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Cambridge Film Handbooks
Ingmar Bergman's Persona
Long held to be among the world's greatest filmmakers, Ingmar Bergman shaped international art cinema from the 1950s to the 1980s. Among his many works, Persona is often considered to be his masterpiece and is often described as one of the central works of Modernism. The essays collected in this volume use a variety of methodologies to explore topics such as acting technique, genre, and dramaturgy. Also included are translations of Bergman's writings that have never before been available in English.
- GenresFilmNonfictionEssaysArt
208 pages, Paperback
First published September 13, 1999
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March 9, 2010
Last night, the tanned, shellacked, and post-consumer recycled assembly which, together, is customarily known as the Hollywood establishment/cabal gathered in an auditorium in Los Angeles for the not sole, but primary purpose of contorting its multicellular body into a ceremonial auto-rimjob (of the deep-penetration, non-dental-dammed variety), which was then broadcast to televisions around the world to narcotize the little people with visions of grimacing celebrity death masks and the fascist heel of Jimmy Choo impaling the already wounded souls of Haiti, Chile, and Schaumberg. This event is, colloquially, referred to as the Oscars®. (The Academy of Motion Picture 'Arts' and 'Sciences' has begun litigation to prevent me from invoking the name Oscar®. That's the kind of stuff they do when they're not giving awards to Braveheart. It's a spiritual mission, really.)
I am no enemy of absurdity, triviality, or -- my favorite -- willful stupidity, but if the elite are summoned by a religious calling to celebrate the best and brightest of the cinematic realm -- a sort of star-studded Star Chamber of everybody and anybody who ever went down on Harvey Weinstein -- surely they can shake a stick and hit a few better nominees than Airport, Broadcast News, The Blind Side, Working Girl, Ghost, The Prince of Tides, The Towering Inferno, The Sound of Music, and Rocky... Yes, perhaps your selective memory has allowed you to forget that all of the preceding films were nominated for best picture -- and the last two actually won -- but I never forget, and I never forgive. In all fairness, we really can't expect much better, can we? It would be as if we took the casts and crews of all the Police Academy movies and asked them to select the best film of the year. We could only blame ourselves for our disappointment if we expected them to come up with Last Year at Marienbad or Celine and Julie Go Boating. Sure, the black guy who makes the noises with his mouth might have some surprising taste, but everything's always canceled out by Steve Guttenberg.
TENUOUS SEGUE: In the mid-1960s, Swedish director Ingmar Bergman released one of the most emblematic films of his career. It was a real puzzler of an enigma of a riddle named Persona, starring two members of his Brat Pack (Bibi Andersson and, in her first Bergman outing, Liv Ullmann) and dealing with identity in some obtuse (but compelling) way. The reason I bring up Persona here and now is that it is precisely the last kind of film that would ever win an Oscar®, not because it's not one of the best films of all-time, but because it epitomizes everything that vulgar, knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers associate with 'art cinema': austerity, non-traditional 'narrative,' existential crisis, and ambiguity! ambiguity! ambiguity! Actually, I'm certain there's a large swath of the populace that couldn't even conceive of the fact that a great deal of time, effort, and capital would be invested in the creation of a film like Persona. It would be entirely unintelligible to them -- not the film itself (but that would be unintelligible too), but that anyone else would dare to want to see a film like Persona.
Maybe this all sounds like cultural elitism. Well, it should. Because it is. Far more dominant in American society is anti-intellectualist reverse-snobbery, so this is my juvenile tit-for-that-tat, the ineffective mallet over the well-coiffed head of middle-brow entertainment.
Persona (according to some accounts) is Bergman's attempt to be more a more adventurous filmmaker. In the 1950s, his films were prim, serene, and eminently tasteful -- the litmus test of world cinema -- but long about the late 50s and early 60s, the French New Wave started to make his films look stodgy and inert. Although he expressed his disdain for the New Wave, for its affected gracelessness and haphazard quality -- and for Godard, its poster child, in particular -- some of his acquaintances alleged that he felt an artistic pressure to transcend the tidy Medieval and chamber films of the 1950s and early 1960s. We see the first inklings of this new pressure -- even in its tentative steps -- in the allegorical film The Silence (the concluding installment of his so-called religious trilogy). He dabbles in the Kafkaesque here... where we find Ingrid Thulin and Gunnel Lindblom as sisters (and perhaps more than sisters) in an unnamed country (in the midst of some kind of militarized crisis) where they don't speak the language. The sisters, in pat symbolic fashion, are two aspects of one woman; Thulin is the 'mind,' as it were, while Lindblom is the 'body.'
Bergman's style becomes most radicalized then in The Silence's follow-up, Persona, which is ostensibly the story of an actress Elisabet Vogler (Liv Ullmann) who suddenly stops speaking and engaging at all with the world during a performance of Elektra. (This turns out to be a very purposeful choice of play on Bergman's part considering the Elisabet's complex and callous feelings about her own child.) At the beginning of the film, after the enigmatic prologue, an inexperienced nurse named Alma (Bibi Andersson) is assigned to the care of Elisabet at a clinic or hospital; the setting, as Bergman allows us to see it, is very minimalist and stage-like, underscoring the film's explicit relationship with art and artifice. We only see three people in this hospital, Alma, Elisabet, and the Doctor (Margaretha Krook), thus lending the locale an atmosphere of eerie loneliness and artificiality.
Eventually, the Doctor ships off Alma and Elisabet (in a strange plot point) to her beach house in the hopes that the change will do Elisabet some good. At first, it seems to do the trick, as Alma and Elisabet become BFFs... but then their newfound 'friendship' disintegrates into psychological terrorism and desperation.
At one point during Persona, the film 'breaks.' In other words, we see the film run off the spool and the frames burn up from the heat of the projector. When the film resumes, it is never quite the same and devolves into an obtuse anti-narrative of psychological identity. A great deal has been written about the 'meaning' (and also the style) of the film, since it obviates any definitive explanation, and Ingmar Bergman's Persona (Cambridge Film Handbook) is collection of several essays engaging with the film. The most famous of these is Susan Sontag's, but since, as she made clear in her essay 'Against Intepretation,' she has no intention of reducing a work of art to a slogan or aphorism or condensed meaning, she doesn't attempt to solve the film so much as she expounds on the artfulness of it.
As with most collections of essays on cinema -- and especially about such a seemingly lofty, canonical film as Persona -- you can expect a lot of hyperintellectual nonsense, but this collection, I will say, is better than most, and since the film itself is so opaque, it is interesting to read other people's takes on it, even if you disagree very strongly. Generally speaking, I subscribe to Sontag's tactic of deflecting interpretation in favor of a visceral experience of a film. Why do I need to know what Persona 'means' when I know all too clearly what it does to me?
Postcript: Thirteen years after Persona, Bibi Andersson would go on to play a stewardess in the third horrific sequel to the Oscar®-nominated film Airport -- known as The Concorde: Airport '79, in which George Kennedy opens the cockpit window on a Concorde traveling at supersonic speeds and fires a handgun at a heat-seeking missile that is tailing the flight. Needless to say, there would be no beverage service.
I am no enemy of absurdity, triviality, or -- my favorite -- willful stupidity, but if the elite are summoned by a religious calling to celebrate the best and brightest of the cinematic realm -- a sort of star-studded Star Chamber of everybody and anybody who ever went down on Harvey Weinstein -- surely they can shake a stick and hit a few better nominees than Airport, Broadcast News, The Blind Side, Working Girl, Ghost, The Prince of Tides, The Towering Inferno, The Sound of Music, and Rocky... Yes, perhaps your selective memory has allowed you to forget that all of the preceding films were nominated for best picture -- and the last two actually won -- but I never forget, and I never forgive. In all fairness, we really can't expect much better, can we? It would be as if we took the casts and crews of all the Police Academy movies and asked them to select the best film of the year. We could only blame ourselves for our disappointment if we expected them to come up with Last Year at Marienbad or Celine and Julie Go Boating. Sure, the black guy who makes the noises with his mouth might have some surprising taste, but everything's always canceled out by Steve Guttenberg.
TENUOUS SEGUE: In the mid-1960s, Swedish director Ingmar Bergman released one of the most emblematic films of his career. It was a real puzzler of an enigma of a riddle named Persona, starring two members of his Brat Pack (Bibi Andersson and, in her first Bergman outing, Liv Ullmann) and dealing with identity in some obtuse (but compelling) way. The reason I bring up Persona here and now is that it is precisely the last kind of film that would ever win an Oscar®, not because it's not one of the best films of all-time, but because it epitomizes everything that vulgar, knuckle-dragging mouth-breathers associate with 'art cinema': austerity, non-traditional 'narrative,' existential crisis, and ambiguity! ambiguity! ambiguity! Actually, I'm certain there's a large swath of the populace that couldn't even conceive of the fact that a great deal of time, effort, and capital would be invested in the creation of a film like Persona. It would be entirely unintelligible to them -- not the film itself (but that would be unintelligible too), but that anyone else would dare to want to see a film like Persona.
Maybe this all sounds like cultural elitism. Well, it should. Because it is. Far more dominant in American society is anti-intellectualist reverse-snobbery, so this is my juvenile tit-for-that-tat, the ineffective mallet over the well-coiffed head of middle-brow entertainment.
Persona (according to some accounts) is Bergman's attempt to be more a more adventurous filmmaker. In the 1950s, his films were prim, serene, and eminently tasteful -- the litmus test of world cinema -- but long about the late 50s and early 60s, the French New Wave started to make his films look stodgy and inert. Although he expressed his disdain for the New Wave, for its affected gracelessness and haphazard quality -- and for Godard, its poster child, in particular -- some of his acquaintances alleged that he felt an artistic pressure to transcend the tidy Medieval and chamber films of the 1950s and early 1960s. We see the first inklings of this new pressure -- even in its tentative steps -- in the allegorical film The Silence (the concluding installment of his so-called religious trilogy). He dabbles in the Kafkaesque here... where we find Ingrid Thulin and Gunnel Lindblom as sisters (and perhaps more than sisters) in an unnamed country (in the midst of some kind of militarized crisis) where they don't speak the language. The sisters, in pat symbolic fashion, are two aspects of one woman; Thulin is the 'mind,' as it were, while Lindblom is the 'body.'
Bergman's style becomes most radicalized then in The Silence's follow-up, Persona, which is ostensibly the story of an actress Elisabet Vogler (Liv Ullmann) who suddenly stops speaking and engaging at all with the world during a performance of Elektra. (This turns out to be a very purposeful choice of play on Bergman's part considering the Elisabet's complex and callous feelings about her own child.) At the beginning of the film, after the enigmatic prologue, an inexperienced nurse named Alma (Bibi Andersson) is assigned to the care of Elisabet at a clinic or hospital; the setting, as Bergman allows us to see it, is very minimalist and stage-like, underscoring the film's explicit relationship with art and artifice. We only see three people in this hospital, Alma, Elisabet, and the Doctor (Margaretha Krook), thus lending the locale an atmosphere of eerie loneliness and artificiality.
Eventually, the Doctor ships off Alma and Elisabet (in a strange plot point) to her beach house in the hopes that the change will do Elisabet some good. At first, it seems to do the trick, as Alma and Elisabet become BFFs... but then their newfound 'friendship' disintegrates into psychological terrorism and desperation.
At one point during Persona, the film 'breaks.' In other words, we see the film run off the spool and the frames burn up from the heat of the projector. When the film resumes, it is never quite the same and devolves into an obtuse anti-narrative of psychological identity. A great deal has been written about the 'meaning' (and also the style) of the film, since it obviates any definitive explanation, and Ingmar Bergman's Persona (Cambridge Film Handbook) is collection of several essays engaging with the film. The most famous of these is Susan Sontag's, but since, as she made clear in her essay 'Against Intepretation,' she has no intention of reducing a work of art to a slogan or aphorism or condensed meaning, she doesn't attempt to solve the film so much as she expounds on the artfulness of it.
As with most collections of essays on cinema -- and especially about such a seemingly lofty, canonical film as Persona -- you can expect a lot of hyperintellectual nonsense, but this collection, I will say, is better than most, and since the film itself is so opaque, it is interesting to read other people's takes on it, even if you disagree very strongly. Generally speaking, I subscribe to Sontag's tactic of deflecting interpretation in favor of a visceral experience of a film. Why do I need to know what Persona 'means' when I know all too clearly what it does to me?
Postcript: Thirteen years after Persona, Bibi Andersson would go on to play a stewardess in the third horrific sequel to the Oscar®-nominated film Airport -- known as The Concorde: Airport '79, in which George Kennedy opens the cockpit window on a Concorde traveling at supersonic speeds and fires a handgun at a heat-seeking missile that is tailing the flight. Needless to say, there would be no beverage service.
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January 18, 2025مجموعهی شش مقاله دربارهی دیده و تحلیلشدهترین کار برگمان. (گردآوریشده در سال ۲۰۰۰).
احتمالن شاخصترین مقالهی کتاب تحلیل سوزان سانتاگ از فیلم است که در آن با تاکید زیاد روی افتتاحیه، پایانبندی و فاصلهگذاریِ وسط فیلم (+چند سکانس مهم دیگر)، تز فرمالیستی «علیه تفسیر» را بر فیلم اعمال میکند و یکتنه به جنگ انبوه منتقدانی میرود که یا سعی داشتهاند با وصله و پینه کردن تکهپارههای فیلم، به روایتی منسجم برسند، یا به کل همه چیز را رویا/فانتزی دانستهاند و از بررسی بیشتر سر باز زدهاند.
اما باقی مقالات هم نکات جالبی برای خواندن دارند. یکی از این میگوید که برگمان به عنوان یک فیلمساز بینالمللی همچنان وابستگی زیادی به فرهنگ سوئد دارد. اینکه چطور در پرسونا، برای پل زدن بین داستانگویی و تجربهگرایی از استریندبرگ و دو نمایشنامهی «قویتر» و «یک نمایش رویایی» کمک میگیرد. دیگری از حضور پررنگ ژانر و عناصر ملودرام در فیلم میگوید. تضادهای طبقاتی، ارزشهای خفهکنندهی اجتماعی و امیال ارضانشده.
مقالات دیگر هم که برای من کمتر خواندنی بودند: «پرسونا در بستر سینمای دههی شصت میلادی»، «پرسونا و اغواگری بازیگر» و «خوانش کوئیر از پرسونا»
احتمالن شاخصترین مقالهی کتاب تحلیل سوزان سانتاگ از فیلم است که در آن با تاکید زیاد روی افتتاحیه، پایانبندی و فاصلهگذاریِ وسط فیلم (+چند سکانس مهم دیگر)، تز فرمالیستی «علیه تفسیر» را بر فیلم اعمال میکند و یکتنه به جنگ انبوه منتقدانی میرود که یا سعی داشتهاند با وصله و پینه کردن تکهپارههای فیلم، به روایتی منسجم برسند، یا به کل همه چیز را رویا/فانتزی دانستهاند و از بررسی بیشتر سر باز زدهاند.
اما باقی مقالات هم نکات جالبی برای خواندن دارند. یکی از این میگوید که برگمان به عنوان یک فیلمساز بینالمللی همچنان وابستگی زیادی به فرهنگ سوئد دارد. اینکه چطور در پرسونا، برای پل زدن بین داستانگویی و تجربهگرایی از استریندبرگ و دو نمایشنامهی «قویتر» و «یک نمایش رویایی» کمک میگیرد. دیگری از حضور پررنگ ژانر و عناصر ملودرام در فیلم میگوید. تضادهای طبقاتی، ارزشهای خفهکنندهی اجتماعی و امیال ارضانشده.
مقالات دیگر هم که برای من کمتر خواندنی بودند: «پرسونا در بستر سینمای دههی شصت میلادی»، «پرسونا و اغواگری بازیگر» و «خوانش کوئیر از پرسونا»
November 22, 2020
A few standouts, namely Sontag’s essay (maybe the best writing qua writing in the book) and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster’s lesbian feminist readings of the text (truly the gold standard for film criticism in the zeitgeist of identity politics. Pauline Kael’s review, as uneven as she claims Persona to be, was simply her being fearful at audiences finding her job obsolete.
January 31, 2020
Susan Sontag's essay, one of the finest pieces of film criticism I've ever read, is worth the price of admission. Her prose, knowledge of other critical assessments, and handle on film grammar are astounding, and put the reader exactly where they need to be to tackle this difficult film. The other essays range from good to very good, with each making some excellent points regarding very specific portions of the movie, but none giving any sort of overarching poignancy (beyond the very simple points one can gleam from the film itself). Persona remains one of the great elusive pieces of modern art and this book is a worthy companion, which, like the film, never give you everything you're looking for, which is what you want (isn't it?).
October 30, 2017
Witnessing painful struggles of different writers to decipher one the most debatable works by Bergman, was amazing! Even Sontag seems to have nothing to say apart from reflecting on her perplexed mind about Persona, and yet the book is a good collection of articles. In particular, Christopher Orr's article, "Scenes from the class struggle in Sweden" was quite unexpectedly interesting and Gwendolyn Audrey Foster's projection based on the lesbian critical theory is very informative. I also have to express my admiration to Brigitta Steene's view on the Strindbergian style of Bergman.
January 6, 2020
Ingmar Bergman's PERSONA is a challenging film, to say the least. The essays in this book look at the film from various perspectives: sociopolitical, homoerotic, etc.
This book should not be regarded as a "skeleton key" that enables you to understand PERSONA. (No book will do that.) However, it will enable you to appreciate the movie more, on several different levels.
This book should not be regarded as a "skeleton key" that enables you to understand PERSONA. (No book will do that.) However, it will enable you to appreciate the movie more, on several different levels.
August 15, 2017
Didn't understand a word
August 17, 2012
Depicting the mysterious relationship between an actress who has stopped speaking and the nurse assigned to care for her, Ingmar Bergman's 1966 film Persona is widely regarded as a masterpiece. In this collection edited by Lloyd Michaels, part of the Cambride Film Handbooks series, seven scholars offer their examinations of various aspects of the Swedish director's work.
After Michaels' introduction, Birgitta Steene, regarded as the foremost authority on Bergman, contributes a chapter on the inspiration that Persona draws from the plays of August Stringberg (especially "The Stronger" and "A Dreamplay"), which Bergman had known for decades and directed in the theatre. Then, this volume reprints Susan Sontag's classic 1969 essay on Persona. This is thought-provoking and Sontag brushes aside many of the facile readings by contemporary critics (and still by many viewers today).
Wheeler Winston Dixon's "Persona and the Art Cinema" describes the context in which Bergman's film was shown in theatres, though. He lists the innovative films of the early 1960s and notes how in PERSONA Bergman, though of an older generation, reinvented his art through the inspiration of the New Wave. Steven Vineberg's essay "Persona and the Seduction of Persona" discusses what the performances of actresses Ulmann and Andersson brought to the film.
Two of the essays represent Marxist and lesbian feminist interpretations of Persona, and I find these of little appeal. Christopher Orr's "Scenes from the class struggle in Sweden" claims that the relationship between Alma and Elizabet is necessarily political, as the two belong to different social classes. While he makes some good points, especially in highlighting Brechtian "distancing" techniques in the film, some of his quasi-Marxist assertions on the social relationship that the two women supposedly have seem very reaching.
While Orr had only hinted it, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster goes further in her "Feminist Theory and the Performance of Lesbian Desire" and says outright that she isn't concerned with what the auteur created, but how her chosen viewer interprets it. Well, I came to this collection searching for insights on Bergman's work, so this was useless to me.
As an appendix the book reprints 1967 reviews of the film (some positive, some negative) by Brendan Gill, Pauline Kael and P.D.Z. (an anonymous reviewer for Newsweek). The book also includes a Bergman filmography and a bibliography of books on Bergman in general, but this all feels like padding.
I found this entry in the Cambridge Film Handbooks series worthwhile in that it gave me some new perspectives on what is one of my favourite films. However, with the two overtly ideological essays and the fact that the slim book is obviously padded out, it is hard to recommend it too highly.
After Michaels' introduction, Birgitta Steene, regarded as the foremost authority on Bergman, contributes a chapter on the inspiration that Persona draws from the plays of August Stringberg (especially "The Stronger" and "A Dreamplay"), which Bergman had known for decades and directed in the theatre. Then, this volume reprints Susan Sontag's classic 1969 essay on Persona. This is thought-provoking and Sontag brushes aside many of the facile readings by contemporary critics (and still by many viewers today).
Wheeler Winston Dixon's "Persona and the Art Cinema" describes the context in which Bergman's film was shown in theatres, though. He lists the innovative films of the early 1960s and notes how in PERSONA Bergman, though of an older generation, reinvented his art through the inspiration of the New Wave. Steven Vineberg's essay "Persona and the Seduction of Persona" discusses what the performances of actresses Ulmann and Andersson brought to the film.
Two of the essays represent Marxist and lesbian feminist interpretations of Persona, and I find these of little appeal. Christopher Orr's "Scenes from the class struggle in Sweden" claims that the relationship between Alma and Elizabet is necessarily political, as the two belong to different social classes. While he makes some good points, especially in highlighting Brechtian "distancing" techniques in the film, some of his quasi-Marxist assertions on the social relationship that the two women supposedly have seem very reaching.
While Orr had only hinted it, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster goes further in her "Feminist Theory and the Performance of Lesbian Desire" and says outright that she isn't concerned with what the auteur created, but how her chosen viewer interprets it. Well, I came to this collection searching for insights on Bergman's work, so this was useless to me.
As an appendix the book reprints 1967 reviews of the film (some positive, some negative) by Brendan Gill, Pauline Kael and P.D.Z. (an anonymous reviewer for Newsweek). The book also includes a Bergman filmography and a bibliography of books on Bergman in general, but this all feels like padding.
I found this entry in the Cambridge Film Handbooks series worthwhile in that it gave me some new perspectives on what is one of my favourite films. However, with the two overtly ideological essays and the fact that the slim book is obviously padded out, it is hard to recommend it too highly.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews