Persona
Ingmar Bergman,
1966,
83’
A nurse is put in charge of a mute actress and finds that their personae are melding together.
EN
“As I have suggested, Persona is constructed according to a form that resists being reduced to a ‘story’ – say, the story about the relation (however ambiguous and abstract) between two women named Elizabeth and Alma, a patient and a nurse, a star and an ingenue, alma (soul) and persona (mask). The reason is that reduction to a ‘story’ means, in the end, a reduction of Bergman’s film to the single dimension of psychology. Not that the psychological dimension isn’t there. It is. But a correct understanding of Persona must go beyond the psychological point of view.”
Susan Sontag1
- 1Susan Sontag, “Persona | Review by Susan Sontag,” originally published in Sight and Sound, Autumn 1967.
