Weekly meditations from your humble messenger
Farewell
to the Master
(Persona, 8/20/07)
By Nicholas Nicastro
The
recent, near-simultaneous deaths of Sweden's Ingmar Bergman and Italy's
Michelangelo Antonioni mark the real terminus of film's first century,
and perhaps the end of its "classical" age. Though we live
in faith that another Fellini, Welles, or Bergman is always just around
the corner, there are no guarantees that any artform will continue to
replenish itself from some wellspring of fresh geniuses. The tragedies
of ancient Greece, for instance, never recovered from the death of Euripides;
classical music can be divided between the time before Beethoven, and
after him. Future generations of critics may say something similar for
movies after the death of Bergman.
By way of retrospective, I recently
watched Persona (1966), one of the director's most original and
challenging films. Based on a story by Bergman himself, the film is
a chamber piece for two instruments—the beautiful and haunted Elizabet
(Liv Ullmann), and her vivacious but insecure nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson).
Elizabet, a renowned actress, hasn't spoken since going silent in mid-performance
three months before; Alma has been assigned as a companion to lure her
back into congress with her fellow humans. What occurs at the seaside
retreat they share isn't "healing" as much as a kind of mutual,
compensatory infection. Alma, who begins as a well-meaning but superficial
careerist, adopts Elizabet's artistic detachment and, perhaps, her cruelty.
Elizabet finds that even her silence is no protection against becoming
drawn into the drama—or comedy—-of her life.
The plot isn't really what Persona
is about. Bergman fills it with reminders that his film is a story,
a contrivance: at one point, the violent conflict between Alma and Elizabet
literally sputters, stops, and burns a hole in the celluloid. In another
context this might be called an act of Brechtian distancing, but here
it isn't as patently political as that word usually implies. Bergman
was a seducer, not a revolutionary, and his subject was the masks ("personae")
usually associated with actors. When, in the film's key image, Elizabet
gestures as if to clear away Alma's professional mask, the act seems
compassionate, if not necessarily liberating.
Even now, more than forty years
after it was made, fresh "solutions" to the puzzles of Persona
are still turning up on the internet. Sorting out its levels of meaning
isn't as important here as the fact that it inspires passionate questioning.
The idea that film should be taken seriously—that it is an art
that should not just amuse, but challenge, and that viewers should expect
to find their noggins stimulated as well as their glands, is next to
dead in America. Perhaps more tragic, its passing is barely lamented,
as generations have grown up since knowledge of foreign and classic
film was considered de rigueur for a modern education.
Bergman, who retired from feature
filmmaking in the mid-1980's, was not just the brooding eccentric legend
has made of him. He was, at root, someone who preferred to fend off
his demons by surrounding himself with beautiful women. (The film he
released just before Persona had the English title All These
Women.) Andersson and Ullmann were two of his celebrated companions;
the farcical nature of seduction, the pursuit of sex and the existential
disappointment that forever attends it, were always among his themes.
If he had made just one more film, it should have been an adaptation
of the Memoirs of his 18th century counterpart, Giacomo Casanova.
Now that would have singed a few frames, wouldn't it?
©2007 Nicholas Nicastro
back to Culture Blog