Persona

By the midsixties, Ingmar Bergman had already conjured many of the cinema’s most unforgettable images. But with the radical Persona, he attained new levels of visual poetry. In the first of a series of legendary performances for Bergman, Liv Ullmann plays a stage actor who has inexplicably gone mute; an equally mesmerizing Bibi Andersson is the garrulous young nurse caring for her in a remote island cottage. While isolated together there, the women undergo a mysterious spiritual and emotional transference. Performed with astonishing nuance and shot in stark contrast and soft light by Sven Nykvist, the influential Persona is a penetrating, dreamlike work of profound psychological depth.

In 1963 Ingmar Bergman was appointed head of the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm. Refusing to cut back on his filmmaking projects, exhausted and stressed out, he soon fell ill. In his nine weeks of recovery from a rather difficult case of pneumonia accompanied by acute penicillin poisoning, trying to keep his mind occupied, Bergman developed an idea for a new film—the groundbreaking and analytically elusive Persona, today hailed as one of the most significant and accomplished films of the 20th century. Having all the time in the world to contemplate his work, filmmaking and art in general, he came up with a story centered on duality, loneliness, insanity, personal identity and the theme of representation. The crucial image on which he based his vision came to him as he saw a slide of actresses Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann sunbathing together, with a resemblance he deemed uncanny. Andersson was his long-time collaborator, but Ullmann was a complete mystery to him. One brief chance encounter on the street, however, put his mind at ease. He was convinced he found two perfect matches for the main parts in the film. Having contacted filmmaker Kenne Fant, then CEO of the Swedish Film Industry, Bergman asked if he would fund his next project, after which Fant wanted to know more about the film’s plot. “Well, it’s about one person who speaks and one who doesn’t, and they compare hands and get all mingled up in one another,” Bergman responded. Assuming such a film simply couldn’t cost a lot of money, Fant agreed and the project was on its way.

Shot during two months of the summer of 1965, Persona had a rough start, as almost nothing went according to plan when the production took place at the Filmstaden studio in Stockholm, but as soon as the crew moved to the island of Fårö, where Bergman would later frequently go to charge his creative batteries, the production somehow took off. Upon its release, most critics were respectful, acknowledging the obvious craft that went into the creation of the film, but almost all of them agreed the film was a real challenge to decipher, resisting unanimous analysis and simple categorization. Persona is definitely among only a handful of films to receive such extensive analytical treatment by critics and scholars, who saw it as their white whale. A part of the beauty of this film, in fact, lies in this very quality: Persona can’t be stripped down to a single, unambiguous truth, something that Bergman himself understood all too well. “On many points I am unsure, and in one instance, at least, I know nothing,” he stated when asked what the exact theme and message of the film really was.

What we do know for sure is that the title derives from the Latin word meaning “mask,” just like it also conjures up Carl Jung’s notion of an external, artificial personality used to hide the real self. The film obviously deals with the perplexing theme of duality, as the two protagonists became so entangled that the question of whether there really are two people we’re seeing or only an internal dissolution of a single personality become as valid as anything else. Without giving an exact and final answer, Bergman supported the validity of such reasoning when he raised the question of whether it was all “a composition for two voices in the same soul’s concerto grosso.” There’s also the theme of motherhood and the rejecting to play this specific part, an idea we could use to suggest Persona also deals with the struggle of women with the role the patriarchal society puts on their back, an argument further supported by the main catalyst of the plot: one woman’s decision to stop speaking, a resolute, rebellious stance against the world. Cinematography, the alternate title that Bergman abandoned on Fant’s advice, suggests Persona deals with the nature of film itself, with the idea of representation and the power of the image, as well as the substance and quality of the material films are made on. Unlike any other film, this is a film about celluloid, about the material essential in making films. It begins with a projector starting up, ends with a projector shutting down, forcing us to think about film as a medium, something the overwhelming majority of other movies desperately wants us to forget. Persona breaks the fourth wall, even allowing us to see Bergman and his film crew at one point.

Visually stunning and displaying more intense close-ups than probably any other film we’ve seen, the film was shot by Bergman’s frequent partner, the celebrated Swedish cinematographer Sven Nykvist. The shot of Andersson and Ullmann’s face joined together, the startling sequence of the image breaking apart in the middle of the film and the beautiful dichotomy between light and dark echoing the same relationship between silence and voice is Bergman and Nykvist’s visual triumph that is forever etched in our memory.