Cinéma Palace : Persona
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Cinéma Palace : Persona
09/12 @ 19h00
As a nurse talks and her patient remains silent, their identities begin to merge.
“Persona is bound to trouble, perplex and frustrate most filmgoers. Or so one would suppose.”
~Susan Sontag
In January 1963 Ingmar Bergman was appointed head of the Royal Dramatic Theatre. It was to prove a very demanding job indeed: with the entire company in need of reorganisation, he found himself in an 'insoluble and incomprehensibly chaotic situation.' Against his better judgement, he did not cut back on his film work and ended up paying the price: double pneumonia and acute penicillin poisoning. In the spring of 1965 he was admitted to Sophiahemmet, the royal hospital, where he began to write the screenplay for Persona, 'mainly to keep my hand in the creative process.'
In poor shape, both physical and psychological, he started to question the role of art in general, and his own work in particular.
Bergman writing in "Images - My Life in Film":
'It was not a case of developing an aversion to my professional life. Although I am a neurotic person, my relation to my profession has always been astonishingly non-neurotic. I have always had the ability to attach my demons to my chariot. And they have been forced to make themselves useful. At the same time they have still managed to keep on tormenting and embarrassing my private life. The owner of the flea circus, as you might be aware, has a habit of letting his artists suck his blood.'
The first notes for what was to become Persona were written on 12 April 1965.
These early notes constitute a unique summary of the film. Persona has often been regarded as a watershed in Bergman's career, a new start, just as he had prescribed for himself. The subsequent writing appears to have been swift. A few pages further on in his workbook we find words that are highly relevant to the film: 'Talk to each other', 'Eroticism', 'Testimony', 'Facial studies', etc. One of the key scenes is already in place: 'What's the point of being an artist. Nurse Alma makes a passionate defence of this, but is forced to eat her words.'
At this point, there are already also some self-mocking notes in the margin of the screenplay: 'One up, one down, that's basically it.'
The two women in Persona have sometimes been regarded as one and the same person (rather like the sisters in The Silence and Cries and Whispers). This analysis does have some validity, as Bergman himself implies: 'Could one make this into an inner happening? I mean, suggest, that it is a composition for different voices in the same soul's concerto grosso?'
Bergman has often made use of musical metaphors when describing Persona. At a later date he would referred to it as a sonata for the instruments Andersson and Ullmann. Asked whether the sonata should be in a major or minor key, he replied that it should be neither, 'the way it is in modern music.'
Keeping his hand in the creative process' started to pay off, and it became clear that a film might be forthcoming, after all. Having thought about casting, Bergman decided that the principal roles should go to Bibi Andersson and the highly-praised young Norwegian actress, Liv Ullmann. He had never actually seen her act, but he had been at the home of Gunnel Lindblom looking at slides taken during the shooting of Pan, in which Andersson and Ullmann both took part. Struck by how similar they were, this initial impulse eventually led Bergman to Persona.
Reasonably enough, Kenne Fant wondered what the film would be about, to which Bergman replied: 'Well, it's about one person who talks and one who doesn't, and they compare hands and get all mingled up in one another.' 'Oh, really,' said Kenne. I said: 'It'll be a very small film, so it needn't cost much.' Kenne put up the money wholeheartedly. And that's something I'll never forget.'
Fant's willingness to finance such a risky project should, however, be seen in the context of The Silence, which two years earlier had been SF's greatest ever box office success. This may go some way towards explaining his ready generosity.
The finished screenplay is not dissimilar to the random jottings in Bergman's workbook, yet although it may appear somewhat improvised, it was 'painstakingly planned.' Nonetheless, it is prefaced by the reservation that much of the film will be determined once shooting is underway.
For Dreamers, Coffee shots, Orezza, eau de Saint-Georges !
Cinéma Palace : Persona