Persona is one of those works where you really have no way to unequivocally say what it's about. As Bergman said himself it is whatever you want to be. For me this is the greatest indication that Persona is Bergman revealing his inner monologue. This is his struggle between as he sees it two ways of living. An 'artist' vs being anyone else. The conflict here is between Sister Alma who keeps her world deliberately simple vs Elisabet who experiences the world viscerally. It seems to me Bergman was at a point in his life and career to where he was about to succumb to pressures his lifestyle brought on only to realize that Sister Alma's have their own struggles to deal with.
The question for me with Persona is who is real and who is the other? A strong case could be made Alma is real, but I think the fact she doesn't speak and wrote the letter speaks to Elisabet being real.
I think this is where it's made quite clear that this is a conflict between two people living inside one mind.Sloper wrote:Bergman said that what fascinated him above all, as a film-maker, was the human face, and especially what the face does in close-ups. What do faces do in the close-ups in this film? Why do we see Alma’s monologue about Elisabet’s son twice, from two points of view, and why do the two women’s faces merge together at the end of this sequence?
I think it's exposing that nothing is real or truth everything is performance and within that was must cope.Sloper wrote:The Latin word ‘persona’ could refer to an actor’s mask. This film is explicitly asking questions about faces, about language, and about everything a person ‘projects’ to the rest of the world: are these things ever reliable indicators of truth? Is there a truth to be indicated, or are such performances in themselves the nearest things we have to ‘truth’?
Neither. This was Bergman asserting and then reasserting his control over his world, profession and audience.Sloper wrote:The film begins with a projector firing up, and at several other points (especially just after the broken glass incident) we are forcefully reminded that we are watching a film. Is Bergman expressing a hopeless scepticism about the capacity of this medium to aid in our search for truth, and / or is he showing how cinema is uniquely equipped to illuminate aspects of the human condition that are normally inaccessible?
Elisabet & Alma is the struggle, when her eyes are closed Alma, Elisabet's conscience, is free to pursue her art. The child Bergman trying to grasp at who or what he is.Sloper wrote:At the end of the prologue (which I have to say I’m not that keen on, although I love this film), we see a teenage boy placing his hand on a screen, on which the faces of Elisabet and Alma keep dissolving into each other, mostly with their eyes open – but Alma’s eyes are closed at the end of the sequence. We come back to this image at the end of the film. Why is the story framed like this? Is the image of a child groping confusedly at an ever-shifting human face somehow indicative of what this film is about?
It doesn't. Bergman stops this exploration for God and instead with Persona goes on a journey inward.Sloper wrote: In what ways does this film continue to explore the questions about God that were so central to much of Bergman’s earlier work?
