Persona

"Today I feel that in Persona — and later in Cries and Whispers — I had gone as far as I could go. And that in these two instances when working in total freedom, I touched wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover."
--Ingmar Bergman

The Seattle Art Museum's Bergman series ended with a bang last night -- Persona (1966), claimed to be one of the greatest movies ever filmed, and -- after Citizen Kane -- the film having received the most critical analysis.   The organizer of SAM's film series reminded us that we had seen only nine of Bergman's 45 or so films; another series is planned for next winter.

I'm at a loss as how to analyze this film, or even how to describe its confusing plot.  Or, most basically, what it all means.   I'll just describe some of the impressions that watching it made on me.

The movie begins with a surreal series of bizarre images flashed on the screen, accompanied by screeching, atonal music.  This prologue alone is enough to unnerve the viewer.  The opening credits play over a portion of this prologue.

Next we see a young adolescent boy -- played by the same Jörgen Lindström who played the boy in last week's The Silence, but by now three years older.  He wakes up in a bed (or is it a slab in a morgue?), tosses around, and ultimately discovers a large unfocused screen with a woman's face on it, a woman who turns out to be his mother.  He runs his hands over the screen, attempting to feel, to caress the face.

Then the primary narrative begins, with a doctor explaining to a nurse (Alma, played by Bergman favorite Bibi Andersson) that she has been chosen to help care for a patient (Elisabet, played by Liv Ullmann). Elisabet is a famous actress who stopped in the middle of a performance, and now refuses to speak.  Tests show that she is both physically and mentally normal; she simply prefers to remain silent.

Alma and Elisabet retire to the doctor's country house on Faro island, and become close companions.  Alma talks, Elisabet listens.  Alma -- in a particularly intense scene -- tells of a beach orgy she and a woman friend had with two very young teenage boys, an experience which gave her great pleasure and left her with strong feelings of shame and guilt.  Liv Ullmanm-- who, having no lines, was free to interpret her part as it occurred to her -- reacts with a highly expressive face showing a play of a number of emotions, most of them ambiguous.

Eventually, Alma seems to lose track of who she is -- which part she's playing -- her role as a nurse, or Elisabet herself.  She somehow perceives experiences from Elisabet's past that Elisabet has not described to her.  She knows that Elisabet has a son -- the boy we saw at the outset -- whom she had tried to abort and whom she has hated and found disgusting ever since his birth.  A son who, oddly, loves his mother with an intensity that she also hates.

Because of a letter by Elisabet that Alma has read, Alma feels that her confidences have been betrayed; her newly arounsed hatred for Elisabet now overlays her simultaneously intense love for her. She feels that she and Elisabet are two aspects of the same person.  The actresses have said that they had agreed to play their parts as though they were, in fact, two sides of the same personality and that the personality of which they were two sides was that of Bergman himself. 

The intense relationship between the two women apparently causes Alma to panic, and she walks away from her employment. As she leaves the beach house, we see a film crew -- apparently Bergman's film crew -- filming her departure.

Bergman, characteristically, has refused to interpret the film, preferring that each viewer find in it what he will.

The film ends with the boy once more watching the screen, once more reaching for his absent mother.

Everything one says about Persona may be contradicted; the opposite will also be true.

--Peter Cowie, film historian.

And, I suppose, that is one aspect of one sort of  "great film."