THE ESSENTIALS
Persona (1966) — How Far Can Cinema Go?
An essay examining Ingmar Bergman’s essential masterpiece and its various possible meanings
“Today, I feel that in ‘Persona’— and later in ‘Cries and Whispers’ — I had gone as far as I could go. And that in these two instances, when working in total freedom, I touched wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover.” — Ingmar Bergman, “Images: My Life in Film” (1990)
These are big words from Ingmar Bergman, whose body of work stands as one of the most triumphant in film history. His stories examined much about man’s relationship with God, faith, existentialism, and dreams — the latter, he says, is best illustrated through filmmaking over any other medium. Despite the many outstanding achievements in his career, Persona (1966) is the movie that seems to stand out as something else.
Aside from Citizen Kane (1941), perhaps no other film has generated as much analysis and academic discussion as this one. The irony is that, on paper, its premise is quite simple. Elisabet (Liv Ullmann), an actress, suddenly goes mute in the middle of a performance. She is taken to a secluded cottage by the sea with her emotionally troubled nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson), where their minds deteriorate, likely because they are one and the same. However, we come back to Persona because of the cinematic enigma — that is, the mystery of filmmaking itself — that Bergman presents.
The word I think of to describe the film is Cinema. Yes, this term has become overused to the point of parody recently, particularly ever since Martin Scorsese unintentionally set viewers’ opinions ablaze with his comments about what is/is not cinema. However, it is entirely essential to deciphering Persona because — akin to the great Soviet director Dziga Vertov and his revolutionary Kino-Eye theory — Bergman seeks to connect all aspects of human desire, emotion, transgression, and self-created illusions through the cinematic apparatus.
The film opens with a famous seven-minute sequence of various film images. Two brightly lit carbons of an arc lamp (the intense light was used for early movie projectors) emerge from the darkness and, once sparked together, begin a montage of cinema history. The images consist of an early cartoon, a brief chase scene from a silent comedy, a spider crawling, a sheep getting beheaded and gutted, a man’s hands nailed to a cross, a wall, an open forest, gates, and a little boy waking up in a mortuary and moving his hand across an abstract screen that has Elisabet and Alma’s faces projected onto it.
Most, if not all, of these images have no narrative significance for the film and work mostly on subconscious and metaphorical levels. In simplest terms, the images declare “THIS IS A MOVIE” before starting the feature presentation. However, this sequence provides a complex framework for much of what Bergman is exploring.
Persona evokes the feeling of God and creation with its arc lamp carbon that lights up and gives way to life on a screen. What separates this film from the rest is that Bergman explores the self through illusions and modernism. An image that solidifies this idea is when the little boy sits up from his deathbed, looks into the camera — breaking the fourth wall — and waves his hand across the screen.
His actions make him one with the viewer. The following shot reveals the screen with the two women’s faces — both of whom will drive the film — projected on it. Bergman makes the screen’s presence apparent after we were placed in its position. What are we to take away from this? Perhaps it’s like the mirror in Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus (1950) that transports the subject to the underworld. In Persona, are we transported into the film, or is the film transporting into us? One way or another, Bergman signals an essential aspect of how our identities — or should I say personas — are defined in the modern world: media.
Persona differs from Bergman’s other works because it exists entirely within a modernist realm. Just as art became influenced by the Industrial Revolution and evolved past religion-based classicism, so too does his filmography.
There are many modern images scattered throughout Persona. One of the most enduring that shocks Elisabet and makes her back into a corner is the self-immolation of Thích Quảng Đức. We recognize this act not only because of its infamy in history, but also because a glimpse of it was in the opening credits. In one sense, it calls attention to how we are shaped and molded by the events we consume. Another idea is that it foreshadows what the ensuing narrative — as disjointed as it is — will be about: the destruction of the self.
There are remarkable shots in Persona — thanks to the hypnotic cinematography by Sven Nykvist — in addition to the esoteric images that reinforce these ideas. One of which comes early, after Alma is assigned as Elisabet’s nurse, and the two meet for the first time. Alma puts Elisabet to bed and leaves. The camera stays on Elisabet for one minute and sixteen seconds. She turns to face the camera, her face brightly illuminated. As the take continues, a shadow grows over her face, casting half of it in darkness.
It’s an essential image because we sense that Elisabet is detaching from the world, perhaps falling into a dream. Yet, her eyes are wide open the entire time. Maybe instead of representing the unconscious mind, it relates to the burning monk clip that frightens Elisabet. Quảng Đức was a Buddhist Monk, and Buddhism believes shadows symbolize the impermanence and transitory nature of existence. It could be that the horrors of the world have caused Elisabet to stop speaking.
Alma is a different matter, and her troubles are closer to the soul. This getaway with Elisabet is a unique opportunity for her to confess stories she’s never told to a woman who will conceivably never tell anyone.
Everyone remembers the story Alma tells Elisabet of cheating on her fiancé, lying nude on a beach with a woman she just met, and engaging in an orgy with two men who approached them. The story becomes painful for Alma to tell once she confesses to becoming pregnant and having an abortion. In a film famous for its imagery, this story is told entirely through words, yet its details are vivid, as if we see them happen on-screen.
Roger Ebert had an interesting description for this experience: “Bergman is showing how ideas create images and reality.” If that’s the idea, it’s not a coincidence that the following scene — arguably the film’s most famous moment — is an image. Whether it’s reality or a dream is up for interpretation.
Alma goes to bed, her room lit by the moon’s basking glow. Out of this pale light comes Elisabet entering Alma’s room. The two women face each other. Alma plops her head down onto Elisabet’s shoulder to be caressed, and they turn to face the camera like they are looking into a mirror. Lars Johan Werle’s score is ominous, daunting even; as Elisabet brushes Alma’s hair, Alma reaches behind her to do the same, and the two lean their heads into each other in a merging-like image.
Bergman’s film exhibits a sense of mirror construction, where the camera is not only a metaphorical window, but also a reflection that the characters acknowledge. Many theoretical debates about Persona are, in part, influenced by the writings of German playwright Bertolt Brecht, who said that art is like a hammer that shapes reality.
Take the following scene as another example. Alma is wandering on the beach — calling back to her story — and Elisabet rises from the bottom of the frame. She looks at the camera and snaps a picture. The idea that she photographed something else is invalid because the film never shows what’s behind the camera; therefore, it doesn’t exist. What’s apparent is that she sees us, and we see her, thus complicating the relationship between the spectator (who’s real) and the movie (that’s fantasy).
Another astonishing challenge to our perception comes a couple of scenes later. Alma has learned that Elisabet spoke condescendingly about her and her confession in a letter. Out in the sunny yard, Alma cleans up broken glass on the ground, but leaves one shard. She watches as Elisabet steps on it, causing pain and showing a sign of weakness for the first time.
The moment comes when Alma returns inside. She pulls back a curtain, and the film jarringly cuts to a reaction shot of Elisabet outside, then back to Alma as the screen flickers out of control. The projector seemingly breaks and burns the image away. The clips seen in the opening return, but feel more intimidating. The nail driven into a hand comes with an agonizing scream. The following shot is an extreme close-up of an eye that zooms in on its spider veins.
Several ideas are accomplished with this break. Alma’s sense of betrayal is represented by the intensity of the filmmaking. The filmmaking itself circles us back to the knowledge that what we’re watching is a movie. Hands — the tools we have to create — are penetrated, while the eye — commonly regarded as the window to the soul — lures us back into a hazy dream.
Several thought-provoking questions arise from this. One that I thought of during my most recent watch was whether the burning celluloid over Alma — like that of Quảng Đức — signals her act of cerebral self-immolation. If we’re to think of Alma and Elisabet’s relationship as two aspects of the same unconscious mind, then what do these feelings of anger and betrayal reveal?
A potential answer comes in another mesmerizing sequence. Alma sits down with Elisabet and relays her story. Elisabet wanted a child, got pregnant, had doubts, attempted a failed self-induced abortion, and now hates the child who wants her love. Then, the story is told again — the exact same scene. The first telling fixates on Elisabet’s face as she sits silently while Alma tells the story. The second switches the camera to Alma as she describes it. In the end, their nearly identical faces merge into a single picture. (As the story goes, Ullmann and Andersson were unaware this would happen and, once seen, gasped at the shock of it.)
Playing the same scene twice is a massive risk, but it communicates the characters’ duality. It’s the same story word-for-word, but it’s told by both women. Elisabet’s silence speaks as much as Alma’s voice. There’s a psychological battle occurring between the conscious and unconscious female mind. Reality vs. dreams. Responsibility vs. suppressed desires. Nurture vs. the mother shadow.
As the film ends, it is bookended by the images that opened it. Furthermore, Alma leaving the island (the beach prominently featured) signals the film’s inception. Bergman first thought of Persona 60 years ago, in 1964, when he met Ullmann and Andersson on a beach and dreamt of them that night. It’s not a coincidence, then, that he ends the film not only with Alma on the beach, but with a brief glimpse of him and his crew shooting. Thus, he personifies his idea that film is the dream of the dreamer.
I must admit, writing about Persona is one of the most daunting challenges I’ve undertaken. No matter how many times I’ve rewatched it, read books about it, and jotted down notes, I still didn’t have a clue where I would begin. That’s one of the signs of an essential film, where its greatness is almost beyond words. No other film I can think of better exhibits cinema’s limitless capacity to personify who we are. Bergman said he felt like he’d gone as far as he could go with Persona. Truthfully, films haven’t gone much further since.
