DVD of the Week: Persona

Writing in “Images,” his 1990 book of recollections, Ingmar Bergman acknowledged the crucial role in his career and his life that was played by the 1966 film “Persona,” which I discuss in the clip above. Although it’s the story of an actress (Liv Ullmann) who falls catatonic and the nurse (Bibi Andersson) who attempts to cure her and finds herself caught in the actress’s torment, Bergman emphasizes the autobiographical impulse at the heart of the film, connecting it, in particular, to his 1965 essay “The Snakeskin,” which is something of an artistic manifesto:

Literature, painting, music, film, and theatre give birth to and feed upon themselves. New mutations, new combinations occur and are destroyed; viewed from the outside the movement seems feverishly vital, nourished by the artists’ unbridled eagerness to project to themselves and to a more and more distracted audience a world that has ceased to ask what they think…. Generally speaking, however, art is free, shameless, irresponsible, and as I said: its constant movement is intense, almost feverish; it resembles, in my opinion, a snake’s skin full of ants. The snake is long since dead, emptied, deprived of its poison, but the skin moves, full of bustling life.

Bergman had reached the end of something; he sensed that the forms and styles of his chosen art form had been exhausted. He was more interested in the life that inhabited them, and he knew that in some way he had to break through those forms in order to get to that life—and to his own. He added, in a notebook entry that he quotes in the book:

I feel that the final battle is fast approaching. I must not postpone it further. I must arrive at some form of clarity. Otherwise Bergman will definitely go to hell.

The actress played by Ullmann also represents the artist who, in exhaustion and agony, falls silent, and whose silence is both radically destructive of any who get sucked into its vortex yet fiercely creative of an impossible yet necessary way of life that is itself a form of art. To make “Persona,” he subjected himself to a regimen of isolation that was reflected in the film; he shot it mainly on the lonely island of Fårö; and, at that time, he had a house built there, which became his main residence for the rest of his life (except for his eight years in Munich, where he went in 1976 when accused by Swedish authorities of tax evasion). Here’s how Bergman concludes his chapter on the film:

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.

Bergman blends a theatrical subjectivity—scenes of the inner life that defy physical reality and depend on special effects, whether in the film lab or on set—with a tactile visual intimacy, with his characters, the objects close at hand, and the superb coastal landscape. He also captures—or, rather, reveals—the blasted inner landscape of political and historical horrors, the Vietnam War and the Holocaust (which he evokes in a scene involving an iconic image that he examines with a distinctive artistry). Perhaps Bergman could indeed go no further, as, crucially, he conveys the sense that the cinema itself could go no further. In some respects, he was right. It couldn’t go on; it went on.