The Favorites - Persona (#95)

Again, scheduling conflicts send my Favorites post to a Monday. When the series resumes in January, I will probably return to Wednesday. Meanwhile stay tuned this week. I am going to be very busy with Lost in the Movies. To put it mildly...

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. Persona (1966/Sweden/dir. Ingmar Bergman) appeared at #95 on my original list.

What it is • Elisabeth (Liv Ullmann) is mute, by choice apparently. An actress horrified by the world around her (represented by the image of a burning monk in Vietnam) and oddly fascinated by a photo of her young son, her silence seems an alluring mystery. And it's a mystery that we sense Alma (Bibi Andersson), like us, wants to solve. Alma is normal, chatty (she more than compensates for Elisabeth's lack of conversation), and the actress' nurse, watching over her during a recuperative rest at an isolated seashore. She tells Elisabeth all about her life and, as the quiet but intense Elisabeth - taller, enigmatic, more self-possessed than Alma - slowly starts to take over the nurse's fragile mind we don't get closer to any simple answers. Somehow, though, we do feel we're getting closer to the experience, what philosophers might call the "phenomenon," of Elisabeth's withdrawal from the world. The prolific, intensely personal Ingmar Bergman made many celebrated movies, but Persona is often acclaimed as his masterpiece - the most intense, the most personal, at once an icon of 60s art-house chic and a supremely individual expression. At no point moreso than when the babbling Alma, suffering what seems to be a mental breakdown, lets loose a stream of self-doubt and incoherent anxiety. We suddenly sense - with the shock of an epiphany - that Bergman himself is letting down his guard and telling us what it's like inside his own head.

Why I like it •

Persona

This is an entry in "The Big Ones," a series covering 32 classic films for the first time on The Dancing Image. There are spoilers.

Here is a film that is quite different from the last one in this series. The Passion of Joan of Arc may be a film “that does the work for the viewer” – one which does not need theories or code-cracking or interpretation or (most importantly) collaboration in order to cast its spell, so potent are the images themselves. Persona is very much a “meet me there” movie, its tantalizing wisps and fragments invitations (to a masked ball, no doubt) rather than letters declaring their purpose. When I mentioned this would be a film I covered, a commentator noted that Persona is like a “Rorschach Test,” a notion that is appropriate not just to the viewer’s experience with the film but for the characters in the film itself – particularly Alma, the insecure nurse asked to look after intentionally mute actress Elisabeth in a lonely beach cottage.

What do I see in the ink blot? Appropriately enough, something a bit different each time, though the overall shape and contours remain consistent. Persona was one of the first foreign films I saw, when I was a teenager, and I cottoned to it right away. Some have noted a dreamlike quality to the film but I get there more from the similarly-themed 3 Women and Mulholland Drive; Persona has something more lucid about, something more reminiscent of heightened awareness during waking hours. Bergman can get pegged as an overly cerebral filmmaker, but I think he’s always grounded in sensuous experience – an engagement with the environment (acutely expressed through the evocative soundscapes in his movies).

That Total Film 1964 - 1966 • "32 Days of Movies" Day 16

The sixteenth chapter in "32 Days of Movies", an audiovisual tour through 366 films.
(2015 update: included Vimeo embed after the jump)

View "Chapter 16: That Total Film"

That Total Film

The films in today's chapter form an entity thrilling, melancholy, beautiful, and tragic - the end of a beginning and the beginning of an end. When asked to write about Fists in the Pocket forty years later, Jean-Pierre Gorin noted ruefully, "every scene ... with the convulsive beauty of its framing and composition, amply proves how much this period was made by people so steeped in classical culture that they fantasized it could be solid beyond its fragility, shaking it to the core and ultimately ushering in a world they could themselves hardly live in." Oh, you can see that all over the place today, in a chapter that - not accidentally - finds itself exactly halfway through the series, to the point where the closing clip is even divided in two, to be concluded tomorrow.