Ingmar Bergmans

Persona
Edited by

LLOYD MICHAELS

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

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CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Cambridge University Press 2000
This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
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the written permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2000
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A catalog record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ingmar Bergmans Persona / edited by Lloyd Michaels.
p. cm. (Cambridge film handbooks)
Filmography: p.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-521-651751. ISBN 0-521-65698-2 (pbk.)
1. Persona (Motion picture) I. Michaels, Lloyd. II. Series.
PN1997.P464154
1999
791.4372 dc21
ISBN
ISBN

0 521 65175 1 hardback

0 521 65698 2 paperback

Contents

Acknowledgments
List of Contributors
Bergman and the Necessary Illusion
An Introduction to Persona

page xi
xiii

LLOYD MICHAELS

Bergmans Persona through a Native Mindscape

24

BIRGITTA STEENE

Persona and the 1960s Art Cinema

44

WHEELER WINSTON DIXON

Bergmans Persona

62

SUSAN SONTAG

Scenes from the Class Struggle in Sweden

Persona as Brechtian Melodrama

86

CHRISTOPHER ORR

Persona and the Seduction of Performance

110

STEVE VINEBERG

Feminist Theory and the Performance of Lesbian Desire

in Persona
130
GWENDOLYN AUDREY FOSTER

Filmography

147

Reviews of Persona

165

Select Bibliography

177

Photographic Credits

181

Index

183
iii

LLOYD MICHAELS

Bergman and the

Necessary Illusion
AN INTRODUCTION TO PERSONA

I. SCENES FROM A MOVIE

1. The darkness of the movie theater is suddenly illuminated
on screen by the flash of light from the projector arc, followed by a shot
of film leader running through the machine. Images of unrelated figures
an animated cartoon, close-ups of hands, a spider, an eye, animal
entrails alternate with blinding reflections of white light off the empty
screen, accompanied by abstract sounds. After the shocking close-up of
a human hand with a spike driven through it, the picture dissolves into
a montage of wintry scenes and of aged faces, apparently corpses, as we
become aware of the sound of dripping water and then a distant ringing. The close-up of an elderly woman viewed upside down suddenly
cuts to the same shot with the crones eyes now wide open. A strangelooking boy lying under a sheet slowly awakens, puts on glasses, and
begins reading a book, only to be disturbed by the presence of the camera, which he tentatively reaches out toward to touch. A reverse shot
reveals the object of his attention to be a huge, unfocused still of a
womans face; this image gradually shifts to the close-up of what seems
to be another woman, one who closely resembles the first. The boys
extended hand traces the elusive figure, separated from him by the
screen, as the sound track becomes high pitched and intrusive. The
titles begin PERSONA/EN FILM AV INGMAR BERGMAN separated
by a series of nearly subliminal shots, some of them recognizable, others obscure, while the sound track intensifies the effect through percussive drums and xylophone. The movies story, set in a hospital room,
begins. (612 minutes; nearly 60 shots)
1

LLOYD MICHAELS

2. Sister Alma, a nurse, relates to Elisabet Vogler, an actress and her

patient, the story of a past sexual misadventure: she had once participated with a friend in an erotic coupling with two very young boys on a
beach. She then had sex that evening with her fianc, the most pleasurable lovemaking during their long engagement. Shortly thereafter, Alma
discovered she was pregnant and decided to abort the child. While she
recalls this intensely sensual experience, the camera remains within the
bedroom, alternating between close-ups of the nurses face and that of
the impassive listener who resembles her. Elisabet, wearing a similar
white nightdress, reclines on the bed smoking and remaining silent
throughout the scene as Alma fidgets in her chair, paces across the
room, lights a cigarette, and finally collapses into the other womans
arms. (nearly 7 minutes; 10 shots)
3. The same two women, now dressed in black turtlenecks, sit across
a table confronting each other. Alma describes in menacing detail the
pregnancy and mothering impulses of Elisabet, who again remains
silent during the entire account. Mrs. Vogler had felt incomplete because
her friends said she lacked motherliness and so conceived a child
whom she grew to hate even before it was born. Despite her cold and

BERGMAN AND THE NECESSARY ILLUSION

indifferent attitude toward her son, whom she had wished dead and
now finds repellent, the boy loves her with total devotion. The monologue begins with a two-shot of Alma speaking in the foreground darkness, back to camera, with Elisabet facing her and the camera; as it proceeds, the shot dissolves into two successive close-ups of Elisabets face,
her left side (right side of the frame) brightly lit, the other side in darkness. After Almas indictment concludes (You think hes repulsive, and
youre afraid), the scene begins over again, the speech recited verbatim,
this time with the camera repositioned so that Elisabet is now in the left
foreground darkness, back to the camera, while Alma, half lit from the
left, is seen in close-up. As the monologue reaches its climax for the second time, however, the dark side of her face is briefly transformed into
half of Elisabets face, which then disappears as Alma cries, Nay! But
within moments, the strange close-up returns and remains, a composite
of the two bad sides of the actresses faces, as the silence is disturbed
by a single dissonant chord. (8 minutes; 11 shots)
These three sequences, comprising one-fourth of the films total
running time, may serve to introduce the enduring artistic

LLOYD MICHAELS

achievement of Ingmar Bergmans Persona. Utterly original at the

time of the films first release and virtually unrepeated in any
movie since, they each offer a unique cinematic experience, one
that is simultaneously mysterious and beautiful. The opening
sequence, for example, goes beyond simply establishing certain
images that figure prominently later in the narrative (hands, a
rocky beach, upside-down faces) or presenting, as Bergman himself describes it, a poem about the situation in which Persona had
originated.1 By alternating brilliant whiteness and sharply contrasting dark images in a rapid montage (particularly in the credits), the film recapitulates the ontology of the cinema itself literally immersing the audience in the flicks that bring life out of
darkness in the expectant movie theater. A careful scrutiny of the
body language of spectators during the beach orgy sequence will
confirm the authority of Bergmans conjuring art. Without resorting to flashbacks or cutaways, without removing a stitch of clothing from either of the beautiful women in the frame, he creates
one of the most intensely erotic moments in the history of the

BERGMAN AND THE NECESSARY ILLUSION

cinema. I have observed a class of unsophisticated students, many

of them watching their very first art film, lean forward, lips parted, bodies absolutely still as they take in this scene, faintly disturbed by its lesbian undertones but totally absorbed by the unanticipated urgency of the events both described and witnessed as
well as their lasting consequences. By the time these same students come to the films equally celebrated double monologue,
after frequently expressing an audible gasp (or groan) of recognition at Bergmans experimental device, they immediately concentrate on comprehending the nuances of the repeated tale and its
shattering final close-up. Few of these undergraduates are prepared
to interpret Persona immediately after its conclusion, but fewer
still remain unmoved or unwilling to embark on a discussion of
its significance.
The puzzled, tentative quality of these initial classroom discussions can also be found in the contemporary reviews of Persona by
some of Americas most literate critics. Although generally praising the film, they tend to shy away from definitive interpretation,
preferring instead to describe its sensory effects and to hazard
some speculations as to their possible meaning. More thorough
readings of the text emerged later, but no less an authority than
Peter Cowie, Bergmans biographer, has declared (somewhat
hyperbolically), Everything one says about Persona may be contradicted; the opposite will also be true.2 Perhaps encouraged by
this critical license, dozens of fascinated viewers, including myself,
have scrutinized the haunting images that comprise the films
eighty-four minutes in order to produce partial explications of
what continues to be one of the most complex films ever made.3

II. THE CRITICAL RECEPTION OF PERSONA

From the moment of its American release in 1967, Persona
has been considered among Bergmans masterpieces; indeed,
many critics regard it as one of this centurys great works of art.4
The influential French journal Cahiers du cinma has called it
Bergmans most beautiful film, and an international panel of

LLOYD MICHAELS

critics and scholars polled by the British magazine Sight and Sound
has ranked it among the ten greatest films of all time. Ratings and
reputation aside, Persona certainly stands today as one of the
supreme examples of modernist art the cinema has yet produced.
Like the central works of modernism in other forms Picassos
cubist paintings, Pirandellos plays, Eliots The Waste Land,
Joyces Ulysses it exhibits the qualities of fragmentation, selfreflexivity, and ambiguity associated with the movement that
came into prominence at the beginning of the century while
retaining a spirit of experimentation that makes it still seem a
film in search of its own laws.5 At the same time, Bergmans trust
in the integrity of his own intense vision along with his technical
mastery of the medium at this stage of his filmmaking career raises Persona to a new level of accomplishment, modernism becoming classical before our very eyes.6
Despite the evident cultural status of Persona, surprisingly little
has been written about the film during the past decade. Several
reasons account for this recent neglect. The first is probably the
spate of excellent analyses produced relatively soon after its
enshrinement in the modern canon, beginning with Susan Sontags remarkable review essay included in the present volume.
John Simons Ingmar Bergman Directs selected Persona along with
three other Bergman films for close analysis, deciphering shot by
shot the self-referential allusions of the prologue and providing a
formalist analysis of the films narrative structure. Bruce Kawins
Mindscreen tackled the question of point of view, defining Personas
subjectivity in terms of psychological processes related to self-conscious narration. And Paisley Livingston examined the film as an
extension of Bergmans ongoing concern with the role of the artist
in Ingmar Bergman and the Rituals of Art. The scope and intellectual
rigor of these critical works seem to have inhibited current scholars Robin Woods reassessment of his own earlier auteurist study
of Bergman, an article cited by some of the authors in this collection, remains a notable exception from undertaking new
appraisals of Persona. Another reason may be political: Following
his retirement from filmmaking after Fanny and Alexander (1983)

BERGMAN AND THE NECESSARY ILLUSION

and with the ascendancy of postmodernism (for which Quentin

Tarantino has become a cinematic poster boy), Bergman has come
to be regarded as a conservative artist of the somewhat devalued
humanist tradition. Against the preference for mask and gesture
found in postmodernist narrative, Bergman, despite the title of
this film,7 has chosen to focus on the face and the existentialist
necessity for willed action of the sort commended by Eliot in the
last lines of The Waste Land. Although few younger critics
would deny the achievement of the body of his work, not many
seem interested in exploring the gravitas of his cinematic vision
for a new generation. Moreover, the European art cinema that had
originally nourished him and of which Bergman became the
supreme exemplar, has steadily declined since his own retirement.
In a related development, the various directions that academic
film studies have taken in the past twenty years toward nonWestern cinema, studio history, queer theory, and B-film production, among others have not seemed conducive to continued
examination of essentialist films like Persona. That is, until now.
The original essays anthologized here reflect a number of new
critical approaches to the film, exploring such relatively ignored
areas as genre, dramaturgy, female sexuality, and acting technique.
Christopher Orrs analysis of the melodramatic elements and
Brechtian influences in Persona, for example, serves to refute
Andrew Sarriss contention, still widely held, that Bergman is
essentially an artist in an ivory tower in an isolated country8;
Gwendolyn Foster provides insight into the relations between the
two women through a feminist psychoanalytic vocabulary
unavailable to the critical discourse of an earlier generation. Collectively, these new essays suggest that much productive work
remains to be done on not just Persona but the entire canon of
this remarkable filmmakers long career.

III. THE LIFE AND TIMES OF INGMAR BERGMAN

Along with near contemporaries Federico Fellini, Luis
Buuel, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Akira Kurosawa, as well as

LLOYD MICHAELS

the younger Nouvelle Vague directors Franois Truffaut, Jean-Luc

Godard, and Alain Resnais, Ingmar Bergman helped shape the
international art cinema for more than thirty years until his retirement with Fanny and Alexander. Since then, through his continuing career directing for the stage and writing screenplays, memoirs, and personal reflections, as well as recent retrospectives of his
films as major cultural events in New York and Stockholm, he has
come to be seen as one of the monumental artists of the second
half of the twentieth century. Although it is only fair to acknowledge that he is presently somewhat out of favor among many
younger scholars, his contributions to the art of cinema remain
fundamentally unchallenged:
1. Bringing intellectual content and the emotional force of language to the screen. Bergmans were among the very first
screenplays to be regularly collected and published in America.
2. Exploring the expressive potential of prolonged silences in a
medium that had cluttered the sound track since the arrival of
talkies.
3. Refining the film score to complement what he envisioned as
the cinematic equivalent of chamber music.
4. Restoring the aesthetic value of the close-up to a prominence
it had not achieved since the silent masterpiece of fellow
Scandinavian director Carl-Theodor Dreyer, The Passion of Joan
of Arc (1928).
5. Expanding the compositional qualities of the frame and creating, along with his celebrated cinematographers, Gunnar Fischer and Sven Nykvist, some of the most celebrated long takes
in film history.
In no other Bergman film are all of these achievements more
prominent than in Persona. Indeed, after watching it again many
years later, the director would write, Today, I feel that in Persona
. . . I had gone as far as I could go.9
Bergmans life, much of it reflected quite openly on the screen,
can be understood (if necessarily reductively so) as a product of

BERGMAN AND THE NECESSARY ILLUSION

his Lutheran bourgeois upbringing and the existentialist angst of

postwar Europe. He was born on July 14, 1918, in Uppsala, Sweden, the middle child of strong-willed parents, Eric and Karin. His
father soon moved the family to Stockholm, where he was
appointed chaplain to the Royal Hospital and, in 1934, parish
priest at Hedvig Eleonora Church. In his autobiography, The Magic
Lantern, Bergman recalls his childhood as marked by perpetual
cycles of sin, confession, punishment, forgiveness, and grace.10 A
sickly, sensitive child, Ingmar found refuge from the discipline
imposed by his parents during frequent visits to his widowed
grandmothers home in Uppsala, where he indulged in fantasies
about the antiques and old photographs that had filled her apartment for a half century, listened to her nostalgic stories, and often
accompanied her to the local movie theater. But even his grandmother, with whom he felt an intuitive bond of tenderness, could
be a source of fearful punishment, once locking him in a dark
closet to atone for some forgotten misbehavior. Ingmar found a
more permanent sanctuary in his childs puppet theater and, later,
a magic lantern projector that had been a Christmas present for
his older brother Dag, who swapped it for Ingmars collection of
tin soldiers. Karin Bergman was a devotee of the theater and
encouraged her imaginative, reclusive son in his early fascination
with puppetry and primitive filmmaking. Ingmar built elaborate
sets for his marionettes and staged well-known plays for his private amusement. In addition to the technical training and experimentation this hobby provided, some biographers have suggested
that Bergmans boyhood interest may have influenced both his
own early reputation as a demon director intent on controlling
every aspect of his stage and screen productions11 and his predilection for deterministic themes in many of his films.
Bergmans distance from his parents, linguistically signified by
his avoidance of the intimate pronoun du in his relations with
them, grew into adolescent rebellion that climaxed in an argument in which he assaulted his father, insulted his mother, and
left home permanently in 1937. The next year he enrolled in
Stockholm University, where he soon became involved with the

10

LLOYD MICHAELS

student and local theaters, leaving the university in 1940 but continuing to stage plays, including one of his own, The Death of
Punch (1942). In January 1943 he began working as a scriptwriter
for Svensk Filmindustri (SF), Swedens most prestigious company
since the glorious silent era of Victor Sjstrm (who was to play
the starring role in Bergmans Wild Strawberries [1957]) and Mauritz Stiller (the man who discovered Greta Garbo). Many of the
technicians and craftspersons had worked at SF for decades, so
Bergman was trained by more experienced instructors than he
could have found at the university or film school. Two months
after joining the production company that employed him for the
next twenty-six years he married Else Fisher, the first of his five
wives; a daughter, Lena, was born in December.
As it had during World War I, Sweden remained neutral
throughout World War II, a period that saw Bergmans dual career
in theater and film begin to flourish. His first screenplay, Torment,
was filmed by the distinguished Swedish director Alf Sjberg, soon
followed by his own directorial debut, Crisis (1946), which he also
wrote. As these early titles and his personal life suggest (estranged
from his own family, by the end of 1946 he had divorced, remarried, and fathered two children), Bergman was living and working
at a fever pitch. The movies of his apprenticeship often deal with
the stressful circumstances of a young couple, as if Bergman were
expressing both his own anxieties and those of a guilt-ridden
nation that insisted it too knew about suffering. Add to this cultural context the rising influence of French existentialism, and
Bergmans absorption in the philosophical/theological questions
that mark his mature work are not difficult to comprehend.
The dozen or so pictures that mark Bergmans first decade at SF,
although varying in style from the gritty urban neorealism of Port
of Call (1948) and melodramatic fatalism of Prison (1949) to the
lyrical eroticism of Summer Interlude (1951) and Monica (1953), all
reflect with the singular exception of Sawdust and Tinsel (1953),
an anomaly that anticipates his metaphysical costume dramas of
the mid-1950s the resistance of youthful, restless characters to
the conventions of contemporary Swedish society. These early

BERGMAN AND THE NECESSARY ILLUSION

11

works, although competently crafted and sincerely felt, were not

huge successes in Sweden. It was Bergmans continuing activity in
the theater, a tradition among Swedish filmmakers, along with the
loyal patronage of Carl Anders Dymling and Victor Sjstrm at
Svensk Filmindustri, that sustained him. He directed an average of
three plays a year throughout the country, many of them at the
Gothenburg City Theater, during this period, which introduced
him to several of the performers he would later incorporate into
his films. Indeed, Bergman has never abandoned the theater,
maintaining an active schedule of directing for the stage (most
notably for the Royal Dramatic Theater, Stockholm, which he
presided over from 1963 to 1967) that continued long after his
retirement from filmmaking.
Bergmans breakthrough into international cinema began with
Smiles of a Summer Night (1955), which won a Special Jury Prize at
the Cannes Film Festival and was enthusiastically received after its
American release. With The Seventh Seal, which premiered to great
fanfare and subsequent critical debate in Stockholm as Svensk Fillmindustris fiftieth anniversary production, and Wild Strawberries,
winner of the Golden Bear Prize at Berlin among numerous other
accolades, both released in 1957, Bergmans status as a director of
the very highest rank was confirmed. The Virgin Spring (1960) and
Through a Glass Darkly (1961) won consecutive Academy Awards
for Best Foreign Film. In an era when the art film served to fill a
cultural void created by the collapse of the Hollywood studio system and the enormous new popularity of television, Bergman had
joined a small galaxy of filmmaking superstars.
Despite a turbulent private life that included five marriages,
eight children, and intimate relationships with several of his leading actresses, Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann (the mother of his
youngest child, Linn) among them, his reputation as a film and
stage director continued to grow. Bergman has always contended
that his personal neuroses, which he readily acknowledges, have
rarely interfered with his professional activities. He takes particular
pride in his craftsmanship and likens his work to that of the
anonymous artisans who created the cathedral of Chartres.12 Of

12

LLOYD MICHAELS

his sometimes scandalous affairs Bergman has written, Film work

is a powerfully erotic business; the proximity of actors is without
reservations, the mutual exposure is total. The intimacy, devotion,
dependency, love, confidence and credibility in front of the cameras magical eye become a warm, possibly illusory security. The
strain, the easing of tension, followed by anticlimax: the atmosphere is irresistibly charged with sexuality.13 Whatever the case, it
is certainly true that Bergman has always enjoyed a fierce admiration and loyalty among those who served him on the set. His
farewell film, Fanny and Alexander, involved a remarkable reunion
of present and past wives, former lovers, children and stepchildren
as well as longtime collaborators. Bergmans ability to remain
true friends with the women he has abandoned is uncanny,14 his
biographer reports. Liv Ullmann, for example, has recently produced his novel, Private Confessions, for Swedish television and
will direct Faithless (Trolsa), his latest screenplay. At the same
time, it should be noted that his marriage to Ingrid von Rosen
endured, apparently happily, for nearly twenty-five years until her
death in 1995.
Around the time of Persona in the mid-1960s, Bergmans films
began to shift away from metaphysical themes to more personal
studies of intimate human relationships and psychological dimensions. Cries and Whispers (1972) and Face to Face (1976) continued
to enhance his prestige, but Bergmans good fortune came to a
shocking halt in 1976 when he was arrested by Swedish authorities in the midst of a rehearsal of Strindbergs The Dance of Death
at the Royal Dramatic Theater and charged with tax evasion, an
event that immediately became a cause clbre in Sweden and,
before long, internationally. Under considerable strain, the hypersensitive director suffered a breakdown that caused him to be hospitalized. The situation reminded many observers of a scene from
a Bergman movie: the kind of public humiliation he had feared
since childhood and had dramatized in Sawdust and Tinsel, Wild
Strawberries, and The Magician (1958). The charges were eventually
dropped with the accused officially exonerated by the Swedish
government in 1979, but not before the bitterly disillusioned
Bergman announced his intention to leave Sweden in order to

BERGMAN AND THE NECESSARY ILLUSION

13

protest the bureaucracy and preserve his artistic freedom. His

sojourn eventually took him to Munich, where he resumed his
dual career, but his film work, perhaps inevitably, suffered.
Although he continued to maintain his home on the island of
Fr, he did not return to Sweden permanently until 1981 for the
production of Fanny and Alexander, which won four Academy
Awards and a considerable profit for Svensk Filmindustri. Reconfirmed as a national treasure following the international success of
his finale as a feature filmmaker, Bergman resumed directing plays
at the Royal Dramatic Theater and, in 1987, published his autobiography, The Magic Lantern, which became an immediate best-seller in Europe. A decade later, in reasonably good health, he plans
new projects and receives new honors from around the world.
Life, one presumes, is good.

IV. THE PRODUCTION OF PERSONA

Bergmans most daring and enigmatic film15 grew from
an extraordinary convergence of personal circumstances and fortuitous events:
1. A crisis of faith in his own creative powers brought on by the
administrative drudgery of his position as head of the Royal
Dramatic Theater; Bergman has often referred to Persona as his
artistic salvation, the film that saved my life.16
2. A prolonged illness involving a viral infection of the inner ear
that left him dizzy, incapacitated, and ultimately hospitalized
during the first several months of 1965.
3. A chance view of a photograph of Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann, who had recently become close friends; Bergman
noticed the strong resemblance between the two actresses and
began conceiving of a film starring them both, a sonata for
two instruments, as he would later describe it.17
4. The image of two women wearing big hats and comparing
hands that floated into Bergmans mind during his hospitalization along with his view of the morgue from his bedside
window.

14

LLOYD MICHAELS

Perhaps influenced by the international political climate at the

time as well as the radically new styles developed by European
directors like Godard (Vivre sa vie [1962], Pierrot le fou [1965]),
Resnais (Hiroshima, mon amour [1959], Last Year at Marienbad
[1961]), and Antonioni (Lavventura [1960]) and certainly reflecting
his own need to expand as an artist, Persona became Bergmans
most innovative film to date, marking a shift toward narrative disruption and technical experimentation that continued in Hour of
the Wolf (1968) and The Passion of Anna (1969). The screenplay
was much different from anything he had published before,
more like the melody line of a piece of music, he suggested,
which I hope with the help of my colleagues to be able to orchestrate during production.18 The earlier scripts read like plays; this
one, although carefully constructed, is closer to a treatment from
which entirely new images and ideas were allowed to emerge
spontaneously during production. Most famous among these
improvisations, of course, is the trick shot fusing the bad sides
of the actresses faces. As a result of the many retakes and revisions

BERGMAN AND THE NECESSARY ILLUSION

15

during the actual shooting of the film, the published screenplay,

although useful as a source for genetic criticism (the study of how
a work of art evolved into its final form), remains an unreliable
text for clarifying the experience of watching Persona.
In general, the script tends to clarify certain ambiguities and
offers few indications of the films striking formal design. For
example, Elisabet definitely directs Alma to go to bed after her
long narration of the beach orgy (instead of inscribing the
moments subjectivity by having her whisper offscreen), and it is
Elisabet, not Alma, who breaks down into nonsense near the end.
Even more significantly, the psychiatrist returns in the screenplay
to pronounce a Freudian diagnosis (strongly developed infantility) and inform us that Elisabet has successfully rejoined her family and career. And the published text gives no description of
Bergmans exciting visual prologue or the repetition of Almas climactic monologue.

V. COMING TO TERMS WITH PERSONA

Unlike most commercial movies, Persona, for all its ambiguities, may seem easy to talk about (interpret) precisely because it
is difficult to understand (comprehend). The problems it presents
for viewers are obvious: (1) the absence of visual codes to distinguish between what is dreamed or imagined and what is actually
occurring; (2) the ellipses, doublings, and disruptions that confound any sense of a linear narrative; (3) the montage of apparently unrelated images and the presence of the strange boy at the
beginning and end; (4) the discontinuities in space and time, as in
the scene with Mr. Vogler or the reappearance of Alma in her uniform treating the apparently hospitalized Elisabet near the end; (5)
the inconsistencies in point of view ranging from the apparently
objective diagnosis provided at the outset by the psychiatrist and
the voice-over narration (from Bergman himself) describing the
transition to the island to the subjectivity of Elisabets night visit
to Almas bedroom or the mirror shots of the two women. Alan
Barr has accurately described how Persona systematically thwarts

16

LLOYD MICHAELS

the desire to know, that hallowed pursuit of plot-followers,19 but

Robin Wood seems equally correct in arguing we are to take it
that what we see is in some sense really happening.20 In short, all
may be illusion in one sense, it is all a tissue of lies (to quote
Cries and Whispers [1972]), only a movie; at the same time, we feel a
powerful need to accept this particular film as a representation of
some profound truth.
Perhaps the best procedure for considering the construction of
meaning in Persona is to begin with the most widely held view of
its content: Whatever else it may be about, the film is concerned
with its own status as a work of art and, as a consequence, the
problematic relation between the artist and the audience. To
underscore the integrity of his medium and the self-reflexive
aspect of his themes, Bergman lobbied for the title Cinematography
before finally relenting to SFs demand for a more appealing name,
and he insisted that the sprocket holes at the edge of the frame be
retained in the early publicity stills for Persona. Most critical studies to date have emphasized the significance of the films self-referentiality: the autobiographical content, the commentary on the
limits and responsibilities of art, the relation to the cinemas system of signification.21 In its pervasive self-reflexivity, Persona marks
a kind of midpoint in Bergmans exploration of the role of the
artist in such works as Sawdust and Tinsel, The Magician, Hour of the
Wolf, Shame (1968), Autumn Sonata (1978), and Fanny and Alexander. From the perceptive but still sanguine view of the intrinsically
deceptive nature of his craft he had described in the introduction
to the first anthology of his screenplays,
Even today I remind myself with childish excitement that I am
really a conjurer, since cinematography is based on deception of
the human eye. I have worked it out that if I see a film which has
a running time of one hour, I sit through twenty-seven minutes of
complete darkness the blankness between frames. When I show
a film I am guilty of deceit. I use an apparatus which is constructed to take advantage of a certain human weakness, an apparatus
with which I can sway my audience in a highly emotional manner. . . . Thus I am either an imposter or, when the audience is

BERGMAN AND THE NECESSARY ILLUSION

17

willing to be taken in, a conjurer. I perform conjuring tricks with

apparatus so expensive and so wonderful that any entertainer in
history would have given anything to have it.22

Bergman had developed a much more critical understanding in

his notebook during the making of Persona:
I am unable to grasp the large catastrophes. They leave my heart
untouched. At most I can read about such atrocities with a kind of
greed a pornography of horror. But I shall never rid myself of
those images. Images that turn my art into a bag of tricks, into
something indifferent, meaningless.23

This is Elisabet Voglers dilemma, as well as Bergmans. Her silence

becomes her protest.
Bergmans awareness of his artistic predicament undoubtedly
stemmed from the tide of political consciousness-raising in the
1960s. He had been steadily criticized, especially in the Swedish
and French press, for his isolation on Fr and his apparent refusal
to engage contemporary events within his films. The insertion of
iconic images from the holocaust (the Warsaw ghetto child) and
Vietnam (the self-immolation of the Buddhist bonze) provides a
resonance that transcends the idealist vision of his earlier historical melodramas and psychological case studies. At the same time,
they remind us of the gulf that separates documentary and fictional representations.
When we consider these historical references along with the
films refiguring of the womens faces into the composite image of
a monstrous double, Persona may be fairly regarded as a kind of
modernist horror movie. In addition to the newsreel, it includes
(twice) another film-within-the-film: a snippet of primitive horror
farce in which a man is chased around his bedroom by a skeleton,
a scene Bergman first used in Prison (1949). Persona specifically
evokes the vampire subgenre through its images of Elisabet lowering her head to caress the nape of Almas neck and later sucking
the blood that bubbles from her wrist. Almas dedication to caring
for others, her breakdown into madness and violence, and her

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LLOYD MICHAELS

attraction to mirrors may also conjure up the mythic figure of Dr.

Jekyll/Mr. Hyde.
The films title, of course, introduces the motif of masks that
culminates in the composite close-up of Alma/Elisabet a mask,
to borrow Roland Barthess description of modern art, that points
to itself. As Persona questions narrative representation and continuity in its formal construction, its story line blurs conventional
distinctions between being and role playing. The psychiatrists
diagnosis of Elisabets hopeless dream to be, cited in nearly all
accounts of the film including those anthologized here, still needs
to be qualified as a definitive interpretation of Bergmans meaning. Her speech occurs very early in the film, never to be alluded
to or repeated. We also have the directors own testimony that
Elisabets silence is completely unneurotic . . . a strong persons
form of protest.24 Moreover, the spectator familiar with Bergmans
other work will recognize in the psychiatrists detached, authoritarian, and imperious demeanor as she pronounces the clinical
verdict of science a recurrent figure (The Magician, The Passion of
Anna, The Touch [1971]) whose name is always Vergrus. In her
anonymity and subsequent disengagement (a revision of the
screenplay), she too wears a mask.
The hopeless dream of being, Persona implies, is the shared condition of both life and film art. In its aspiration to escape subjectivity, the cinema inevitably falls back on special effects (its expensive and wonderful apparatus) and the audiences willingness to
be taken in; from our own desire to live in truth, we invariably
resort to another kind of performance that experience will, in
time, unmask. But to go beyond romantic conceptions of the
artist as redeeming visionary or exemplary sufferer, as Elisabet
apparently has, or to renounce a conventional life of service, as
Alma seemingly does, need not necessitate dismissing the efficacy
of either works of art or good deeds. To the tyranny of lies,
Bergman responds with the necessity of illusions.
Paisley Livingston confirms this view of Persona when he suggests, If [Mrs.] Voglers silence queries art, art returns the question, measuring the value and consequences of an actresss refusal

BERGMAN AND THE NECESSARY ILLUSION

19

to continue. Vogler, then, is not the voice of Persona; rather, the

film gives voice to her silence.25 In a succession of films from his
mature period one thinks of the hillside picnic in The Seventh
Seal that provides an interlude of clarity and peace in the midst of
plague, the deus ex machina ending of The Magician whereby Dr.
Vogler is miraculously rescued from disgrace, and the gorgeous
autumnal tableau of the three sisters in a swing at the conclusion
of Cries and Whispers Bergman reminds us of the illusory element in all moments of heightened perception, community, transcendence, and happiness as he simultaneously suggests that the
solace, affirmation, and joy contained in these images is something more than merely a sentimental religious faith or an existential joke. By such illusions, he seems to say, do we all manage
to live.
Such is my own understanding of Persona. The essays collected
here offer a variety of distinctive critical approaches that illuminate the films continuing hold over sophisticated patrons of the
art cinema and inexperienced patrons of the multiplex alike. The

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LLOYD MICHAELS

first two chapters are concerned primarily with contexts, providing

the sources and cultural background that stimulated Bergmans
creative energies. The remaining essays offer new readings of the
film based on different methodologies for explicating how a cinematic text constructs meaning and is, in turn, itself constructed by
various spectators.
Birgitta Steene, a native of Sweden who holds appointments at
the University of Washington and Stockholm University, is probably the worlds leading authority on Ingmar Bergman. Her essay
draws on her knowledge of Swedish film and stage history to
demonstrate that Bergmans artistic vision, while employing certain universally recognized elements, is filtered through an
indigenous Swedish mindscape and influenced, in particular, by
the symbiotic presence of August Strindbergs A Dreamplay.
Drawing on several previously untranslated documents, she illustrates how Persona occupies a position in the Bergman canon
similar to A Dreamplay in Strindbergs oeuvre, and how both
works reflect a dialectical tension between classical narrative and
modernist discourse.
An experimental filmmaker as well as a scholar of wide-ranging
interests, Wheeler Winston Dixon describes the cultural ambience
of the international art cinema at the time of Personas release,
emphasizing the influence of Jean-Luc Godard as well as placing
this film in the context of Bergmans long career.
Susan Sontags 1967 essay, first published as a review in the
British magazine Sight and Sound and anthologized in her book
Styles of Radical Will, is reprinted here because it has informed
nearly all subsequent discussions of Persona. It exemplifies her
contention, expressed in a famous essay entitled Against Interpretation, that the function of criticism should be to show how
it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it
means.26 Employing this formalist approach, Sontag defines Persona as not just a representation of transactions between the two
characters . . . but a meditation on the film which is about
them. This self-reflexiveness is usually represented through the
theme of doubling, expressed through both the films formal struc-

BERGMAN AND THE NECESSARY ILLUSION

21

ture and the exchange of identities. Careful readers will also note
Sontags reference to the image of an erect penis in the credits
montage, a shot that was subsequently withdrawn from American
prints of the film. Thirty years after its publication (and thus without the benefit of analyzing projectors, videocassettes, and repeated viewings), this essay remains remarkable for its synthesis of the
films competing claims formal, psychological, erotic and its
placement of Persona in relation to several landmarks of modernist
cinema: Resnaiss Last Year at Marienbad, Antonionis Lavventura,
Buuels Belle de Jour, and Bergmans own The Silence.
Unlike much that has been written about Persona, Christopher
Orrs new study eschews issues of intentionality and biography in
order to examine Bergmans film through the concept of genre.
Orr sees Persona as an amalgam of the art cinemas self-reflexivity
and the melodramas unveiling of anxiety over such social issues
as class and gender, producing what he calls subversive melodrama. While Elisabet Vogler personifies the dilemma of the modern
artist, he argues, she remains as well a member of Swedens cultural elite, enjoying a quite different status from that of the nurse
who cares for her. The interaction between Alma and her patient,
although certainly expressing the fragile nature of personal identity, thus also exposes class exploitation and envy.
Many commentators have noted Bergmans skill in eliciting
strong performances from his repertory company of actors none
more compelling than those of Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann
in Persona but Steven Vinebergs essay is the first to analyze this
aspect of the film in depth. After surveying the evolution of acting
style in Bergmans largely neglected early work, he employs certain standard acting exercises as models to explain the effects
achieved in several of Personas most celebrated scenes and to
demonstrate how the film is about the seduction and power of
acting.
Gwendolyn Audrey Fosters concluding essay follows some of
the most recent directions in film theory to shift attention to spectatorship rather than authorship as a means of generating a films
meaning. Adopting the stance of feminist and queer theory, she

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LLOYD MICHAELS

sees Persona as dramatizing a struggle for control of the imaginary

lesbian phallus, site of female pleasure beyond patriarchal
norms. Her analysis, although speculative and challenging, offers
a forthright discussion of a major element in the film the homoerotic relationship between the two women that has been consistently repressed until now.
Although none of these studies claims to be definitive, together
they may guide the awestruck, puzzled, or simply bored viewer
toward a more comprehensive understanding of Bergmans
achievement. Near the end of the film, a disillusioned Alma
remarks bitterly, Ive learned a lot. The attentive spectator of Persona, it is hoped, will feel much the same way (without the bitterness!) after reading this book.
NOTES

1. Stig Bjrkman, Torsten Manns, and Jonas Sima, Bergman on Bergman

(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1973), 198199.
2. Peter Cowie, Ingmar Bergman: A Critical Biography (New York: Scribners, 1982), 231.
3. Robin Wood, Ingmar Bergman (New York: Praeger, 1969), 156.
4. Hubert Cohen, Ingmar Bergman: The Art of Confession (New York:
Twayne, 1993), 227.
5. Bruce Kawin, How Movies Work (New York: Macmillan, 1987), 76.
6. John Simon, Ingmar Bergman Directs (New York: Harcourt, Brace,
Jovanovich, 1972), 215.
7. Bergman has directed three features with face (ansikte) in the
title: Woman without a Face (1947); The Magician (1957, released in
England as The Face, a literal translation of the original Swedish
title); and Face to Face (1976). After his retirement he also made a
short memorial to his mother entitled Karins Face (1983).
8. Andrew Sarris, Confessions of a Cultist (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1971), 292.
9. Ingmar Bergman, Images (New York, Arcade, 1994), 65.
10. Ingmar Bergman, The Magic Lantern (New York: Viking Penguin,
1988), 7.
11. Birgitta Steene, Ingmar Bergman: A Guide to References and Resources
(Boston: G.K. Hall, 1982), 8.
12. Ingmar Bergman, Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman (New York:
Simon & Schuster, 1960), 21.
13. Bergman, The Magic Lantern, 169170.
14. Cowie, 230.

BERGMAN AND THE NECESSARY ILLUSION

23

15. Egil Trnqvist, Between Stage and Screen: Ingmar Bergman Directs
(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press), 137.
16. Bergman, Images, 64.
17. Cowie, 227.
18. Ingmar Bergman, Persona and Shame (New York: Grossman, 1972),
21.
19. Alan P. Barr, The Unraveling of Character in Bergmans Persona,
Literature/Film Quarterly 15.2 (1987): 127.
20. Wood, 153.
21. See, especially, Simon, 208310; Paisley Livingston, Ingmar Bergman
and the Rituals of Art (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982),
180221; Lloyd Michaels, The Phantom of the Cinema (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1998), 3346.
22. Bergman, Four Screenplays, 15.
23. Bergman, Images, 59.
24. Bjrkman, Manns, and Sima, 211.
25. Livingston, 181.
26. Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation (New York: Delta, 1966), 14.