This prologue is one of the most debated aspects of this frequently debated film, and while there are numerous interpretations, I see it as fundamentally practical. That is, despite its avant-garde provocations, it very effectively allows Bergman to accomplish two important goals. First, in true modernist fashion, he draws our attention directly to the philosophical point that Persona is a film—an artist’s interpretation of reality, not reality itself. While seemingly obvious, the divide between the cinematic and the real has long been a central debate in film theory, one that was particularly heated in the 1950s and ’60s when Bergman reached the pinnacle of his career. Secondly, Bergman is essentially priming the audience with images because intense visuals are at the constant forefront of Persona. Close-ups of the human face are central to the film emotionally and thematically because we must read a great deal of the action in the eyes of the two principal characters. The film contains dialogue, but most of it is not nearly as important as the exchanges of looks and facial expressions.

The story itself concerns two women: Elisabet Vogler (Liv Ullmann), a seemingly healthy actress who one day decides to stop talking, and Alma (Bibi Andersson), the high-spirited nurse who cares for her. At first, Alma cares for Elisbet at a hospital, but under her doctor’s suggestion, they end up spending the summer together at a house on a small, isolated island. Alma, good, naïve soul that she is, is determined to help Elisabet, and in an effort to pull her out of her (self-imposed?) shell, she talks to her constantly, eventually confiding her utmost secrets (including a sexual encounter that she describes in frank detail) to the apparently sympathetic actress. The thrust of the story is psychological, and the film shows the progression of battle between the two women’s identities, which eventually merge into one, shown symbolically by combining their faces in a single shot. Some critics (Susan Sontag among them) has suggested that the film is not about two people, but about one, which makes Persona a particularly compelling forerunner to the modern puzzle film, which presents one apparent reality only to reveal something much different later on. Bergman is never so obvious as that, but the possibilities are tantalizing.

Persona is a confounding mix of dream and reality, and the distinction between the two—if any—is left almost entirely up to the individual viewer. We are not only unsure of what is “real,” but we are essentially forced to question what constitutes “real” in the first place. Because the majority of the film is shot in a fluid, dreamlike manner (starting with that evocative, psychological pump-priming prologue), it is sometimes difficult to tell when we are in the physical reality of the two women and when we are in their psychological realities—their dreams, their fantasies, their nightmares. This is compounded by Bergman’s insistence on making sure we never forget that this is a work of art instead of reality. So, for example, in one instance he shows the exact same scene twice in a row from different perspectives. Not only does this give us two versions of the same sequence, but it also conveys the sense of a director making two cuts of the same scene, unsure of which one to use (interestingly, in his book Images: My Life in Film, Bergman notes that he shot more retakes while filming Persona than he had on any of his other films).

Bergman wrote Persona at a time of particular difficulty in his life, when he was professionally and personally exhausted from taking on too much work as both a prolific filmmaker and the managing director of Sweden’s crumbling Royal Dramatic Theater. He wrote the screenplay while convalescing for three months at the hospital at Sophiahemmet after suffering double pneumonia, acute penicillin poisoning, and a viral infection in his inner ear that led to intense dizzy spells. He wrote the screenplay primarily as a means of staying creatively engaged and grappling with his increasing disillusionment with the role of art in life (it is no small surprise that the films centers on an actress who purposefully becomes a mute). Bergman had long mined his own neuroses and personal problems for creative inspirations (in Images he writes, “I have always had the ability to attach my demons to my chariot. And they have been forced to make themselves useful”), but something about the intermingling of his professional and artistic crises prior to writing Persona elevated him to another plane. The film is at once his most spare and his most profoundly complex.

Working again with longtime cinematographer Sven Nykvist, Bergman ensures that every shot in Persona is intense and pounding. There are moments of self-aware artistry, in which Andersson and Ullmann appear to be posing for the camera like statuary, and there are other moments of raw emotional torment, such as when Elisabet is horrified at televised imagery of a Buddhist monk burning himself in protest against the Vietnam War. At one point, the film’s emotional register becomes so intense that the image literally burns up on screen, which again confounds the self-aware created reality of the film’s drama with the mechanical nature of its creation (and, in this case, destruction). The film’s at times hallucinatory quality has been compared to Bergman’s previous film The Silence (1961), just as Elisabet’s name conjures up memories of Albert Vogler, the similarly tormented and purposefully mute protagonist of Bergman’s The Magician (1958), which suggests that Persona is both a synthesis of previous themes and aesthetic strategies and a culmination to which the director had been working for years, perhaps unconsciously.

Bergman’s fascination with the human face, especially the female face, finds its greatest expression here, and the film frequently employs close-ups and two-shots to emphasize the uncanny and unsettling similarities between Andersson and Ullmann (a fact of which Bergman had used as inspiration for the story). Bergman constantly reminds us how much they are alike both physically and psychologically, despite being completely different in virtually every other regard. One of the last shots in this film, which recalls a hallucination where Elisabet comes into Alma’s bedroom at night, suggests they will never be able to forget each other, just as virtually anyone who sees the film is unable to forget it. You might not understand it all right away, or even after multiple viewings, but there is nothing about Persona that is forgettable. It is an experience that sticks with you and gnaws at you, compelling you back to it again and again.

Copyright ©2014 James Kendrick

Thoughts? E-mail James Kendrick

All images copyright © The Criterion Collection