Persona (1966)
My boyfriend and I have been endeavoring to watch more films this year. This is already something we’ve done a lot of throughout the course of our relationship, but this year I specifically added “watch more films” to my list of New Year’s resolutions.
Tacky as resolutions may be, I’ve actually managed to keep up with them so far, and I wanted to start by exploring directors whose work I’d heard of but had never seen. So obviously we had to watch an Ingmar Bergman movie.
Persona was a really spectacular film. I guess some people have called it “the best film of all time” and analysts have equated it to Mt. Everest due to the level of difficulty a viewer has in sifting through the meaning of the film. I certainly wasn’t sure I had it all worked out by the end, or even now as I sit here writing this post. But I know I enjoyed watching it very much.
Bergman did such a wonderful job of exploring mental illness. How much or how little does it take for the mind to snap? How much of mental illness do we inflict upon ourselves, whether we mean to or not? Can mental illness catch like a contagion?
The main character, Elisabet, is a screen actress who suffers a mental break while filming a movie and is struck dumb. Her nurse, Alma, cares for her while she rests, and fills Elisabet’s silence with her own out-loud musings.
I can’t sufficiently examine the movie in a blog post. It would definitely require at least one essay to wade through my myriad thoughts on this one. However, I think the most interesting aspect of this movie to me was the human tendency to use interactions with others as a way to examine ourselves. Alma talks to Elizabet without much response and experiences her as some strange kind of mirror, reflecting back at her her own feelings about herself and her actions. Sometimes Alma seems to loathe what she “sees,” othertimes she loves, or even lusts after it. Simply the quiet presence of another human being invites self-judgement and self-analysis. Much of the move feels like a talk-therapy session, ironically not for the woman sent away to care for her mental health.
There are so many films where women experience madness and become one another. 3 Women, Dead Ringer, and Black Swan are a few off the top of my head. What is it about women that invites us to analyze one other, envy one another, adore one another, loathe one another, perhaps even lust after one another, and compare ourselves to one another using such meticulous and sub-divided checklists that we experience such an overlapping of selves? Alma seems both desperate to prove she can be as lovely as she thinks Elizabet is and yet wishes to assert in the end that she is not Elizabet.
This is a terrific movie exploring identity that I think almost anyone who likes to really think about what they’re watching can find merit in, simply because there is so much to mine. It also features some of the most striking and iconic shots in filmmaking that have gone on to inspire so many other directors’ work.
