Bergman on the set with actress Liv Ullmann
Director Ingmar Bergman
Actress Bibi Andersson
Bergman on the set with actress Bibi Andersson
Actresses Bibi Andersson (left) and Liv Ullmann
Bergman on the set with cameraman Sven Nykvist
Bergman
Bergman with actresses Bibi Andersson (left) and Liv Ullmann
Bergman on the set with Liv Ullmannn
PERSONA A
Sweden (83 mi) 1966 d:
Ingmar Bergman
The hopeless dream of
being, not seeming, but being
Born out of an extensive hospital confinement with a
persistent ear infection turning into double pneumonia and acute penicillin
poisoning, leaving the director bedridden and miserable for nine weeks, perhaps
even imagining his own death, from which Bergman quickly wrote a script in 14
days that may have helped resurrect his own life and career and would go on to
become his most influential and written about film. As to what set the stage, the 60’s was a
decade in search of the alienated modern soul, personified by the
soul-searching emptiness of Antonioni’s L’AVVENTURA (1960), a film that
initially shocked audiences, showing how easily we lose our way, wondering how
we became so indifferent to the rapidly changing world around us, delving into
the heart of existential angst, featuring Monica Vitti in RED DESERT (1964) as
a character lost in the surrounding industrial wasteland, suffering from the
toxic effects of technical and psychological overload, where his films moved
into an interior landscape. Fellini’s LA
DOLCE VITA (1960) and 8 ½ (1963) intuitively deconstruct the world around us
with a surrealist yet withering critique of the alienating effects of modernization,
becoming an abstract free-for-all expressing an endless quest for happiness
that can never be found, succumbing to dreams, drugs, and imaginary reveries as
an alternative reality to the existing horrors that define our times. This sudden breakthrough into new narrative
forms must include the Alain Resnais masterwork Last
Year at Marienbad (L'Année Dernière à Marienbad) (1961), a puzzling
experimental film that frustrated filmgoers, with actors resembling statues,
revealing ghostly yet immaculately dressed characters in opulent settings stuck
in a continuous state of utter detachment, deftly exploring themes of time and
memory. Welles followed with THE TRIAL
(1962), an apocalyptic version of Kafka, a modern era nightmare about our
dwarfed status in the human hierarchy, suddenly, and tragically, tossed aside
for greater matters larger than our own, where we are authoritatively dismissed
from the human equation, dehumanized, rendered powerless and insignificant,
beautifully expressed in one of the more innovative film openings, The Trial / Le procès: Franz
Kafka (Orson Welles / 1962) HD - YouTube (2:51), where our individuality is
nonexistent, our views deemed irrelevant and absurdly inconsequential, with no
explanation given, yet we are blamed for the enveloping crisis that engulfs us
all, collaborators of our own demise.
Tarkovsky burst onto the scene with Ivan's
Childhood (1962), which certainly caught Bergman’s eye, expressing the
following, "Ingmar
Bergman - On Tarkovsky":
My discovery of Tarkovsky’s first
film was like a miracle.
Suddenly, I found myself standing
at the door of a room the keys of which had, until then, never been given to
me. It was a room I had always wanted to
enter and where he was moving freely and fully at ease.
I felt encouraged and stimulated:
someone was expressing what I had always wanted to say without knowing how.
Tarkovsky is for me the greatest,
the one who invented a new language, true to the nature of film, as it captures
life as a reflection, life as a dream.
Having cleansed himself with his extensive inquiry into the
effects of God’s silence in his Faith trilogy, God was no longer the oppressive
force it had previously been in his life, feeling liberated, suddenly able to
walk into a new day unencumbered by past burdens, free to open up his
imagination to introduce an entirely new approach, one brimming with
originality and psychological scrutiny, written expressly for the two actresses
he had in mind, including Bibi Andersson, his former lover, and Liv Ullmann,
his new lover, forging their identities into a uniquely experimental modern era
search for meaning. Along with FANNY AND
ALEXANDER (1982), this is Bergman at his definitive best, a small film,
basically an expanded chamber drama that touches upon themes of horror, with
dissonant electronic music, extreme cuts, and extraordinary montage sequences,
a formal response perhaps to the experimentalists of the 60’s, where Bergman
may be acknowledging a crudeness of art beside the complexities of human
existence, a film with one of the more unique opening credit sequences ever, Opening
of Persona: Thematic Montage — Critical Commons (6:49), a poem of images
which features, among others things, a carbon lamp lighting celluloid as it
passes through a projector, and images are born onscreen. At the same time, similar to the opening from
Tarkovsky’s MIRROR (1975), the subject of communication itself seems to be the
issue, as subliminal images and early archival prints are shown, perhaps even
the Keystone cops, upside down cartoons, as well as a young boy who awakens to
an illuminated wall that is projecting an image of a face, like a mother, that
he reaches out to embrace (Bergman’s own mother died six months before the
release of the film, with some believing his Faith trilogy was the director’s
way of addressing his father issues, while Persona
might be viewed as addressing lingering maternal issues, (The Mother's Role in Bergman's
<em>Persona</em> | Film International). Also, like Polanski’s REPULSION (1965), there
is extraordinary use of offscreen sounds, which enhances jarring images that
are meant to incite the emotions of the audience, as they are utilized with
abstract images onscreen meant to jolt the senses of the viewer. It’s an effective technique, especially as
the storyline includes an actress who has a personal breakdown onstage,
suddenly aware of and disgusted by all the misery in the world and the artifice
in her own life, who hasn’t spoken in three months, Elisabeth Vogler (Liv
Ullmann in her astonishing film debut), and her nurse Sister Alma (Bibi
Andersson) who makes startlingly personal confessions that seem to fall on deaf
ears, whose frustration grows with her patient’s continual passivity and
refusal to speak, becoming a battle of wills, turning angry and hurt, then
intensely hostile over time.
After a very direct appraisal from Ullmann’s doctor
(Margaretha Krook), describing it not as a pathological symptom but as
strategic behavior, lapsing into yet another role that she’ll abandon once she
grows tired of it, rejecting the outside world, passively taking safe refuge
from the storm (which forces others to assertively face the inherent dangers
she’s avoiding), with no apparent medical ailment, seeing no need to keep the
patient in the hospital, sending her instead to the doctor’s own private
seaside retreat, which evolves into dramatic shoreline shots of what eventually
became Bergman’s own home on Fårö Island, leaving his position as chief
executive of the Royal Dramatic Theater in Stockholm for the remote Baltic
island retreat, which he utilizes brilliantly in one endless tracking shot that
recalls the loneliness and personal isolation of Antonioni’s L’AVVENTURA
(1960). Of interest, Andersson is the
director’s former lover, and Ullmann becomes the new love of his life, so of
course Bergman sets them opposite one another.
Both offer phenomenal performances, enhanced even further by the spare
minimalist structure of the film, which is surgically precise, especially the
use of archival prints, which include Ullmann’s silent horror witnessing a
televised newscast of a Buddhist monk (Thích
Quảng Đức) setting himself on fire to protest the American incursion into
Vietnam, and later she is aghast as she looks at a war photo
from the Warsaw ghetto of Nazi soldiers pointing their guns directly at
children, where the camera zooms in on close-ups of the terrifying faces. Faces are prominently featured in this film,
projected like masks hiding who they really are inside as they stare blankly at
the camera, joined by one another, where like a lava lamp they merge, co-mingle
as one, perhaps representing an unrecognizable mixture of dreams and reality,
art and humanity, and then converge into a completely new identity. Andersson’s lyrical, rambling monologues are
incredible, intensely personal, even erotic, Persona (1966) -- One Time
At The Beach - YouTube (5:24), but like Ullmann, she reaches a point of
recognition where she becomes acutely aware of the role she’s playing, where
the roles reverse and she herself becomes the neurotic patient, observed and
evaluated by a silently impassive Ullmann, which comes as a shocking
revelation. The celluloid itself appears
to burn out at this point midway through the film and everything must start
anew with a reawakened understanding.
No longer the austere and brooding Swede, Bergman’s film is
fearlessly incendiary, meant to shock and incite provocation, capturing the
immediacy of the present along with the turbulency of the times, suspended in a
place between reality and dreams, becoming his most radical film, also among
his shortest and most economical as well, creating a choreography of extreme
facial close-ups, like a window into the soul, beautifully shot by Sven
Nyqvist, using various tactics to examine underlying motives, going
surrealistic with an imaginary image of Ullmann drinking the blood from
Andersson’s cut arm in a vampire-like expression of consuming her soul. This enigmatic film bears a similarity to
Hitchcock’s Vertigo
(1958), where viewer’s relationship to a film is shattered, having to build a
new one, where this film is not so much about an exchange of identities on a
personal level as a merging metamorphosis of two entirely different states of
consciousness, eliminating all the extraneous protective facades,
reconstructing something entirely new.
Once the projector breaks down, everything is observed in a different
light, where an extreme degree of uncertainty sets in, as the film exposes even
the film crew itself at one point and challenges the viewer to examine the
artifice in their own lives and relationships, perhaps best represented by a
revelatory scene about their aversion to motherhood, and even marriage, that
repeats itself from both women’s perspectives, as the actress and the nurse are
too wrapped up in their own careers to offer themselves over completely to such
an all encompassing new role. With suggestions
of Ullmann’s abandonment and neglect, sacrificing her child for her illustrious
stage career, Andersson is unmarried and childless, having aborted an earlier
pregnancy, seemingly happy to be engaged, yet even she begins to question her
role in that relationship, as both women are seen as somehow less than whole,
incomplete, even inadequate, until they can lose themselves completely in the
love of an “other,” something neither of them has ever been able to do. The boy who appears at the beginning and the
end of the film, Jörgen Lindström from The
Silence (Tystnaden) (1963, another film featuring two women drifting apart
with a neglected child), could symbolically represent a range of characters,
from an aborted fetus to a young boy his guilt-ridden mother may wish was dead,
especially when viewed lying on a slab in a morgue, but may also represent the
maternal yearnings of the director as a young boy or our own perplexing
struggles to establish an identity in a world too confusing and cruel to call
our own. The film asserts that the
jagged pieces of our lives require reassembly, reevaluation, coming clean with
one’s own conscience, never really offering any clues on how this might be
done.
