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Ingmar Bergman's Persona As a Modernist Example of Media

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Ingmar Bergman's Persona As a Modernist Example of Media Filozofski vestnik | Volume XXXV | Number 2 | 2014 | 219–237 Ernest Ženko* Ingmar Bergman’s Persona as a Modernist Example of Media Determinism Introduction The film medium developed during a time of the rapid expansion of modernism, which took over almost all of art. Nevertheless, mainstream narrative cinema joined this movement only after a considerable delay. During the 1920s certain movements in cinema appropriated the main ideas of modernism, but it was only after the Second World War, in fact during the 1960s, that modernism in cinema came to full bloom. Due to its reflexive nature, the role of its auteur, and its open-endedness, Ing- mar Bergman’s film Persona (1966) is considered one of the finest examples of modernism in cinema. Persona is, nevertheless, also an exceptional example of media and technological determinism. In this film, Bergman accomplishes a reversal of a crucial modernist problem related to technology: he does not show how to animate an apparatus, but rather how media technology have infiltrated the prevailing frame of mind so deeply that the psyche can at best be grasped through the film medium itself. We should, for clarity, distinguish between a “vulgar” understanding of me- dia determinism as a reductionist, causal relation between the appearance of technological media and their impact on society, culture, art, and subjectiv- 219 ity, on the one hand, and its “soft” (or dialectical) version, on the other. In the latter, there is more space for various, sometimes even mutually opposed processes that obscure the main orientation, which nevertheless remains pre- sent in both crucial mantras of the so-called “media turn”—Marshall McLu- han’s “medium is the message”1 and Friedrich Kittler’s “media determine our 1 Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1994, 7. * University of Primorska, Koper, Slovenia ernest ženko situation.”2 In both assertions, priority has been given to the materiality of a medium over its content. In this paper, we will claim that such a view, related today to the above-men- tioned authors of the media turn, has actually been one of the key characteristics of modernist art. As pointed out by Mallarmé (“poetry was made not of ideas but of words”), Cartier-Bresson (“the photo was made not of stories but of lines”) and other modernist authors, it was the materiality of the medium that constituted the conditions of possibility for the creation, and consequently the interpreta- tion, of a work of art.3 Persona is not an exception to this rule, but is instead one of the best examples of media determinism ever created in the film medium. Persona, or, Cinematography There can been no doubt that Persona is an enigmatic film that defies a definite interpretation, and today, from the distance of half a century, this is perhaps even more so. After showing it to an audience of undergraduate students, I came across a judgment that evidently demonstrated how distant this film already is from the expectations of contemporary 20-year-olds. In their opinion, Per- sona is not film at all, because it tells us no coherent and comprehensible story and, consequently, makes no sense as a whole. They were thus quite bewildered when they realized (after searching internet resources for the film and using their smartphones during the screening, which is equally symptomatic) that what they had just seen was “one of this century’s great works of art.”4 Film critics and scholars never shared the opinion that Persona makes no sense; nevertheless, from the very beginning they did find it enigmatic and difficult to 220 pin down. In the words of Bergman’s biographer Peter Cowie, “Everything one says about Persona may be contradicted; the opposite will also be true.”5 This assertion reminds one of an old joke about abstract paintings: 2 Friedrich A. Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999, xxxix. 3 Not only modernist artists themselves, but also the scholars who interpreted their works became aware of this process, among them most notably Walter Benjamin. 4 Hubert Cohen, Ingmar Bergman: The Art of Confession, New York: Twayne, 1993, 227. Su- san Sontag even claimed that Persona was the best film ever. 5 Peter Cowie, Ingmar Bergman: A Critical Biography, New York: Scribner’s, 1982, 231. ingmar bergman’s persona as a modernist example of media determinism “I think this one is hanging upside down.” “How can you tell?” Consequently, there have been few serious attempts among critics to develop solid interpretations supported with firm arguments: “Although generally prais- ing the film, they tend to shy away from definitive interpretation, preferring in- stead to describe its sensory effects and to hazard some speculations as to their possible meaning.”6 One of the reasons why Bergman’s masterpiece manages to preserve the sta- tus of an enigma, evading any final determination, undoubtedly lies in some- thing that Bertolt Brecht called the alienation effect, which is associated with the film’s reflexive or self-referential structure. Christopher Orr even claims that “Persona remains the most avant-garde of Bergman’s films in the sense that its self-reflexive devices disrupt the spectator’s involvement in the events of the narrative and call attention to the film’s status as material object. In this respect, Persona can be placed within the context of what was in 1967 an emerging sub- genre of the art cinema: the Brechtian film.”7 Persona, therefore, calls the audience’s attention to the fact that it is watching a film, or, in other words, it “encourages the audience to suspend its willing sus- pension of disbelief, to back out of believing the story and take a critical look at it.”8 The alienation effect is enabled, but also complicated, by film’s reflexivity. Persona is modernist in a radical Kantian-Enlightenment sense, probably most precisely articulated by Clement Greenberg: “The essence of modernism lies, as I see it, in the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the disci- pline itself, not in order to subvert it but in order to entrench it more firmly in its area of competence.”9 The same critical procedure should be valid for any me- 221 6 Lloyd Michaels, “Bergman and the Necessary Illusion,” in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, ed. Lloyd Michaels, Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 5. 7 Christopher Orr, “Scenes from the Class Struggle in Sweden: Persona as Brechtian Mel- odrama,” in Michaels, 88. Cf. Dana Polan, “A Brechtian Cinema? Towards a Politics of Self-Reflexive Film,” in Movies and Methods. Volume 2, ed. Bill Nichols, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1985. 8 Bruce Kawin, How Movies Work, New York: Macmillan, 1987, 76. 9 Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism Vol. 4, ed. John O’Brian, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993, 85. ernest ženko dium, not only modernist painting, and, since Persona “is a film in search of its own laws,” as Bruce Kawin puts it, it is therefore per definitionem modernist.10 There are not many coincidences in Bergman’s films, and the choice of a title would certainly not be one of them. As we know, the original Latin meaning of “persona” relates to a theatrical mask, and only in the later Roman period did the term change to indicate a character in a theatrical performance. From this early usage, the word entered contemporary culture and obtained the meaning of a character played by an actor, as well as that of an individual’s social role. The lat- ter developed within psychology under the influence of Carl G. Jung, who defined persona as “a kind of mask, designed on the one hand to make a definite impres- sion upon others, and on the other to conceal the true nature of the individual.”11 Many interpretations of Persona draw heavily from the assumption that nomen est omen, and they follow the motif of masks throughout the film, relating its meaning above all to the abovementioned Jungian understanding of persona. Bergman’s Persona thus becomes a mask that points to itself and questions the relation between the individual and the social, between being and role-playing. All interpretations of this sort, which focus mainly on and track the develop- ment of the narrative involving the main protagonists, assume that the film’s title is, in words of Roland Barthes, the anchor directing us towards a meaning already selected in advance (in this case by the film director).12 The crucial ques- tion that the interpreters have to answer therefore relates to the interpretation of a mask and its meaning, especially in relation to the culmination of the film in a composite close-up of both protagonists comprising a single mask. Some authors conclude at this point that Persona is a narrative about one single soul, 222 wearing a mask, divided into true self and role-playing. There are at least two arguments that speak against such interpretations. The first one comes from Bergman himself, who has been always “extremely specific 10 Kawin, 76. 11 Carl G. Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, London: Baillière, Tindall & Cox, 1953, 190. 12 Cf. Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image,” in Image—Music—Text, New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. ingmar bergman’s persona as a modernist example of media determinism in disavowing this reading of the film.”13 When presenting the basic idea of this film to Svensk Filmindustri (SF), the leading Swedish film company, he gave a very simple description of the project: “It’s about one person who talks and one who doesn’t, and they […] get all mingled up in one another.”14 The second argument follows the well-known, but sometimes neglected, fact that the title Persona was not Bergman’s initial choice at all.
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