The Collective Building of the Cathedral:
Bergman’s Baroque Persona
In Devotional Cinema, a work first presented as a lecture at Princeton University’s Conference on Religion and Cinema, the experimental filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky writes:
On a visceral level, the intermittent quality of film is close to the way we experience the world…On close examination, even our vision appears to be intermittent…when we turn our heads we don’t actually see a graceful continuum but a series of tiny jump-cuts, little stills joined, perhaps, by infinitesimal dissolves. Intermittence penetrates to the very core of our being, and film vibrates in a way that is close to this core. It is as basic as life and death, existence and nonexistence. (Dorsky, 30–31)
Two ideas significant to the consideration of film as a Baroque medium, or the consideration of any specific film as Baroque or Baroque-inflected, emerge from this passage. First, the notion that film speaks to us in the language of our own perception: Because it echoes the intermittence of our most fundamental and natural instrument of experience, our seeing, film easily draws us in, is able to touch us viscerally and deeply. Motion, flickering light, and undulating sound are the building blocks of our engagement with the world, the vehicles through which we receive our environments and discover our selves. Think of the still and rapt faces, washed by light, in a movie theater—how naturally and instinctively our minds surrender to the dynamic aliveness of film. So, inherent to film as a medium is the sensory magnetism, the resonant mirroring of the world and of ourselves (the “pulse of life,” John Rupert Martin says on page 48 of Baroque) that Baroque artists such as Caravaggio and Bernini strove to evoke through the devastating expressiveness of their works.
The second major relevance of Dorsky’s passage is his recognition that film is in its very nature a gestalt of contradictions. Light itself and the contrasting interplay between lightness and darkness make up the images we perceive onscreen. And the subject of a film isn’t just realistic—it is real—but at the same time, it is absent. It seems to be present, but is actually merely represented. A moving image, from the moment it is recorded, is simultaneously alive and dead. Film typically aims (like much art and literature) to affect a genuine emotional or intellectual response in its viewer, despite its own artifice and constructedness. To me, the integral presence of all these seeming paradoxes indicates that, in its very essence, film contains the tensions (as stated by Dr. Lois Zamora in The Inordinate Eye) between “spirit and matter, mind and body, time and space, ideal and real, reason and un-reason” (297) that characterize the Baroque.
It goes without saying that many popular filmmakers throughout film’s relatively short history as a medium (since the very end of the 19th Century), especially those affiliated with the dominant Hollywood studios, have ignored these naturally contradicting aspects of film. Rather than embrace the medium’s essentially dynamic character and its potential to operate on multiple experiential planes at once, most of the time, creators and audiences have conceived of film in only one dimension. Thus, filmmakers have tended to make work in which the complex nature of reality seems to have been deliberately reduced into a mostly flat, formulaic structure dependent on and attendant only to a film’s diegesis, narrative coherence, logical causality, and so forth. I want to use Ingmar Bergman’s Persona as an example of a film which acknowledges and investigates the inherently contradicting attributes of the medium through its meta-awareness, resonates with the Baroque through its surreal narrative which resists genre constraints such as linearity and cohesion, and makes use of the allegorizing function of doubling and repetition. Furthermore, I hope to illustrate that Persona’s holistic motivation is toward an expression of conflict within a unified system, rather than an emphasis on the subversion of genre conventions or fragmentation as ends in themselves.
First, here’s a brief introduction to the film, for the sake of being able to reference its scenery, its main characters, and so forth, throughout the rest of this discussion. Persona was released in 1966, and was the second film which Bergman shot on the island of Fårö, a tiny piece of land in the middle of the Baltic Sea. There’s something of the Borgesian Baroque in this setting itself: Bergman considered it to be one of his “chamber” works, as it features only two main characters (Elisabet and Alma, as played by Liv Ullmann and Harriet Andersson, respectively) within a very limited setting. In her discussion of Borges’ “The Library of Babel,” Zamora writes of a paradox between “the limited space of artistic media and human selves on the one hand, and the disembodied illusion of infinite extension on the other” (256). In the case of Persona, the “limited space of artistic media” is the materiality and artifice of film itself, as well as characteristics of this film in particular such as its small cast and single, minimal setting (a house on Fårö) amid the seemingly “infinite” outstretching backdrop of ocean.
The briefest possible synopsis of Persona’s surface-level narrative goes something like this: Elisabet, a successful actress, suddenly ceases speaking, moving, and otherwise engaging with the world. Doctors determine that there’s nothing diagnosable wrong with her, mentally or physically, and send her to recuperate at an island house along with a cheerful, admiring young nurse, Alma. Alma is open and talkative, while Elisabet remains silent, though she seems to enjoy Alma’s presence and chatter. The two women develop a harmonious and symbiotic relationship, but eventually this dynamic splinters, erupting in emotional and physical violence when Alma becomes frustrated by Elisabet’s silence, begins to sense that her identity is being subsumed by Elisabet, and starts to fight against their psychic intertwining.
It’s important to note, before diving further into a discussion about the meta-awareness and allegorical impulses of Persona, that the film revives aspects of Baroque visual drama, as well as some of its compositional preoccupations, such as an emphasis on faces and hands, chiaroscuro, and mirrors. I’ll briefly describe a few examples, just as illustration: In one shot, a closeup lingers on Elisabet’s face for over ten seconds, as the light around her slowly darkens, obscuring her expression. Eventually, seemingly overcome by an ambiguous thought or emotion, she covers her face with her hands. In another shot, Elisabet stands in the center of her hospital room in a flowing nightgown. The room is dark but for a glowy beam from the television, which appears to be directed toward her, touching her, perhaps a reference to or an ironic mimicry of the divine effulgence often depicted in Renaissance and Baroque-era paintings. As Elisabet and Alma’s identities begin to attract each other intensely, if not quite yet merge, they are shown standing before a mirror, dressed similarly in white nightgowns, draping heads and hands on each other, and contemplating their dual reflection. Elisabet and Alma. From Persona. AB Svensk Filmindustri, 1966. Later, as the overlappingness of their identities begins to give rise to conflict, Alma, having learned something disturbing about how Elisabet sees her, gazes Narcissus-like at her own image reflected in a pond. Zamora writes of the mythic Mesoamerican figure Quetzalcóatl’s first encounter with a mirror and thus his own body and visage: “Quetzalcóatl sees himself through others’ seeing him; his image contains and reflects himself to himself through the perception of others” (Zamora, 6). As his encounter with the concept of the perception of others does for Quetzalcóatl, Alma’s encounter with Elisabet’s perception of her disrupts and her sense of self. From this point in the film, tension between the two characters builds. Alma begins to seek separation from Elisabet and to attempt to retake possession of her idea of herself, as Quetzalcóatl sought to empower himself by commissioning a mask from a feather worker, an effort to take control over his own presentation.
Now, I’ll consider some of the ways in which the film points to its own artifice.
Persona opens—not after the credits, but before, as the first light in the darkness of a theoretical screen and theater—with a montage of images. First, we see a projector lamp brightening. Then, projector sounds, film strips moving; it’s as if we’re inside a projector, seeing at work the mechanics behind the images on the screen. Rather than being ushered into an illusion by image and music or dialog, as in the standard experience of watching a film, we are asked to recognize first (and therefore significantly) that what we are about to regard is a construction. Then, a multitude: A segment from one of Bergman’s other films, featuring a comically prancing figure in a skeleton suit; a spider (similar to the one which appears in another of his films as a representation of a kind of god / demon hybrid); the grotesque intestines spilling from a sheep’s body; an intense and discomfiting close-up of a nail being driven through the center of a palm (an undeniable religious reference); and finally, closeups of the feet and hands of what appear to be bodies lying in a morgue. The images might seem like contextless fragments, were we to forget that their collection in this montage places them in a context, puts them in a deliberate dynamic relationship with each other. Zamora writes, in consideration of Frida Kahlo’s repeating and varying self portraits, that: “…dynamism depends upon the permutation of compositional elements that grow out of one another and dissolve into one another, whether the elements are ideas or images or volumes or voids; the association, accumulation, and diffusion of elements become the basis for Baroque structures as a whole” (186–187). The images in Persona’s opening montage, having been consciously juxtaposed, associate and accumulate into an impact on the viewer that’s greater than any of the images alone would have summoned. We’re left, holding in our minds, thoughts of materiality, artifice and performance (film / projector); the grotesqueness and fragility of bodies (sheep intestines, dead people); religion—depending on the person, perhaps the cruelty of religious forces, or a wonderment about the fate of our souls—(the nail); all tinged with a suggestion of absurdity (the comic skeleton suit). And Bergman’s inclusion of references to his own films (as do his tendency to work with the same actors and settings repeatedly and give seemingly individual characters in separate films the same name) suggests that they are interconnected thematically, perhaps all part of the same potentially infinite project. At the end of the montage, a boy suddenly looks into the camera, and thereby appears to be looking out at us, the audience. For an instant, it’s as if this boy is reaching out to touch our face:
A coextensive moment in Persona. AB Svensk Filmindustri, 1966.
This coextension feels especially intense because it’s embodied in a real, moving human figure—and thus it shifts our perception in a way that’s not just spatial, but existential. We’re watching, we’re being watched, and the film seems to be watching itself. It turns out, when the camera switches its angle to show us, that the boy is actually touching an image of the two main characters’ fused faces; so he may represent Bergman the creator and artist, us the audience, the concept of perception, and beyond. Space between film and viewer is coextended at other points in the film, too: At one point, Alma speaks to the camera while preparing for bed. Looking directly at us, and applying a cream to her face, she muses aloud as if to herself or to a friend. During a placid, atmospheric shot of the beach and ocean, Elisabet suddenly jumps up into the frame, holding a camera, and seems to take our picture—or is she taking a picture of the video camera that’s filming the ocean shot we were just watching? Either way, the moment once again startles us into awareness of our own presence and status as viewer.
Our closeup. From Persona. AB Svensk Filimindustri, 1966 Let’s consider Zamora on Velazquez’s Las Meninas alongside this motif of Persona: Velazquez paints himself painting himself, a circle of self-representation that includes the monarchs whom he ostensibly paints but whom we see only as reflected mirror images at the back of the salon. This oscillation between the interior and exterior of the canvas doubles the oscillation between subject and object, painter and painted; the Baroque self is both surveyor and seen. (Zamora, 171) Similarly to the way that viewing Las Meninas makes the seer conscious of Velazquez’s multiple identities, Persona is a kind of multiply reflexive mirror. A viewer perceives the film, the film seems to perceive itself, the film seems to perceive the viewer, and, therefore (brilliantly): Upon being reminded of her existence separate from the film by the film’s recognition of her existence, the viewer perceives herself as observer. We’re implicated in the game of representation, we’re participating, we inhabit our own Baroque selves. That coextension can function as a tool which incites self reflection in the viewer / reader / witnesser / receiver of the art is, to me, part of the great so what of it. What do we see, when we self-regard? Perhaps, having received the idea that Persona seems to acknowledge its own materiality and its artifice, its existence as a projection by a machine—an illusion—a self-regarding viewer will in turn be prompted to consider the constructedness, the illusory nature, of her own “self.” The arc lamp and projector that construct a modern human “self” might be social prescriptions, accidents of birth, psychologically formative experiences, etc., but that’s a different conversation. The point I hope to make here is that catalyzing the reflective conversation on the nature of one’s self has a potentially significant impact— theoretically, acknowledging the arbitrary nature of self could expose the artificiality of some perceived hierarchies, causing individuals to reexamine the ways that they relate to the other members of and groups within their communities. Now, I’ll examine a few more of Persona’s important scenes, noting how they subvert narrative cohesion, embrace the surreal, and utilize allegorical doubling, respectively. First, think back to the boy at the end of the opening montage, who seemed for an instant to reach out toward us. That scene, and that boy character, share no explicit connection to the film’s narrative; the scene is unmoored from the place, time, and story of the rest of the film. Still, it can’t be regarded as a separate fragment, as it contributes to the effect of the whole—it guides our attention toward ideas of perceptive multiplicity. Thus, it resonates thematically, deepening our experience of watching, if not our ability to ascertain an explicit or causal relationship between it and Persona’s other parts. In one of the film’s turning points, Alma receives a middle-of-the-night bedroom visitation from Elisabet. There’s a dreamy quality to the scene: hazy light, a breeze revealed by undulations of sheer white drapery, and a lack of speech, even on the part of typically chattery Alma. The scene concludes with the shot of Alma and Elisabet gazing together into a mirror, in a kind of union (see the still on page 5). Following the incident (the next day, apparently), when Alma questions Elisabet about the visit, Elisabet denies that it occurred. Due to the the dreamlike feeling of the scene and Elisabet’s denial, it’s unclear to the viewer whether or not what’s shown in the scene actually happens in the world of the film. What are we to trust—Alma’s experience, Elisabet’s denial of it, or our own perception? It seems that there’s reason to question all three. At one point, after Alma has become uncomfortable with Elisabet’s silence and perception of her, and begun to fear the loss of her own identity, she consciously fails to warn Elisabet that she’s about to step on glass. Our view cuts to a closeup of Alma’s face as she witnesses Elisabet’s painful step, and we naturally expect there to follow an expression or a word from Alma to inform our understanding of her motivations behind and reactions to the occurrence. But the film breaks down here, into a montage which repeats images from the opening montage, the film itself seeming to rupture or burn through, dissolve as a material. Again, Bergman exposes the limits of his film’s ability to convey reality, and points to the fictitiousness of the characters. The truth is more complicated than Elisabet’s acted pain, and vaster than what Alma’s individual character, even were she real, might be experiencing. So we are offered a window into neither character’s interior space—we are forced, by being shut out of the illusion of Elisabet and Alma’s relationship by the dissolving of the film, to view the scene as a representative altercation in which the typically submissive figure acts out, resulting in a rupture. Susan Sontag recognized the film’s function as a kind of essayistic contemplation, something different than a conventional film which privileges its characters’ feelings and its overt narrative over other facets of its operation: The construction of Persona is best described in terms of the form: variations on a theme. The theme is that of doubling, and the variations are those that follow from its leading possibilities—duplication, inversion, reciprocal exchange, repetition. Once again, it would be a serious misunderstanding to demand to know exactly what happens in Persona; for what is narrated is only deceptively, secondarily, a “story” at all. It's correct to speak of the film in terms of the fortunes of two characters named Elizabeth and Alma who are engaged in a desperate duel of identities. But it is no less true, or relevant, to treat Persona as what might be mistakenly called an allegory: as relating the duel between two mythical parts of a single “person,” the corrupted person who acts (Elizabeth) and the ingenuous soul (Alma) who founders in contact with corruption. (Sontag, 189) Finally, there’s a scene in which the themes of doubling and dueling identities that Sontag points out spiral into a kind of climax. The scene is a repeated monologue by Alma, a speech delivered twice. Alma and Elisabet are again dressed alike, as if mirror images of each other. They sit across from each other at a table in the little Fårö house. Alma criticizes Elisabet’s behavior, claiming that she is not like her. Elisabet remains silent. The first time Alma speaks her words, we watch Elisabet’s face; the second time, we watch Alma’s. Why? This doubleness again emphasizes the presence of multiple perspectives, privileging neither Elisabet’s nor Alma’s, and breaks, in a way that no viewer could fail to notice or dismiss without questioning, the convention of a narrative which proceeds in a cohesive linear fashion. Toward the end of the scene, half of one of the womens’ faces flickers into superimposition upon the other’s; then the faces seem to fully merge, and to remain fused for several seconds. Zamora writes, “We have seen that the Baroque self, however hyperbolic, contains a transcendental core that connects the individual self to human types and archetypes (301).” Here, I hope, we have seen examples of how the selves of Elisabet and Alma are Baroque in that they inhabit the dual roles of performer (seen) and witnesser of the viewer’s presence (seer), and in that their identities fuse and diverge. Further, I hope we have seen that the self-reflexivity of the film throughout, its consistent reminders that it is an illusion, concretizes our understanding of the characters as such. By functioning in this way, Elisabet and Alma also expose the dual natures of the viewer and the artist. Here is Bergman, from Four Screenplays of Ingmar Bergman: In former days the artist remained unknown and his work was to the glory of God. The ability to create was a gift. In such a world flourished invulnerable assurance and natural humility. Today the individual has become the highest form and the greatest bane of artistic creation. The smallest wound or pain of the ego is examined under a microscope as if it were of eternal importance. The artist considers his isolation, his subjectivity, his individualism almost holy. Thus we finally gather in one large pen, where we stand and bleat about our loneliness without listening to each other and without realizing that we are smothering each other to death. The individualists stare into each other's eyes and yet deny the existence of each other. (Bergman, 24) This passage seems to want to self-consciously subvert Bergman’s role as an individual artist, as well as associate individualism with a kind of spiritual danger. Let’s keep this in mind during a consideration of one of the film’s final parts. The final series of Persona’s shots includes a brief view of Bergman (along with his cinematographer Sven Nykvist) at the camera, on a crane. The presence of the artist here doesn’t seem to be motivated by any self-glorifying attitude. Rather, this self-reflexivity once again draws our attention to the film’s artificial nature, and the shot serves as just another moment in the film (like the coextensive moments and the breakdown before the central montage) which ruptures the potential for us to submerge ourselves in the illusion of the film world. Just as the film’s story isn’t about individual characters, this shot isn’t about Bergman; it points to the artist’s hand. This continual awareness of various fallible points of view—his, ours, each characters’, art’s—destabilizes each of them. Many perspectives are acknowledged, and not one is centralized or emphasized as the ultimate version. This decentralization is central to the film’s purpose, the accruing of its ideas. Thus, the film doesn’t fragment and disrupt itself for the mere sake of resisting cohesion and meaning; it uses these techniques to reveal an inclusive, complex system, to acknowledge the interconnected and multi-faceted conundrums of representation, perception, and storytelling. Bergman has said, “To my mind, until a play or a film has encountered the audience's consciousness it's neither a play nor a film, but it's still a semi finished product (21).” He shows himself on the crane not to give himself special placement, but to reveal himself as a working part; a cog, a brick, a bit of the mechanics, like a projector bulb. Sontag wrote, “The Latin word persona means the mask worn by an actor. To be a person, then, is to possess a mask, and in Persona both women wear masks. Elizabeth's mask is her muteness. Alma's mask is her health, her optimism, her normal life…But in the course of the film, both masks crack” (187). Likewise, the film cracks open the illusory nature of its own world, and cracks the masks of the artist and the viewer as well. Thus, the concept of the self as something stable, fixed, or isolated, is cracked. We might take this as a call to reflect on the plasticity of our selves and of each other’s selves.