Persona

Persona
Directed by	Ingmar Bergman
Produced by	Ingmar Bergman
Written by	Ingmar Bergman
Starring	Bibi Andersson Liv Ullmann
Music by	Lars Johan Werle
Cinematography	Sven Nykvist
Distributed by	AB Svensk Filmindustri (Sweden) United Artists (USA)
Release date(s)	October 18, 1966 (Sweden) March 6, 1967 (USA)
Running time	85 min.
Language	Swedish

Persona is a movie by Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, released in 1966, and featuring Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann. Bergman held this film to be one of his most important; in his book Images, he writes: "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." He also said that

The film explores an encounter between two women: Elisabet, a successful actress who has become mute during a performance of Electra, and Alma (soul in Spanish and Portuguese), the nurse charged with caring for her. Some critics have seen August Strindberg’s play The Stronger as a source of inspiration for Persona.^[2] Bergman wrote Persona during nine weeks while recovering from pneumonia.^[3] During filming Bergman wanted to call the film A Bit of Cinematography. His producer suggested something more accessible and the title of the film was changed.^[4]

Persona is considered a major artistic work by film critics and filmmakers. The essayist Susan Sontag is one of many critics who have written extensively about it, calling it "Bergman’s masterpiece".^[5] Another critic has described it as "one of this century’s great works of art".^[6]In Sight and Sound’s 1972 poll of the ten greatest films of all time, Persona was ranked at number five.^[7]

Plot

Persona begins with a long montage that features clips of silent films, scenes of film running through a reel, pictures of various things including an erect penis, a film of a sheep being killed with a knife, a film of a nail being hammered into a hand, and several still pictures of seemingly dead or unmoving bodies under white sheets. The montage ends with a film of a young boy on a hospital bed reading a Swedish version of Mikhail Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time and then holding his hand out to a blurred image of a woman’s face.

The montage is followed by the title sequence, in which several shots of people’s faces are seen, most commonly that of the boy in the opening sequence.

Next comes a fairly straightforward narrative about a young nurse, Sister Alma (Bibi Andersson), who is charged with taking care of a patient, the stage actress Elisabet Vogler (Liv Ullmann), who has stopped talking to anyone after performing in the play, Electra.

The head doctor of the hospital suggests that Alma take the actress to the doctor’s summer house on the seaside for further recuperation. What follows are several days and nights where the nurse Alma talks, mainly about herself at first, but then about the actress. Eventually, this leads to Alma having a mental breakdown, in which she physically harms herself and attacks the actress by slapping her.

The negative shift toward Elisabet Vogler begins when Alma, who is delivering mail for the actress to the hospital, reads a letter by the actress about Alma. In the letter, Vogler writes how she enjoys studying Sister Alma, and about how the nurse seems to be in love with her. She also mentions private stories Alma shared with her, including the nurse’s affair with a married man and a sexual tryst on a beach with another woman and two boys that led to an abortion.

Throughout the film, the actress remains silent, though she responds to several of the nurse's questions by nodding or shaking her head.

Near the end of the film, Vogler’s husband appears at the house. He speaks to Sister Alma as if she were Elisabet. At first the nurse resists, but then begins to answer as if she were the actress. Elisabet Vogler watches from behind them. The husband and Alma are then shown in bed next to the actress, clearly having had sexual intercourse.

Following this scene, Alma and Elisabet are once again alone in the house. Alma finds Elisabet covering a picture of a young boy under her hand on the kitchen table. The nurse then begins to narrate a story of the birth of Elisabet’s son, in which the actress hates herself for becoming pregnant and giving birth, and then hates the baby and wishes it were dead. The scene ends with the faces of the two women merging on the screen into one another.

The film ends with the two women parting ways as if nothing happened. Alma packs up the summer house and then takes a bus somewhere. The end of the film shows another montage of film being run through a film camera, then fades to black.

Cast

• Bibi Andersson — Alma, The Nurse
• Liv Ullmann — Elisabeth Vogler, The Actress
• Margaretha Krook — The Doctor
• Gunnar Björnstrand — Mr. Vogler
• Jörgen Lindström — The Boy

Critical reception

The film has been interpreted in many different ways and has been the subject of long-standing debates among film fans as well as critics.

Lloyd Michaels sums up what he calls "the most widely held view" of Persona’s content".^[8] According to this view, Persona is "a kind of modernist horror movie"^[9] Elisabet’s condition, diagnosed by the psychiatrist as "the hopeless dream to be", is "the shared condition of both life and film art".^[10] Bergman and Elisabet share the same dilemma: they cannot respond authentically to "large catastrophes" (such as the Holocaust or Vietnam War).^[9] The actress Elisabet responds by stopping speaking: by contrast the filmmaker Bergman emphasizes that "necessary illusions" enable us to live.

Susan Sontag suggests that Persona is constructed as a series of variations on a theme of "doubling".^[11] The subject of the film, Sontag proposes, is "violence of the spirit".^[12] Film scholar P. Adams Sitney offers a completely different reading, arguing that "Persona covertly dramatizes a psychoanalysis from the point of view of a patient".^[13]

Censorship

Two scenes are frequently cut from versions of the film; a brief shot at the beginning depicting an erect penis, and a piece of Alma’s monologue where she says her lover "made her come with his hand" and implies they were children or teenagers. These changes were removed for American distribution, but retained on most American video releases.

When MGM archivist John Kirk restored Persona as part of a larger restoration project, he worked with the original, uncensored version with the brief shot of an erect penis. He also created new subtitles by commissioning several language experts to provide new, accurate translations for the dialogue; this is particularly noticeable during Alma’s graphic recollection of an orgy, which some were reluctant to translate without toning down some of the details.

The original, uncensored version wasn’t widely available in the U.S. until 2004, when MGM’s home video department reissued Persona on DVD, utilizing Kirk’s work.

Other films

Bergman features prominently in Woody Allen’s work. Another Woman is a variation on Persona, and Love and Death references Persona in its final minutes; two characters are lined up, one facing the camera, the other at a 90-degree angle, with their mouths in the same space, just as in Persona.

David Lynch's surreal noir Mulholland Dr. is heavily influenced by Persona; including, but not limited to, an actress character and similar questions concerning identity, as well as a visual nod to Persona's famous merging of women's faces.

Robert Altman’s expressionist film 3 Women is also influenced by Persona as Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek begin to shift roles.

Fight Club draws on Persona, with similar themes, plot points and a still of a penis embedded film-in-film.

The Simpsons episode Lost Verizon parodies Persona when Bart Simpson finds a new cell phone and prank calls a bar in Sweden called "Inga-bar Beerman's." Upon realizing the call was a prank, the bar-tender proceeds with existential dialogue with heavily contrasted cinematography, similar to famous scenes in both Persona and Woody Allen's "Another Woman."

Awards and recognition

• Persona won the 1967 National Society of Film Critics awards for Best Film, Best Director (Bergman) and Best Actress (Andersson).^[14]
• Persona was included in The New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made.^[15]

References

Bibliography

• Bergman, Ingmar (1972). Persona and Shame: The Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman. trans. Keith Bradfield. New York: Grossman Publishers. ISBN 0670158658. 
• Michaels, Lloyd (ed.) (2000). Ingmar Bergman's Persona. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521656982. http://books.google.com/books?id=CR8JsHbnkS0C&dq=0521656982. 
• Sontag, Susan (2002), "Bergman’s Persona", Styles of Radical Will, New York: Picador, pp. 123–146, ISBN 0312420218, http://books.google.com/books?id=cHoIAP6CTkoC&pg=RA1-PA123&vq=%22bergman%27s+persona%22&dq=%22styles+of+radical+will%22&sig=RDjjDjU0MhXH7XdUiqSZhThWmuo 

External links

• Persona at the Internet Movie Database
• Persona at Rotten Tomatoes
• Roger Ebert’s review
• An essay on the film by P. Adams Sitney
• Blog posts by Peter Leithart, prominent Reformed Theologian

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