Ingmar Bergman's
Persona and
David Lynch's
Eraserhead (1977) are very peculiar movies. Both are experiments in film-making conducted by renowned directors with full control over the final product, fiercely defying conventions and, in the process, leaving so many questions unanswered that they end up alienating a great part of their viewers. Their uniqueness, however, has influenced the work of several acclaimed directors, most famously
Stanley Kubrick, who
openly adored Eraserhead, and
Robert Altman, whose masterpiece,
3 Women (1977), draws very closely from
Persona. Yet, while
Eraserhead tends to be relegated to the cult movie circuit nowadays,
Persona still figures prominently in countless Great Movies lists, being one of the most written about movies I can think of... Why?
One night, after having appeared in the play
Electra, Elisabet Vogler (
Liv Ullmann) makes the sudden decision to stop talking. Having ultimately entered a near catatonic state, Elisabet is then committed to a hospital, where she is taken care of by nurse Alma (
Bibi Andersson). As there is no improvement in her condition, both nurse and patient move to a secluded house at the beach in hopes the change of air would be beneficial to Elisabet's health. In that place, where time seems nonexistent, in order to break the silence, the introverted Alma spends her days talking to Elisabet, who limits herself to listen passively. Comforted by finally having someone listen to her, nurse Alma ends up revealing her most intimate secrets and deepest frustrations to Elisabet, eventually realizing her own identity is being overrun by her patient's persona. Upon discovering she had been toyed with by Elisabet all along, Alma becomes hostile towards her and starts to fight to keep their personalities apart, culminating in a confrontation where Alma exposes the truth behind Elisabet's voluntary illness:
Elisabet, tired of living a life of lies whose last straw was the birth of a son she cannot make herself love, had decided to renounce it all by closing herself to the world. In the following morning, both women go their separate ways.
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| Filmstrip "burning" halfway through Persona |
As the
story goes,
Persona would originally be called
Cinematography, being then centered around the art of film-making, based on notes Bergman had written while convalescing in a hospital. In a way, that concept is still present in the actually produced film, albeit in a symbolical way, that is, as the role-playing in which we must be constantly engaged in order to be able to live as a society. The complexity of this topic opens a wide range of possible approaches, from which Bergman, much like writer
Machado de Assis before him in his short story
The Mirror, chooses two: the abyss between what one is to the others and to oneself, as well as the need to have one's self-identity acknowledged by others in order to feel oneself whole as an individual. To stress the parallel between role-playing in society and in movie-making,
Persona is built as a movie-within-a-movie, opening with an old carbon-rod film projector lighting up, and closing when its fire has extinguished, besides coming to a halt when the filmstrip "burns". The artistic decision of shooting it in 4:3 black-and-white with no soundtrack further reinforces that metaphor, making it seem like each one of us is the main character in our own film (concept which has been explored in
Peter Chan's musical
Perhaps Love - 2005 -, but I digress).
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| Elisabet (Liv Ullmann) |
By being an actress, Elisabet (
Liv Ullmann) is used to embodying different people for short periods of time, as a typical season in the theater does not last long. In her personal life, as she has to abide by social rules like any other person, she also has to personify the roles of wife, lover and friend, all of which are also temporary in a way, since she can stop being friends with someone, as well as divorce her husband. One night, challenged for her lack of motherliness, she decides to get pregnant, thus assuming the additional role of mother, a part over whose length she has no control, being involuntarily bound to it until her last day. This realization frightens her immensely, and she ends up rejecting her son even before his birth, delegating him to nannies once he is born while she occupies herself with her career. Upon playing Electra, a play in which a despised daughter plots her mother's death out of revenge, she sees herself in Electra's mother, feeling thus "a sudden urge to laugh" at the irony of playing a role about herself. On that same night, pondering about her life, Elisabet realizes that not only her son, but her personal life as well, are abhorrent to her, as she herself feels "cold and rotten and indifferent" in her current situation, living a life that is alien to her real persona. She then makes the decision of closing herself in a world of silence in order to find her true identity. Nevertheless, by doing so, she could no longer perform; after all, how could she keep on talking onstage despite being silent off it? What would her friends, her husband, the press say? There would be demands and impositions, and with each justification given, a new lie... Realizing she would have to choose between the adoration of an audience, on which she thrives, and keeping on living her life of lies, which she despises, she becomes deeply depressed, entering a near comatose state. This is why her condition does not improve while she is on the hospital: only when she is living with Alma, who talks to her ceaselessly without imposing for an answer, that she leaves her apathetic state: one may say she feeds on Alma' attention, as a substitute for a real audience's. Thanks in great deal to the expressiveness of her face highlighted by
Sven Nykvist's cinematography, Ullmann is fantastic in her portrayal of the multifaceted Elisabet in a role in which she speaks only two words. One may even go so far as to say
Persona is a study of her face, but more on that later.
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Alma (Bibi Andersson), with Elisabet in the background
guiding her hand |
Alma's (
Bibi Andersson) life is somewhat analogous to Elisabet's, as she also has dedicated her life to pleasing others in spite of her real feelings. Alma knows Elisabet's decision not to speak is a conscious one, and such mental strength frightens her, since she is aware she could never be as resolute, and that is why, after her first meeting with Elisabet, Alma has to convince herself that the life she lives is, with no margin for doubt, one of bliss: "
It's all decided. It's inside me. I don't even have to think about it. [...] But it's good. Yes... it's good", she mutters to herself before going to sleep. Alma's fortitude seems to be projected onto her nurse's uniform: throughout the movie, upon wearing it, she is able to confront Elisabet as an equal; being disrobed of it, however, as in the short story
The Mirror, she is deprived of her identity, becoming as hopeless as a child eager to please. Such is the state of mind with which she carries on with her personal life, emulating thus the character of the closest person available in order to be liked, to fit in. As she herself narrates, when she was sunbathing naked at the beach with another woman and realized there were two boys spying on them, she instantly became ashamed and distraught; by seeing the other woman's reaction, nevertheless, her mindset changed altogether, culminating in the once-bashful Alma performing group sex on the beach. Once again, when her fiance wanted her to abort her baby, she acquitted. "
We were both relieved. We didn't want children", she sobs to Elisabet, trying to make herself believe that. It is therefore natural that she would unconsciously try and emulate her patient's persona while both were confined at the beach house, and Alma would not be wearing her self-shielding nurse's uniform. Elisabet's face becomes then a blank canvas onto which Alma projects her dreams, her doubts, her frustrations and her innermost secrets, reason why she feels betrayed when she discovers she is merely being studied by a very detached Elisabet. Alma, from there on, starts to waver between delusions of being Elisabet and hostile actions to punish her for her lack of acknowledgement. Finally, after having an epiphany in a dream in which she becomes Elisabet to the eyes of Elisabet's husband, Alma is able to recompose herself and have a final confrontation with her patient. Once again wearing her nurse's uniform, she then proclaims, "
I'll never be like you. I change all the time. You can do what you want. You won't get to me." Andersson gives a bravura performance in a movie which is essentially a monologue by her vulnerable Alma. While her descent into madness is not as striking (or literal) as
Catherine Deneuve's in
Roman Polanski's
Repulsion (1965), it is exquisite to watch her complex portrayal of Alma's mental deterioration, in whose apex she is finally able to coerce a word from Elisabet.
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Our first glimpse of Elisabet implicitly shows
there are two sides of her: one light, one dark |
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Elisabet looking at a photo of
her son, in the foreground |
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Elisabet in her final confrontation with Alma
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The greatest star in
Persona is undoubtedly cinematographer
Sven Nykvist, by virtue of his exquisite use of lighting to express the duality of the human soul. Take, for instance, the first time we see Elisabet in
Persona: by being illuminated horizontally, we see half of her face completely lit, whereas the remaining half lies in the shadows, implying that there is a darker side to her persshe wants to keep hidden, a recurring theme throughout the movie. Elisabet is lit in this fashion nearly every time she is interacting with someone, particularly with Alma, hinting at her deceitfulness toward the vulnerable nurse, who believes Elisabet to be her friend, whereas Elisabet is purely studying her. This half-face effect was achieved not only by the obvious solution of shooting both actresses in profile, but also by obscuring the other half of her face by shadows or by Alma's in profile. This, aided by the extreme use of close-ups, gives the audience the idea that their half-faces complement each other, which culminates in a disturbing shot where both actresses' faces are spliced together into one. In fact, there are several scenes in which our attention is unintentionally drawn toward Elisabet due to her being lit by Nykvist in this fashion. Take for instance the scene in which Alma is narrating her sexual adventure at the beach while Elisabet is lying on the bed: in spite of Alma being in the foreground, the diegetic light in the scene used to lit half of Elisabet's face makes her white nightgown shimmers in contrast to the gray of the room, thus putting her quite literally in the spotlight.
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| Even though Alma is in the foreground here, the limelight is on Elisabet |
Interestingly enough, Alma is only lit like Elisabet after her epiphany about Elisabet's true character, as illustrated in their final confrontation. Actually, prior to meeting Elisabet, Alma is always shot alone and in full face, even while talking to Elisabet's doctor, who remains out of frame; Alma overwhelming confidence requires her to be portrayed that way. Upon meeting with Elisabet, on the other hand, she is mostly depicted in profile shots, perhaps indicating that, by incessantly narrating her life to Elisabet, she has finally acknowledged that she as well is not happy with her status quo, that is to say, she is not a full person. After her epiphany, however, full-face shots of Alma become again the norm, but then she is lit like Elisabet. I wonder if that means Alma has finally found a way to deal with her emotional problems, thus no longer needing to emulate Elisabet's identity...
Bergman once
said, "
I want audiences to feel, to sense my films. This to me is much more important than their understanding them." Perhaps that is why I keep coming back to Persona as the years go by, even though I know I will never be able to fully comprehend it. I cannot say for sure whether I like
Persona; I have, however, become able to appreciate it for what it is (at least for me): a study on human psyche.
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Cinematographer Sven Nykvist's half-faces in close-up have become the trademark of Persona.
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Coming back to my original point, there is a very thin line between thought-provokingly different and just plain weird; Bergman's Persona walks dangerously close to that line, while Lynch's Eraserhead dances right through it while stomping on the carcasses of deformed babies.
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