![]() The break in the middle shows it turning back and beginning again. The opening sequence suggests that "Persona" is starting at the beginning, with the birth of cinema. The middle "break" ends with the camera moving in toward an eye, and even into the veins in the eyeball, as if to penetrate the mind. In both cases, a projector lamp flares to life, and there is a montage from the earliest days of the cinema: jerky silent skeletons, images of coffins, a hand with a nail being driven into it. This sequence mirrors the way the film has opened. ![]() Elizabeth cuts her foot, but this is essentially a victory for the actress, who has forced the nurse to abandon the discipline of her profession and reveal weakness.Įlizabeth looks at Alma, seeming to know the glass shard was not an accident, and at that moment Bergman allows his film to seem to tear and burn. In the sunny courtyard of the cottage, she picks up the pieces of a broken glass, and then deliberately leaves a shard where Elizabeth might walk. There is a moment when her resentment flares and she lashes back. Elizabeth, the patient, mute and apparently ill, is stronger than Alma, and eventually the nurse feels her soul being overcome by the other woman's strength. Their visual merging suggests a deeper psychic attraction. Bergman told me, "The human face is the great subject of the cinema. Andersson told me she and Ullmann had no idea Bergman was going to do this, and when she first saw the film she found it disturbing and frightening. Later he superimposes the two faces, like a morph. Bergman emphasizes this similarity in a disturbing shot where he combines half of one face with half of the other. Elizabeth says nothing, and Alma talks and talks, confessing her plans and her fears, and eventually, in a great and daring monologue, confessing an erotic episode during which she was, for a time, completely happy. Held in the same box of space and time, the two women somehow merge. A psychiatrist thinks it might help if Elizabeth and Nurse Alma ( Bibi Andersson) spend the summer at her isolated house. One of them, of two faces, one frontal, one in profile, has become one of the most famous images of the cinema.Įlizabeth ( Liv Ullmann) stops speaking in the middle of Electra, and will not speak again. And Sven Nykvist's cinematography shows them in haunting images. Bergman shows us everyday actions and the words of ordinary conversation. "How this pretentious movie manages to not be pretentious at all is one of the great accomplishments of 'Persona,' " says a moviegoer named John Hardy, posting his comments on the Internet Movie Database. It is exactly about what it seems to be about. ![]() A third of a century later I know most of what I am ever likely to know about films, and I think I understand that the best approach to "Persona" is a literal one. "Persona" was one of the first movies I reviewed, in 1967. But it suggests buried truths, and we despair of finding them. It is apparently not a difficult film: Everything that happens is perfectly clear, and even the dream sequences are clear-as dreams. "Persona" (1966) is a film we return to over the years, for the beauty of its images and because we hope to understand its mysteries. ![]()
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