Ingmar Bergman’s Persona
A famous stage actress, Elisabet Vogler (Liv Ullmann), suddenly stops speaking mid-performance – and stays this way. Doctors cannot determine any physical or mental malady and have decided her silence is a result of willpower and resolution rather than illness. A young nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson), is assigned to her, and together they travel to a remote summer cottage for the actress’s recuperation (filmed on Fårö, the director’s own Baltic island retreat).
Put like this, the plot of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) is undemanding, if slightly anomalous. But its basic story is as nothing to the frenzy of emotion, intensity, incongruity, pain and discomfort that this astonishing film offers up. It is a staggering exploration of human identity, duality, sexuality, psychology, cruelty, kindness, absence and presence. It features deep metaphysical musings, frank discussions of al fresco orgies, mirages of exquisite tenderness and images of the most savage violence. It is a film that, once seen, echoes through the rest of your life, making you shudder, making you swoon.
Initially Alma is in many ways our surrogate, a little irritating as well as we desperately try to understand the mute and necessarily elusive actress Elisabet, but we soon find Alma herself far more interesting, as she blithely gabbles on, earnest and friendly, revealing intimate details about her life to us. Her appearance, too, is an equivocating attraction: studious reader; prim and proper nurse; behatted and sunshades-wearing movie star – for all her warmth and honesty, she has a remarkably chameleonic set of manifestations (further masks, façades and disguises, a spirited series of functions and parts). That said, Elisabet is never less than captivating either, compelled to exist only as an elaborate series of looks, frowns and smiles. Through these two remarkable actresses, Ullmann and Andersson, we see the enormous power of both talking and not talking, speaking and listening, being and non-being.
After a formal, frosty start, the relationship between Alma and Elisabet constantly shifts: at different points, each one takes on a maternal role; at times they seem like sisters; at others more like lovers, then old friends, rivals or enemies. (And Bergman’s visual library, with its kaleidoscopic concoction of disturbing images – including a spider, a crucifixion, animal slaughter and self-immolation – is a shrewd counterpart to, and catalyst for, this intricate interpersonal mélange.)
Sometimes Alma and Elisabet seem total opposites, oil and water repelling one another; at others they merge into one being – with countless consequences and complications for identity, fidelity, integrity. Their clothes, hair and so on are characteristic, individual, but in due course they end up in the same chic black sweater, and eventually even their faces are joined together on the screen, with remarkably little distortion (and we realise with a shiver just how similar their aspects and appearances have been all along). Accusations flung between carer and patient – though their relationship ceased to carry this status early on – turn out to be products of self-indictment, memories, self-hatred and self-disgust. Silenced for so long, Elisabet’s thoughts, feelings and memories take on Alma’s voice (and perhaps vice).
Each can go in an instant from frightened child to stern parent, vicious sadist to sensual lover. Tense, explosive, physical, dreamy, tangible, abstract – Persona is a relentlessly repositioning stage play with far-reaching cinematic horizons. Placid one moment, volatile the next, full of repetitions, doublings and distinctive, apparently inimitable moments (which then duplicate themselves), throughout we question just how far Elisabet is unwell or acting or both, a tension keenly felt by Alma too. At one point, after reading a private letter that discloses Elisabet’s mockery of / fascination with her guardian, the nurse sets a trap with some broken glass that is as tense as any Hitchcockian thriller.
Such are Bergman’s outstanding abilities as a storyteller and cinematic architect, we never feel lost or confused – or, rather, we feel lost and confused only when he wants us to, when he wants us to be as disoriented and bewildered as Alma and Elisabet. To an extent, then, both analysis and enjoyment of Persona demand paradox, contradiction, misperception and perplexity: this is part of the film’s formal procedure. If we feel threatened or frustrated by the complexity of Persona, its intense beauty should win us over – but we mustn’t fear its density, its enigmas, either. They are part of the pleasure.
Near the beginning and end of the film we witness one of Bergman’s most famous screen images: a boy’s hand silhouetted against glass behind which lies a woman’s face. Is it simply a child missing its mother, or humanity grasping at eternity (which the film makes clear at several points is not to be undertaken)? We can take both interpretations, or more, or none at all, for it is straightforwardly a gorgeous image, as memorable as any ever committed to celluloid: simultaneously intimate and detached, at once shocking and soothing. It lingers in our visual imagination, its beauty sanctioning and exploiting the infinite number of possible meanings, for Persona is a moody, playful quest towards everything and nothing.
Dr David Vernon is the author of four books: Disturbing the Universe: Wagner’s Musikdrama, Beauty and Sadness: Mahler’s 11 Symphonies, Ada to Zembla: The Novels of Vladimir Nabokov and Beethoven: The String Quartets. His next book, Sun Forest Lake: The Symphonies and Tone Poems of Jean Sibelius, will be published in November 2024, while a study of Yukio Mishima’s novels is planned for 2026.