(https://youtube/watch?v=iO4gk3_kZjU) Persona (1966) opens and closes with images of the cinematic apparatus, the carbon arc of a projector: at the beginning we see film running through the projection mechanism and fragmented images of a silent film, of a slaughtered sheep, of a hand with a nail driven through it. In an unlocalized space we see a boy on what appears to be a morgue slab; he rises and sees as if on a screen the merged images of the two women who will be the major characters of the narrative proper. Within that narrative, Bergman interrupts the action to bring us back to consciousness of its filmic reality. At one point the film burns and tears; at another he has a character deliver the same monologue twice. The first time the camera observes the person to whom she speaks, the second time it gazes over that person’s shoulder, looking at the speaker. The construction of the narrative itself is full of ellipses (more accurately, empty with ellipses); it lurches along the paths of its mystery-the bizarre relationship of two women, one an actress who refuses to speak, the other her nurse who speaks too much, allowing the actress to drain away her personality. The modernist elements here work toward mystifying the narrative; they are an effective gambit, but only a gambit. In any given sequence, once Bergman begins to concentrate on the interaction of the two women, the devices used to create distance disappear, and we are invited to partake of immediate emotion and psychological mysteries. The characters’ fears and agonies and Bergman’s fascination with them overtake any desire he might have to examine the way they are created. His desire to communicate the perverse pleasures of emotional confrontation outweighs his need to confront the intellect by denying narrative desire and its fulfillment. Taken from The Altering Eye by Robert Phillip Kolker
Posted on: Tue, 14 Oct 2014 05:15:21 +0000
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