Ingmar bergman persona

Another possible reference to psychology is that when Elisabet falls mute, the play she is in is Electra by Sophocles or Euripides. By depicting this tension as experienced primarily by women, Bergman may be said to "problematize the position of woman as other"; the role society assigns women is "essentially foreign to their subjecthood".

The theme of merging and doubling surfaces early in the film, when Alma says that she saw one of Elisabet's films and was struck by the thought that they were alike. Analysts have noted possible lesbian under- [ 14 ] and overtones in the film. Foster believed that Elisabet's gaze presents Alma with questions about her engagement to Karl-Henrik.

Persona is the Latin word for "mask" and refers to a mouthpiece actors wore to increase the audibility of their lines. In Greek drama, persona came to mean a character, separate from an actor. Elisabet is a stage actress and, according to Singer, is seen in "mask-like makeup" suggesting a "theatrical persona". Singer wrote that Elisabet wears "thick and artificial eyelashes" even when she is not acting.

According to Singer, Bergman confronts his viewers with "the nature of his art form". Although Alma initially believes that artists "created out of compassion, out of a need to help", she sees Elisabet laugh at performances on a radio program and finds herself the subject of the actress's study. She rejects her earlier belief: "How stupid of me".

Michaels wrote that Bergman and Elisabet share a dilemma: they cannot respond authentically to "large catastrophes", such as the Holocaust or the Vietnam War. Persona also includes symbolism of vampirism. Although psychologist Daniel Shaw interpreted Elisabet as a vampire and Alma as her "sacrificial lamb", [ 74 ] Bergman replied when asked if Alma was entirely consumed:.

No, she has just provided some blood and meat, and some good steak. Then she can go on. You must know, Elizabeth is intelligent, she's sensible, she has emotions, she is immoral, and she is a gifted woman, but she's a monster because she has an emptiness in her. Persona has been called an experimental film. The BFI called Persona "stylistically radical", noting its use of close-ups.

He summarized the blankness before a projector runs, leading to clips of classic animation, a comedic silent film , crucifixion, and a penis, concluding that it summarized cinema. Scenes creating a "strange" or "eerie" effect include Elisabet entering Alma's room, where it is uncertain if she is sleepwalking or Alma is having a dream, and Mr.

Vogler having sex with Alma; it is uncertain if he mistook her for Elisabet. Biographer Jerry Vermilye wrote that despite experimenting with color in 's All These Women , Persona represented Bergman and Nykvist's return to the "stark black-and-white austerity of earlier chamber pieces". According to Vineberg, Ullmann and Andersson's acting styles are dictated by the fact that Andersson does nearly all the talking.

She delivers monologues , and Ullmann is a "naturalistic mime ". Everything is there". Music and other sounds also define Bergman's style. This includes the prologue, with a "discordant" score accompanied by dripping and a ringing telephone. According to Bergman, the story had its roots in a chance encounter with past collaborator Bibi Andersson [ n 10 ] in a Stockholm street.

Andersson, who was with Liv Ullmann, introduced Ullmann to him. This inspired the beginning of his story, a vision of two women "wearing big hats and laying their hands alongside each other". Bergman had been in a romantic relationship with Andersson and was attracted to Ullmann; of Persona ' s conception, Andersson said, "He saw our friendship, and he wanted to get Bergman wrote Persona in nine weeks while recovering from pneumonia, [ ] and much of his work was done in the Sophiahemmet hospital.

Alma remains on the island and plans to write Elisabet a letter until she sees the Holocaust photo and abandons her plan. Bergman appealed to filmmaker Kenne Fant for funding for the project. Supportive, Fant asked about the film's concept and Bergman shared his vision of women comparing hands. Fant assumed that the film would be inexpensive, and agreed to fund it.

And that in these two instances when working in total freedom, I touched wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover. If I had not found the strength to make that film, I would probably have been all washed up. One significant point: for the first time I did not care in the least whether the result would be a commercial success". Bergman had planned to cast Andersson and Ullmann in The Cannibals , a large project he abandoned after becoming ill, but he still hoped to pair them in a project.

That made me the one he wanted to work with Andersson said that she and Ullmann agreed to play their parts as different sides of the same personality, and they assumed that personality was Bergman's. The actress said that they tried to balance each other in their performances. Although the scene where Alma describes her orgy was in the screenplay, Andersson said in that Bergman had been advised to remove it from the film.

She insisted that it be shot, volunteering to alter dialogue she felt was too obviously written by a man. For the scene in which Andersson and Ullmann meet in the bedroom at night and their faces overlap, a large amount of smoke was used in the studio to make a blurrier shot. Bergman used a mirror to compose the shots. The screenplay called for a "close-up of Alma with a strange resemblance to Elisabet".

The actresses were unaware of the effect until a screening in the Moviola. According to Ullmann, the scene where Alma describes Elisabet's motherhood was filmed with two cameras, one filming each actress, and shots of each were intended to be mixed in editing. Then Bergman decided that each angle communicated something important and used both in their entirety, one after the other.

Bergman was unhappy with the sound in the scene where Alma describes the orgy, so he told Andersson to reread the scene, which she did in a lower voice. It was recorded and dubbed in. The score , by Lars Johan Werle , uses four cellos, three violins, and other instruments. Werle described his effort to meet Bergman's requests without a description of the scenes Werle would score:.

Then he came with vague hints about how the films would look, but I understood him anyway and he gave me some keywords I was a little surprised to be part of an artistic work that I had so little time to digest One wonders how it is even possible that one could only see the movie once or twice and then compose the music. Persona was released on 31 August , and its promotional premiere took place on 18 October at the Spegeln cinema in Stockholm.

Combined with the institute's earlier production grant, the project received 1,, kr from the SFI. It opened in the U. The marketing quoted critics, particularly about Alma's erotic monologue. Two scenes censored from the U. The film was released to favorable reviews in the Swedish and U. In Sweden, Dagens Nyheter critic Olaf Lagercrantz said that a cult following of Swedish critics had developed by October and coined the name Person a kult for them.

Crowther wrote that its "interpretation is tough", and "Miss Ullmann and Miss Andersson just about carry the film—and exquisitely, too". Essayists and critics have called Persona one of the 20th century's major artistic works, and Bergman's masterpiece. Reviewing Persona 's home video, Richard Brody credited Bergman for a work that shed realism with special effects and conveyed "a tactile visual intimacy", and praised the film's island setting.

The website's consensus reads: "Arguably Bergman's finest film, Persona explores the human condition with intense curiosity, immense technical skill, and beguiling warmth. Persona won the Best Film award at the 4th Guldbagge Awards. Some of Bergman's later films, such as Shame and The Passion of Anna , have similar themes of the "artist as fugitive", guilt and self-hatred.

David Lynch 's film Mulholland Drive deals with similar themes of identity and has two female characters whose identities appear to merge. Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects. Wikiquote Wikidata item. AB Svensk Filmindustri. Release date.

Running time. Plot [ edit ]. Cast [ edit ]. Themes and interpretations [ edit ]. Identity and duality [ edit ]. Psychology [ edit ]. Gender and sexuality [ edit ]. Art and theatre [ edit ]. Vampirism [ edit ]. Style [ edit ]. Bach's Violin Concerto in E major. Problems playing this file? See media help.

Ingmar bergman persona

Production [ edit ]. Development [ edit ]. Casting [ edit ]. Filming [ edit ]. Post-production [ edit ]. Vogler Gunnar Bjornstrand. They are outside. The child is born deformed, and Elizabeth left it with relatives so she can return to the theater. The story is unbearably painful. It is told with the camera on Elizabeth. Then it is told again, word for word, with the camera on Alma.

It shows their beings are in union. The imagery of this monologue is so powerful that I have heard people describe the scene as if they actually saw it in the film. In all three monologues, Bergman is showing how ideas create images and reality. The most real experience Alma has ever had is her orgasm on the beach. The title is the key.

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from until his death in In , he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism. Persona Drama. The audience is being haunted, as it were, by the sense of a lost or absent meaning to which even the artist himself has no access. But this is, at best, an arbitrary ruling. For instance, the material can be treated as a thematic resource—from which different, perhaps concurrent, narrative structures can be derived as variations.

The difference will probably appear most striking in the treatment of time. The movement is strongly linear, whatever the meanderings and digressions. Each link in the chain is, so to speak, self-abolishing—since it has served its turn. But the development of a theme-and-variation narrative is much less linear. But this forward movement can be sharply qualified by a competing retrograde principle, which could take the form, say, of continual backward—and cross-references.

Such a work would invite re-experiencing, multiple viewing. It would ask the spectator, ideally, to be able to position himself at several points in the narrative simultaneously. In Persona , Bergman uses a mixed approach. But despite this more moderate use of the procedure of temporal dislocation, the construction of Persona is best described in terms of the form: variations on a theme.

The theme is that of doubling, and the variations are those that follow from its leading possibilities—duplication, inversion, reciprocal exchange, repetition. We know this in two ways. Second, by the fact that he has introduced a number of reflections about the nature of representation the status of the image, of the word, of action, of the film medium itself.

The most explicit vehicle for this meditation is the opening and closing sequence, in which Bergman tries to create that film as an object: a finite object, a made object, a fragile perishable object, and therefore existing in space as well as time. Persona begins with darkness. Then follows a final set of images, run off at normal speed. But the boy stirs, awkwardly kicks off the sheet, puts on a pair of large round glasses, takes out a book and begins to read.

Then we see that ahead of him is an indecipherable blur, very faint, but on its way to becoming an image. As if in a trance, the boy slowly reaches up and begins to caress it. The surface he touches suggests a movie screen, but also a portrait and a mirror. Who is the boy? But is it? And then Bergman cuts to the shot of the incandescent arc lamp; the carbons fade; the light slowly goes out.

The film dies, as it were, before our eyes. For one thing, it states on the formal level the theme of doubling or duplication-that is present on a psychological level in the transactions between Alma and Elizabeth. Here, in the very strongest terms, Bergman is playing with the paradoxical nature of film—namely, that it always gives us the illusion of having a voyeuristic access to an untempered reality, a neutral view of things as they are.

But what contemporary film-makers more and more often propose to show is the process of seeing itself—giving the viewer grounds or evidence for several different ways of seeing the same thing which he may entertain concurrently or successively. In the ways that Bergman made his film self-reflexive, self- regarding, ultimately self-engorging, we should recognise not a private whim but an example of a well-established tendency.

What is commonly patronised as the over-exquisite self-consciousness in contemporary art, leading to a species of auto-cannibalism, can be seen—less pejoratively—as the liberation of new energies of thought and sensibility. Rather, It is a statement about the complexity of what can be seen and the way in which, in the end, the deep, unflinching knowledge of anything is destructive.

To know perceive something intensely is eventually to consume what is known, to use it up, to be forced to move on to other things. His work is characterised by its slowness, its deliberateness of pacing, something like the heaviness of Flaubert. And this sensibility makes for the excruciatingly unmodulated quality of Persona and of The Silence before it , a quality only very superficially described as pessimism.

The Latin word persona means the mask worn by an actor. To be a person, then, is to possess a mask, and in Persona both women wear masks. But in the course of the film, both masks crack. One way of putting this is to say that the violence the actress has done to herself is transferred to Alma. Violence and the sense of horror and impotence are, more truly, the residual experiences of consciousness subjected to an ordeal.

It is here, I think, that one must locate the ostensibly political allusions in Persona. Unlike Godard, Bergman is not an historically oriented film-maker. The TV newsreel of a Buddhist immolating himself, and the famous photograph of the little boy from the Warsaw Ghetto, are for Bergman, above all, images of total violence, of unredeemed cruelty.

History or politics enters Persona only in the form of pure violence. His subject is, if you will, the violence of the spirit. If each of the two women violates the other in the course of Persona , they can be said to have at least as profoundly violated themselves. But it is worth noting that this theme need not necessarily be treated as a horror story.

But perhaps the main contrast between Bergman and James on this theme derives from their differing positions with respect to language. As long as discourse continues in the James novel, the texture of the person continues. The continuity of language, of discourse, constitutes a bridge over the abyss of loss of personality, the foundering of the personality in absolute despair.

But in Persona it is precisely language—its continuity—which is in question. It might really have been anticipated. As the purification of language has been envisaged as the peculiar task of modernist poetry and of prose writers like Stein and Beckett and Robbe-Grillet, so much of the new cinema has become a forum for those wishing to demonstrate the futility and duplicities of language.

In Persona , the notion of the burden and the failure of language is developed in a much more complex way. The hopeless dream of being - not seeming, but being. At every waking moment, alert. The gulf between what you are with others and what you are alone. The vertigo and the constant hunger to be exposed, to be seen through, perhaps even wiped out.

Every inflection and every gesture a lie, every smile a grimace. No, too vulgar. But you can refuse to move, refuse to talk, so that you don't have to lie. You can shut yourself in. Then you needn't play any parts or make wrong gestures. Or so you thought. But reality is diabolical. Your hiding place isn't watertight. Life trickles in from the outside, and you're forced to react.

No one asks if it is true or false, if you're genuine or just a sham. Such things matter only in the theatre, and hardly there either. I understand why you don't speak, why you don't move, why you've created a part for yourself out of apathy. I understand. I admire. You should go on with this part until it is played out, until it loses interest for you.

Then you can leave it, just as you've left your other parts one by one. All All. Sign In. Persona Not Rated 1h 23m. Play trailer