Ingmar Bergman’s Persona

“Persona…the personality that an individual projects to others, as differentiated from the authentic self. The term, coined by Carl Jung, is derived from the Latin persona, referring to the masks worn by Etruscan mimes. According to Jung, the persona enables an individual to interrelate with the world around him by reflecting the role in life that the individual is playing. In this way one can arrive at a compromise between one’s innate psychological constitution and society” (Persona 1).

Swedish filmmaker, Ingmar Bergman, when questioned by interviewer John Simon, a writer for The New Leader, about the meaning of his 1966 film, Persona, and the many images it brings to its viewers, responded, “On many points I am unsure, and in one instance, at least, I know nothing…For this reason I invite the audience’s fantasy to dispose freely of what I have put at its disposal” (173).

Though silent about the film’s meaning, Bergman cannot help but reveal, though the portrayals, images, and realities of his characters’ lives—clues to what is behind the many masks he himself wears in his personal and public life. Like his viewers, Bergman’s identity is a result of his experiences, his culture, his associations and relationships with others—acquaintances, friends and family. And, like his viewers, his personality is a product of his pain, suffering, and disappointments. For all of his cunning creativity and artwork, Bergman’s disguise as silent filmmaker belies itself once viewers witness the film. “Many of his stories are assumed to have autobiographical significance, to analyze weaknesses he finds in his own character” (Brophy 7).

But Bergman wears not only one mask of artist and director but rather the many masks of his life’s past. Like the boy who searches for his mother but cannot find her; like Elisabeth, the actress, who searches for understanding but chooses silence as a form of revenge rather than communication; like Alma, the nurse, who searches for meaning in her life but falls victim to the cruelties bestowed upon her by others; like all of us who wear our masks in search of meaning beyond nothingness, Bergman, too, searches, using art as a means to gather possible answers. His innumerable masks interfere, interweave and interconnect with one another until there is no beginning and no end. The masks, the disguises used, are indefinable as a single unit for they are complex beyond description. They are his persona, his identity, which will forever change his viewers’ personae.

In the opening of Persona, underlying the mask of filmmaker who wishes to convince his viewers that what they will be watching is only a film, are the masks of both the happy creative child and the lost abandoned child. “It is in his childhood that Bergman’s best as well as his worst memories dwell” (Lost 1). While Bergman, as a child, had an active imagination, a love of the theater, and a delight for playing games, he was also faced with a tyrannical religious upbringing, often experiencing harsh discipline and psychologically severe punishment at the hands of his father, a puritanical Lutheran minister (Smyth 1). Viewers see the work of the happy creative child, who enjoys games, cartoons, and imagery and who flashes facsimiles of them across the screen. But, along with these amusing images are those of the lost abused child, who hunts for the truth about his mother—a mother with merging identities of evil and good, who could not or would not defend him against an abusive father; a mother who perhaps wished him dead rather than bring him into her world; a mother who had two faces, one silent and cruel, the other nurse-like responsive, talkative, and even soothing at times; a mother who, in fact, was dying at the time Bergman conceived this film and who abandoned him totally and finally in death in 1966 (Facts 1).

Bergman’s mask as patient, recovering from a painful illness at the time he conceived Persona, is also evident. He visits the morgue, where people lay dying, then puts on his mask of philosopher as he poses the question of the existence of God versus the nothingness of death. “Bergman’s interest in life’s enduring questions was undoubtedly fueled by a strict Lutheran upbringing…” (Maltin 3). Torn between atheistic existential beliefs and the possibility of a God who cares, he shows us the hand of Christ who suffers in silence as He is nailed to the cross. Do we live in a world that evolves into nothingness, Bergman asks, or is this Christ truly a redeemer who died to save men from their sins?

Hidden images of Bergman’s life are exposed through the actions of his characters, the seemingly disconnected images cast upon his screen, the dreamlike filming sequences used to express subconscious states and shown in shadowed light upon his surrealist screen (Beaver 126, 331), and through the changing masks of good and evil worn by Elisabeth, the actress, and Alma, the nurse. But film scholars of Bergman’s history, as “maestro of the moving image…colossus among directors” who has earned universal reverence among filmmakers, critics, and viewers through “his penetrating vision and unfailing powers,” know that he is far too accomplished an auteur to give his audiences anything by accident. What may seem like unintentional acts to some viewers is simply Bergman’s way of lending his “compassionate eye” (Smyth 1) to others so that they may discover the pith of his personal questions, confusions and dilemmas concerning the human condition and glean from them their own particular associations, interpretations, and messages.

At first viewing, the film Persona could be construed, by the unaccustomed to Bergman’s work, as a simple tale of two women—one wearing a mask of silence, the other wearing a mask of contentment—who are thrust together more or less through an accident of fate; form what appears to be a friendship of sorts; and then, through close personal contact, interactions, and exchanges, change dramatically taking on elements of each other’s personae. But Bergman’s tale of Elisabeth, the actress, and Alma, the nurse, is far more reaching than this simple synopsis suggests. By placing viewers in the roles of voyeurs, Bergman lays bare to them the fact that we all create and use a variety of various masks to present ourselves to another person or persons, each time using a different disguise depending on a given person, situation, and interaction. Yet, to relieve viewers of excessive responsibility in taking the story too literally, he reminds them continuously throughout the film that what they are watching is, in fact, fiction.

“He primes us, from the beginning, to pay attention to his pictures by starting with an abstract assemblage of shots that includes a scene of film passing through a projector. We are reminded that what we are watching is not reality, but an artist’s reconstruction of it” (Brophy 7). Using tangled, muddled, and mixed images, Bergman pulls viewers away from the story, yet drives home the fact that we are vulnerable to the whims of others, their masks, and their potential to indoctrinate us into their way of thinking, being, acting. Wearing his filmmaker, director, auteur mask, Berman warns that others’ masks, even the evil parts of their personae, may make their way into our own, corrupting us, our thoughts, and our futures. “[W]e don’t simply wear masks; masks, Bergman implies, are what we are and perhaps all we are, and they are capable, at peril of our lives, of being changed indiscriminately and without warning” (Gill 166). As the psychiatrist attending Elisabeth in the hospital scene of Persona, remarks, “…reality is diabolical. Your hiding place is not watertight. Life trickles in from the outside. And you’re forced to react. No one asks if it’s true or false…These things matter only in the theater…hardly even then…”

This life that “trickles in from the outside” may enter our individual beings surreptitiously through silence. And the invasion of silence, Bergman tells his viewers, can be extremely powerful. “Silence is silence itself, and it is meaning without language; silences can be meaningful, just as language can be without meaning. Silence as form of discourse occupies a space even more vast than does language, due to the limitlessness and endlessness of silence and all that silence can imply” (Sendbuehler 1). Bergman notes that silence can not only be powerful but cruel as well, even evil. He shows his viewers how this works, through the portrayal of Elisabeth’s silent departure from the stage and her decision to stop speaking as a way of taking revenge against a world of people who only hear the parts she plays as an actress but who never attempt to reach out or into her spirit to learn that she suffers from tremendous pain and guilt. It is Alma’s misfortune to unsuspectingly enter Elisabeth’s web of deceit where she becomes a pawn in Elisabeth’s plan of destruction.

Alma, once a nurturing caregiver, who has believed that Elisabeth was a friend, a patient to be pitied, a woman like herself, does not recognize Elisabeth’s deception, her wickedness, nor the malignancy of her evil intent. She, therefore, falls victim to Elisabeth’s depravity, absorbs it, and viciously acts out; she deliberately leaves a shard of glass where she knows Elisabeth will step on it with bare feet and threatens to throw a kettle of boiling water in Elisabeth’s face, her new persona teeming with vengeance toward the actress.

While Bergman, as artist and filmmaker, makes no personal claim to the pain, suffering, or violence portrayed through his characters, Elisabeth and Alma, it is the very realness of these feelings coming straight from his soul that strikes the viewer with a sense of astonishment, awareness, and belief that he has endured these elements of life, if only vicariously. The horrors of war and unspeakable crimes against humanity are set before viewers in the form of a Vietnamese monk burning himself on the street, soldiers from Hitler’s Third Reich rounding up Jewish women and children to take them to their final horrific homes in death camps, and in the emotional pain and guilt both Elisabeth and Alma experience in their horror over their most regrettable lives.

Yet, it is the mask of the man who loves women, but is also confused by them, that becomes apparent as Bergman submits to his male desire to control their every movement on screen. His male gaze fixes the women—Elisabeth and Alma brilliantly portrayed by Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson—into roles from which they cannot escape. They are tormented by their plight in life which is to be mothers, their inability to escape lifeless relationships with men, and a patriarchal culture which plays into the idea that women must set themselves against each other in order to achieve any small portion of power. Desire is not something that they easily connect with or even come to know because the way in which they should act, react, or feel has been dictated to them by a male-dominated society.

The many masks of Bergman, as seen in Persona, act as a kind of puzzle that each viewer may put together in her or his individual way. Each individual brings to the film their sets of masks which enable them to see—or find—similarities and differences in Bergman’s production. As Pauline Kael states in her film review, “It may be that an open puzzle movie like this one, which affects some people very profoundly, permits them to project into it so much of themselves that what they think the movie is about has very little to do with what happens on the screen” (171).

Throughout the film, Bergman, in his technical director’s mask, uses “minimal composition and extremely tight close-ups to illustrate the theme of psychological deconstruction.” These tight close-ups and the lack of camera movement forces viewers to study the characters’ faces and the feelings they are expressing, the facades they display, and the different identities they project. (Persona, Review 1). Bergman captures and holds us hostage with his hovering camera as we are forced to feel the cruelty, passion, and pain of the actors playing their roles.

Just as, in the beginning of the film, “twin elements of an arc lamp—the kind that was once used to project moving pictures onto a theater screen—come together in a blaze that floods our vision with light” (Frazer 1), at the end, the film runs out of the camera and the light dies. “Bergman is showing us that he has returned to first principles. ‘In the beginning, there was light.’ Toward the end, there is a shot of the camera crew itself, with the camera mounted on a crane and Nykvist and Bergman tending it; this shot implicates the makers in the work. They are there, it is theirs, they cannot separate themselves from it” (Ebert 2).

Finally, the mask Bergman mainly uses to convey his messages is one of creativity. It is simply Bergman, the artist, playing with film, black and white, shadow and light, close-ups and long shots, interiors and exteriors who tells the story of Persona. Considered a masterpiece among Bergman’s films, Persona, merges all of his many masks into one unique and powerful experience which lends itself to viewer self-interpretation. And, without a doubt, Bergman’s persona, if we, as viewers, stay alert to his ideas, silently steals a spot in our own individual personae through which we may understand that while the tale of Elisabeth and Alma was just a story, we have moved closer to an understanding of how life works, how our lives are entwined with one another’s, and how everything we say and do and show, whether in silence or in sound, leaves a lasting impact on those around us.

By Coralie Cederna Johnson

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