Genre: Drama Director: Ingmar Bergman
Writer: Ingmar Bergman
Producer: Ingmar Bergman
Cast: Bibi Anderson, Liv Ullman, Margaretha Krook, Gunnar Björnstrand
Music: Lars Johan Werle
Cinematography: Sven Nykvist
Distributed By: AB Svensk Filmindustri (Sweden), United Artists (US)
Release Date: October 18, 1966 (Sweden), March 6, 1967 (US)
Running Time: 85 min
“At some time or other, I said that Persona saved my life — that is no exaggeration. If I had not found the strength to make that film, I would probably have been all washed up. One significant point: for the first time I did not care in the least whether the result would be a commercial success...”
-Ingmar Bergman on Persona
I am often asked what my favorite movie is. To that question I would answer either Hitchcock’s Notorious or Fellini’s La Dolce Vita. Both movies for me embody what I love so much about going to the movies. Notorious is a film that is cinematic to the core, a film that is elegant, subtle, and suspenseful and propelled by fantastic performances. La Dolce Vita is life, music, art, love, sex, literature, and all those things on film. It’s a film that has had a tremendous impact on me, not just in the way I look at film, but how I look at art and life in general. There are other movies too that I love like Ran or It’s a Wonderful Life or Touch of Evil or here I go again. Now ask me what the greatest movie ever made is and here we have a problem, because greatest is different from favorite. Greatest implies that it is the best of all time, and film when compared to literature and music is still in its infancy, so there are so many great films that have yet to be made, but my answer must for now be Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, the subject of today’s Classics Corner. There are SPOILERS ABOUND so you have been warned.
Persona is a difficult film to approach, it’s by no means an easy film to watch, and the best way to describe the experience is an existentialist nightmare. Bergman’s muse Liv Ullman plays an actress named Elisabet Vogler who for some reason stops speaking in the middle of performing Electra. The silence seems to stem from some horrible trauma she has suffered in her mind, and in order to recuperate she is sent to a beachside house to rest herself. Bibi Anderson plays Nurse Alma who tells Vogler all of her secrets believing she will not tell anyone. What plays out is a power struggle between the two women who find that their very identities are disintegrating into one another. This is the most plot we get; the film is really a series of events that heavily mix dreams and reality. The viewer is never quite sure if what’s being shown is real or not. The famous opening scene of the reel of silent film clips and a later “interruption” of the film by a repeat of these clips suggests that what we are witnessing is a film within a film and son on. Persona also features heavy sexual imagery from the quick shot of the erect penis at the beginning to the surreal dream Alma has of Elisabet to the camera heating up and then cooling down. Then there’s the pure intensity of the struggle between the two women, it’s violent and unpleasant, the two abuse each other physically and emotionally and it is painful to watch, Persona is an intense emotional experience.
It’s these elements that have led critics to label the film as a sort of a modernist love story between the two women, though I believe it is simpler than that. The power struggle is a result of the repressed sexual feelings the women have for one another, it’s all pure lust and guilt. The film is also about female expression, remember this film was made in 1966 just as the feminist movement was gaining ground, and Bergman’s representation of the female mind was shocking for the time. Nurse Alma is a sexually manipulative woman, and in a famous monologue she explains how she seduced two adolescent boys on the beach into having sex, though she is unsure of whether it was intentional or not. Elisabet’s rejection and horror of becoming a mother was and still remains shocking, because even today many do not understand the horror many women feel during pregnancy. This is my own opinion on what I believe the film to be about, Bergman allows for plenty of different ideas to be presented, and the film is extremely open-ended and allows for many emotional reactions.
If all this sounds confusing, it is, Bergman intended for Persona to be a “visual poem,” and he succeeds in that area. Collaborating with his favorite cinematographer Sven Nykvist, the entire film is shot in a high contrast black and white. Everything has this feeling of eerie sterilization, as if what we’re watching isn’t real at all, but rather some distorted version of reality. It’s a visually stunning work, and each shot is set up with careful attention to detail. The contrast between black and white increases as the film progresses until we reach the scene where the two women sit down for dinner clad in pure black clothing. Like with The Seventh Seal there are scenes in Persona which have entered the popular culture, the scene where the two women’s faces come together has been borrowed by other filmmakers like David Lynch or parodied several times. However even when the film isn’t being visual it still keeps visuals in play. During Alma’s monologue about her day at the beach, she describes the entire event in such detail that we cannot help but imagine the scene in explicit detail, and Bergman keeps the dialogue in tune with the rest of the film, that cryptic, sterile style so that we are able to imagine the scene as looking like what we have been seeing on screen. His use of film stock is also well used, he uses just enough for effect, but doesn’t go overboard with it, and each piece of film stock is selected to fit in with the film and its themes.
Like always Bergman extracts fantastic performances from his actresses. Liv Ullman and Bibi Anderson understood what Bergman was trying to create and they pull from somewhere two great performances filled with what must have been an unbearable agony. Liv Ullman is perfect at playing the ice queen, her eyes and sly expression are always hiding something, and she feels manipulative, but her face also hides something else, a broken woman. Bibi Anderson has a child-like naivety about her, and a certain innocence that lends well to her role, but as she gets closer to her breakdown she begins to breakdown, and her performance is filled with just this great intensity. The two actresses are amazing with one another, and their performances must be admired if not that they are great performances, but for what must have gone into these performances that made them so great.
Persona is an enigma; it’s neither an easy film to watch nor an easy one to write about. Perhaps that’s why it took me nine previous articles before I was ready to write about it. I haven’t been able to say everything there is to say about the film, but there isn’t enough time to go more in-depth than I have, so I leave you all, dearest readers with this. Go watch Persona, if you haven’t seen it, see it, if you have seen it, watch it again. This film really shows us what cinema is capable of.
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