Persona, dir. Ingmar Bergman. Sweden, 1966. 35mm, b/w, 85 min.
Philosophy has taught us that perception is a subjective action in which we intuitively catch, not the thing in itself, exterior to us, but its representation. Psychology considers it as composed by two different, but not separated, movements: discrimination between stimuli and their interpretation. In the activity of perception this corresponds equally to two systems: the sensorial and the intellective. We may approach Persona based on these notions. David Bordwell would say that although the film uses certain “art cinema conventions” it also introduces formal innovations and novelties. But what about the functions of these features? Perhaps the question is not how obscure and difficult Persona is, but how we as spectators situate ourselves in front of it. “In front”: right from the prologue, the film asks for our gaze and attention and, at the same time, tells us that it is a film, something made image by image, sound by sound, gesture by gesture. The film is external to us, but it invades us, it affects us. This option connects with our activity as spectators. Instead of demanding our identification, the film invites us to hear it and see it at a distance — as if it were a recording of a motion picture performance or the shooting of a film’s projection. Yet we are moved. When the film burns, illusion is revealed as illusion, but it has a dramatic effect. Persona is a film of confrontation, not comfort. The prologue’s images may be read in the context of Ingmar Bergman’s other films, but their violence and unexpectedness is a provocation directed at us and may be linked with the aggressions in the film’s last third. The presence of the projector, the camera, and other devices, convey a sense of the presence of the cinematic apparatus and therefore a sense of our presence. Our utopia as spectators is to touch the projected images as if they were densely material. Just like the boy (Jörgen Lindström) in the film who caresses the screen, we want to grasp what we see and hear. The white light and the shots from other films suggest that Persona may be almost a dream. Nevertheless, many images are not purely dreamlike. They relate to real references and generate resonances: the picture of the chid in the Warsaw Ghetto, the newsreel on television about the War in Vietnam, for example. Images within images. Images behind images. The strongest instance of this is the repetition of the scene in which Elisabet (Liv Ullmann) hides the torn picture of her son. We could say that it is not a duplication, but a reverberation where the same sentences gain different meanings. By definition, persona is the aspect of a person’s character that is presented to or perceived by others. Hence it can be the mask that allows an encounter with the truth in the lie that the film is. The idea of the mask is inseparable from the image of the face as something expressive and undecipherable. Faces disclose the irreducible of human beings, even when they are alike — which is why the combination of Elisabet’s and Alma’s (Bibi Andersson) faces is so disturbing. If there is a mystery in this film it is this kind of spell, that passed on to contemporary cinema as the image of two women that are confounded or trade places in films like Lost Highway (1997) and Mulholland Dr. (2001), both directed by David Lynch. [20.01.2013, orig. 03.2005]
