Persona is Ingmar Bergman's most technically innovative film. It is also one of his most difficult to understand, due to the multiple levels of meaning he tries to communicate through this innovation and experimentation. In this film, Bergman uses self-reflexive "modernist" devices (among other things) to address themes of personal identity and the differences between appearance versus reality, and to ponder the metaphysical issue of a silent and possibly malevolent God. In this paper I will use a short sequence in the very middle of the film, one in which his experimentation is at its most radical, to illustrate how Bergman does this.
But first, it might be useful to situate the scene within the broader context of the film's basic structure and story line. The film begins with a series of seemingly disjointed shots, most of which have to do directly with the medium of film itself, including shots of film going through a projector, clips from silent films and cartoons, a boy looking at a screen, etc., as well as shots of a sheep being killed, a nail driving through a hand and other powerful and somewhat disturbing images. After the opening credits, we are introduced to the two main characters of the film. Alma, a nurse, is assigned to take care of Elisabet, a famous stage actress, who mysteriously stopped speaking during one of her performances. Once it has been established that there is nothing medically wrong with her, the two go off to the beach together, where their relationship slowly evolves. This happens as Alma innocently and somewhat naively recounts the most intimate details of her life to a seemingly passive Elisabet, who still hasn't uttered a word. One day, however, the nurse discovers that she is in fact being actively studied herself, and is deeply hurt by what she deems Elisabet's lack of compassion. The scene I will analyze shows her attempt at revenge.
Alma has just returned from mailing Elisabet's letters, one of which she has read and thereby discovered her patient's true purpose. She goes back to the house and gets a drink of water and walks outside with it. There is an unusually long and static long shot of her sitting on a bench outside the house, thinking. She then accidentally knocks over the glass, goes inside to get a broom, comes back out, and, while sweeping, decides to leave a shard of glass in such a way that Elisabet might accidentally step on it. All this happens in this one shot, and the camera never moves. Nor are there any sounds or music, except for the faint sounds of her actions (sweeping, walking, etc.) She then sits and waits for Elisabet to walk by, which she soon does. Elisabet walks over the glass twice unharmed, and on the third time she steps on the glass and lets out a yelp of pain. Next we see Alma inside, stubbing out the cigarette she has been smoking, and she walks toward the window to look at Elizabeth. She pulls aside a veil which was previously invisible and we cut to Elisabet outside, looking in. When we see Alma again, the film suddenly cracks, and her face seems to crack as well. Then the film burns completely and we are left with a white screen. We suddenly hear some loud noises that sound like explosions and on this white flash some of the images we saw at the beginning of the film: a monster from an old film, three fellows running across a room in what looks like a chase scene in a silent comedy, a skeleton approaching the screen (also presumably from an old film,) a hand getting a nail driven through it (at which point we hear a scream and some music fades in) and finally an extreme close up of an eyeball. This last shot quickly dissolves to a very slow, out of focus shot of Elisabet walking into the house and then (after the focus has suddenly come back) walking out again and going to the beach, where she is seen with her back to the sun, partially blocking its light.
Watching this for the first time, or maybe just reading this description, one can't help but wonder what the hell all this means. Let's see what we can make it. As I mentioned, the film asks a lot of questions about the difference between appearance and reality, both in art and in life. Before this moment, everything was clear for Alma, just like the water in her glass, as well as the glass itself. But when she finds out that Elisabet is not at all what she seemed, the glass shatters. Nothing is clear any longer, and the contents of her life, which were previously held in a clear container, have suddenly spilt out. She has spilt out the most intimate details of her life to Elisabet, and her betrayal has made her feel vulnerable. Suddenly, she feels far away from everything, hence the long shot. And the process she has been going through of self discovery comes to a halt when she learns that she is not the only one studying herself. This is portrayed by the strange stillness and quiet of this first shot.
So she decides to get revenge, and she does this by using a piece of glass (which, again, can be seen to represent life) to make Elisabet speak. Elisabet has been trying to hide from life, which she considers a series of false performances (she is an actress.) But she is not strong enough, because when this piece of glass enters her, she cannot keep quiet any longer. Earlier in the film, she watched with horror as a Buddhist monk burned himself to death without making a sound. Suddenly, we realize that she is nothing like that. All it takes is a little piece of glass to make her start "acting" again (if we see speech as an act, which she obviously does.) What makes things a bit complicated here is that Bergman has suddenly switched focus from Alma's anger to Elisabet's inability to escape the seeming superficiality of everyday life. But this is done on purpose, since, what Bergman is doing is slowly bringing the two characters together and making their problems more and more indistinguishable. This will become clearer in the next shot.
We now go back to Alma's point of view as she stubs out her cigarette and walks toward the window to look at Elisabet. She can put out the cigarette because she has relieved some of her own pain by passing it onto Elisabet. When she gets to the window, she pulls aside a veil which was previously invisible (it covered the entire lens and was completely transparent.) Thus, the two characters have been brought closer together. There was an invisible barrier between the two of them which has been pulled aside by Elisabet's involuntarily being brought back down to Earth, so to speak, by her normal response to pain.
Now, suddenly, Alma cracks, literally, when the film we are watching suddenly cracks itself, making her lose half of her face. This shot is so packed with meaning it will take a while to explain fully, and in order to do so, I will have to make a momentary digression into philosophy. So please bear with me. Kierkegaard, a brilliant existentialist thinker who wrote a lot about personal identity, said that the self has two natures: one part of us longs for the eternal, the absolute and the necessary, while the other part exists in the every day world and therefore is subject to the temporal, the finite and the contingent. This leads us to different forms of despair, depending on how we react to this problem. One form comes from ignoring this inherent contradiction (Alma,) and another comes from trying to suppress one side of our nature over the other (Elisabet, who wants to do away with the "lies" of everyday existence and searches hopelessly for some ideal "purity" of soul.)
Back to the film: I said that the two characters were coming together. We have already seen how Elisabet cannot escape her everydayness, and, unlike the Buddhist monks (who live outside this Kierkegaardian schizophrenia, which is arguably purely a Western phenomenon,) she cannot help being subject to her bodies natural contingent responses. Alma, at this moment, has a similar realization, but in the other direction. When she pulls aside this veil and makes eye contact with Elisabet (shot reverse shot,) she suddenly realizes that she has been ignoring the tremendous problem Elisabet has been trying so hard to face, albeit wrongheadedly. The half of her face she loses will be replaced, later in the film, by half of Elisabet's face, and therefore the two human natures, body and soul, will be momentarily united.
There is more, though. Through this self reflexive technique, Bergman brings the viewer himself into all this mess. We have been happily watching this movie, getting involved in the characters' lives, letting the drama overtake us, entering this other world. by letting the film crack, Bergman suddenly reminds us that we ourselves should not let ourselves be deceived so easily. We have to remember that this is all an illusion, created by images on celluloid, and that these images are vulnerable in the same way Elisabet is vulnerable. Just as her foot can get cut by a simple piece of glass and she can be forced to come back down to earth, we the viewers can be pulled back into the world by the little flame that burns the film.
But wait, there is yet a deeper point to be made: What is left when the film burns away? What lies behind the mask of illusion? Absolutely nothing. We cannot take away illusion and reveal something else, since the performance we go through every day is all there is. Bergman thus seems to be telling us, "yes, life is an illusion, and, yes, you should be made aware of that. But, once you are aware of it, you just have to keep living in it, because if you take it away, there will be nothing left." The film thus represents both sides of Bergman's argument. First, it represents an idealized world which is in truth vulnerable (like Elisabet,), and second, it represents the illusion we have to go accept if we are going to go on living (like Alma, who has to realize that she has been living an illusion.)
So out of the white we start to see images form other films. Two of these shots (the monster and the skeleton) show us the types of things that intrude on the comfort of our everyday lives and lead us to become aware of our inherent despair. That is, when we see representations of death, we become aware of our own mortality and realize we cannot just go on living without coming to terms with our longings for eternity. Hence, Bergman shows us an eye in extreme close up after these shots. He's trying to make us look more carefully at the nature of existence. We see the eye from the outside because he's showing us what it is like when people are made to look, as Elisabet and Alma are doing.
But there is another shot which I have not yet mentioned in that quick series of flashes which alludes to yet another theme of this astoundingly deep film. There is a shot of a nail getting hammered through a hand, along with the sound of a man screaming. Here Bergman is suggesting a somewhat different interpretation of the film: a religious one. I am not well versed in theology, and I don't think this interpretation is as tight as the others, so I won't go as far into it. I think we can try to see Elisabet as a silent God figure. Earlier in the film, Alma says something to the effect of, "you could turn into me at any moment" (God turning into man-Christ) And she says that if she tried hard enough, Alma could turn into Elisabet (Man being made in God's image.) Later, Alma begs for Elisabet's forgiveness. Alma (which, incidentally, means soul in Spanish) talks and talks and looks for answers. Elisabet won't give her any. Alma is trying to test Elisabet's humanity, and that's why she tries to get a human reaction from her with the glass.
With this interpretation, I can try to make some sense of the last two shots in my sequence. After all these flashes, we see Elisabet walking all out of focus through the room and then outside into the sun. Again, Alma's self realization makes Elisabet (God) jump into focus, and this is reinforced when Elisabet is seen in the next shot standing directly in front of the sun, her head superimposed on it. The sun can clearly be seen to symbolize God, and Elisabet His incarnation. The shot is from below, making Elisabet seem larger than life. If this is so, Bergman doesn't have a very optimistic view of God, for, as we have seen, Elisabet is somewhat cold and confused herself, and her only purpose in creating all these conflicts in Alma's soul is to play some sadistic psychological game.
In conclusion, this movie is obviously the work of a man with a far greater intellect than mine, and the more I write the more ideas I'm getting, and I could probably go on much longer. But, for reasons of space and fatigue, I will stop here in the hopes that I have shed some light on Bergman's ability to suggest very profound problems of the human condition without much help from dialogue or other traditional narrative techniques.
Copyright 1999, Tao Ruspoli