Persona

This, what could be Bergman's 27th effort as writer and director, is a film I've gone back to over the years, because over time I wish to work out what it truly means. Everything that we see in its way of communication, its dialect, its structure of implications are completely apparent. Its only mere evocations are of hidden realities, and we lose hope of finding them. It is about motherhood, or abandoning it. It is about existentialism, or a sensation of bewilderment and loss of nerve despite a deceptively vain and futile world. It is about being known too well for comfort, or whether or not that is possible.

Elisabet, played by Bergman's girl Friday Liv Ullmann, stops speaking in the middle of a performance, and never again does. A psychiatrist thinks it might help if Elizabet and Nurse Alma, played by Bibi Andersson, spend the summer at her remote beach house. Seized in the same enveloped period of interval, the two women in some way fuse. Elizabet says nothing, and thus Alma feels free to talk at length, professing her hopes and her worries, and in time, confessing a truly sexy experience during which she was absolutely blissful.

Bergman emphasizes the two actresses' resemblances in a disquieting shot where he merges halves of both faces. Soon after, he overlays the two whole faces, like a transmutation. Their visual amalgamation intimates a more entrenched intuitive pull. Elisabet, silent and seemingly in poor health, is a stronger presence than Alma, and in due course the nurse feels her psyche being permeated by the other woman. There is a very real instance when her bitterness channels in the arcane passages of her soul in the juxtaposingly sun-drenched patio of the lodge, where she gathers the shards of a broken glass, and then calculatingly leaves a piece where Elisabet will presumably stroll by. Elisabet cuts her foot, and we feel Bergman's familiarity with this sort of subterranean vindication as the execution of the act itself seems so unsuspecting, but still this is in effect a conquest for Elisabet, who has driven the nurse to forsake the order of her job and, literally, bring to light a failing of hers.

At this second, Bergman lets his film to appear to shred and smolder as the picture goes bare before restructuring. This echoes the opening of this otherwise fairly straightforward movie. Both times, a projector lamp blazes, and there is a medley from the very dawn of cinema. The midpoint punctuates with the camera tightening in on an eye, and even into the veins in the eyeball, as if to penetrate it to the extent that a camera can.

The beginning sequence could maybe imply that this self-reflexive picture is starting from scratch, with the origin of movies. The rupture in the median would then mean it returns and originates yet again. When the movie ends, the celluloid comes to a literal end and the lamp goes out. Is Bergman intimating that he has harked back to primary theories. Just before the end there is a shot of the actual movie crew, almost as if the film's central theme of merging is having a universal effect.

The images and descriptions of the monologues in this sequence of variants on the subject of replication and coalescing is so commanding that Bergman truly reveals how ideas produce perceptions and certainty. One would have to be certain of what one is revealing in a film in which the plot changes through a noncausal order, entirely lacking the reverse cross-shooting audiences have grown so accustomed to in most films, replaced with simultaneous angles and point-of-view shots.

When I think about it, there are only a couple of truly existent, or impartial, encounters in the story, the film altogether, each punctuated by rupturing the film, as if everything else is assembled by beliefs and feelings. Elisabet and Alma are only two or three times capable of infiltrating the trances that are their lives. The largest part of one's self-image is not complete familiarity with the rest of humanity, but a psychological transmission, like a movie, prepared by thoughts, dreams, recollections, media, interactions, jobs, faith and uncertainties. Elisabet opts to be who she is and Alma is not firm enough to elect not to be Elisabet.

4444(创建者)