The interior of the projector at the beginning and the end of Persona—and, at the midpoint, the celluloid disintegrating around a still shot of Bibi Andersson’s icy mien—signals to the viewer a self-awareness that is the raison d’etre of the entire work; a trickery on the part of the filmmakers that beguiles in practically every frame, inviting one’s study while at the same time rebuffing the kinds of analyses that attempt to freeze its “meaning” into some monolithic interpretation.
The director, like Prospero parading his illusive stagecraft to a captive audience, is making it clear that this film is literally that: film, whole spools of it being fed through the projector and kindled into motion by carbon arcs. Also shown, at the very end, are cameramen operating the machinery capturing the material out of which the film is made. Any discussion of the “inner” narrative—that of Andersson’s nurse, Alma, caring for the famous and willfully mute actress Elisabet Vogler, played by Liv Ullmann—must, therefore, be contextualized by this structural decision.
With Persona, then, it is important to keep in mind that surface is key, working in a top-down manner upon the narrative(s) it conforms; just as a mask conforms one’s perception of the mask-bearer, while all the while concealing the bearer’s true nature from the perceiver, whose speculations are circumscribed by whatever the mask presents. So it is that the face of the Other allures, and disquiets.
Persona is a powerful work of art, by one of the medium’s preeminent practitioners, which went on to inspire countless filmmakers who fell, and continue to fall, under its meta-fictional spell. What exactly constitutes its greatness, however, has been up for debate for just about as long: scholarly responses run the gamut from Freudian/Jungian treatises prodding into the filmmaker’s relationship with his mother to pronouncements like the one attributed to critic Peter Cowie, that “Everything one says about Persona may be contradicted; the opposite will also be true.”
Likely not, of course, since however much Persona might confound in its daring engagement with a multiplicity of themes, one cannot claim that it is about absolutely everything (such is even negated by Cowie’s own informative video essay on the first seven minutes of the film), as a few salient themes arise that most attentive reviewers can identify, and rightfully prioritize; but also liable to be missed in such ultra-serious treatment is the film’s light, but unmistakably present, layer of un-seriousness.
After all, one of the first flickering shots in the prologue, set to a grating atonal score by Lars Johan Werle, is of a fully erect penis. And then an early-twentieth century animation of a plump lady washing her breasts in a pond. Bergman seems to be poking fun at the voyeuristic nature of what is taking place, on his and the viewer’s side of the screen. But more on that, later.
So: Persona is a film. (Easy enough.) The story of said film involves the psychological back-and-forth between kindly nurse Alma and Elisabet, who takes a vow of silence after she collapses, laughing, in the middle of her performance as/in Electra. Why, exactly, she has taken this vow can only be guessed at: she seems to be horrified by footage from the news, of a Buddhist monk burning himself alive in protest of the war in Vietnam; a photograph of a boy lifting his hands as Nazis round up Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto further stuns her into silence. Do the world’s moral calamities rob her of voice, since even to raise it in protest seems futile?
The doctor at the clinic where Alma and Elisabet meet (an all-knowing Margaretha Krook, and Bergman stand-in?) ascribes her silence to existential experimentation rather than any genuine mental break. It is far easier, after all, to be silent than to engage with others, whose view of you cannot ever be totally vetted, whose expectations trap you into acting in ways superfluous to self-agential desire. She even coldly encourages Elisabet to continue this “role” by staying with Alma at her summer beach house, despite predicting that she will eventually drop it, like she has all other performances.
Elisabet, the Mute Spectator, refusing to “perform” the social role of mother, worker, wife, citizen. Bubbly Alma as the all-too-willing confider, who, once joined with a partner who can but only listen, begins to unfurl her life, her insecurities and disgusts; helplessly narrativizing in the face of silence, before a pretty and seemingly submissive mask. In one of the film’s notable monologues (all she can do is monologue), Alma confesses an orgy she and a friend initiated with two much younger men—boys, really—while staying at the house of her lover. Isolated from the rest of society, with her guard fully dropped, just who is this nurturing, twenty-five-year-old mother-to-be, partaking in such a licentious episode and admitting that she has not, since that point, felt sexual fulfillment even close to what was experienced there?
That both women are fascinated by the other is clear. Attraction lingering at the edges of eros compels Alma to bare herself to the silent patient, who slowly takes on the role of counselor, studying the vulnerabilities of Alma as a psychoanalyst might her couched subject. There was a pregnancy, and then an abortion; guilt over what is and what cannot be torments Alma. Is it truly possible to be a person, when such interior conflict tears? Is there room for every desire in one life? Why not two?
A peek at Elisabet’s private letter to her doctor creates a fissure between them. In an expertly choreographed scene, Alma leaves a shard of glass on the ground in wait for Elisabet’s unsuspecting step. A pained yip is one of the only sounds we hear from the actress, prefiguring a later revelation. Alma, now on the offensive, stares at Elisabet from behind a newly drawn veil, unable to disguise her contempt…
…then the film dissolves, as mentioned before, and its beginning stream of pictures is returned to. Snatches of music; shots of silent horrors. Nails being driven into a man’s hands. Cries and discordant whispers. And a quivering eye, telescoped into, watching the viewer watching it. Artificiality reigns.
By now, Bergman’s mission statement ought to be somewhat discernable, if not understood in all its particularities (and certainly not upon first viewing). How the viewer will experience Persona after this meta-fracture depends on what they do, or do not, discern. The flimsiness of “roles,” unmasked at a moment’s notice once the judging eyes of others are out of the picture; his playing with doubles, Alma and Elisabet’s merging (the dreamy sequences of blowing curtains and a returned lover, and the famous shot of the two women staring right into the frame, caressing each other in anticipation of some union) though Alma is the more pliant one, reduced to an almost childlike openness by the other’s taciturnity.
The opening montage, bringing the viewer right to cinema’s incipience, in both historical and material/tactile terms. Again, that penis—which is, according to The Cinematograph, parodying the China Girl custom used by film technicians to color correct—and that cartoonish bathing woman in the woods; everything in Persona, from the bestial eroticism to those feminine shades each desiring something from the other (both unaware and too-aware of being watched), to that half-naked boy stroking the screen, a woman’s impassive features – all simply a telltale function of light and other assorted chemicals, all projection. But whose?
Bergman’s, surely, since he is the one telling the tale, but also the viewer’s, whose speculations he excites by connecting them to a cavalcade of imagery suggestive of both Bergman’s past as a filmmaker (references to his iconography abound, the most relevant being from his “God” trilogy, which similarly deals with the profundities of silence) and the subliminal emotions Alma and Elisabet elicit from, and make explicit to, each other. By pulling from what makes many pure “experimental” films compelling as explorations of the inchoate, and tying it to solider narrative structure, Bergman stretches the bounds of the medium as it was understood in 1966 and in ways filmmakers struggle to match even now, nearly sixty years later.
That much of Persona comes across as dated—the charged lesbian eroticism, especially, and some of the psycho-babble rendered ho-hum by an age so “therapized” to the point that its everyday lingo is positively littered with related terms—and pretentious, or overdone—a too-on-the-nose vampiric attack by Elisabet, or just the overall drone of high seriousness that even Bergman’s more wink-wink-nudge-nudge moments cannot totally dispel—is almost beside the point, though these marks arguably knock it down a tier from some of his other lauded masterpieces. To echo Dan Schneider’s oft-repeated claim, it is not the what but the how of art that takes precedence, and if art’s process is creatively respected, it can lift up even dubious subject matter into high quality.
To further echo Schneider, it really is Persona‘s style that varnishes over its pretensions, as “the ultimate style over substance film,” but only in the sense that the heavily stylized technique actually embodies its substance; it just so happens that Persona is, again, concerned with surfaces as such, the reflexivity of which becomes quite difficult to grasp, even by seasoned filmgoers’ standards.
And it is impossible to deny the power of the film’s frame-by-frame composition, and the ways in which longtime Bergman collaborator Sven Nykvist draws both shadow and light into his lens, emphasizing the starkness displayed by their contrast but also the richness found in each. There are few works more exemplary of black-and-white’s potential as an artistic tool in cinema, regardless of time period.
Since Persona is a two-hander, for the most part (barring the doctor and a brief appearance by Gunnar Björnstrand as Elisabet’s husband), much of what Bergman sets out to do relies heavily on his cast. Fortunately, Ullmann and Andersson are superb in their roles, though Ullmann is, for my money, the standout. It is a tricky thing, to act sans spoken dialogue; and further, to act so alongside your partner in such a way that renders your role as the stronger of the two, all the while resisting affectation. And to also exhibit enough vulnerability in the performance to have the audience believe that something is profoundly wrong with the character while at the same time enough firmness of personality to keep them guessing as to whether or not actual psychological trauma is at play. Andersson is luminous as Alma, but there are, as they say, levels to this.
In one of the best, and most iconic, shots of the film, both Andersson and Ullmann’s faces occupy Bergman/Nykvist’s frame, leaned over and beside the other, forming a sort of wavy mountainous shape against the blazingly white-curtained backdrop. After intense hurt and upheaval, Alma is attempting to reconstitute herself. She will never be like Elisabet, she says, because unlike her, she is capable of change.
But in the shot, Alma is obscured by her erstwhile patient, with only her lips visible, as if the camera is reducing her to voice alone. The voice—Alma’s voice, any voice—believes that it says what it means, but meaning, of course, changes. It wants to not just speak, but be. It wants an experience beyond itself—while silence listens from the other side, as if in pity. As if it knows.
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