Review of Persona (1966) by Donovan D — 15 Apr 2008

By the mid-60s Bergman's depressing, angsty cinema must have begun to lose its freshness, even if it hadn't lost any of its profundity. Considering the breakout success of the Seventh Seal, it's hard to imagine that just 3 short years later kinetic and self-aware films like Shadows, Shoot the Piano Player and Breathless would be bursting on the scene, making a stagey theatrical work like the Seventh Seal decidedly old hat in comparison.

While the films that followed the Seventh Seal are some of the Swedish auteur's best - and Through a Glass Darkly is my favorite of all his work - a filmmaker as great as Bergman must have seen the benefit of cinematic developments like Godard's postmodern pranksterism, the extreme modernism of Resnais' Last Year in Marienbad, the cinematic poetry of the New American Cinema and the burgeoning structural/materialist movement, all of which are seemingly points of departure for one of Bergman's most devastating (though somewhat atypical) masterstrokes; Persona.

Psychological struggle has played a major role in so many of Bergman's best works - especially in the Faith Trilogy - and it returns here in an even more minimalist chamber piece. The stunning Liv Ullman and Bibi Andersson are marvelous here, and the visual similarity of the two actresses is utilized here to startling effect - none more shocking that Bergman's superimposition of the two faces one on top of the other.

Form is the major achievement of Persona, as it finds the great dramatist Bergman utilizing cinema-specific techniques in order to tell his story. The film famously begins with a cinematic poem as avant-garde as anything produced by Maya Deren or Kenneth Anger, and ends with a reflexive shot of Bergman and cinematographer Sven Nykvist that is as self-aware (if more subtle) than some of Godard's formal cinema-as-artifice experiments.

But most startling of all is the way the film's breaking point is presented; the film literally breaks on screen. While we've seen this kind of thing in films like Fight Club (which has many parallels with Persona), for a film of its time this will impress even the most jaded of viewers, and is all the more impressive given that Bergman is usually known for films that are basically theatrical productions on screen rather than anything particularly akin to structural film.

While I'd certainly rate Bergman's Cries and Whispers and Through a Glass Darkly ahead of Persona in terms of preference it is most certainly up there in the top five films made by the late master - at once surprising and characteristic of his oeuvre.