![]() If there is, it is so buried that it doesn’t function in the work. But for this kind of speculation (and one would have to go through almost every image in the movie this way) to have any purpose, there must be a structure of meanings in the work by which an interpretation can be validated I don’t think there is one in Persona. It’s easy to say that the little boy reaching up to the screen is probably Bergman as a child and he may also represent the nurse’s aborted baby and/or the actress’s rejected son. Though it’s possible to offer interpretations, I don’t think that treating Persona as the pieces of a puzzle and trying to put them together will do much more than demonstrate ingenuity at guesswork. Most movies give so little that it seems almost barbarous to object to Bergman’s not giving us more in Persona, but it is just because of the expressiveness and fascination of what we are given that the movie is so frustrating. But the two look very much alike, and Bergman plays with this resemblance photographically by suggestive combinations and superimpositions. ![]() In the dramatic material the women don’t change identity it is merely their roles that change as the nurse become hysterical and uncontrollable. (I thought I even felt it go - at the repeated passage, when the director seems to be trying an alternate way of shooting a sequence.) It’s a pity because the inner movie had begun to involve us in marvelous possibilities: an actress (Liv Ullmann) who has abandoned the power of speech is put in the care of a nurse (Bibi Andersson) and the nurse, like an analysand who becomes furious at the silence of the analyst, begins to vent her own emotional disturbances. ![]() He gives us a movie within a movie, but he seems hardly to have made the enclosing movie, and then he throws away the inner movie. In Persona, as in the very early Prison, Bergman involves us in the making of a movie. It’s one of the rare, truly erotic sequences on film.īergman’s movies have almost always had some kind of show within the show: a ballet, a circus, a magic show, a bit of animation, many pieces of plays and even whole plays. But he does, and it builds and builds and is completed. As she goes on talking, with memories of summer and nakedness and pleasure in her words and the emptiness of her present in her face, we begin to hold our breath in fear that Bergman can’t sustain this almost intolerably difficult sequence. In Persona Bibi Andersson’s almost fierce revery has that kind of beauty. In moments like these, Bergman is a great artist. Bergman has the capacity to create images that set off reverberations: in the early part of Illicit Interlude an old woman appears for just a moment on a road - walking - and this image, like the croquet game in Smiles of a Summer Night, seems to be suspended in time. We do not need to see images of the beach and the boy and the return to the fiancee that she describes because the excitement is in how she tells it. There is a brief passage in Ingmar Bergman‘s Persona - Bibi Andersson tells about a day and night of sex - that is so much more erotic than all of Ulysses that it demonstrates what can be done on the screen with told material.
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