Persona [VHS]

Persona [VHS]
by Ingmar Bergman

Persona [VHS]

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Product details

Actor: Bibi Andersson, Gunnar Bj?rnstrand, J?rgen Lindstr?m, Liv Ullmann, Margaretha Krook
Director: Ingmar Bergman
Cinematographer: Sven Nykvist
Producer: Ingmar Bergman
Writer: Ingmar Bergman
Editor: Ulla Ryghe
Edition: VHS Tape
Audio: English (Subtitled)
Format: Black & White, NTSC, Subtitled
Running Time: 83 minutes
Release Date: 1991-04-01
Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated)
Publisher: Henstooth Video
Studio: Henstooth Video

VHS Movie Reviews of Persona [VHS]

Movie Review: You only think you know who you really are...
Summary: 5 Stars

Ingmar Bergman has really changed the way I look at film. He was a brilliant master of cinematic marvels and he really challenged the viewer with every film. `Persona' is probably one of his most widely acclaimed and most widely discussed films, and for rightful reasons.

This film speaks to me.

The plot is simple (at least on the outset). Elisabeth Vogler is an actress who, for no apparent reason, decided partway through a performance to remain silent and she has been hospitalized because of it. Alma, a young and na?ve nurse, has been commissioned to care for her. The two women are relocated to a small seaside house where Alma will attempt to break Elisabeth of her muted condition. When alone though, these two women begin to clash. Mentally they start to break one another down, frustrated and impatient and stubborn they start to attack one another (especially Alma as her frailty starts to unravel).

The film is not given a clear conclusion, but that doesn't take anything away from you've experienced. It actually helps to watch the film multiple times, for it is with each viewing that one can dissect and uncover the core of this very poignant and powerful expos? on human mentality and illness.

With brash directorial touches, Bergman blurs the lines between character developments to expose a truth we strain to see.

Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann are flawless here. This is Andersson's movie, despite this being Elisabeth's story. As Alma, Andersson carries the bulk of the films dialog, and she handles each scene rather effortlessly. Even when discussing weighty subjects (her erotic encounter is just brilliant) she has this natural tone, an ease that helps establish her remarkable comfort with Elisabeth. Although silent, Liv really transcends that silence and delivers a very moving performance. Bergman always pushed his actors to deliver with minor facial movements to really convey feelings and emotions that were not dependant on words. Liv's dynamic performance is proof of that.

If you are willing to climb inside your mind and explore what may not be most comfortable, then `Persona' is a film for you. With startling images (the opening scenes are rather abrasive and shocking) and a subtle yet complex plot, `Persona' has everything a film needs to make an impact.

And what an impact it makes!

Movie Review: The osmosis of identity....
Summary: 5 Stars

"Persona" (1966) is a film about many things on many levels. It can be seen an experimental deconstructivist film, or as a film about identity and nothingness, or as a film with any number of other themes. Actress Elisabet Vogler (Liv Ullmann) has a breakdown, and after a short stint in the hospital she is taken care of by Alma (Bibi Andersson) at a remote seaside cottage. Elisabet never speaks to Alma, and so Alma fills the silence with her intimate life stories. After a time it is as if the two woman are gradually becoming one. Alma speaks for, and interprets what Elisabet is thinking. This is a powerful, and thought provoking film, that gradually lays down layers upon layers of images, as it develops this story that becomes something of an unconscious power struggle between, and within, two people, as their identities gradually become reversed over time, as Alma seems like the patient, and Elisabet, the caregiver.

It could also be said that Ingmar Bergman is making a statement about how it is impossible to really know another person, and that we project our ideas and values onto other people. The speechless Elisabet acts like an empty vessel that Alma projects her own ideas and feelings upon. Elisabet is the actor, the blank slate, that changes her personality and character with each role she plays. Perhaps this was also what led her to have her break down. She had lost her sense of self, her identity. Ingmar Bergman reminds us that the film we are watching is a fabrication, a recreation on celluloid, with the initial film clips, and with the fragmenting of the image as the film appears at one point to burn up before resuming the story of the two women. The white light of the projection is the blank slate that the director fills with images and his story, just as Elisabet is the blank slate of Alma's projections of who she thinks Elisabet is. Alma doesn't really know who Elisabet is, she only knows Elisabet from the roles she has played as a screen actress.

I watched this film with the original mono Swedish audio, with English subtitles. There is also an English (mono audio ) dubbed version for the soundtrack, but I wouldn't recommend using it as it spoils the mood and atmosphere of the film. The English dubbed voice used for Alma sounds like a young girl, which gives an altogether different quality to Alma's voice.

There is also a featurette with interviews with the actors and Ingmar Bergman, as well as an audio commentary by Marc Gervais. This is the uncensored, theatrical version of the film, with a new (2004) digital transfer of the film that is presented in the original aspect ratio of 1.33 to 1.

Movie Review: Impenetrable and dull
Summary: 3 Stars

The Bottom Line:

Persona feels more like a pet project of Bergman's than a film meant for mass consumption: it's consistently obtuse, mostly dull, and feels long even at under 90 minutes; unless you're a real Bergman aficionado then stay away from this very unpleasant film.

2.5/4

Movie Review: Five stars for visionary artistry; one star for the message
Summary: 3 Stars

There is little doubt that Ingmar Bergman's cinematic masterpieces have continually redefined the popular notion of film as art, and Persona takes that influence to the extreme. As the film began, with flickering, disintegrating film reels, a phallus, an eviscerated sheep, and a boy lying limp in a morgue, Persona challenged everything I knew about cinema and left me asking two questions: "Is this art?" and "Is there a purpose?" The answer to both is certainly "yes," though I am not as pleased with the purpose as with the art.

While the film is, on the surface, the story of electively mute actress Elisabet Vogler and her nurse, Alma ("soul" in Spanish), I choose to see it as a film about two sides of the same person -- two internal voices squabbling over the mess of a complicated life full of dark secrets hidden in shadowy recesses. Additionally, motherhood is an issue raised repeatedly and prominently in the film. Alma still carries the shame of a secret abortion (as well as the pregnancy's genesis) while Elisabet secretly hates her son and wishes he were dead because she is not able to requite his love. It is hard to resist connecting this to the image which frames this film of a young boy yearningly touching a (movie?) screen projecting the intermixing faces of Elisabet and Alma. I choose then to see Bergman as the dichotomous Alma/Elisabet mother, the audience as the yearning children that he alternately rejects (Elisabet) and makes love to (Alma), and film (or perhaps this film) as the insufficient love he attempts to give to his children (and we are reminded by Bergman throughout the film that Persona is a paltry cinematic illusion, not a substantial reality).

I write all of this partially to give new viewers to the film a point of reference against which to contrast their own interpretation of this amorphous work, and I also write this to make it clear that I appreciate the artistry and symbolism behind this film even while I do not appreciate the film, itself.

Here's my issue: I believe that the purpose of art is to connect while instructing. A great film should win your affection (emotionally and/or intellectually) while subtly changing you in the process. This film challenges, and good art should challenge, but it offers me little more than that. Elisabet and Alma, as the only two fully developed persona in the film's reality (of course, they are one persona and it isn't reality), function as everywomen -- norms in the world as Bergman sees it. While Elisabet's elective silence is abnormal, the internal cause behind it is presented as quite the opposite. Even the doctor, a minor character at the beginning of the film, confesses that she understands the underlying issues that haunt Elisabet. She feels them too.

Yet both Alma and Elisabet are monstrous, and I find myself unable and unwilling to connect with them. I don't want to believe that all mothers secretly wish their babies were dead or that all faithful fiances are secretly having wild beach orgies with adolescents while their partners are away. We all hide ugliness within ourselves, but this is more ugliness than I am willing to handle. I am not often bothered by shocking art. Even the sheep having its eye gouged and its intestines ripped out at the beginning didn't disturb me in the slightest, but this misanthropic view of humanity haunts me. Bergman attempts to show us that, beneath the facade, we are all monsters, and then reminds us that he too is a monster hiding behind his art.

It is hard to accept that Persona is a product of the same artist who brought us films like "The Seventh Seal" and "Wild Strawberries" which, while asking all the hardest existential questions and challenging our senses of self and purpose in life, ultimately provided opportunities for redemption. There were lessons to be learned, changes that we were inspired to make. Maybe longing for such things sounds contrived and conventional; maybe I sound like the guy who is turned off anytime he doesn't get a happy ending, but all I see beneath Persona's art is the message that we are all truly terrible people deep down inside. I am not able to connect to the protagonists emotionally nor intellectually because of this, and I do not see anything redemptive nor positively transformative about such a conclusion. It leaves its audience on the morgue table, naked and emotionally starved, desperately reaching out to the coldness of the movie screen for a sense of hope that Bergman is either unable or unwilling to give. Ultimately, Persona offers its viewers a lesson in depravity and misanthropy, and nothing more.

Movie Review: The Nurse Becomes the Patient
Summary: 3 Stars

My third Bergman film thanks to the greatest cable channel ever invented - TCM, is a like a cream puff. The inside tastes much better than some of the other parts. There is a great story here, unfortunately buried inside a bunch of artsy-fartsy film junk that almost spoils it all.

A very normal female nurse is asked to take care of an actress who has decided to stop speaking. Since it is determined that the actress seems perfectly fine to the doctors, the head doctor suggests that the nurse spend some time with her at her summer house at the beach. This sets up a very interesting situation in which two people will be spending time together, but only one of them can talk.

As the situation unfolds, the nurse begins to expose more and more about herself to the actress. It then begins to resemble a sort of therapy session for the nurse as she digs deeper and deeper into her own life.

The movie reached it's climax - pun intended, when she decribes an orgy-like experience she and a girlfriend of hers had at the beach with two boys. A sidenote for you men who are reading this - if you do not get "excited" during this purely verbal scene, then there is something wrong with you.

The movie then proceeded into some type of 1960s LSD trip where I did not know what was real and what was a dream for the nurse. I hate when directors do that in a movie because it causes me to struggle as opposed to enjoying the movie and actually getting something out of it. It was especially upsetting to me with this movie because the main concept was so interesting.

This is not Bergman's worst movie, but it's nowhere close to being as good as The Seventh Seal.

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Summary of Persona [VHS]

Ingmar Bergman's 1966 film, photographed by Sven Nykvist, begins when famous actress Elisabeth Vogler (Liv Ullmann) freezes on stage in the middle of a performance. Struck dumb by an unknown cause, she winds up in the care of young inexperienced nurse Alma (Bibi Andersson), and together they retreat to the seaside for the summer, where they enter into an uncommon intimacy and clash of wills. Bergman's study of the fragility of the human being and the treachery of life is incredibly moving in its perception and unrivaled imagery. And as always with Bergman and his reappearing ensemble of actors, the performances are flawless. Especially notable is the scene in which Alma recounts for the silent Elisabeth a morally and emotionally ambivalent erotic encounter she had experienced on a beach with a friend and two teenage boys. It is one of the most strangely erotic scenes ever filmed, and not a stitch of clothing is removed. Also of interest, and one of the most intriguing scenes in the film, perhaps among the most intriguing in all of cinema, is when Elisabeth paces barefooted back and forth over a patio on which we know there to be broken glass. It is an achievement in simple suspense from which many an aspiring director of thrillers could learn a bit. For those who've had their fill of predictable plots, irrelevant matter, and apish acting and are looking for something a little more sensual, poetic, and relevant to what life is about beyond the daily grind, this may be a good place to start. --James McGrath

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