Persona

 

A film to end all faces: Persona. Or rather, a film that puts an end to the faces of the two central protagonists that feature therein, one a mute actress named Elisabet Vogler (Liv Ullmann), the other, a young nurse named Alma (Bibi Andersson). In his book, Screening the Face, Paul Coates has talked about how both women are subjected to what essentially amounts to a facial ordeal in the film, namely through the patterns of framing used by Bergman. The director’s use of extreme-close ups, in particular, often violently splits the faces of the two women into fragments from which the forehead or chin has been excluded, in turn, generating an abiding impression of violation, voyeurism, even torment. ‘Framing the face so closely as to deny access to its entire shape suffices intimacy with invasiveness’, states Coates (2012: 165).

Even more than Eyes Without a Face, Persona is also a tale of masking. The fact that Elisabet is a mute actress, is, of course, significant in this respect, in that for most of the film we are invited to read into the void left in her absence of speech by looking into the traces of expression left on her face. There is only one problem: in contrast to Alma, Elisabet is very much an expressionless character, whose face hardly gives anything away throughout the majority of the film. For example, when filming one of the most famous scenes in Persona (a confessional conversation during which Alma reveals her participation in a beach orgy), Bergman asked the actress playing Elisabet, Liv Ullmann, to concentrate ‘all of her feelings on her lips’ (Coates 2012: 168). The resulting performance, in this scene, and indeed, throughout the narrative, is a tour de force in ambiguity and understatement. No matter how hard we try, we are unable to see past Elisabet’s facial features, to what might, or might not, lie underneath: her mind.

Want to know more?

Read about Persona here.

Watch the entire film for free here.

Read about the perceived 'mystery' of the female face here and here (Chapter 3)

Read about the fetishisation of the female face here (Chapter 3)