1966: Persona

Persona (1966, Bergman) 8/10

Recently, while rummaging through the university library, I perused through Peter Cowie's biography of Ingmar Bergman and noticed a startling fact. In 1963, almost a million Swedes went to see The Silence, the last of Bergman's quasi-religious trilogy that included Winter Light and Through a Glass Darkly: an impressive statistic for a nation whose population is between 7-8 million.

Three years later, after being made director of the Dramaten (The Swedish Royal Theatre Company in Stockholm) and increasing their profits (with oddly plays designed for children), releasing a misinterpreted film (All These Women) and almost dying due to antibiotic poisoning, Bergman's latest film Persona (which had been lauded worldwide) attracted only ten percent of the domestic audience that the critically-mixed The Silence attracted.

The question that Cowie failed to answer in his biography was why so few people were interested in Bergman's latest project that was a self-conscious treatise on identity and the nature of cinema itself? Perhaps the answer is reflected in Bergman's original title for the project that would be Persona: Cinematography. Coupled with the scandalous on-set affair by lead actress Liv Ullman and Bergman, the abstract aesthetic nature of Bergman's latest project was hardly in-line with his previous "mainstream" projects.

Contemporary audiences could easily relate Radiohead going from OK Computer to Kid A; as Persona threw out the conventional theatrical leanings and traditional filmic documentation and instead replaced it with a new bold cinematic language. Certainly, the rise of the Nouvelle Vague movements throughout continental Europe could explain for the drop in Bergman's audience, but Persona is something even more experimental, daring and oblique than anything produced by Godard, Antonioni or Pasolini during this period.

This is cinema at its most basic and its most complex. Utilizing the historic implications of imagery from the silent era, Bergman creates a film that is strikingly rich in detail and feels cool and ultra-modern the entire time. After being nearly paralyzed from a severe lung infection, Ingmar Bergman returned to the screen with his most daring film ever. Persona was initially developed through a combination of his boredom at being bedridden in a Swedish hospital bed and his glancing upon a magazine photograph of his ex-wife Bibi Andersson with her Norwegian friend Liv Ullman. Wholly believing the pair were physically alike, Bergman developed a story based upon the idea of two different women being one and the same. The result was a film that is still fresh, invigorating and perfekt to this day.

The film stars Liv Ullman as Elisabet Vogler, a famous theatre actress who during an adaptation of Electra suddenly stops talking and places herself in a silent semi-autistic state. Alma (Bibi Andersson), a bubbly innocent nurse is placed in charge of Elisabet's health and is asked by her superiors to take her to a cottage in the countryside in order to try to improve Elisabet's health.

Yet, instead Alma begins to openly reveal herself to her mute friend, before realizing their friendship and close relationship is not Alma perceives it to be. This produces a film that not only explores the ideas of duplicity, but also the ability of two halves of a being becoming whole. Bergman and Sven Nykvist film the picture in a crisp monochrome style that attempts to showcase this theme of "the human mirror."

Throughout the film, Bergman also teases us with his cinematic experiments as he tries to break down the invisible wall between cinema and the audience via a variety of methods: Ullman photographing the audience, a young boy touching the screen etc. Through his breaking down of this wall, Bergman is allowed to wildly experiment with the material substance of film. Yet, this is never done a gimmicky fashion. All is done artfully and tastefully in the manner of an expressionist horror film with Ullman as the vampire or God figure depending on which scholar is analyzing the film.

Dominated by excellent performances from both Andersson and Ullman, Persona captures the essential themes of Bergman's earlier works (fears about art, existence, God, modernity etc) and repackages them in a bold and strikingly beautiful, yet unconventional format. The result is a multi-layered film that not only questions our existence and the nature of identity, but our role in the modern world. Through film Bergman expressed his fears and Persona is his attempt to strip down cinema to the elemental- removing its personas and its masks to reveal that all our notions of self and being are ultimately analogous roles played by ourselves.

* Persona is available through MGM Home Video as part of the Ingmar Bergman Collection

Copyright 2006 8 ½ Cinematheque.