Persona (1966)
Directed by Ingmar Bergman, 1966.
Plot
Elisabet Vogler, a famous stage actress, is performing Electra when she suddenly stops talking mid-performance. Medical tests find nothing wrong. She simply refuses to speak. Her doctor sends her with a young nurse, Alma, to recover at a remote summer cottage on a Swedish island.
Alone together, the two women drift into an unstable intimacy. Alma — chatty, open, a little naive — talks to fill Elisabet’s silence. She confesses things she’s never told anyone, including a beach orgy that led to an abortion. Elisabet listens, writes a cruel letter about Alma to her doctor, and Alma finds it. The power dynamic inverts. Alma becomes violent, then broken. Their faces start to merge — the famous shot where half of each actress’s face is composed into a single impossible face. By the end we genuinely don’t know which of them has absorbed which.
The film opens and closes with a montage of film projector mechanisms, an erect penis, a slaughtered lamb, a boy reaching toward an enormous female face. The frame literally burns through at one point. Persona keeps reminding you it’s a film being made, not a story being told.
What It’s About
Persona is a breakdown of identity, psychoanalytic in method even when it’s not in theory. The title comes from Jung — persona as the mask worn for the world — but the film isn’t illustrating Jung, it’s doing its own version of the same problem. Elisabet has stopped performing her persona. Alma is still stuck inside hers. Once they’re isolated together, both structures collapse.
Freud is in here through the confession sequences. Alma’s monologues function as analytic sessions — Elisabet is the silent therapist, extracting material by not speaking, and the material that comes out is repressed sexual guilt. When Alma realizes Elisabet has been using her as an object of clinical interest rather than a person, the wound is betrayal-by-therapist. The rage that follows is transference gone wrong.
The Double structure is the deeper engine. Dostoevsky’s doubles — Golyadkin and Golyadkin Jr., Stavrogin and his reflection — are about the self splitting under moral pressure. Bergman does the same trick with a face: put two faces in a frame long enough and they become one, and you can’t tell whose interior you’re watching anymore.
It’s 83 minutes long, shot in black-and-white, and arguably the most radical film a major European director made in the 1960s. It’s also unusually sensual for Bergman — sunburn, hair, water, breath — even though almost nothing “happens.”
Connections
- Ingmar Bergman — the film where his style becomes fully its own
- Sigmund Freud — the confession / silent-analyst dynamic; sexual guilt as engine
- Dream Psychology — the interpolated dream sequences where Elisabet visits Alma’s room
- Fyodor Dostoevsky — the Double as a vehicle for moral and psychic breakdown
Lineage
Predecessors: Strindberg’s chamber plays; Dostoevsky’s The Double; Dreyer’s close-ups; silent film (the film is partly about what happens when sound is withdrawn).
Successors: Robert Altman’s 3 Women; David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (Lynch has said this film basically unlocked his brain); Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan; every “two women merging” movie of the last fifty years.