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In six words, Shakespeare asked what is perhaps the most profound question of human life: ‘To be, or not to be?’ Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona” character Elizabeth answers both with two words: ‘No, don’t!’ She plays an actress who has never spoken since she abruptly ceased mid-performance one night. Now, in a fit of rage, her nurse Alma is attempting to throw a boiling pot of water at her. “No, don’t!” means: I do not wish to feel any pain, do not wish to be scarred, do not wish to die. She wishes… to be. She acknowledges… she exists.
“Persona” (1966) is a film we come back to every so often, for the beauty of its visuals, hoping to delve deeper into its mysteries. On the surface, it does not seem particularly complex: everything that is happening is perfectly lucid, including the dream scenes, which are lucid in and of themselves. However, it conceals certain truths that are much deeper, and we are left helpless in attempting to search for them. “Persona” was one of the first films I critiqued, back in 1967. I did not believe I comprehended it. A third of a century later, I believe I know most things about films, and the best way to approach reviewing ‘Persona’ is through a more literal lens.
The film, to me, is about exactly what it portrays. “How this pretentious movie manages to not be pretentious at all is one of the great accomplishments of ‘Persona,” says a viewer by the name of John Hardy from the Internet Movie Database. Bergman shows mundane behaviors and normal speech. And the haunting sights of Sven Nykvists’s cinematography captures them beautifully. One of them, of two faces, one frontal and the other in profile, are most famous images of cinema.
Elizabeth (Liv Ullmann) stops talking in the middle of Electra, and will not speak again. A psychiatrist believes it might be beneficial for Elizabeth and Nurse Alma (Bibi Andersson) to spend summer at her secluded house. In this place, the two women are somehow merged. Elizabeth says nothing, while Alma keeps speaking, divulging her plans and fears, and at last, in an enormous and daring monologue, admitting an erotic episode where she was, for a time, very happy.
The two women share a resemblance. He combines halves of the ladies’ faces in a shocking way. Later, he fuses the two faces together like a morph. As far as Andersson says, Bergman never told her and Ullmann about this and she found the movie scary and disturbing when watching it for the first time. Bergman told me, “The human face is the great subject of the cinema. Everything is there.”
And the other way around. Their visual merging suggests a deeper psychic attraction. Alma and Elizabeth, the nurse, mute and feeble student, are overpowered by the latter’s strength. As she walks through the courtyard of the cottage, Alma finally succumbs. At that precise moment, her anger builds up and is set free; she frantically tries to correct her restraint. She takes a shard of glass and purposely leaves it where she knows Elizabeth will walk. In the end, the nurse managed to cover her foot and violate a range of basic rules of discipline.
Elizabeth notices Alma and understands that the glass shard was not spilled by chance, and at that moment Bergman lets his film appear as if it is ripping and burning. There is no more image. Then the film comes back together. This part corresponds with the way the film has started. In both of them, a projector lamp is turned on, and there is a collage from the early days of the cinema violent moving pictures skeletons, coffin images, and a hand are nailed into. The middle “break” ends with the lens zooming in to an eye, and even further to the veins within an eyeball as if entering into a brain.
The first scene indicates that ‘Persona’ is starting at the start, the birth of cinema, and then follows through to the end. The mid break cuts as it is beginning again. The end sequence shows the film being elongated out of the camera, the light on the lamp dying and the film being completed. In this Bergman tells us that he has come back to his principles. “In the beginning, there was light.” At the end there is a shot of the camera crew themselves, the camera positioned on a crane, and Nykvist and Bergman are looking after him. This shot puts the makers into the context of the work. They are there, it is theirs, and they cannot remove themselves from it.
Towards the beginning of the movie, Elizabeth sees a Vietnamese Buddhist monk setting himself on fire for a protest or dharma offering on TV. Later, there are ghetto photographs of Jews being captured that include a close-up of a little boy at the end. After observing everything, one has to wonder, have all these events across the globe turned Elizabeth mute? The movie does not clarify, but it’s evident to all that her silence is a result of these events. From Alma’s perspective, horrors come more from within: She is unsure about her impending marriage, has serious doubts about her capability as a nurse, and fears that she may not be able to confront Elizabeth.
However, Elizabeth has some deeper traumas of her own, which Bergman unfolds in a manner that is incredibly straightforward, yet stunningly bold that as a viewer, one cannot help but admire its brashness. There comes first a dream sequence (if it is a dream sequence, there seems to be a disagreement), where in some fuzzy reality Elizabeth walks into the bedroom of Alma in the night. In a Swedish summer, night is a slender paleness between one day and the other, and a soft pale light illuminates the room. It’s as if the two women were staring at each other whereas they were in fact looking at their own reflection. Both of them now turn away from us with one of them swiping back the other’s hair. “Elizabeth,” calls out a voice. It was her husband, Mr. Vogler (Gunnar Bjornstrand), who withheld compassion speaking, “indeed, I am outside.” He started stroking Alma’s face, while saying, “you are Elizabeth.” “I am not,” she replies. “Well, you are, and, look,” he carries on while taking hold of Alma’s hand and stroking the face of his wife with it.
Later on, Alma gives a lengthy speech regarding Elizabeth’s child. The child is born rather deformed, so Elizabeth left it with some relatives so she can go back to the theater. The story is unbearable and accompanied by a camera on Elizabeth. Then it is told again, with a twist, where the camera is now on Alma. I believe this is not simply Bergman trying it both ways, as has been suggested, but literally both women telling the same story – through Alma when it is Elizabeth’s turn, since she does not ever speak. It shows that there are other ways to view them.
In contrast, the other solo speech in the film is more well-known; it is Alma’s account of sex on the beach with her friend and two other boys. The mystique surrounding this particular monologue is so striking that I have listened to people talk about it as if they were actually in the movie. In each of Bergman’s three monologues, he demonstrates how thoughts formulate reality.
Alma’s orgasm at the beach is noted to be the most primal instinct of hers. In comparison to everything she’s experienced as reality, from the boiling water you threaten with to the cut on the foot, the film tries to depict art as a thought, and everything else as ‘broken’, thus shifting to a more objective viewpoint. Most ideas that we consider to be part of ourselves, are largely the result of media, memories, roles, duties, hopes, fears, and so on, which mentally reconstruct the world for you. The pain of Elizabeth and the ecstasy of Alma were enough to combat the shattering reveries of their lives. In contrast to Alma, Elizabeth tries to choose who she is. There in lies the crux of it all. The title is the answer. Singular: Persona.
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