Persona
by Ingmar Bergman
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DVD Cover Information
Actor: Bibi Andersson, Gunnar Björnstrand, Jörgen Lindström, Liv Ullmann, Margaretha KrookDirector: Ingmar Bergman
Brand: ANDERSSON,BIBI
Cinematographer: Sven Nykvist
Producer: Ingmar Bergman
Writer: Ingmar Bergman
Editor: Ulla Ryghe
DVD: Region Code 1
Audio: English (Unknown), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Subtitled); Spanish (Subtitled); French (Subtitled); English (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; Swedish (Original Language), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono; English (Dubbed), Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono
Format: Black & White, Dubbed, DVD, Full Screen, NTSC, Special Edition, Subtitled
Picture Format: 1.33:1
Running Time: 83 minutes
DVD Release Date: 2004-02-10
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
Movie Reviews of Persona
Movie Review: Flying Into the Sun
Summary: 5 Stars
The word "persona" stands for the roles people assume on stage or in the world. It relates back to the masks that actors wore in ancient Greek drama. What happens in art or life when we refuse to wear our masks? What if we can't keep them on? How then are we to live? Persona is perhaps the furthest flight ever made by a filmmaker in search of answers to these questions.
Bergman shot Persona in the mid sixties, a time when all the big constructs - personal identity, the nature of art, the role of the individual in society - were up for grabs. The opening of the movie seems to mirror the intellectual jumble of the times: shots of film stock, a camera, an arc lamp; several disturbing images dredged up from the swamp of the adult unconscious; finally, an adolescent boy in a hospital-like room. The boy gets out of bed and walks toward the blurry, blown-up photograph of a woman's face.
After this disconcerting beginning, Bergman drops us into the actual start of the story. Elisabeth (Liv Ullman) is a famous actress who suddenly refuses to speak. She's sent to a psychiatric institution where she's attended by Alma, a young, seemingly naïve nurse (Bibi Andersson in one of the bravura performances in world cinema). Elisabeth turns on the television in her hospital room and sees one of the sixties' most indelible images: a Vietnamese monk burning himself alive on a sidewalk as a war protest. Perhaps Elisabeth stays silent because she refuses to participate in such a horrific world.
Elisabeth's psychiatrist arranges for a rest cure in a summer cottage on a small island off the Swedish coast, and sends Alma along to care for her. Once on the island, Alma's nurse mask starts to slip. She drinks too much one night and tells Elisabeth about an odd sexual encounter she had several years back with another woman and two boys. We watch the silent Elisabeth drink in Alma's words like a vampire draining the life force from a victim. Elisabeth's voyeurism feels almost repulsive, but then we realize it's no different from our own.
Alma tells Elisabeth that the sexual experience she described led to an abortion, after which she can no longer bear children. Elisabeth then casually reveals Alma's sexual secrets in a letter that Alma peeks at on the way to the post office. This betrayal knocks Alma off center. The kind, deferential nurse deliberately leaves a piece of broken glass where Elisabeth will step on it. Alma doesn't know herself any more, which Bergman dramatizes by cutting to a shot of the film stock snapping in two.
Social conventions are abandoned. Alma gives over to primal emotions - anger, violence, lust, cruelty - to try and break through Elisabeth's wall of silence. Alma attacks Elisabeth for being a monstrous egotist, and accuses her of hating her son and wishing he was dead. Andersson does all the talking in this scene, but the camera is focused exclusively on Ullman's face. Then Andersson repeats the same monologue, word for word, only this time the camera stays fixed on her own face. Now we're not sure if Alma is talking about Elisabeth's son or describing the guilt she felt at aborting her own child. Alma denies that she's like Elisabeth; at the same time, on the screen their two faces merge into one.
From here, fantasy and reality blur even further. In one gruesome sequence, Elisabeth literally sucks the blood from Alma's arm. Alma briefly surrenders. A look of sexual pleasure flits across her face, but then she recoils and slaps Elisabeth viciously across the cheek. In another dreamlike scene, Alma, back in uniform at the hospital, wakes up Elisabeth and holds her. "It's all nothing," Alma says. Which is what all of Bergman's authorial intrusions into Alma and Elisabeth's story seem to be telling us: creative illusions are just that, no thing. Yet they signify everything, and great artists will surrender their social and psychological security in service to them.
The two women pack up and leave the cottage. The movie ends with a series of images that relate back to the opening. There's Elisabeth back on stage - is she cured, or has she succumbed to a worse illness than silence and withdrawal? We see a closeup of a mask sculpture that we saw before outside the cottage, then a cut to the film crew, including the great cinematographer Sven Nykvist behind his camera. Alma flags down a bus, presumably headed back to her "normal" life as a hospital nurse. We see the little boy from the opening sequence again, looking at images of Ullman's and Andersson's faces. The film unspools, and we're staring at a screen gone to black.
For movie that deals with such abstract ideas, Persona is surprising sensual. The camera caresses the faces of Ullman and Andersson; they caress each other; Sven Nykvist sculpts the light into pleasing, mysterious textures. Using only a black and white palette, Bergman turns morning into twilight, sun to shadow, beautiful faces into harpy masks. The rhythms of physical reality shift and morph like the psychological foundations of Alma's identity.
In a sense, Bergman has recast the Icarus myth. Elisabeth soars above accepted social constraints, but may not be able to return to normal life. Too much self-knowledge that she can't emotionally handle melts Alma down, as surely as solar heat melts wax wings. In this, as in his other movies, Bergman, despite his own bouts of incapacitating doubt and despair, simply refuses to stop flying right toward the sun.
Summary of Persona
A nurse is put in charge of a woman who has stopped speaking and soon finds that their two personalities are melding into one.Genre: Foreign Film - Swedish
Rating: NR
Release Date: 10-FEB-2004
Media Type: DVD
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