On Screen
SIMON, JOHN
ONSCREEN By John Simon Bergman Redivivus After seeing Ingmar Bergman's Persona twice, I still cannot be sure that I understand it. What I am sure of, however, is that something difficult and...
...Different explanations suggest themselves...
...He puts on glasses and starts reading A Hero of Our Time...
...inner organs being pulled from a sheep...
...cowering actress, then on the malignly triumphant nurse...
...Inside a projector, a film runs off the sprockets...
...Sven Nykvist's cinematograpny?I think black-and-white photography can achieve no greater heights -manages to abolish the boundaries between dream and waking...
...only the women, with their jolly day-clothes, frilly nightwear, or dreamily mingling blondeness generating ephemeral warmth-are masterly every step of the arduous way...
...Like the Magician, Elisabeth is an equivocal figure: There is good but also considerable falsity in her...
...The film begins with a mysterious sequence of unrelated images...
...then diverse forms of fear, cruelty, loneliness, including the spider-God of Bergman's Trilogy...
...And Alma...
...Persona concerns a young nurse...
...In this dream Alma begins by asserting her superiority over Elisabeth...
...Can she go back to her old life as if nothing had happened...
...a nail being hammered into a hand...
...There follows a series of fights and reconciliations in the course of which Alma manages to make Elisabeth step barefoot on a potsherd (a beautifully staged scene), Elisabeth bloodies Alma's nose, Alma threatens to throw scalding water in Elisabeth's face and elicits a screamed "No, don't...
...Bergman himself has said about Persona, "On many points I am unsure, and in one instance, at least, I know nothing...
...It could be a dream but it isn't: almost completely alike in their diaphanous nightgowns, the two women merge in an embrace...
...And, with luck, a magnificent film...
...The boy curls up as in a womb, but is forced to awaken...
...scenes from old-fashioned cartoon and Keystone Kops comedy...
...her eyes close in grief or exhaustion...
...Then what seems to be a morgue: the sound of water (or formaldehyde...
...A telephone rings...
...Alma puts on her uniform again and we see her catch a bus back to town...
...Thus her condition may be caused by the inflamed world, the cooling of the flesh, or by an artful devil within, a devil connected with her art...
...when she hears some austerely classical music, she is close to weeping...
...Again art (Lermontov) is to teach us how to live heroically, but unheroic we (bespectacled) reach out to the Ewig-Weibliche, mother or woman, for help...
...It may thus be a mere flashback, saying that her abdication continues...
...as Alma in a later desperate moment fears, exhibitionism...
...At this point the film once again jumps off the sprockets, as it did also after the first big quarrel between tne women, suggesting that art cannot resolve this problem: Life is too much for it...
...And her silence is evil—just as in Bergman's The Silence, non-communication, however innocent-seeming, is always bad...
...The artist and the ordinary human being need each other, but this is a love-hat-e, a fight for absolute power over the other...
...We see Mrs...
...The two young women take to each other, communicate even through shared aestival experiences, but Elisabeth persists in her speechlessness...
...Now the story begins...
...Liv Ullmann's actress and, even more so, Bibi Andersson's nurse, are overwhelming characterizations, the one making silence, the other chitchat, supremely eloquent...
...And why do we see only Alma leaving...
...It seems to me that those initial images represent the pitifully limited efforts of art (film) to grasp reality...
...She even implacably forces Elisabeth to repeat after her the word "Nothing"-giving her speech only to take away meaning...
...That Elisabeth is to be taken as a symbol of the artist is confirmed by the fact that she is called Vogler (i.e., fowler) like the hero of Bergman's The Magician, who more manifestly embodies the artist...
...First it is their clothes that progressively resemble each other...
...or we the word...
...then we see shots of them in which their bodies seem to fuse...
...Alma suffers a frightening breakdown in her dream: She talks nonsense (in which, however, the blending of egos is implicit), beats a table and then Elisabeth, rends her own arm and gets the wound sucked by the actress-samaritan-ism or vampirism...
...Alma, who is to look after Elisabeth Vogler, a famous actress who has lapsed into absolute silence...
...The latter's husband, blind in the dream, arrives and makes love to Alma, thinking her his wife, as Elisabeth abets and watches...
...Does this mean that, cured, she resumes her work...
...What I am sure of, however, is that something difficult and elusive is struggling to gain form and recognition here...
...We don't see Elisabeth leave, but there is a shot of her playing Electra again...
...the seaside, beautiful yet also harsh...
...she learns that the actress is really having fun with her, studying her as a subject for her art...
...Never before on film has the derailed psyche been more penetratingly examined, never before has the drama been played so consistently beneath the surface, yet without the slightest sacrifice in palpable excitement...
...Relatives, lovers, friends, all who are sucked into this conflict, suffer along with the principal combatants...
...In the morning, the women, silent and hostile, pack their respective bags...
...To illustrate that this is sheer projection, as well as insane identification with the other, Bergman gives us the scene twice: first focusing on the (guiltily or innocently...
...Thereupon the two women's faces contract into a split but single tortured countenance...
...But has the word failed us...
...The whole film appears to be shot from inside out: The tormented and tormenting soul is not so much viewed as allowed to express its own views, to impress us with its awesomely human inhumanity...
...But it is the same shot we saw when we were told of her breakdown...
...She also tells Elisabeth about an incident on a beach where she and a highly-sexed girl sunbathed naked and were observed by two very young boys...
...Alma, who awake kept asserting her insignificance vis-a-vis the great actress, now transcends her...
...An abortion resulted, about which she still feels guilty...
...Significantly, when a romantic play reaches Elisabeth over her radio, she laughs...
...He stretches his hand toward the apparition, but her eyes close and she fades out...
...They seduced the boys and even passed them on to each other, Alma experiencing the greatest sexual satisfaction of her life...
...The result of the strife is madness, whether feigned or real hardly matters...
...Alma (the name may come from the Latin '"nourishing, bountiful," or from the Celtic "all good") confides more and more in Elisabeth...
...Then the final isolation, death -non-being out of which we are summoned into life...
...A woman's face begins to appear to By John Simon Bergman him, in and out of focus, on a translucent wall or screen...
...Could the entire tale have taken place in Alma's mind????was there only one person all along, assuming various "per-sonas," i.e., actor's masks...
...There is a certain "subjectivity" or "arbitrariness" in the scenes included: "For this reason I invite the audience's fantasy to dispose freely of what I have put at its disposal...
...Their complete communion is illusory and painful-only a dream, a nightmareyet also real enough, perhaps...
...Barely perceptibly, Alma and Elisabeth begin to merge...
...dripping...
...to mark them both...
...The woman doctor sends Alma and Elisabeth off to her seaside villa for what is to be a therapeutic summer...
...Then comes a nocturnal scene during which Alma repeats aloud some affectionately cautionary whispers of Elisabeth's, thinking the words her own...
...As emerges from an admonitory speech of the woman doctor, Elisabeth may simply be essaying yet another role: Finding it impossible to be real, she prefers to sham muteness...
...Unforgiven, she lapses into a terrifying dream...
...Life and art batten on each other, art sucking life's blood, life trying to cajole or bully art into submission, into becoming its mirror...
...She tells the alertly, indeed avidly listening actress about her first unhappy love affair, about her current engagement to a decent but plodding fellow who cons'ders her a "sleepwalker," of her work which she enjoys and hopes to go on with...
...From a letter from Elisabeth's husband that Alma reads out loud to her, we learn that something has gone deeply wrong with that marriage...
...that, unlike in a film such as Accident, the complexity and obscurity are unavoidable, and not merely gratuitous mock-profundities...
...In a frightening scene, Alma tells Elisabeth how she, the actress, tried to avoid maternity but, trapped into it, proceeded to make her boy an emotional cripple...
...Is this therapy, friendship, or...
...Bergman's dialogue, rhythms, and mise en scene-the hospital, all vacuous white austerity...
...She eludes us...
...There is a scene in which Alma runs barefoot over rocks after Elisabeth, pleading and humbling herself...
...Later there are little hugs and similar endearments...
...Like Vogler in that film, she too is first seen in a black wig (for Electra) and then in her natural blonde hair...
...I can only guess at the ultimate meaning...
...Alma reads a letter of Elisabeth's she is supposed to mail...
...after which the silence resumes even thicker...
...various winter landscapes, including a picket fence...
...The crypto-lesbian experience with the boys on the beach assumes a deeper meaning...
...Vogler in her hospital room in anguish as she watches on the TV screen a Buddhist monk's fiery self-immolation-what is the death of one Agamemnon to the horror of Vietnam...
...The end is, at best, a draw...
...a spider in extreme close-up...
...an old man, a crone, a boy laid out and covered with sheets...
...Next morning, Elisabeth denies everything with a shake of her head...
...A woman psychiatrist tells Alma that the patient's mind and body are perfectly sound, but that she simply stopped speaking after a performance of Electro...
...The possibilities of communication seem to begin where the word ends...
Vol. 50 • May 1967 • No. 10
