701 Persona

[manicsounds]

I don't think I've heard it, but I know how others have complained about it, but as I remember the 30 minute making-of was quite good, which featured Gervais.

[FrauBlucher]

For those that can't wait to get this in their grimy little hands like me, this will work.

[barryconvex]

I really love listening to Paul Schrader talk about movies. If someone made a documentary of just him talking about his favorite movies i'd be first in line. His discourse on Persona is not as informative as the one he did for Pickpocket, but i still find the man fascinating. Aside from Tiny Furniture has he done any other interviews for criterion? ...on a separate note, this is some of the nicest cover artwork and packaging criterion's ever done...

[colinr0380]

There's Schrader's Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters with a commentary track that also might be close to what you want.

[barryconvex]

yes, i have to go back and listen to that...thanks

[manicsounds]

The back cover doesn't list MGM or United Artists, so it wasn't licensed from them, although I assumed they had the US rights to the movie. It looks like the MGM boxset is still available, so Criterion and MGM both have the rights to the movie in the US?

[jsteffe]

The back cover doesn't list MGM or United Artists, so it wasn't licensed from them, although I assumed they had the US rights to the movie. It looks like the MGM boxset is still available, so Criterion and MGM both have the rights to the movie in the US?

As far as I know, the MGM box set is out of print and has been for a while. It's still listed on Amazon, but it's only being sold through third party sellers if you look closely - "Fulfilled by Amazon." Other online vendors such as Barnes and Noble and DVD Planet don't even list the set any more. So more than likely MGM/UA lost the rights to most, if not all, of their Bergman titles.

If it means that Criterion can someday release new transfers of HOUR OF THE WOLF, SHAME and THE PASSION OF ANNA, great.

As for THE SERPENT'S EGG, maybe it can go into a special Eclipse set called "Bergman Stumbles," along with THE TOUCH and ALL THESE WOMEN.

[Bando]

All These Women has been on the Hulu channel for a while now, so it's clearly in the Criterion universe. Personally, I don't think it's that bad...

Now, as for Shame, I'd love to see that get a release. Maybe that could be what they pair with the Faro-Dokument films?

[dwk]

As of last year, MGM still had the rights to the other four Bergman films.

[jsteffe]

As of last year, MGM still had the rights to the other four Bergman films.

Oh well, so much for that... At least PERSONA received the treatment that it reserves.

[manicsounds]

I notice that the bonus 1.5 hour documentary on the disc "Liv & Ingmar" has Dolby 5.1 audio and has optional English subtitles (for Swedish), and English SDH. That's quite unusual for Criterion to have full subtitles for their bonus features, is it not? It would be nice if Criterion subtitled their extras, like the BFI does, but I guess the cost of subtitling is the biggest issue.

[Magic Hate Ball]

Anyone else think the opening montage is kind of silly? I'm extremely down for avant-garde but there's something so thudding and clumsy about it that makes me giggle.

[domino harvey]

No

[barryconvex]

Anyone else think the opening montage is kind of silly? I'm extremely down for avant-garde but there's something so thudding and clumsy about it that makes me giggle.

Do you mean the content or how it's presented? I've always found it more than a little unnerving...

[hearthesilence]

I absolutely loved it the first time I saw it. It's meant to be a little cheeky, but it's definitely unnerving.

[Dylan]

A review of a new opera based on Persona that performed on October 23rd and 24th at National Sawdust in Brooklyn, New York. Did anybody here see it?

[Trees]

For me, "Persona" is probably Bergman's best film. There are still a few titles of his I have not seen, but it's hard to imagine that any of them will surpass "Persona". My previous favorite Bergman was probably "Wild Strawberries", but "Persona" buries that film, in my opinion. "Persona" is pure and exquisite -- cinema stripped to its core, just like Andersson's character was stripped to hers during that story about the beach. Bergman seems to be at the height of his powers for "Persona". It feels like a confluence of events brought Bergman, Nykvist, his crew, and these actors to the right place at the right time, and the result was... near perfection.

Bergman himself alludes to this:

He writes in his book Images: "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: "At some time or other, I said that Persona saved my life—that is no exaggeration. If I had not found the strength to make that film, I would probably have been all washed up. One significant point: for the first time I did not care in the least whether the result would be a commercial success..."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persona_(1966_film" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;)

In terms of frames, "Persona" has at least half a dozen all-time, world-class compositions, including several that are not only among Bergman's best, but anyone's best. The scene in the bedroom where Ullmann's character walks in, walks out, and then comes back to embrace Andersson is maybe a watershed moment in cinema. Total perfection.

Anyone else think the opening montage is kind of silly? I'm extremely down for avant-garde but there's something so thudding and clumsy about it that makes me giggle.

If I have one criticism against what is otherwise a near perfect film, I think that some of this avant-garde, experimental stuff in the intro and outro have not aged well, and seem at this point almost superfluous to the core film. The boy I understand, but some of the projector stuff seems a bit hokey and too obvious now, whereas the main core of the film is absolutely timeless and basically perfect. If "Persona" premiered even today at Cannes, it would probably win. You can't say that about all of the major classics. For example, would "Bicycle Thieves" win at Cannes today if it was just being released? No chance. "Persona", I think, could win.

[rrenault]

If I have one criticism against what is otherwise a near perfect film, I think that some of this avant-garde, experimental stuff in the intro and outro have not aged well, and seem at this point almost superfluous to the core film. The boy I understand, but some of the projector stuff seems a bit hokey and too obvious now, whereas the main core of the film is absolutely timeless and basically perfect. If "Persona" premiered even today at Cannes, it would probably win. You can't say that about all of the major classics. For example, would "Bicycle Thieves" win at Cannes today if it was just being released? No chance. "Persona", I think, could win.

Oddly enough, Ingmar never actually won a Palme, although Fellini, Bunuel, and Antonioni all did.

[adavis53]

If I have one criticism against what is otherwise a near perfect film, I think that some of this avant-garde, experimental stuff in the intro and outro have not aged well, and seem at this point almost superfluous to the core film. The boy I understand, but some of the projector stuff seems a bit hokey and too obvious now, whereas the main core of the film is absolutely timeless and basically perfect. If "Persona" premiered even today at Cannes, it would probably win. You can't say that about all of the major classics. For example, would "Bicycle Thieves" win at Cannes today if it was just being released? No chance. "Persona", I think, could win.

Not that I think it's all too helpful to retroactively award palmes (as much as I would have loved Bergman to get one), in regards to your point about "Bicycle Thieves" let's remember that bro-neorealist filmmakers like the Dardennes have, in recent years, walked away with a whole host of awards from the festivals ("Deux Jeurs, Une Nuit" having been a favorite to win in 2014), while the more "experimental" - for lack of a better word - fare of "Adieu au langage" or "Holy Motors" walk away with less. Never underestimate contemporary critics' adoration for a heart wringing melodrama about the less fortunate.

[ianthemovie]

I watched this on Blu last night and was mildly irritated to see that end credits have been appended to the film. I can only assume this was a decision made by Svansk Filmindustri for their restoration? It really seemed to clash with the final shot of the arc lamps burning out and the screen fading to black--about as definitive and literal a sign that the movie is over as you can get. Any end credits after that point just feel superfluous.

[dda1996a]

If I have one criticism against what is otherwise a near perfect film, I think that some of this avant-garde, experimental stuff in the intro and outro have not aged well, and seem at this point almost superfluous to the core film. The boy I understand, but some of the projector stuff seems a bit hokey and too obvious now, whereas the main core of the film is absolutely timeless and basically perfect. If "Persona" premiered even today at Cannes, it would probably win. You can't say that about all of the major classics. For example, would "Bicycle Thieves" win at Cannes today if it was just being released? No chance. "Persona", I think, could win.

Not that I think it's all too helpful to retroactively award palmes (as much as I would have loved Bergman to get one), in regards to your point about "Bicycle Thieves" let's remember that bro-neorealist filmmakers like the Dardennes have, in recent years, walked away with a whole host of awards from the festivals ("Deux Jeurs, Une Nuit" having been a favorite to win in 2014), while the more "experimental" - for lack of a better word - fare of "Adieu au langage" or "Holy Motors" walk away with less. Never underestimate contemporary critics' adoration for a heart wringing melodrama about the less fortunate.

having watched Bicycle Thieves for the first time a few months ago, along with Rossellini's war trilogy, they all hold up perfectly well and are still heart wrenching today. For me they remain timeless

[Mr Sausage]

DISCUSSION ENDS MONDAY, OCTOBER 24th

Members have a two week period in which to discuss the film before it's moved to its dedicated thread in The Criterion Collection subforum. Please read the Rules and Procedures.

This thread is not spoiler free. This is a discussion thread; you should expect plot points of the individual films under discussion to be discussed openly. See: spoiler rules.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

I encourage members to submit questions, either those designed to elicit discussion and point out interesting things to keep an eye on, or just something you want answered. This will be extremely helpful in getting discussion started. Starting is always the hardest part, all the more so if it's unguided. Questions can be submitted to me via PM.

[Sloper]

In case anyone finds them helpful, and in a totally non-prescriptive way, here are a few discussion questions:

Bergman said that what fascinated him above all, as a film-maker, was the human face, and especially what the face does in close-ups. What do faces do in the close-ups in this film? Why, in the early scenes, do we see Alma’s face, or arm, getting in the way of Elisabet’s face? Why do we see Alma’s monologue about Elisabet’s son twice, from two points of view, and why do the two women’s faces merge together at the end of this sequence?

The Latin word ‘persona’ could refer to an actor’s mask. This film is explicitly asking questions about faces, about language, and about everything a person ‘projects’ to the rest of the world: are these things ever reliable indicators of truth? Is there a truth to be indicated, or are such performances in themselves the nearest things we have to ‘truth’?

The film begins with a projector firing up, and at several other points (especially just after the broken glass incident) we are forcefully reminded that we are watching a film. Is Bergman expressing a hopeless scepticism about the capacity of this medium to aid in our search for truth, and / or is he showing how cinema is uniquely equipped to illuminate aspects of the human condition that are normally inaccessible?

At the end of the prologue (which I have to say I’m not that keen on, although I love this film), we see a teenage boy placing his hand on a screen, on which the faces of Elisabet and Alma keep dissolving into each other, mostly with their eyes open – but Alma’s eyes are closed at the end of the sequence. We come back to this image at the end of the film. Why is the story framed like this? We last saw this child in The Silence, caught in the middle of a conflict between his mother and his aunt. At the end of that film, he was deeply absorbed in the ‘words in the foreign language’ Ester had written down for him. Now we see him touching projected images of the faces of his mother (perhaps – he is the boy in the photograph later on) and her nurse, in a film where the mother refuses to speak, and the nurse’s faith in language gradually disintegrates. Is the image of a child groping confusedly at an ever-shifting human face somehow indicative of what this film is about?

Obvious question: why has Elisabet stopped speaking? What do the real-world atrocities shown on TV and in the photograph have to do with her silence?

Alma talks a lot while Elisabet is silent. Elisabet is not completely uncommunicative, though. How much self-expression, and what kinds of self-expression, does she allow herself? To put it another way, how much is she able to say without words? We spend a lot of time watching Elisabet when Alma is not; what do we see in Elisabet’s face as she listens to Alma? This is something Bergman explores a great deal in his films: not just what a person says, but what a person does while listening (or not listening) to someone else.

Why is Alma hesitant to take on this job, and how is she supposed to be helping Elisabet? Do the doctor’s sententious words near the start of the film, and Elisabet’s letter to her later on, suggest an answer to the second question? Clearly, Alma talks to Elisabet for several reasons that have nothing to do with her job. What are those reasons? She says she is normally a good listener, but here she veers to the opposite extreme. What is it about this situation that causes her to open up like this? And does she really open up? Do we really learn anything about her, just because she talks?

Alma reads out a statement about faith, or the redundancy of faith, in the modern world, and Elisabet nods her agreement with it; Alma disagrees. In what ways does this film continue to explore the questions about God that were so central to much of Bergman’s earlier work?

[Sloper]

In The Passion of Anna, Elis says something along the lines of, ‘I don’t claim to penetrate the soul with my photography. I can only record the interplay of forces, large and small. You look at a picture and you imagine something. It’s all lies, all poetry.’ The opening shot of Persona anticipates his reference to ‘the interplay of forces, large and small’, as we see two rods (not sure of the right technical term) inside a projector, the larger one above the smaller; the large one is the first to light up, and we get the impression that it initiates the explosive interaction that follows. I guess most audiences can be assumed not to understand the precise workings of this mechanism, so this mysterious first shot invites us to impose a meaning on it, to imagine some way of making sense out of the relationship between these two glowing objects. We’re aware that what we’re seeing is, in a sense, quite mundane, and that it’s more or less exactly what has just happened in the projection booth behind us (depending on the kind of projector), but because we’re watching a film we expect to be told a story, and instinctively see these (highly animated) inanimate objects as characters, or as an emblematic representation of characters – which they are, since the film turns out to be about the ambiguous relationship between two different-sized forces, Elisabet and Alma, who blur into each other as they come together, just as the two rods do in the first shot.

The film as a whole draws on the example of Strindberg’s one-act play, The Stronger, in which one woman talks while another remains completely silent. The talking woman gradually realises that the silent one has infected her life, exerting an extraordinary and invasive power over her, but eventually declares herself the ‘stronger’ of the two, because she has taken so much from the other woman while giving nothing in return. She may be wrong about this, of course, and may be aware that she is wrong. The opening of Bergman’s film seems to show one force dominating another, and once we meet the two main characters it seems clear – and Alma says this explicitly – that Elisabet, aside from being taller and more successful, possesses a mental strength that Alma lacks. But the subsequent battle of minds raises the same questions as Strindberg’s play: does Elisabet take over Alma (‘I’m not Elisabet Vogler, I’m Sister Alma’), does Alma deconstruct Elisabet (‘you wanted a dead baby’), at the end is Alma left stronger and more confident because of her experience, while Elisabet remains in the disturbed state she was in at the start? It’s interesting that when we see the innards of the projector again, at the end, we see them from the opposite side – some kind of reversal has taken place, but its exact nature is hard to pin down.

Towards the end, we see Elisabet freezing on stage once again, and also see her being filmed – upside-down, as it appears – on a set. This second moment is so brief that it gives no clear indication of whether she will now be able to act again, even in the more private, controlled environment of a film set, where she can record her dialogue later. The film is disturbingly vague about what becomes of her. We see more of Alma at the end, and there’s more evidence that she might have emerged unscathed. She briskly tidies up the summer house with no hint of emotional turmoil. There’s a repeat of the shot from the dreamlike sequence where Elisabet visits Alma’s bedroom, only now the shot is framed more tightly to emphasise Alma. When she looks in the mirror, she sees this image again: a ghostly Elisabet stands behind her, stroking her hair. Is she haunted by the effect this powerful woman has had on her? Does she retain the empowerment Elisabet seems to be facilitating in her in that moment, but does she then confidently move on from the experience with a greater sense of independence? Does Elisabet’s slightly vampiric gesture as she leans towards Alma’s shoulder undercut the pride and confidence that seem to appear in Alma’s face?

In that scene from The Passion of Anna, Elis goes on to say that you can’t deduce someone’s inner emotions from their appearance, and offers as proof a photograph of his wife (played by Bibi Andersson) looking joyful while suffering a migraine. Sister Alma has become as inscrutable as this by the end of Persona. Early in the film, she is excessively open, leaving herself vulnerable to Elisabet’s cold, analytical eye. Every fleeting emotion seems to manifest itself in her face. Elisabet, at that point, is aggressively blank. There’s an incredible sideways shot of her in the hospital, where she just looks vacantly into the camera until the key light reflected in her eyes fades out, then she turns and puts her arm over her face, exhausted with the effort of not expressing anything. By the end of the film, Alma seems to have acquired this talent for inscrutability. In her double monologue, for instance, her face remains relatively impassive while Elisabet’s undergoes a series of dramatic changes as she re-lives the emotions Alma is describing. Perhaps Alma ends up achieving what Elisabet was striving for, a non-expressive state, in which no outward action (in her face or her words) gives a reliable clue to what is going on inside. Elisabet, meanwhile, seems more exposed than ever as she is pinned by the camera that swoops down on her.

Or are we just seeing Alma’s fantasies of sadistic dominance, as deluded as were her fantasies of intimacy in the first half of the film? She cuts open her own wrist and holds Elisabet’s face in the blood, before repeatedly slapping her in an a cackling frenzy. Then she imagines being back in the hospital, bullying Elisabet into saying ‘nothing’, as though that would be the only thing she could say if she were to speak. Alma, in her head, is saying to her patient, ‘you need my blood because you have nothing inside you’ (remember the talk in Wild Strawberries of being ‘dead inside’). Her frenzied physical attack is revenge for the slaps she received from Elisabet earlier, and a fulfilment of how she almost responded to those slaps at the time: she made as if to throw boiling water in Elisabet’s face, then grabbed violently at her cheek, both gestures that express a desire to destroy or tear off the face. With Elisabet’s face off-screen at the end, we get the impression that Alma will just go on hitting it until it’s gone. Elisabet has no facial expression here, no reaction shots; after she plunges her face into Alma’s blood, she disappears from view. Earlier on, it was unclear whether Elisabet really had visited Alma’s bedroom, or whether this was just a wish-fulfilment fantasy on Alma’s part, and the later confrontations are similarly opaque.

Both Ullmann and Andersson have a wonderful ability to seem completely earnest and raw at one moment, then completely closed off at another, and much of the pleasure of watching this film comes from seeing how they manage these transitions, trying to interpret their facial expressions, and reflecting on the difficulty or impossibility of doing so. Aside from the examples already mentioned, I especially love what Ullmann does in the early scenes, when Andersson is chatting obliviously at her. If you watch her face carefully, you can see clear signs of impatience and boredom at first, as she wonders how she will cope with having to listen to this self-absorbed woman drone on about her humdrum life and commonplace ideas – she can’t gesture to her to shut up, because this would be more self-expression than she is currently allowing herself, and it would open up some sort of tense, unwelcome dialogue between them. So she’s trapped into listening. But then, as Alma goes on, she becomes a worthy object of this the great Elisabet Vogler’s attention, and Ullmann very subtly transitions her face into a more settled, attentive and receptive state, so that by the time Alma is describing the orgy on the beach Elisabet seems quietly transfixed. And then there’s Ullmann’s unique, ambivalent smile, which is deployed quite frequently in this film. For instance, after the boiling water incident, what does it mean when Elisabet smiles, and then laughs? Is she trying to make peace with Alma? Is Alma wrong to take offence? Without any accompanying words, the smile could just as easily be mocking as friendly, and I think that’s the point of Alma’s response: ‘You always have your laugh, but it’s not so easy for me.’ One way or another, Elisabet retains her superior position by refusing to commit herself, so even if her intent at this moment is friendly, she is in a sense always laughing at Alma, who has no such defences.

A few more random notes:

I love the way the shot of the brick wall, in the prologue, dissolves into the shot of the trees, so that for a few seconds the texture of the bricks seems to be imposed on the tree-bark, as if the trees were made out of bricks. Aside from being a beautiful, disturbing effect in itself, this also anticipates the shots of the rocky beach later on, which accompany Alma’s reading from her book, and the final shot of the film before we return to the teenage boy and the fading projector arc-light. Perhaps channelling the island sequence from L’avventura, Bergman plays with the idea that people are akin to rocks piled on a bleak, lifeless shore, and the prologue’s movement from brick wall to trees to fence to snow to corpses in the morgue eloquently hints at this take on the human condition.

This one gets a bit complicated... Also in the prologue, when we see the nail being driven into the hand, the camera changes angle, then changes back again. This technique is repeated in Sister Alma’s first scene, while she’s listening to the doctor explain the case to her, although this time the camera doesn’t revert back to the original angle. Still, it’s essentially the same technique. The effect in both cases is to disorient us and so draw attention to the artifice of what we’re watching. There’s no reason to show these things from different angles – the re-positioning of the camera doesn’t give us any new information – so it’s completely arbitrary. In the prologue, the nail in the hand comes right after the footage of an actual sheep being slaughtered, which comes after the shot of the spider. Bergman once said that when faced with real-world atrocities, he saw his films as mere bags of tricks, and felt unable to say anything meaningful. The image of the spider alludes to what Bergman said about this same issue in Through a Glass Darkly and Winter Light; the sheep being slaughtered is a terrifyingly real image of death, as real as the news footage and the photo of the Warsaw ghetto Elisabet Vogler looks at later on (recalling The Magician, where Vogler tries to witness and study the moment of Spegel’s death; ‘Spegel’ means ‘mirror’, by the way, and the first film in the faith trilogy is really called ‘Såsom i en spegel’, or ‘As if in a mirror’); the nail being driven into the hand is an impressive special effect, but we know it’s as fake as the fragments of the silent movie (about death and the devil) we see in the prologue. Images of real-world horror drive Elisabet into silence, just as they did Bergman himself. So there’s a lot of complex self-referentiality going on here. But my point is that the film gestures towards its sense of its own futility through that shift in camera angle, first when vainly attempting to portray human suffering (the tortured hand suggesting Christ’s physical pain, an overfamiliar subject for art, and memorably critiqued by Algot Frövik in Winter Light), then when showing the nurse struggling to understand her new patient’s inexplicable, incurable disorder. Even thought I find the prologue to this film slightly irritating in some ways, it’s remarkable how many ideas Bergman manages to allude to, and how many associations he draws between them, in just a few brief images.

The famous shot where Ullmann’s and Andersson’s faces are combined gives me a shiver every time I see it, and I’m sure it was in David Lynch’s mind when he created that even more terrifying shot in Inland Empire (if you’ve seen it you’ll know the one I mean). When we see each face individually, it is half-illuminated and half in shadow, then the two illuminated halves are combined, and I think the consequent elimination of the ‘dark side’ of each face is part of what makes the shot so creepy. The face we see is unnervingly bright, and given the film’s constant concern about self-exposure it also seems worryingly exposed – the face no longer has any shadows to hide in. Because we no longer see a ‘light half’ and a ‘dark half’ in each face, there also seems to be a loss of duality, a disturbing unity to what should seem divided and discordant. It recalls Alma’s confusion earlier when she says, ‘Nothing fits together! Is it possible to be one and the same person at the very same time – I mean two people?’, or her joke about how Elisabet could ‘become her’ easily, except that her soul would stick out at the edges. What’s horrifying about the climactic image of the combined faces is that nothing does stick out at the edges, everything does fit together, and they are both one and the same and two people at the very same time. First, Alma watches Elisabet, through increasingly intimate close-ups, as she (Alma, off-screen) delivers the monologue about Elisabet’s son; then she experiences the scene again, but this time watches herself, from Elisabet’s point of view, as she describes Elisabet’s experiences and emotions – and suddenly she becomes aware of her nightmarish loss of identity in the midst of this out-of-body experience, and screams out, ‘I’m not Elisabet Vogler’, before becoming frozen in a grotesque amalgam of herself and her patient. It’s more than just the realisation that she understands another woman’s feelings about having children because she has the same feelings herself; what might normally be called empathy here crosses over into a loss of identity, which is somehow more frightening because it’s incomplete. Imagine if the body snatchers only robbed you of half your identity... Bergman is anticipating the outright horror film he made right after this, Hour of the Wolf, in which Liv Ullmann’s character is haunted by the prospect of becoming like the husband she has lived with for so long, and been so intimate with, to the point that she has started to share his hallucinations.

[ando]

Thanks for the Strindberg reference. At least now I have a point from which to explore this rather difficult film.