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. […]