Film: Persona
Rating: 4 Stars
I’m not sure if I’m watching Ingmar Bergman films in the correct order or not. The first one I watched was Wild Strawberries, which was a pretty straightforward film about aging and the passing of a life. Next up was The Seventh Seal, most famous (and most parodied) for a medieval knight playing chess with Death. This was a much more complex film dealing with large issues of life, death, and God.
Because it ranked eighteenth on the BFI Sight and Sound list, I watched Bergman’s Persona. Imagine my surprise when, sitting down to watch it, a close-up image of a fully erect penis popped up on my screen within the first two minutes. Toto, I guess we’re not in Kansas anymore. This is especially true considering that this was released in 1966, when the American film industry was still operating firmly under the puritanical Hays Code.
The plot is deceptively simple. Elisabet Vogler (Liv Ullmann) is a famous actress. In the middle of a stage performance, she stopped speaking. There is no apparent physical or known psychological cause. She just refuses to speak. A psychiatrist recommends that the nurse Alma (Bibi Andersonn) take care of Elisabet. Eventually, thinking that it might help Elisabet, the psychiatrist recommends that Alma and Elisabet move to a house on the beach.
For the entire time, Elisabet refuses to speak. Alma, to fill the void if nothing else, proceeds to do the heavy lifting of keeping the conversation going. Having a person so attentive to what she’s saying causes Alma to really open up and start sharing the most personal, intimate secrets that she’s never previously shared.
Alma eventually tells the very personal account of having an orgy like affair while engaged to be married. She became pregnant as a result of this assignation and aborted it. Later, when she’s mailing an unsealed letter for Elisabet, Alma sees that Elisabet is writing about her affair and abortion. Feeling betrayed, she lashes out at Elisabet. On the verge of throwing boiling water on her, Elisabet shouts to stop her. That’s the only words that Elisabet says in the film. Alma later begs Elisabet for forgiveness.
Later, possibly in a dream sequence, Elisabet’s husband visits. Apparently, he mistakes Alma for Elisabet and has sex with Alma.
By the end of the film, it appears that Elisabet and Alma are beginning to merge their identities. In one split shot, you see their two faces gradually merge into one.
So, what the actual fuck? I have no idea. I’ve read several analyses of the film. None of them are in agreement. Apparently it’s been called the Mt Everest of film analysis. One film critic said something along the lines of, “everything said about Persona can be contradicted, the opposite is true as well”.
The obvious unanswered question is, is this a Fight Club scenario? Spoiler alert for a twenty-five year old novel and film, but in Fight Club, the mayhem causing Tyler Durden and the seemingly mild-mannered narrator are actually the same person. Durden can be thought of as the narrator’s id.
Is Alma a manifestation of Elisabet? Although an acclaimed actress, Elisabet appears unhappy. She has a child that she apparently despises (a picture of him is sent to her and she tears it in half). Alma is younger. Does she represent a different start to a life that might have been more rewarding or fulfilling than acting? Does Alma’s story of an abortion represent an expression of Elisabet’s regret of bearing a child?
Another unanswered question is, why does Elisabet stop talking? We might see a clue in some of the nightmarish imagery of the film. We see the infamous picture of the terrified young boy in the World War II Polish ghetto with his upraised arms. Being filmed in the year 1966, we see the picture of the Buddhist monk immolating himself in protest of the Vietnam War. Is Elisabet horrified at the current state of our world? As an artist, does she not have words to express the horror that she sees?
The film possibly touches upon the idea that Elisabet is not speaking because she no longer wants to lie. As an actress, lying is kind of the name of the game. You have to say words that you don’t believe and convey emotions that you do not feel. Given the corrupt state of the world, does she simply feel that she doesn’t want to feed its corruption with her own lies? Since her art is based upon lies, does she feel that she has nothing of truth to share?
Is this an example of metafilm? At the beginning of the film, you see the lights of the projector and you see the film cells go whizzing by. The film ends with a camera crew following Alma as she leaves. In the middle, there’s an out of context interlude that reminded me nothing more than of the Terry Gilliam animated shorts in the middle of Monty Python’s Flying Circus.
In all of these cases, you are brought out of the false reality that you usually find yourself in when you sit down to watch a film. Is this an attempt to lift the veil of film making? Is this to remind you, that even as the film is talking about truth and lies, that the film itself is an artificial contrivance lying to you?
In case you haven’t figured it out by now, I have absolutely no fucking clue.
The sixteenth through the eighteenth films in the Sight and Sound list have been quite a ride. You have Meshes of the Afternoon, a fourteen minute long surrealistic mind fuck of a film. You have Close-Up, which absolutely demolishes the line between documentary film and fiction. And you have Persona, a fairly short film where over ninety percent of the film consists of only two actors, only one of whom even talks. It’s an amazing accomplishment that Bergman was able to embed so many interesting questions and ambiguity into it.
I’m not sure where Sight and Sound is going to take me next. I will be buckling my seat belt.
dorkenstein 