Julia Curl
Integrative Seminar 2
April 28, 2017
EXISTENTIAL AWAKENING IN BERGMAN’S PERSONA
Born on July 14, 1918, the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman came into being during one of the greatest upheavals of human history. The First World War claimed sixteen million lives, and in its wake obliterated any notion of mankind’s “inevitable progress”—what kind of progress was there, really, when an entire generation huddled “in foul dug-outs, gnawed by rats/And in the ruined trenches, lashed with rain”?[1] Yet even WWI’s horrors pale in comparison with those that were to come just as the young auteur was turning 21. World War II took the destruction of human life to a peak never before imaginable; the Holocaust raged on, but Sweden remained stubbornly neutral in the face of an immense loss of human life. The festering guilt that this bred among the Swedish intelligentsia—particularly in a man like Bergman, who himself admitted to an “adolescent attraction to [Hitler’s] fascism” as an exchange student in Germany—ran deep.[2]
World War II fundamentally altered the way that people conceived of the world, be it through art, philosophy, or even in everyday life. “The very foundations of what we call ‘reality’ were crumbling,” one author writes.[3] The celebrated film critic Robin Wood notes how “the ordinary structures” of “beginning, middle, and end… disappeared as necessary parameters” in the wake of the conflict.[4] Coherent art suddenly made little sense when everyday reality was incoherent and incomprehensible. Poets like T. S. Eliot rose to international prominence within “Bergman’s generation,”[5] rejecting the classical structures of the poetic medium in favor of a more fractured vision of the world. Bergman’s own anecdotes from this time reflect a sense of shattered normalcy: “I had very few contacts with reality or channels to it,” he writes. “I was afraid of my father, my mother, my elder brother—everything. Playing with this puppet theater and a projection device I had was my only form of self-expression.”[6]
One of the most influential philosophical movements that arose during this time period was French existentialism, pioneered by Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre himself developed his theories through direct engagement with the events of the Second World War; the philosopher was briefly held in a German prisoner of war camp, and upon his release formed an underground resistance group in Paris.[7] Camus’ work deals with the absurdity of the post-war world, particularly through “defamiliarizing the natural object or natural condition, rendering it strange with a calm and blinding lucidity.”[8]
This defamiliarization and confrontation of the absurd would have a lasting effect on Ingmar Bergman. In several 1968 interviews, Bergman discussed the importance of existentialism in shaping the course of his work. At the beginning of his career in 1946, Bergman even directed Camus’ play Caligula.[9] His films, too, reflect a deep familiarity with Camus and Sartre’s existentialism[10]—Bergman even goes so far as to pick a favorite, calling Camus’ philosophy more “refined” than Sartre’s.[11] As a result, studies of Bergman’s work tend to explore the philosophical and existential implications of his oeuvre perhaps more deeply than they consider its cinematographic elements.[12]
Bergman was even briefly in contact with Camus during the late 1950s, when he was attempting to produce an adapted version of La Chute. (This production, however, was curtailed by Camus’ untimely death).[13] Indeed, Bergman’s philosophy is so indebted to the French existentialists that one critic states that “If [Bergman] is a philosopher in the cinema, he is a philosopher with plagiarized views, personally important but culturally derivative.”[14] We see this connection further in Bergman’s films The Seventh Seal and Winter Light, as the protagonists’ theological crises reflect one of the crucial issues of existentialism: how to inhabit a world “in which God is absent.”[15] In these films, the question of the existence of God is paramount.[16] Although there has been some debate as to what Bergman’s ultimate leanings might be, the prevailing argument asserts that both The Seventh Seal and Winter Light “are preoccupied with the silence of God and are pessimistic about man’s relationship with God.”[17]
Bergman’s films tend to turn this existentialism inward, examining the psychological consequences of absurdity, the profound anxiety of living in a godless—and thus meaningless—world. Like the Modernists’ revolt against poetic meter, Bergman’s films “move away from the staged melodrama of classical film into a world of oblique signs where plotlines are never clear.”[18] Moving even deeper than plotlines, however, Bergman’s films present a world where even being itself is never clear: the mind struggles to see objective reality, struggles to see outside of itself, and even struggles to see itself at all.[19]
Perhaps the most striking example of this is Bergman’s 1966 masterpiece, Persona, shot at the height of the Vietnam War. The film reflects a growing resistance to a discernible, objective reality in Bergman’s work, a resistance that runs parallel to his exploration of post-WWII existentialism: In Persona’s dissociated identities and dislocation from space and time, we see the individual’s disorientation and struggle to exist in a seemingly meaningless, war-torn world. The intangibility of the self that one finds in Persona is the true essence of Bergman’s horror.
Persona begins with an onslaught of disturbing footage spliced together, scenes that in combination provide no narrative, only a general atmosphere of alienation and horror. The film slowly fades in from darkness as a sharp, uncanny noise squeals in the background; we then see up-close, abstracted shots of a film reel whirring. The screen flashes white, as numbers count down. (In an absurdist touch, when we get to where the number 6 ought to be, the image of an erect penis flashes by). It speeds through shots of a tarantula, footage of hands wringing blood from a dying sheep’s neck, a flash of intestines, and then images of a nail being driven through a hand as if in a crucifixion. Each of these images is clearly meant to provoke and unsettle the viewer, particularly through the discomfiting mix of sexual imagery and gore.
Perhaps even more significant, however, is Susan Sontag’s remark about these disorienting scenes. She writes, “What first needs to be made clear about Persona is what can’t be done with it. The most skillful attempt to arrange a single, plausible anecdote out of the film must leave out or contradict some of its key sections, images and procedures.”[20] A great portion of this montage is impossible to describe with words, as no summation of its events would make any sense. This is perhaps the film’s most salient quality; it is impossible to make heads or tails out of what is happening, impossible to tie it into a narrative without inventing threads that are simply not present in the film itself.
The film’s narrative begins with the image of a white, characterless doorway. A nurse, Alma, comes through it and addresses a doctor, who speaks from off-screen. In all of these hospital scenes, each image is completely devoid of context: there are no establishing shots of the hospital interior or exterior, and minimal detail in the few spaces that we do see. Every time a person speaks, we see only their upper torso against a blank monotone background, with minimal furniture, no windows, and no anchors of place or time. As a result, the viewer is disoriented, somehow alienated from the setting; we experience the same “defamiliarization”[21] of the everyday that Camus describes in his 1955 essay “The Myth of Sisyphus.”[22]
In fact, there are many striking parallels to this work of Camus’ that can be found throughout Persona. One of the first facts that established in the film is that Elizabeth Vogler is a famous actress who, after briefly going silent during her final performance of Electra—she told her colleagues that the urge to laugh “suddenly overcame her”—has decided to stop speaking. Camus’ text is peppered with metaphors for the stage: He frequently makes use of phrases like “the stage scenery masked by habit.”[23] This lexicon of “unmasking” that Camus returns to over and over also echoes the very name of the film itself: “Persona” originates from the Latin term for a theatrical mask, although it is most commonly used to refer to a role played by an actor.
Camus even brushes up against the very plot of the film itself: “At certain moments of lucidity,” he writes, “the mechanical aspect of [people’s] gestures, their meaningless pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them.”[24] It can certainly be no coincidence then that Elisabet is engaged in a literal pantomime when she is overcome with laughter—it is perhaps the very absurdity of the play that drives her to silence. The parallels don’t stop with Elizabet’s character, either: in a letter to her doctor, Elisabet writes that Alma “complains that her notions of life don’t accord with her actions.” This comes eerily close to one definition that Camus uses for “the feeling of absurdity”: The “divorce between a man and his life, the actor and his setting.”[25] Alma, then, can be seen as exemplifying the “divorce between a man and his life”—Elizabet, “the actor and his setting.”
The absurd is a prevailing theme in Persona as whole, but it appears most starkly in the break at the center of the film. At the film’s halfway point, Alma leaves a shard of glass for Elizabet to step on out of spite. As we see a shot of Alma’s face, the physical film becomes corrupted. White streaks break out across the image, and the film burns through into whiteness where Alma’s face was. Through the white screen, we see flashes of a man dressed as a vampire, another man in a skeleton suit jumping out of a box—all childish, absurd scenes of mock-horror. Death is recast in a foolish pantomime, and the fear and anxiety at the heart of the entire film—the one thing that gets Elizabet to speak—becomes utterly ridiculous.
As Robin Wood notes, “breakdown… is both theme and form”[26] in Persona. Towards the end of the film, events become increasingly abstract; a series of dream sequences occur in which Alma and Elisabet’s identities become confused, and the conflict between them grows ever more violent. In one fractured scene, Alma scratches the length of her arm, drawing blood, and Elisabet sucks at the wound. In another, Alma cries without context or coherence, “No, no, no. Us we me I, many words and then disgust, unbearable pain, the nausea.” Nausea, perhaps not at all coincidentally, is the name of Sartre’s major existential novel, and a central part of the acute state of self-awareness that characterizes existentialism’s “definitive awakening” to the absurdity of life.[27]
Throughout Persona, dialogue, plot, even the physical medium of the film itself break down. In these dramatic disruptions, “one can see the whole traditional concept of art—an ordering of experience toward a positive end, a wholeness of statement—crackling and crumbling” along with the image.[28] Bergman, through an embrace of existentialist philosophy, confronts the absurd head-on; he intersperses the individual psychological drama of Elisabet and Alma with footage of a monk self-immolating, and with photographs of a Nazi officer pointing a gun at a child in the Warsaw ghetto. His characters recoil from a world in which these sorts of horrors “are not merely possible but everyday.”[29] Seeing all of this together, particularly noting the deep similarities between Persona’s plot and “The Myth of Sisyphus,” it might make sense to then see Persona’s disorientation and chaotic dislocation from coherent narrative as a sort of existential awakening. Bergman not only has Elisabet and Alma face the absurdity and apparent meaninglessness of modern life, but he subjects the medium itself to its own awakening—forcing art to imitate life, with all of the dark absurdities that that entails.
Bibliography
Camus, Albert. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Translated by Justin O’Brien. New York: Random House, 1991.
Hanscomb, Stuart. “Existentialism and Art-Horror.” Sartre Studies International 16, no. 1 (2010): 1-23. http://www.jstor.org/stable/23512850.
Kartal, Esma. “Seeking God in Early Bergman: The Cases of Seventh Seal and Winter Light.” CINEJ Cinema Journal 1, no. 2 (2012): 71-76.
Ketcham, Charles B. The Influence of Existentialism on Ingmar Bergman: An Analysis of the Theological Ideas Shaping a Filmmaker’s Art. Lewinston: E. Mellen Press, 1986.
Sontag, Susan. “Bergman’s Persona.” In Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, ed. Lloyd Michaels. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Orr, John. “Camus and Carné Transformed: Bergman’s The Silence Versus Antonioni’s The Passenger.” Film International 5, no. 3 (2007): 54-62.
Pua, Phoebe. “Response to Seeking God in Early Bergman: The Cases of Seventh Seal and Winter Light.” CINEJ Cinema Journal 2, no. 1 (2012): 42-57.
Sassoon, Siegfried. “Dreamers.” In The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Vol 1, edited by Jahan Ramazani, 390. New York: W. W. Norton, 2003.
Steene, Birgitta. “About Bergman: Some Critical Responses to His Films.” Cinema Journal 15, no. 2 (1974): 1-10. https://login.libproxy.newschool.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com/docview/1297998245?accountid=12261.
Williams, Dan. Klein, Sartre, and Imagination in the Films of Ingmar Bergman. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Wood, Robin. Ingmar Bergman: New Edition. Edited by Barry Keith Grant. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012.
[1] Siegfried Sassoon, “Dreamers,” in The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Poetry, Vol 1, ed. by Jahan Ramazani (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 390.
[2] Dan Williams, Klein, Sartre, and Imagination in the Films of Ingmar Bergman (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 22.
[3] Williams, 14.
[4] Robin Wood, Ingmar Bergman: New Edition, ed. by Barry Keith Grant (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2012), 221.
[5] Birgitta Steene, “About Bergman: Some Critical Responses to His Films,” Cinema Journal 15, no. 2 (1974): 6.
[6] Williams, 16.
[7] Williams, 19.
[8] John Orr, “Camus and Carné Transformed: Bergman’s The Silence Versus Antonioni’s The Passenger,” Film International 5, no. 3 (2007): 55.
[9] Orr, 55.
[10] Williams, 2.
[11] Orr, 55.
[12] Steene, 3.
[13] Orr, 55.
[14] Steene, 3.
[15] Williams, 9.
[16] Esma Kartal, “Seeking God in Early Bergman: The Cases of Seventh Seal and Winter Light,” CINEJ Cinema Journal 1, no. 2 (2012): 80.
[17] Phoebe Pua, “Response to Seeking God in Early Bergman: The Cases of Seventh Seal and Winter Light,” CINEJ Cinema Journal 2, no. 1 (2012): 55.
[18] Orr, 55.
[19] There is a certain irony to this, considering that we tend to seek refuge from chaos and horror by turning inwards.
[20] Susan Sontag, “Bergman’s Persona,” in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, ed. Lloyd Michaels (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 2.
[21] Orr, 55.
[22] Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, trans. by Justin O’Brien (New York: Random House, 1991), 14.
[23] Camus, 14.
[24] Ibid., 15.
[25] Ibid., 6.
[26] Wood, 188.
[27] Camus, 14.
[28] Wood, 188.
[29] Wood, 190.
