In praise of Per­sona – Ing­mar Bergman’s min­i­mal­ist masterpiece

In the 50 years that have passed since the Stock­holm pre­mière of Ing­mar Bergman’s mas­ter­piece, Per­sona, a lot has changed in the world of film. But arguably only one devel­op­ment has altered the basic essence of what a ​‘film’ actu­al­ly is, that being the tran­si­tion from tra­di­tion­al film stock to digital.

With cel­lu­loid film being a phys­i­cal mate­r­i­al and dig­i­tal con­sti­tut­ing elec­tron­ic data, the two are fun­da­men­tal­ly dif­fer­ent at a foun­da­tion­al lev­el, to the extent that even call­ing what we see pro­ject­ed on to a cin­e­ma screen these days a ​‘film’ isn’t strict­ly accu­rate giv­en the absence of actu­al film stock. Per­haps no work of cin­e­ma high­lights the par­tic­u­lar­i­ties of ana­logue film­mak­ing bet­ter than Per­sona. Bergman’s low-key 1966 dra­ma is many things: an abstract, beau­ti­ful­ly shot cham­ber piece, a med­i­ta­tion of the nature and fragili­ty of iden­ti­ty, and, more sim­ply, the sto­ry of a nurse try­ing to treat her mute patient at a remote sea­side cot­tage. But it is also a film about film itself, and the ontol­ogy of the phys­i­cal mate­ri­als that it is made up of.

Sig­nif­i­cant­ly, Per­sona opens with a shot of a film pro­jec­tor start­ing up and ends with it shut­ting down, a fram­ing device urg­ing us to think about the medi­um of film as we’re watch­ing. How­ev­er, even the most atten­tive view­er will be shocked by what hap­pens halfway through. Out of nowhere, cracks appear on the screen and the image breaks down, repli­cat­ing the effect of what hap­pens when cel­lu­loid burns up in the pro­jec­tor dur­ing the screen­ing of a film. For a few dis­ori­en­tat­ing moments we’re shown a mon­tage of sub­lim­i­nal images accom­pa­nied by dis­con­cert­ing sounds, before the film resumes again. It’s a star­tling sequence, one that again brings the sub­ject of cel­lu­loid as a key theme the fore.

For such an ambigu­ous and oblique film, any attempt to dis­cern what – if any – grand state­ment Bergman is mak­ing about the craft of film­mak­ing can­not help but fail to the­o­rise a defin­i­tive inter­pre­ta­tion. But on a more direct lev­el, Per­sona is an extreme­ly tac­tile film, where human hands and touch are a recur­ring motif and where a pre­oc­cu­pa­tion is exhib­it­ed of what objects – includ­ing cel­lu­loid – sound and feel like.

In one key scene, a char­ac­ter fails to sweep up all of the shards of a glass she drops onto the floor, and you can’t help but wince and tense up as the oth­er character’s bare feet unknow­ing­ly approach it. Not only is this sequence tes­ta­ment to Bergman’s skill as a visu­al sto­ry­teller, it also cre­ates a very phys­i­cal kind of ten­sion through the threat of a sharp object.

It’s no coin­ci­dence that the afore­men­tioned mid-point break­down of the film occurs just moments after the char­ac­ter steps on the glass. Here the worlds of the onscreen action and the mate­ri­als pro­ject­ing it appear to inter­min­gle, as a sequen­tial asso­ci­a­tion is made between the glass that lies haz­ardous­ly on the floor and the moment the film image is itself sev­ered. The impli­ca­tion seems to be that cel­lu­loid is a frag­ile and vul­ner­a­ble sub­stance, and some­thing that can be sud­den­ly and eas­i­ly destroyed.

As well as vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty, the oth­er fac­tor asso­ci­at­ed with cel­lu­loid in Per­sona is vio­lence. The sounds it makes as it pass­es through the pro­jec­tor in the open­ing scene and falls apart in the clos­ing sequence are loud to the point of being threat­en­ing. And the images that briefly flash up onscreen when the pro­jec­tor is first turned on are also char­ac­terised by vio­lence, one being a nail being ham­mered into a hand, anoth­er of a sheep being killed. Addi­tion­al­ly, when­ev­er the char­ac­ters in the film encounter visu­al medi­ums they are pro­ject­ing vio­lence, through a tele­vi­sion screen show­ing a man burn­ing alive, and a pho­to­graph depict­ing a scene of Nazi oppression.

Whether as a phys­i­cal sub­stance vul­ner­a­ble to dam­age, or as some­thing capa­ble of emit­ting vis­cer­al vio­lent images, the over­rid­ing impres­sion of view­ing Per­sona is of the essen­tial tac­til­i­ty of film – some­thing the vir­tu­al nature of dig­i­tal does not share. There may have been plen­ty of great films about films over the years in terms of the cre­ative process (like 8½ and Synec­doche, New York) and the world of Hol­ly­wood (like Sun­set Blvd and Sin­gin’ in the Rain), but no film can claim to have been so much about the phys­i­cal prop­er­ties that con­sti­tute cinema.