Persona (1966)

Persona is a Swedish film directed by Ingmar Bergman, who lots of people regard as one of the greatest filmmakers of all time. Persona reflects the time it was made and fits perfectly with the experimental, new-wave cinema movement, that was occurring around the world.

I feel most films, most creative acts in general, fall short of something. Most creative acts aren’t challenging. They don’t make you think about the relationship between form and content. They don’t make you think about what it means to be human. They don’t make you think about what it means to create meaning and express transcendent insights. Persona, however, makes you think about all these things.

Another thing that I feel makes art powerful is when it can’t be pinned down or explained away. It’s that suggestibility of certain works of art, that mystery, which seems to most accurately mirror reality itself.

I find it interesting that Persona was released during the same year as two other films which share very similar plot themes. They are all also experimental and challenging. One of those films is The Face of Another (1966) by Hiroshi Teshigahara and the other is Seconds (1966) by John Frankenheimer. I won’t go into detail with these other films, but like Persona they all focus heavily on the nature of identity. They all explore the masks, or personas, that people adopt in daily life. Ultimately, they all suggest that these masks don’t express the truth of what’s behind them.

Persona is self-aware. The experimental prologue shows extreme close-up shots of a film reel, as though we’re inside the film-viewing process. We also see a young boy touching a screen/wall, with a woman’s blurred face on it. This signifies the idea of spectatorship. We’re immediately being invited to think about what it means to make and watch films. We’re being reminded that we’re spectators in the process of watching a work of art. We’re not being asked to suspend disbelief. In the prologue we also see rapid flashes of scenes from silent movies, again asking us to reflect on the art of cinema, the vehicle of expression that we’re currently experiencing. These flashes open the film up, like James Joyce does with literary references in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, showing us how the film is connected to, and owes a debt to, previous films.

The discordant, experimental score in the prologue, by Lars Johan Werle, is fitting, further showing us that we’re inhabiting a different level of reality at this point. The inharmonious score suggests that we’re experiencing a world that bypasses our rational, Newtonian one, suggesting a deeper, more pure form of reality, one where opposites visibly co-exist and apparent discord reigns.