Ingmar Bergman (1966)
Ingmar Bergman’s famous film has been subject to multiple explanations. According to Wikipedia, ‘Bergman said that although he had an idea of what the story meant, he would not share it because he felt that his audience should draw its own conclusions. He hoped the film would be felt rather than understood’. The same source notes that his leads, Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann, ‘agreed to play their parts as different sides of the same personality and they assumed that personality was Bergman’s’; and that Ullmann believed that the cinematographer Sven Nykvist ‘was also not informed of the director’s intentions and left to work intuitively’. Ullmann is Elisabet Vogler, a stage actress who, midway through a performance, stops speaking. Andersson is Alma, the nurse assigned to care for Elisabet in the aftermath of a breakdown that defies medical explanation. Most of the action takes place in and around the seaside house where the two women go to stay, on the advice of Elisabet’s psychiatrist (Margaretha Krook). The patient remains silent; the nurse talks and reveals more and more about herself. Alma is increasingly exasperated. Realising that she is exposing her own insecurity and vulnerability, she also feels threatened by Elisabet.
Alma can mean (among many other things) soul or nourishing. Elisabeth, when she decides to renounce the power of speech, is playing the title role in a production of Electra. These are hints of Persona’s symbolic possibilities – and Bergman’s black-and-white images are even more richly suggestive. Pauline Kael, though she surely didn’t mean to endorse his approach (she found the film as a whole ‘frustrating’), expressed a judgment not dissimilar to the attitude that Wikipedia attributes to Bergman, in the review that appears in Kael’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang collection:
‘Though it’s possible to offer interpretations, I don’t think that treating Persona as the pieces of a puzzle and trying to put them together will do much more than demonstrate ingenuity at guesswork. It’s easy to say that the little boy reaching up to the screen [in the montage of images that bookends the main narrative] is probably Bergman as a child; and he may also represent the nurse’s aborted baby and/or the actress’s rejected son. But for this kind of speculation (and one would have to go through almost every image in the movie this way) to have any purpose, there must be a structure of meanings in the work by which an interpretation can be validated; I don’t think is one in Persona. If there is, it is so buried that it doesn’t function in the work. We respond to the image of the little boy – not because he’s Bergman or an abortion but simply in terms of the quality and intensity of the image – but we don’t know why it’s in the film.’
Exhaustive dissection of Persona is also liable to detract from how excitingly distinctive it is to watch (and watch again). For example, a character analysis of Elisabet runs the risk of reducing her to a familiar figure: the artist as an empty vessel, parasitic on others, too self-absorbed even for parenthood. Yet the way Elisabet is played (and photographed) comes across as strongly original. An implication that Elisabet stops communicating because she finds the world intolerable – she’s upset watching television news showing a self-immolation in the Vietnam War and by photographs of the Warsaw Ghetto – also has much greater impact than it sounds as if it should have. I’ll keep the rest of this note to just a few observations – drops in the ocean of Persona interpretation.
The received wisdom is that the film’s main themes include the fragility of personal identity and the idea that a human relationship is a power struggle; that the trajectory of Persona is towards a merging of the two women’s identities. When Elisabet’s husband (Gunnar Björnstrand) pays a brief visit, Alma has to remind him (Vogler first appears wearing dark glasses) that she isn’t his wife. Towards the end of their time together, Alma desperately insists to Elisabet that ‘I’m not you!’ Out on the veranda of the house, Alma breaks a glass, sweeps up the pieces but leaves a shard for Elisabet to step on; later, Alma cuts her own arm and allows Elisabet to suck her blood, an act of vampirism initiated by the ‘victim’. Bergman realises the merged identities in spite of the fact that his two principals’ faces are really not all that alike: the cunning visual compositions and superimpositions make them seem alike. Another merging that takes place is between loss of individual personality and loss of authority: Alma and Elisabet exchange roles as much as identities. The nurse, who should be in charge, is increasingly at the mercy of her patient. The potential analysand says not a word; the potential analyst repeatedly gives herself away. Until Alma persuades her in the closing stages to say ‘nothing’ (instead of saying nothing), there’s only one point at which Elisabet definitely speaks – she does so instinctively when the infuriated Alma threatens to throw boiling water at her.
Persona begins and ends with similar montages – a crucifixion and the killing of a lamb, a spider, a young boy (Jörgen Lindström) waking up in what seems to be a morgue and touching the blurred images of two women on a huge screen. A few of these details are individually mystifying but the overall self-reflexive message of the prologue and epilogue comes over loud and clear: Bergman wants to remind the audience that it is watching a film. Shots of a projector and a strip of celluloid are repeated; at the end, the screen even shows a camera being manoeuvred into position by a crew. In a piece that, for the most part, embodies the visual power of cinema and demonstrates the frailty and contingency of speech, it’s an ingenious twist that a shift in Alma’s attitude towards Elisabet is brought about through the written word. Alma takes some letters to post; curiosity gets the better of her when she notices that an envelope addressed to the psychiatrist is unsealed. She opens it, reads the letter it contains and is enraged, and feels betrayed, by what Elisabet has written:
‘My dear, I could live like this forever. Silent, living a secluded life, reducing my needs, feeling my battered soul finally starting to smooth itself out. Alma takes care of me, spoils me in the most touching way. I believe that she likes it here and that she’s very fond of me … perhaps even in love in an unaware and enchanting way. In any case, it’s very interesting studying her. Sometimes she cries over past sins … an orgy with a strange boy and a subsequent abortion. She claims that her perceptions do not correspond with her actions.’
The Latin word persona means both mask and character. In Jungian psychology, an individual’s persona is the mechanism whereby they conceal their true thoughts and feelings, especially in their adaptation to the outside world. In theatre and film, a mask is, at one level, a means of concealment but it’s not unusual for a masked actor – thanks to feeling protected, by the disguise they’re wearing, from revealing their own self – to express the qualities of their character more freely than they might have done without the mask. Bergman’s film is centrally concerned with the fracturing of Alma’s persona (in the Jungian sense) but his actresses, from the start, have nothing to hide behind: the camera subjects the faces of Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann to exceptionally close and unrelenting scrutiny. Elisabet’s silence and relative immobility afford Ullmann a degree of security: the viewer can’t be sure what the character may be keeping to herself – whether her face is revealing emotional truth or dissimulating (Elisabet is, after all, an actress). Although this is theoretically the case with Alma too, we assume that the combination of her face, words and physical movement is yielding up her innermost thoughts and feelings. Bibi Andersson is fearless, especially in the ‘orgy’ monologue – which is not just an act of recollection but, in Andersson’s telling, a revival of the sensations that Alma originally experienced. Her great acting amounts to a further reminder that Persona is inspired artifice: the more Andersson’s character feels trapped and helpless, the more she imposes herself on us.
9 January 2018
