There is no settling into Persona (1966), so let’s not settle in. A
projector’s viscera glows white hot, whirring celluloid flutters by, a cartoon
prototype appears, then a shard of silent slapstick: set to modernist horror
movie music, the prelude reminds us we’re watching a movie; it’s also
incorporating spectatorship into the realm of its story. A sheep is
slaughtered, a spike is driven through a hand, a tarantula crawls across a
white surface, a bespectacled boy (Jörgen Lindström) wakes up in, it seems, a
morgue; at least, the elderlies sharing his pale space look dead enough.
Perhaps the unnerving images that preceded were excerpts from his dreams;
perhaps they were the dreams of the dead surrounding him, their psychic vapour.
The boy tries to read Lermontov (!), but gets distracted, like us, by the
screen, or, for him, the lens, but, actually, a barring window or membrane
separating him from the dissolving images of two women’s faces. He reaches out,
to that screen-lens-membrane, to us, to the women, or some elusive, amorphous
mother that the pair represents. Hard cut. Prelude over. Roll opening credits.
We’re not so much acclimatized for Persona
as sufficiently jarred to enter it.
Nearly 50 years after its debut, Persona can
seem less like a linear experience than a cinematic ecosystem, a movie-place
containing interconnected elements, most famously, images of Bibi Andersson and
Liv Ullman, the film’s ingenious actresses, their merging and/or interlocking
faces and hair. But that sense of the film as an object to behold and puzzle
over dissolves once you start watching it. The opposite of ponderous, the
economy of the opening expository scenes is bracing. Alma (Andersson), the
nurse, is debriefed by her superior (Margaretha Krook) about their their new
patient, Elizabet (Ullman), an actress who stopped speaking one night while
playing Elektra on stage and has yet to recover. A hard cut to a brief
flashback appears in the midst of this: a tight close-up of Elizabet in the
moment of her sudden pause—a pause yet to be broken. It’s as though, all at
once, a veil fell away and she became paralyzingly aware of the sham of her
performance, or of this play, and that awareness followed her into the rest of
life. Authenticity was in that moment all but drained from the world, through
the rare moments when she’s presented with something undeniably authentic—a
television broadcast of a self-immolating monk in Vietnam, a photo from Jürgen
Stroop’s report on the suppression of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising—she recoils.
Does Elizabet’s crisis mirror that of Persona’s writer and director, Ingmar
Bergman? He’d spend the first part of the 1960s making increasingly strange,
inventive and claustrophobic films exploring the traumas and liberation of
living in the absence of God. During those same years younger filmmakers were renovating
film language, making the movies exhilaratingly self-conscious, producing, for
example, movies about genre in place
of more genre movies. With Persona,
Bergman took that new self-consciousness and went inward instead of outward—he
applied these new tools to an exploration of inner life. As Paul Schrader
eloquently puts it in an interview included in Criterion’s superlative new Persona DVD/Blu-ray package, Persona is a milestone not because it
was the first shot in a revolution but, rather, because it was the second. Me,
I didn’t live through the revolution in question, but this second shot, once it
came to me, was the one that wounded me permanently. I first saw Persona when I was 16, and it was the
most transfixing, mysterious and, frankly, erotic experience with moving images
I’d had. It remains all of those things for me. I’ve seen thousands of movies
since, but every time I come back to Persona
all those movies seen only heighten and reinforce my appreciation.
I was saying something about story, and, truly, for at
least half of Persona the story
remains crisp, clipped, just cryptic enough to intrigue. Alma and Elizabet are
sent to Alma’s superior’s cottage on the island of Fårö. It’s summer, the sun
never sets, and the scene seems idyllic. Elizabet remains mute, but her
beguiling face could be read as sympathetic, even fascinated. So Alma talks and
talks and her life, which she previously described as “decided,” begins to seem
looser, at once less fixed and more interesting. She tells stories, and in the
same way that this movie works as profoundly as it does because it acknowledges
its movieness, her stories possess the transfixing-mysterious-erotic power they
do because they come to us as stories—flashbacks would never have the same
impact as the sentences so deftly delivered by Andersson. Elizabet becomes
something like a best friend, or a therapist, or a vampire—later on she’ll
actually drink blood. Does she truly care about Alma’s life and career, or
about that impromptu orgy she partook in and never told a soul about before? Is
Elizabet genuinely interested in Alma or just searching for material? For an
artist, maybe for actors (and writers) most of all, are both things not always
in play?
Persona’s key
moment, or the whole movie in one scene: Alma in bed, the night not dark but
slivery, the air almost smoky, and Elizabet soundlessly enters her room like a
Japanese ghost. Like the boy, the two women will gaze into the screen or
mirror, faces close, stroking hair, a seduction, a spiritual merger… And then
comes some sort of betrayal; petty revenge; a simmering resentment that briefly
tears up the physical substance of film itself; friendship becomes a duel; then
a visit from Elizabet’s confused husband (Gunnar Björnstrand) and a turning of
tables—maybe Elizabet’s real fear wasn’t of being false but of being ordinary,
like Alma. You can explore the emotional geometries in this movie for ages.
This is the trick: certain fundamental mysteries endure, but the character
dynamics and the feelings involved are only too identifiable. “Persona” means mask and masks continually fall
away in Persona. But, in spite of all
these haunting close-ups, how do we know for certain when we’ve arrived at a
real face?
Persona was
always my number one when it came to movies that I felt begged for inclusion in
the Criterion Collection. Criterion hasn’t neglected this happy occasion. This
gorgeous new package has the best looking transfer I’ve seen. The strongest
supplements are, for me, the interviews: one with Andersson, Bergman and Ullman
at the time of the film’s release; one with Bergman from 1970 for Canadian
television; a new interview with Ullman, in which she emphasizes the rigour of
Bergman’s collaborative process and the many important elements that were
discovered only during production or in the editing room; and the
aforementioned interview with Schrader, who supplies sturdy historical context
and still beams like a schoolboy when expressing his admiration for this film.
If you could see my face right now, I suspect I’m beaming too.
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