning during their encounters with each other.
In addition to this maintenance of the mask, there is the film’s modernist self-reflexivity, which insists on our constantly remembering that we are watching a performance. Persona opens with scenes that bring the projector into the picture, and it ends with the camera and the crew appearing in the shot. In the prologue, an old-style carbon arc light movie projector is being lit, as if the images we are about to see are being shown from the impersonal perspective of a machine. Toward the end, the big Mitchell camera is cantilevered into the frame as it films Elisabet lying on her back; and as Alma is leaving, suitcase and all, the boy returns, once more touching the blurred screen image, as if to cue the celluloid strip to jump out of the sprockets of the projector, whose arc lights gradually dim, leaving us literally in the dark.
Yet these scenes are not merely self-reflexive, or nods to Godard’s and Fellini’s films about filmmaking mentioned earlier. Bergman here establishes a series of intriguing equivalences between mask and screen, skin and film strip. This has already been suggested in a scene where Alma’s face cracks like glass and then burns up, a combustible film strip getting torn in the projector gate, consumed by flames like the monk protesting in Vietnam on Elisabet’s television early on. A mere trick, one might think, but also a strong hint that the violence in the film and on the screen may be only a visible metaphor for the invisible violence of the screen, indicative of the aggression inherent in the voyeuristic interest we project onto the action as spectators, to which the director responds with a certain sadism of his own, by suddenly reminding us of the nonhuman materiality of his film.
•••
If it were told from a Hollywood perspective, Persona would be the story of Elisabet, nursed back to health by Alma while each of the women gradually “absorbs” part of the other’s personality. But there is no equivalence, no lasting exchange, and their only common ground seems to be that they are both women. Set against their gender are, for instance, their very distinct backgrounds: Elisabet and Alma differ in marital and social status, in class and celebrity, as well as in temperament and moral outlook. Brought together by chance, the two are locked in a fierce power struggle. At first, it appears that “life” is all on the side of Alma, the “healthy” young woman whose optimism seems infectious. But as the film progresses, the balance of power between them shifts several times.
This is the psychological situation, and it seems that, in the end, they battle each other to a draw, with Alma perhaps coming out a bit on top, because she still has a life to live, whereas we sense that, however much she may recover, Elisabet has little to look forward to, either from her husband (whose brief visit to the island—if this, too, is not a hallucination on Alma’s part—shows him so metaphorically, or even literally, blind that he cannot tell his wife from her nurse) or with her son, whom she emotionally abandoned early on (and who reappears, metaphorically, in the photo of the Jewish boy from the Warsaw ghetto). If we are to believe the sentiments Alma infers from Elisabet’s tacit agreement, in the scene where Alma fills in (for us) the background to Elisabet’s professional and marital life, Elisabet did not want to have the boy but was too cowardly to abort. This in contrast to Alma, who did have the strength to take such a decision when she knew she was not ready to have a child. Motherhood and the maternal are often the key characteristics of women in Bergman’s world, starting with his early Brink of Life (1958), which features a live birth. There is thus something quite archaic or primal also at work in the women’s confrontation in Persona: the power of being able to give birth or refusing to do so, the labor of parturition and the pain of having an abortion being put in the balance and weighed accordingly.
Along with the women’s psychology and gender, a literary side, too, enters the constellation, because Persona brings together two romantic archetypes: the double and the vampire. These two mythological figures are recurring motifs in Bergman’s imaginative universe (1963’s The Silence, 1968’s The Hour of the Wolf and Shame), and surprisingly often, they are female, in contrast to their literary (and cinematic) equivalents. Given the initial near-death situation of Elisabet, it seems clear who here is the vampire, sucking out Alma’s young blood and life force.
But as with the vampire in romantic literature, a political reading suggests itself as well. What used to be a metaphor for the (postrevolutionary) aristocracy retaining its deadly grip on a rising bourgeoisie now traces, in the confrontation between Elisabet and Alma, the outlines of another class struggle: this time between the well-to-do middle class and the menial working class. In this scenario, no longer the aphasia of a sick person, Elisabet’s silence becomes a weapon, the haughty refusal to trade in the currency of common and shared humanity. It makes the babble of Alma stand for the voice of the people, needing to speak regardless, so as not to choke and suffocate in the face of injustice, prejudice, and discrimination. But such is the (Hegelian) dialectic of “master” and “slave” also in this case that dependency can shift and find itself upended, which in Persona is demonstrated by the cinematic dynamics of speech and space.
In the scene onstage precipitating Elisabet’s nervous breakdown, when she suddenly stops midgesture, one expects a cause to be revealed, possibly by a point-of-view shot or a reaction shot. Instead, her action remains unmotivated and unexplained, a diva’s caprice. Yet the way Bergman formally organizes the scene gives us the necessary clues to its function and meaning. The disposition of figure and space, of character movement and camera movement, conveys the urgency of her choice and the claustrophobia in her mind more immediately and convincingly than any of the verbal explanations given by the doctor. We first see Elektra/Elisabet with her back to the camera, addressing an audience in a theater. Gradually, she turns around, approaches the camera, until her face is in close-up and she is looking almost straight at us. Meaning lies not in the verbal commentary (which merely fills in context) but in her physical movement. The shot begins with Elisabet facing the theater audience and ends with her facing us, the cinema audience. Both audiences are “virtual” (as in the iconic shot with the boy), since the theater auditorium appears to be empty. Signaled in her turn from one audience to the other is that she has literally come to a turning point in her life. The transition from an outer void (the world of appearances and make-believe) to facing up to an inner void happens entirely in the fluid motion that joins these two virtual spaces.
This movement from an outer to an inner world is reinforced, and given a concrete spatial embodiment, by the position of the camera. Elisabet is onstage (as a diva, she is also public property), and as she turns toward backstage (where the camera is), she enters a more intimate and immediate, but also a more turbulent and ungrounded, reality (Bergman makes similar use of the backstage metaphor in 1953’s Sawdust and Tinsel and 1955’s Smiles of a Summer Night). Yet what is most striking in this scene is the near complete absence of perspective and depth, which becomes a guiding principle also in the subsequent action.
For most of the film, in fact, the women are almost uncomfortably close to the camera; the background is often indistinct or blurred, with their faces seen as if from behind glass. Composed of flat visual planes with clear outlines, yet without a feeling of roundness and wholeness, Persona conveys an overwhelming sense of at once claustrophobia and transparency, of suffocation and an almost hallucinatory clarity. Such deliberate one-dimensionality in the image, coupled with strong bodily responses, transmits the women’s predicament of being trapped directly to the spectator, making sensation a form of perception. Achieved by Bergman’s refusal to let the illusion of ordinary space develop, it substitutes instead a properly “cinematic” space—without, however, destroying that sense of psychological realism, so necessary to any involvement in the interpersonal drama unfolding.
The presence of this flat cinematic space extends to the outdoor scenes, where the low horizon of the island setting, the pebbly beach and rocky outcrops are shot in a noticeably multiperspectival, cubist manner. This essentially abstract way of rendering physical space contrasts with the few scenes where there are suddenly edge, frame, and perspective. For example, when Alma tells of her sexual adventure with the boys on the beach, Bergman gives the room an extraordinary depth, with the two women as focal points, clearly distinguished and surrounded by pools of light that both illuminate (Alma) and isolate (Elisabet). Against the impersonal, flat, and evenly lit space of the other scenes, this one has an immediate, but deceptive, quality of warmth and intimacy. The function is twofold: Firstly, it clearly separates the two women, removing Elisabet from Alma’s experience while giving to Alma an emotional freedom outside of their ambivalent relationship. Secondly, the deep focus, providing, as it does, plenitude to the image and extending the visual space, perfectly corresponds to the sentiment that Alma tries to express. At the same time, it associates a thematic value, making evident the immensely erotic charge and liberating power Bergman wants to convey through Alma’s tale, the sensual reality of a warm, expansive day on the beach, the sexual abandon, the physical intimacy, the strangely innocent fulfillment of this impersonal commingling of bodies stirred by passion and lust. It is from all and any of this that Elisabet exiles herself with her silence and self-control, inadvertently restoring to Alma the full power and presence that come from speech and language in the cinema. The scene is evidence of Bergman’s extraordinary prowess as a writer, a craftsman of words that here are temporarily (and, one imagines, vicariously) lent to the body and voice of a great actress.
•••
Persona is a chamber play, and in recent years, many of Bergman’s films have been extraordinarily successful all over the world when staged as plays: Persona in Mexico City (2008), Autumn Sonata in Tel Aviv (2007) and Moscow (2012), Through a Glass Darkly in New York (2011), not to mention Scenes from a Marriage, performed widely. But the care Bergman devotes to his cinematic spaces gives the lie to the notion that he remained, for all the auteurist accolades he received, a man of the theater, and that Persona, too, is just Strindberg resurrected, set on an island instead of a stage.
Another charge made against Persona when it was released was that it examines the relation of the two women in a social vacuum. I’ve taken some pains to refute this, too, by showing the complex thematic echoes of class and status that are embedded in the themes of silence and space. But even more telling, it seems to me, are the many ways in which Persona actually infuses urgency and energy into the somewhat clichéd metaphor of the social vacuum. On the one hand, Elisabet’s silence creates a void that Alma is compelled to fill with her words, at the risk of being annihilated by that formidable silence. On the other hand, Elisabet finds in her self-inflicted silence a release from the extroverted existence imposed upon her by her profession. Away from the role that smothered her own self under layers of makeup, she tries to discover an inner dimension, a new intimacy as the hoped-for fruit of solitude. To this, Alma brings the necessary—devastating—correction that there may not be a self beneath the mask.
By yet another dialectical turn, which makes the void less of a black hole and more of a white surface, Alma finds in Elisabet’s silence the screen upon which she can project all the roles she has always wanted to play. She becomes an extrovert to a degree that seems to surprise even herself, though only to discover in the process that, by playing these roles, she has stripped herself of all her outward assurance and certainty. By dramatizing her own existence in front of her silent spectator, Alma becomes an actress, performing before an audience. Here, too, a metacinematic reference becomes evident, if only by the fact that Alma is of course played by a professional actress, Bibi Andersson. As David Thomson once dryly noted: “Bergman’s films are about actors and artists playing actors and artists.”
But a further, more philosophical point also emerges: silence and volubility are merely the two extremes of the same (modernist) theme, so often broached in Bergman’s films (Through a Glass Darkly, 1962’s Winter Light): the Silence of God, eliciting a complementary-compensatory, even hysterical, need for contact and communication. Persona bears out the convergence, but also the clash, of these extremes: of silence countered by words and words met by silence. Perhaps the women, each recognizing her contradictory, if not false, position in the mirror of its opposite, actually gain the insight that, in a world without transcendence, human beings have only each other. This very drama of self-knowledge through the other should give the film an inherent dynamic toward a more conciliatory resolution. It would be the Hollywood ending, but Bergman’s sense of honesty obliges him to withhold it.
Bergman, self-confessed charlatan and conjurer, lover of the magic lantern and lifelong devotee to masters of Swedish silent cinema, is remarkably honest with his characters, but also with his audience. If the prologue of Persona recapitulates, as it were, the pleasures and terrors of cinema experienced by Bergman as a child, the metacinema reference to camera and celluloid toward the end freely admits to the artifice, but also to the self-deception and self-indulgence, that moviemaking entails. In this respect, he was perhaps ahead of both his admirers and his critics, as if the controversies and challenges that Persona continues to provoke were preprogrammed into its very conception: not only the iconic images that are worth a thousand words but also the silences that launched a thousand commentaries.
The Persistence of Persona. By Thomas Elsaesser. Criterion, March 17, 2016.
More on
Persona here :
Cinephilia and Beyond including the essay Susan Sontag wrote for Sight and Sound, autumn 1967.
Page about
the film on the website of the Ingmar Bergman Foundation
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