Return to World Cinema syllabus
Updated 3 October 2006
English 212, Section 3: World Cinema
Week 6: 2 October 2006
Professor: Don Larsson
6:00-6:15 Quiz 3 (French New Wave)
6:15-6:45
Bergman, Scandinavian Film and the
6:45-8:15 View Persona
8:15-9:30 Discussion of Persona and Bergman
In Memoriam: Sven Nykvist (left, with Bergman, right),
died 21 September 2006
Scandinavian Film before World War II
1910s on: Swedish and Danish film industries achieve popularity and influence thanks to innovations in technology and personal visions of a handful of directors:
§ Mauritz Stiller (born,
§ Viktor Sjostrom (1879-1960). Best-known films
include 3 silent films made in
§ Carl Theodor Dreyer (Denmark, 1889-1968). Important influence on later directors internationally. Sometimes compared to Bresson and Ozu for spare cinematic and contemplative cinematic style. Films include The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Vampyr (1932), Day of Wrath (1943), Ordet/The Word (1954), and Gertrud (1964).
Only Dreyer continues to direct major films during and after World War II (but only one/decade!).
§ Influence of drama and literature (Henrik Ibsen, August Strindberg, Lagerlof, etc.): questioning social hypocrisy, exploring human psychology and personal relationships, role of women in family and society, influence of heredity and environment
§ Importance of natural settings to reflect human emotions, critical views of social conventions and human weakness, the presence of the otherworldly (whether God, demons, or something else). All have continuing influence in Bergman’s work.
Other Directors:
Bo Widerberg: Elvira Madigan (1967)
Jan von Troell: The Emigrants and The New Land (1971, 1972):
These 2 films deal with a Swedish
family that settles in
Lars von Trier and the Dogme 95 movement: http://www.dogme95.dk/
Danish director known for controversial exploration of human emotions and social themes, dark satirical edge, and handheld camerawork. Co-founder of the Dogma 95 movement, which encourage “cinematic purity”: no artificial sets or lighting, use only of diegetic music, films only in color and on handheld cameras, etc.
Best-known films include
§ Europa (also known as Zentropa, 1991)
§ The Kingdom (Danish TV series combining elements of ER and The X Files, remade as an American mini-series by Stephen King)
§ Breaking the Waves (1996) with Emily Watson and Stellan Skarsgaard
§ The Idiots (1998), one of the Dogma films
§ Dancer in the Dark (2000), a grim musical, starring Bjork
§ Dogville (2003), with Nicole Kidman
Post-World
War II: The
(1950s-1960s)
§ “Modernist” movement in filmmaking (following Modernist movements in arts and literature in 1900s-1920s)
§ Reflects post-war need in
§ Desire for personal visions and individual styles by directors
§ Experimental and innovative uses of stylistic elements of medium
§ Exploration of personal psychology of characters and relationships
§ Questions about the larger meanings of life, the nature of reality and perception, the role of history and memory
§ Often regarded as “difficult” films by audiences at the time
§ Major directors span the globe:
o
o
o
o France (Bresson, Tati, Resnais)
o Spain/France/Mexico (Luis Bunuel)
o And Bergman!
Ingmar Bergman (Sweden, born 1918)
Father was Lutheran priest, stern disciplinarian
Becomes interested in theater, begins writing plays and screenplays in 1940s, works for director Alf Sjoberg, begins directing own films from 1946 on
Major themes:
§ Human relationships (family, man-woman, parent-child)
o Lack of communication
o Need and repulsion
§ Search for meaning in life
o The silence of God
o The presence of the past
o The irrecoverable past
§ Defining personal identity
§ Art and theater: parasites, the “little world”?
Major Films:
Monika (1953)
Sawdust and Tinsel (1953)
Smiles of a Summer Night (1955)
The Seventh Seal (1957)
Wild Strawberries (1957)
The Magician (1958)
The Virgin Spring 1960
The Silence of God trilogy:
Through a Glass Darkly (1961)
Winter Light (1962)
The Silence (1963)
Persona (1966)
Shame (1968)
The Passion of Anna (1969)
Cries and Whispers (1972)
Scenes from a Marriage (1973)
The Magic Flute (1975)
Face to Face (1976)
The Serpent’s Egg (1977)
Autumn Sonata (1978)
Fanny and Alexander (1982)
Saraband (2003)
Persona (1966)
Director: Bergman; Script: Bergman; Cinematography: Sven Nykvist; Editor: Ulle Rhyga; Music: Lars Johan Werle, J.S. Bach
Cast:
Bibbi Andersson (Alma, the nurse); Liv Ullmann (Elizabet Vogler); Margaretha Krook (the doctor); Gunnar Bjornstrand (Mr. Vogler)
Some Questions to Think About:
1. Why is the opening montage of images there? What do they suggest? Do they relate at all to the rest of the film?
2. Why can’t
3. When and
how does
4. What has happened by the film’s end? How have the two women changed? What are the implications of that change?
Discussion Summary:
Persona is one of Bergman’s best-known and most challenging works. It deals with some of his major concerns and is more stylistically innovative than most of his other films, but at the same it reflects the influence of the theatrical kammerspiel (closet drama) designed for small theaters and audiences by playwrights such as Strindberg. Strindberg’s play The Stronger, in fact, seems to be an important influence on this film. The play has only two characters, a man’s wife and his mistress. The mistress has a nearly non-stop monologue explaining how she plans to run away with the other woman’s husband. The wife remains silent but by the end of the play, the mistress realizes that it is the wife who actually the stronger of the two.
Bergman’s film also features two women, one of whom does not speak through most of the film, but their relationship is much more complicated. At first, the two women—Anna, the nurse, and Elizabet, the actress—seem like complete opposites. Ana claims that she’s very ordinary and that her life is already defined and marked out for her—a career as a nurse, then marriage and children. Elizabet is a well-known actress who has suddenly gone silent, not because she can’t speak but because she won’t. Elizabet’s doctor sends her for a rest cure at the doctor’s home on an island (Faroe, where Bergman himself lived for much of his adult life) with Anna as a companion. In time, Anna comes to reveal much of her self and her personal secrets to Elizabet but is enraged when she believes that the actress has just been studying her for possible use in her own performances. She becomes aggressive in her own relationship to Elizabet, causing her to cut her foot and even slapping her. By the end of the film, it seems that some sort of fusion or transfer of personalities has taken place between the two women and that they may both be the better for it, but the ending is still very uncertain.
That uncertainty is reinforced by the self-referentiality of the film. The film opens with images of a carbon-arc lamp (the kind once used in 35mm. movie projectors) being lit. We look through the shutter gate of a projector and see a cartoon image upside down (as we would if we looked at the film while it was going through the projector), followed by a kind of slapstick chase scene from a silent film, but one in which the figure of a skeleton is chasing the other character. Other unsettling images appear—what looks like a sheep being slaughtered, a hand being nailed to a piece of wood, a tarantula. These images all seem to be allusions to some of Bergman’s earlier movies, such as The Seventh Seal, in which Death appears as a character, and Through a Glass Darkly, in which the heroine has a vision of God as a spider. The implication is that Persona is a summing up of some of Bergman’s major concerns over the years.
These images are followed by shots of what look like the dead bodies of old people lying in a morgue, except we learn that they are actually alive. Among the old people is a young teenaged boy who reaches toward the blurred image of Anna, then Elizabet, and then the fused image of the two that will appear later in the film. We see images from this opening sequence once or twice more during the film and at the end. And about half-way through, the film even seems to run off the sprockets that hold it in place, then break and burn.
These images
are ways of reminding us that we are watching a film that is a product and part of Bergman’s personal imagination, but also of
suggesting that we have to question the “reality” of anything we see and
hear. We cannot be sure that the stories that Anna tells about herself
are true. We cannot be sure that some of the things she sees and hears (Elizabet whispering to her and coming to her room,
What ties all this unreality together is suggested by the title. “Persona” literally means “mask” and was used to refer to the masks that actors wore in the ancient Greek tragedies, such as Electra, the play Elizabet is in when she stops speaking. But the word is also the root of the word “personality” and suggests that our personalities, the ways in which we project ourselves to each other in different ways at different times are all just masks. Is there anything really underneath the mask, then? The possibility of emptiness can be terribly frightening, and that seems to haunt Anna as a possibility. On the other hand, so much of our personalities are formed through actions with a violent and hostile world (suggested by TV images of a Buddhist monk setting himself on fire to protest the corrupt South Vietnamese government during the Vietnam war and the famous photograph of a small Jewish boy being rounded by German soldiers for the concentration camps) that the best way to find a “real” self might be to withdraw from contact with the world altogether, as Elizabet seems to do.
If there’s any resolution, it comes through the realization of the emptiness and of the possible choices that we have in filling it. But even that is no guarantee of future happiness. It is all that we have to go on.