In August of 1966, two productions by artists not typically associated with each other, who were nevertheless arguably at the very peak of their powers, made their respective debuts. The Beatles, four young Englishmen riding a wave of incredible popularity and controversy ("bigger than Jesus") unprecedented at the time as far as pop music combos were concerned, released their album Revolver on August 5. A few weeks later, Ingmar Bergman's Persona was issued in a limited theatrical run, gaining wider distribution in Sweden later that fall and finally reaching the USA in March 1967. Unlike the Beatles, who were still widely regarded as impetuous young mop tops, a lightweight teenybopper fad due to diminish into obscurity at any moment, Ingmar Bergman was already far into his career, approaching middle age, and practically obliged by contemporary movie critics to press up against the frontiers of what was both permissible (in terms of mature, adult-oriented subject matter) and achievable (in terms of cinematic and stylistic innovation) with each new film that bore his name. Indeed, that suggestive possibility was the very tagline that was attached to Persona when it hit the American scene: "A new film by Ingmar Bergman" communicated exactly enough, all that needed to be said, to lure seasoned cinephiles and curiosity seekers alike into the theater to see what the wily, provocative Swede had unleashed this time.
Ever since his international breakthrough The Seventh Seal, but especially in the wake of his "Absence of God" trilogy (Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light and The Silence), viewers had come to expect a stimulating blend of philosophical musings, candid sexuality, artfully luminous imagery and a stagecraft at once complex, forthright and starkly minimalist in the way he positioned his actors before the lens of the camera. His ability to recruit performers, particularly women, who were strikingly photogenic and possessed of sharp intellects only added to the appeal of his films to the global intelligentsia, who sought them out as soon as they became available.
Though I'm not prepared or looking to provide an in-depth commentary on Revolver, I think the nearly simultaneous release of that album and Persona is worth mentioning because in my opinion, they both had a similarly monumental impact in the subsequent development of their respective arts, and they each stand out as signature cultural achievements of the era. A large factor in what made them such special works is that they each incorporate a peculiar self-awareness of the media that they employ to get their message out to a mass audience. This was the heyday of Marshall McLuhan's dictum that "the medium is the message/mess age/massage" - a notion that neither the Beatles nor Bergman were exploring all by themselves, even though they both appeared to be operating at a high level of awareness in recognizing the inherent possibilities.
Revolver opens up with a short sample of audio tape being fed into a playback device, with brief moments of warped sound, an irregular tempo and a spoken countdown cut into the finished master recording just before the music starts. Throughout the remainder of the album, a careful listener is drawn in beneath the surface catchiness of radio-friendly melodies and clever lyrics, as we hear sometimes subtle, and often overtly demonstrative, studio tricks: overdubbed vocal tracks where the lead singer is also providing his own backing harmonies, reversed tape loops, strange sound effects, curious emphasis on sounds made by the human voice ("ah-ah Mr. Heatthhhhh...", for example) and sonic textures unlike anything that had ever been captured on vinyl before. Clearly, the Beatles were pushing beyond even the lofty mastery of the AM radio charts that they'd demonstrated over the previous two years. Their increasing comfort in the studio (aided by brilliant collaborators like producer George Martin and sound engineer Geoff Emerick), the sheer brilliance of their cumulative talent, and the expansive lyrical and conceptual vistas opened up by the band's experiments with psychedelic drugs positioned them at the very forefront of musical innovation in a time of astonishing creativity throughout Western culture.
Meanwhile, around that same time up in Sweden, Ingmar Bergman was wrestling through another bout of prolonged depression, marital failure and crippling doubts about his artistic purpose going forward. Despite his impressive track record and international success, he had already stumbled badly in his most recent film, a moribund comedic effort from 1964 titled All These Women. It was his first movie shot in color, and was deliberately designed to showcase a lighter side of Bergman's outlook on life, perhaps something along the lines of Smiles of a Summer Night, which indeed proved to be a very successful template for witty sex comedies that would be filmed by later directors following in his steps. (All These Women is conspicuously absent from the Criterion Collection, at least as of this writing, though you can watch it on their Hulu Plus channel.)
I have no reason to speculate that Ingmar Bergman was dabbling with mind-altering substances, as the Beatles freely acknowledged they were doing at the time (though I wouldn't be at all surprised if he had - his age, temperament and reputation imparting a more discreet approach to the subject.) But either way, he definitely had some serious head trips going on in the months leading up to the filming of Persona. A recent hospital stay, necessitated by illness both mental and physical, triggered memories of a childhood experience, seeing corpses in a morgue. A weird moment, not quite a hallucination but still rather vividly recalled, in which he imagined one of the dead bodies opening its eyes, was one of several pivotal influences that informed the conceptualization of his next film. He also felt a surge of inspiration from the idea of casting one of his former lovers, Bibi Andersson, alongside a highly recommended new Norwegian actor Liv Ullmann, the woman with whom he would soon fall in love, in a psychology-heavy drama that would perhaps be regarded as a worthy follow-up to the acclaimed films he'd directed in the early years of the decade.
Since 1963, a lot had happened in the world cinema scene, and Bergman was at risk of being regarded as old, passe, retrograde. More crucially, he understood his need to work out his psychic dilemmas in the only way that had proven to be reliably effective in his adult life: through his art. Stirred into a creative whirlwind, he pulled together the basic elements of the project in a mere fourteen days, penning a script that was initially titled "Kinematografi," until his producers at Svensk FilmIndustri objected and insisted that he come up with something more commercially plausible.
And much like the Revolver album, the new film that Bergman presented to the world in 1966 was a tour de force loaded with masterful technique, profound feeling, weighty subject matter and marvelously playful surprises, all evidence of a top notch creative team rallying with brilliant craftsmanship behind a compelling headliner. Ever since its premiere, Persona has maintained a formidable reputation as one of cinema's most beguiling yet satisfying enigmas - eminently watchable and intriguing, even if it doesn't yield an easy explanation or convenient resolution as to what it is exactly that Bergman is trying to say. It's a film that stirs deep emotional responses from those viewers who can track with the director and his twin female muses as they take us on a journey that mesmerizes, confuses, allures and challenges at various turns.
I think I've done a credible job so far extolling my admiration for the film. But what is Persona actually about? What do I make of this perplexing narrative that initially seems to be about a pair of women, one of whom is suffering from a strange psychological breakdown that's rendered her mute, and another who's been assigned to be her attending caretaker but lapses into some problematic boundary violations as their relationship drifts from professional duty to intimate codependency - and from there, shifts to a different plane altogether where we gradually realize that things are not what they seem, even if we can't quite specify what they actually are?
Yesterday I summarized my ideas about Persona on Twitter thusly:
"My working theory on PERSONA at this moment: Ingmar Bergman's autobiography of a repressed transgendered schizophrenic."(Soon after that, I was sent a helpful correction by @VladZhao, informing me that it's better to use "transgender" without the "-ed" at the end - this article explains why.) Though I was being just a bit flippant in the construction of my thesis, the ideas behind it do provide the most coherent framework I can come up with for explaining why Bergman chose to tell the story this way. So here goes my fuller explication...
As the film's original working title indicates, this is an exercise in cinematography, a very deliberate capturing of the auteur's message in a particular format - celluloid running through a projector. That fundamental process is put on the screen at the very start and we're reminded of that several times throughout the film, and at the end as well. Obscure snippets from cinema's past (and Bergman's youth), along with harrowing images freighted with portentous spiritual significance (a nail-pierced hand, a sheep being slaughtered, a monk's self-immolation) and a playfully subversive, nearly subliminal shot of an erect penis, flash past us without explanation. Sex, death, religion, fear, laughter, absurdity - all the fundamental elements of life thrown together in a cinematic primordial ooze from which Persona emerges. We then see a new series of images, corpses laid out on gurneys in stark monochromatic close up, remnants of lives recently expired. Among them is a boy, somewhere in his early teens, who suddenly moves even though he initially appears just as inert and dead as the others. He's presumably naked under his sheet, but as it turns out, he's just resting and turns his back to the camera as soon as he realizes that he's being observed. He finds a favorite book and starts to read. One of the corpses abruptly peeps its eyes at us and we're off.
The boy, portrayed by an actor whom Bergman employed three years earlier when he made The Silence, recapitulates one of that film's important moments, as he holds his hand up to a railway car window. observing a line of tanks that have moved in to occupy and pacify a troubled city. Now his hand reaches up to a glass screen, on to which are projected the faces, in tight close up, of two women who look similar but not identical to each other. Who is this boy, and who are these women?
My interpretation is that the boy is an idealized version, cast by the mature Ingmar Bergman, of his adolescent self. The boy, just emerging from puberty, is staring into his future and projecting his identity into these two women - the outreached hand being a sign of connection and bonding with them both. The women's faces are beautiful, gracious, wise and compassionate in a way that the gangly, awkward boy intuitively understands he will never be. Even though nobody would ever make the case that Ingmar Bergman was ugly or physically repulsive, he nevertheless was never physically capable of the subtlety of expression that faces like those of Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson and his other (typically gorgeous) female leads could convey to an audience. And since Bergman was a deeply perceptive, sensitive soul, he utilized the poetic license and artistic freedom granted to him to use women as expressions of the deeply conflicted dualism that he had been wrestling with throughout his adult life, and perhaps even longer.
The women can be seen as representatives of those dueling aspects of his nature that continually plunge him into relational crisis and fits of existential despair at his inability to sustain both domestic tranquility and creative vitality. The actor, Elizabet Vogler, is a successful performer whose achievements have earned her a level of recognition and flattering acclaim that in some ways she feels is undeserved. The general public that admires her performances has no idea what a manipulative scoundrel she is in her personal life. The nurse, Sister Alma, is a more mundane, less ambitious person, seemingly content to do her work, spend time with her boyfriend and envision a future that is utterly unremarkable in its ordinariness. When given the task of attending to Elizabet's odd collapse into muteness, Alma is initially hesitant, wondering if she possesses the mental rigor necessary to withstand such a challenge, since her patient (soon to become her adversary) has made a deliberate choice indicative of a deep determination to withdraw from mainstream society.
Despite that initial hesitancy, Alma accepts the assignment and quickly finds herself both intrigued and overwhelmed by the new responsibility. Even though she never utters a word in reply, only directs her gaze toward her new found companion, Elizabet turns out to be a compelling magnet that draws and sustains Alma's confidence. That trust encourages Alma to begin sharing intimate details of her personal life, admissions that she's never shared with anyone else, presumably because she fears the backlash of their judgment and criticism. Elizabet is supremely detached, unaffected by even the most tawdry disclosures of sexual indulgence or romantic ambivalence with her current boyfriend and assumed fiance. Alma has found a level of expressive comfort with this empathic listener that life seldom affords. Her guard is totally down, to the point that she seems to forget that her primary role in Elizabet's life is to help rehabilitate her back into some semblance of social normalcy.
Soon enough, Alma learns that Elizabet is not as trustworthy as she'd been led to believe, when she discovers that the actor has written a letter to her husband revealing a condescending attitude toward her nurse. Elizabet's careful listening is not quite as supportive in nature as Alma had assumed; it's more functional. She's gathering material from the lives of everyday, unpretentious people that can be repurposed later for dramatic effect, adding Alma's ordinary stories of moral controversy and emotional turbulence to her inventory of gestures and expressions that are the actor's stock in trade. Suddenly, Alma feels exploited, ashamed and bitter. She lashes out at her patient, at first with passive aggression - setting up a shard of broken glass where she knows Elizabet likes to walk barefoot. When Elizabet does indeed cut her foot on the glass, the two women's eyes lock as they each immediately recognize the severe rupture that has occurred between them. Suddenly, the film snaps, a few images from the prologue invade our field of vision, and we're pulled out of the drama, back into our seats, reminded that we are observing staged events reeking of artifice, no matter how compellingly they are portrayed.
When the narrative resumes, the veiled hostilities hinted at in Alma's evil gaze just as the film breaks are opened up and amplified more blatantly, with verbal and physical threats that culminate in a bloody-nosed Alma frantically clawing at Elizabet's face. The escalating anger provokes only a response of disdainful laughter from the actor, further infuriating the nurse as she grasps the inability of even her most ardent outrage to move the artist to a level of personal disclosure that matches her own sincerity. Suddenly seized by a sense of superiority over her convalescent patient, Alma lets it rip with a scathing criticism that tells Elizabet in clear terms just how sick and twisted she has become, regardless of whatever aesthetic or philosophical justifications the performer might use to excuse her choices. That diatribe, of course, offends Elizabet quite a bit, and she charges out of the house to take a long walk along the rocky beach.
A thoroughly magnificent and heroic tracking shot captures Alma's desperate, hysterical pursuit of Elizabet as she realizes the mistake she's made. But it's hard for us to know how Alma's interpreting her own actions. Is she sorry for having behaved so unprofessionally, so out of character according to the medical training she's undergone to prepare her for this work? Or is she simply dismayed at the fact that she's made Elizabet mad at her and put their friendship in jeopardy? Alma's emotions run the gamut in this scene, from desperate pleading to haughty indignation to abject misery, all in the space of a minute or two, and they're met with Elizabet's determination to escape the clutches of this pathetic woman who's grown too attached and familiar now, an implacable indifference to every verbal thrust and parry that Alma directs her way.
I'll pause my recap of the story of Persona for a moment to just clarify how I see these two women embodying Bergman's "schizophrenia" - his split personality, if you will. Elizabet is of course the creative professional side of him that is exposed to the world, but only on terms that he strictly controls, at least to the best of his ability. What he has to say to us is carefully limited to those published artifacts that he releases into the broader culture, but beyond that, he has nothing else to share and is content to keep his secrets to himself. That's all reflected in Elizabet's silence, even though she continues to keep her eyes open, always paying attention to what she sees happening around her.
Alma represents Bergman's ordinary self - the husband, father, lover who has to relate more intimately with those closest to him, who feels that sense of connection and responsibility to do what's right, to sacrifice his own comforts and well-being to some extent for the sake of others. This aspect of himself, burdened by conscience and sentimental attachments, is more vulnerable, easily irritable and emotionally reactive to life's ups and downs. It's also more susceptible to guilt, inhibition and the manipulation of others who would thwart his freedom to pursue artistic or sensual interests as they develop within him.
So in a nutshell, the conflict between Alma and Elizabet is an outgrowth of Bergman's own divided personae - the two masks he wears as he oscillates between the public and private expressions of his thoughts and feelings. In a scene that occurs shortly after the big blowup on the beach, we see Elizabet's husband show up unexpectedly, where he somehow mistakes Alma for his wife, despite Alma's attempts to correct his error and clarify her own identity. His misperception persists even to the point that he and Alma make love (off camera) even while Elizabet impassively watches their passionate encounter. The husband leaves soon after, allowing the two women some privacy to finally do their best to reach some kind of reintegrating solution.
In the last major scene of the film, Bergman locks his camera on the faces of Elizabet and Alma as the nurse offers her conclusive analysis of what led to her patient's disturbed condition: the actor's profound ambivalence regarding a pregnancy that she allowed due to some critical feedback about lacking maternal characteristics. Her unsettled emotions and growing contempt for the developing child exploded into an unresolvable paradox, as Elizabet recognizes how wrong she is to despise an innocent baby, but is too committed to her ideals of artistic and emotional integrity to deny the intensity of her feelings. In spelling out this indictment, Alma assumes a stance of judgement over her patient, insistently denying that "I'm not like Elizabet Vogler," but as she does so, her sensitivity and compassion are stirred as she recognizes her own hypocrisy, having had an abortion herself earlier in life. Who is she, after all, to render a negative opinion on how Elizabet has responded to life's pressure? Alma has more in common with this "sick" woman than she dares to admit even to herself - a lot more, even to the point where they become, at first momentarily, and by the end of the film, permanently fused, two incompatible but codependent halves now destined to merge into a whole, who will somehow find her way onto the bus that will return her back to the ordinary future that awaits her in the soft open air prison of civilized human society.