Celia Ingrid Farber, New York, May 28, 2009Persona Revisited
My good friends Jadd and Ginny invited me to a screening of Bergman's Persona the other week, at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan. Jadd stressed that he knew I was no Bergman fan but noted that Liv Ullman was going to introduce the film.
I don't know if Jadd had any idea how much I love Liv Ullman, or if I knew, before this night. I dashed down to 17th street at the appointed time. Jadd bought me a Mojito and we descended the spiral staircase to the closed door of the screening room, where we stood on line with four other friends of Jadd and Ginny's. We were told it was stone cold sold out. One of Jadd and Ginny's friends — a Russian woman, and her boyfriend — had tickets, none of the rest of us did. When they offered those two a chance to go inside, the Russian woman, who strangely was a dead ringer for Liv Ullman, quietly handed their tickets over to the woman in charge and said, "No thanks. We're all together."
I urged them to go on ahead but she was resolute. It made me think of an old word that was bandied about in my youth, in Sweden, when I was under the influence of the Swedish (no kidding) Communist Party. (I was 13.)
The word was "solidarity," — "solidaritet" in Swedish. We were grilled and trained to understand and live the meaning of that word. I'll tell you more about all this another time. Communism and everything it wrought was a ghastly, murderous, cancerous attack on all things sacred, but the word "solidarity" still has a nostalgic ring to it for me. The Russian woman was very lovely in her moment of solidarity. It seemed like an anachronistic gesture. It brought me back to 1979.
I realized I was almost desperate to get into that room and listen to Liv Ullman, so I pressed my thumb, forefinger and middle finger together in a manner taught to me by a woman named Alice, who taught my family — me, my father, and my sister — a kind of hypnosis called The Silva Method. It seems to work. I use it when I urgently need a subway to come, or need a parking spot to appear, or need any particular outcome to manifest. In this case, passage to this room.
Voila. We were ushered in at the last moment.
Liv Ullman — beautiful and looking her age — was at the podium. The room was dark. There is a man who writes in to all the film discussion sites where everything Bergman is discussed and says the same thing over and over: "Liv Ullman has the most beautiful voice in the world."
It's true.
I sat spellbound. I scribbled notes on one of the survey cards, trying to capture everything she said. She started out telling us that she had a grandmother she was very close to, whose neck, the nape, was to her the safest place in the world, with a particular smell she has chased her whole life.
She was in a leper colony in India, she said, and was frightened of a leper who came over to her. But something made her embrace the leper and take her into her arms. "...And there," she said in her beautiful lilting voice, "there I found it. I found the essence in my grandmother's neck."
She described being a young actress in Norway in the 60s and getting word, in 1965, that the great Ingmar Bergman wanted to cast her and Bibi Andersen in a film. Bergman was in the hospital at the time, having one of his many nervous breakdowns. She was delirious. But soon they got word that no, the film was cancelled. Bergman was unable to function. She and her good friend Bibi were in Prague, and they were devastated. But after a few days they got a telegram to come home — that Bergman had changed his mind — the film was on.
He wrote down some of his thoughts about the film he wanted to make with these two women, and Ullman recalled the following phrases: "Heaviness and sorrow and sensitivity in the hands, the girls' hands. The broad forehead, the strange childishness. To start from the beginning. Not to fuss, not to incite, just to start from the beginning, anew."
She described some of the filming on Fårö, Bergman's beloved island off the coast of Sweden. She said the famous scene where the two women's faces meld into one was a mistake, a fluke in the editing room. When it happened, Bergman called them in to see it. They each saw the other only, in the merged face. "Bibi thought it looked just like me and I thought it looked just like Bibi."
She urged us to view the film we were about to see as "Chinese boxes...within each box there is a miracle."
Ullman said that Bergman frequently said: "Persona saved my life."
She also said that she understood that in this film, "I was Ingmar."
It's true that I have not quite warmed to Bergman; I find his projections of monstrous, rejecting mothers all over the place exhausting and depressing, though I admit I know nothing about film, and I admit he was a great artist. His obsession with the strict, cold, rejecting mother of course turned into a dark tunnel into which countless lovely, warm, beautiful and perfectly maternal women — like Liv Ullman — were ushered. ("Liv" means life in Swedish.)
Sometimes his jet-black woman-spite was deeply funny, as in the passage from the book Scenes from a Marriage where the (by Swedish feminism, one presumes) castrated, enraged husband Peter fumes about his wife, at a dinner party at which she is present:
"Katarina is a businessman, with equal stress on both words. What's more, she's a brilliant artist. What's more, she has an IQ of I don't know what. Pretty, too. She's a paragon, all gift-wrapped. How this monster of perfection has ever allowed me to get between her legs is a mystery."
Throughout the book, which I reread from time to time, Liv Ullman's character, Marianne, is debased, insulted, betrayed, used, and humiliated by her endlessly self-pitying husband Johan — Bergman, of course. When I read it, I think: "Snuff him. Come on. You're Liv Ullman. Just snuff him. Crush him like a bug and walk out."
Which she finally does, and it is mighty cathartic.
In Persona, Bergman blessedly keeps the men out of the picture, and explores a psychotic relationship between two women — a grandiose actress (Ullman) who has fallen silent to avoid the falsities of speech, and the nurse who has been assigned to care for her (Andersen) who falls in love with her, non-sexually, unburdens her soul to her, worships her, then starts to hate her flaming guts.
I'd never sat through the whole thing before. It's a preposterous and, I suppose, great film. Ullman says exactly one word in the entirety of the film ("nothing") — does all the acting with her facial expressions. What redeems it from fantastical emotional porn is the fact that Bergman shores up a deep truth that is rarely approached by male artists, namely the depth and complexity of feminine bonds. He understands that this bond is not sexual, but also that it far outstrips, in gravity and importance, the female to male bonds that are so endlessly fetishized. It is women who really matter to women. They turn around and have sex with men, they give their lives to men, they play roles with men — but it is women who matter, because women speak the same tragic language. A woman can only ever be understood by another woman. If she is understood by a man, he is probably gay. Or Ingmar Bergman.
"We thought the movie was so strange," Ullman said, eliciting giggles from the audience. Drifting off, as if lost in thought, she added, "Even Ingmar thought the movie was so strange."
As the gorgeous actresses sat on break, sunning themselves in broad hats, Bergman ordered the cameramen just to film them, nonstop. He had no script, and no idea what the movie was about, but knew it would come to him by way of filming these women, together.
To allow two women to soar and crash into intra-personal catastrophe without the catalyst of a man is indeed a revolutionary idea for 1965. Even more so today, when everything is presumed to begin and end with male supremacy.
The film's greatest theme is Bergman's greatest theme — the difficulty of knowing who we really are, through the lattice of socially conditioned behavior and language. Seeming instead of being. "What does it man to be silent?" Ullman mused, un-Americanly. "What does it mean that you don't want to say words and that it all comes out lies?"
I don't know if Jadd had any idea how much I love Liv Ullman, or if I knew, before this night. I dashed down to 17th street at the appointed time. Jadd bought me a Mojito and we descended the spiral staircase to the closed door of the screening room, where we stood on line with four other friends of Jadd and Ginny's. We were told it was stone cold sold out. One of Jadd and Ginny's friends — a Russian woman, and her boyfriend — had tickets, none of the rest of us did. When they offered those two a chance to go inside, the Russian woman, who strangely was a dead ringer for Liv Ullman, quietly handed their tickets over to the woman in charge and said, "No thanks. We're all together."
I urged them to go on ahead but she was resolute. It made me think of an old word that was bandied about in my youth, in Sweden, when I was under the influence of the Swedish (no kidding) Communist Party. (I was 13.)
The word was "solidarity," — "solidaritet" in Swedish. We were grilled and trained to understand and live the meaning of that word. I'll tell you more about all this another time. Communism and everything it wrought was a ghastly, murderous, cancerous attack on all things sacred, but the word "solidarity" still has a nostalgic ring to it for me. The Russian woman was very lovely in her moment of solidarity. It seemed like an anachronistic gesture. It brought me back to 1979.
I realized I was almost desperate to get into that room and listen to Liv Ullman, so I pressed my thumb, forefinger and middle finger together in a manner taught to me by a woman named Alice, who taught my family — me, my father, and my sister — a kind of hypnosis called The Silva Method. It seems to work. I use it when I urgently need a subway to come, or need a parking spot to appear, or need any particular outcome to manifest. In this case, passage to this room.
Voila. We were ushered in at the last moment.
Liv Ullman — beautiful and looking her age — was at the podium. The room was dark. There is a man who writes in to all the film discussion sites where everything Bergman is discussed and says the same thing over and over: "Liv Ullman has the most beautiful voice in the world."
It's true.
I sat spellbound. I scribbled notes on one of the survey cards, trying to capture everything she said. She started out telling us that she had a grandmother she was very close to, whose neck, the nape, was to her the safest place in the world, with a particular smell she has chased her whole life.
She was in a leper colony in India, she said, and was frightened of a leper who came over to her. But something made her embrace the leper and take her into her arms. "...And there," she said in her beautiful lilting voice, "there I found it. I found the essence in my grandmother's neck."
She described being a young actress in Norway in the 60s and getting word, in 1965, that the great Ingmar Bergman wanted to cast her and Bibi Andersen in a film. Bergman was in the hospital at the time, having one of his many nervous breakdowns. She was delirious. But soon they got word that no, the film was cancelled. Bergman was unable to function. She and her good friend Bibi were in Prague, and they were devastated. But after a few days they got a telegram to come home — that Bergman had changed his mind — the film was on.
He wrote down some of his thoughts about the film he wanted to make with these two women, and Ullman recalled the following phrases: "Heaviness and sorrow and sensitivity in the hands, the girls' hands. The broad forehead, the strange childishness. To start from the beginning. Not to fuss, not to incite, just to start from the beginning, anew."
She described some of the filming on Fårö, Bergman's beloved island off the coast of Sweden. She said the famous scene where the two women's faces meld into one was a mistake, a fluke in the editing room. When it happened, Bergman called them in to see it. They each saw the other only, in the merged face. "Bibi thought it looked just like me and I thought it looked just like Bibi."
She urged us to view the film we were about to see as "Chinese boxes...within each box there is a miracle."
Ullman said that Bergman frequently said: "Persona saved my life."
She also said that she understood that in this film, "I was Ingmar."
It's true that I have not quite warmed to Bergman; I find his projections of monstrous, rejecting mothers all over the place exhausting and depressing, though I admit I know nothing about film, and I admit he was a great artist. His obsession with the strict, cold, rejecting mother of course turned into a dark tunnel into which countless lovely, warm, beautiful and perfectly maternal women — like Liv Ullman — were ushered. ("Liv" means life in Swedish.)
Sometimes his jet-black woman-spite was deeply funny, as in the passage from the book Scenes from a Marriage where the (by Swedish feminism, one presumes) castrated, enraged husband Peter fumes about his wife, at a dinner party at which she is present:
"Katarina is a businessman, with equal stress on both words. What's more, she's a brilliant artist. What's more, she has an IQ of I don't know what. Pretty, too. She's a paragon, all gift-wrapped. How this monster of perfection has ever allowed me to get between her legs is a mystery."
Throughout the book, which I reread from time to time, Liv Ullman's character, Marianne, is debased, insulted, betrayed, used, and humiliated by her endlessly self-pitying husband Johan — Bergman, of course. When I read it, I think: "Snuff him. Come on. You're Liv Ullman. Just snuff him. Crush him like a bug and walk out."
Which she finally does, and it is mighty cathartic.
In Persona, Bergman blessedly keeps the men out of the picture, and explores a psychotic relationship between two women — a grandiose actress (Ullman) who has fallen silent to avoid the falsities of speech, and the nurse who has been assigned to care for her (Andersen) who falls in love with her, non-sexually, unburdens her soul to her, worships her, then starts to hate her flaming guts.
I'd never sat through the whole thing before. It's a preposterous and, I suppose, great film. Ullman says exactly one word in the entirety of the film ("nothing") — does all the acting with her facial expressions. What redeems it from fantastical emotional porn is the fact that Bergman shores up a deep truth that is rarely approached by male artists, namely the depth and complexity of feminine bonds. He understands that this bond is not sexual, but also that it far outstrips, in gravity and importance, the female to male bonds that are so endlessly fetishized. It is women who really matter to women. They turn around and have sex with men, they give their lives to men, they play roles with men — but it is women who matter, because women speak the same tragic language. A woman can only ever be understood by another woman. If she is understood by a man, he is probably gay. Or Ingmar Bergman.
"We thought the movie was so strange," Ullman said, eliciting giggles from the audience. Drifting off, as if lost in thought, she added, "Even Ingmar thought the movie was so strange."
As the gorgeous actresses sat on break, sunning themselves in broad hats, Bergman ordered the cameramen just to film them, nonstop. He had no script, and no idea what the movie was about, but knew it would come to him by way of filming these women, together.
To allow two women to soar and crash into intra-personal catastrophe without the catalyst of a man is indeed a revolutionary idea for 1965. Even more so today, when everything is presumed to begin and end with male supremacy.
The film's greatest theme is Bergman's greatest theme — the difficulty of knowing who we really are, through the lattice of socially conditioned behavior and language. Seeming instead of being. "What does it man to be silent?" Ullman mused, un-Americanly. "What does it mean that you don't want to say words and that it all comes out lies?"
*
A mystery was finally resolved for me when I saw Persona. Being half-Swedish, and raised there, I'd never quite understood where the great myth of the sexually libertine Swedish woman came from. People like to cite I Am Curious Yellow as the mainspring of this myth, but who in the world ever watched that? Turns out Bergman, in 1965, gave us a scenario of two sunning Swedish women watched by two young boys on a cliff, who are invited to come on over, resulting in a foursome so unabashed it resulted in a pregnancy for one of the women (Andersen). That would have done it, myth-making wise.
I was in Sweden the day Bergman died, in the summer of 2007. Friends emailed me wondering if the nation had ground to a grieving halt. I was actually supposed to visit my friend Bengt Larsson, 82, on Bergman's island, Fårö, the day he died, but I changed my plans because I didn't have enough time to get there. I was visiting Bengt's son Åke in Tomelilla, south of Sweden, and it was my birthday. My dear friend Peter Olsen had driven down for the evening, something like an eight-hour drive, and had to return the next day to walk his father's dog. That's friendship.
I remember Peter saying that traffic was bad due to the swarms of journalists trying to get to Fårö. And I remember Åke entering his foyer and putting his briefcase down. Upon hearing the news that Bergman was dead he said simply, "Jasså, är han dõd?" Which means: "Oh, so he's dead?" And then we never discussed it. Swedes live in Sweden — they don't need to watch Bergman films. Nobody is all that sure what he is on about.
Watching Liv Ullman, I wondered if she was not in fact in some ways the greater artist. Not as an artist, but as a spirit. Hers is a spirit you'd follow to the end of the earth. She is the essence of the woman Bergman refused to believe could exist. She knows, she sees, she loves. She is not afraid of death. She is not afraid of her own lack of authenticity. She accepts what is. She embraces a leper and finds her grandmother. A bluebird lands on her night table after Bergman dies, and because she had assured him she would stay connected to him after death, we assume the bird was Bergman, finally understanding all that she's always tried to tell him.
I looked around the room when the film ended to see if I could find her, but she was gone.
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Comments (1)
Interesting
Persona is really a unique ride, as far as I remember. Even if one doesn't completely understand what was exactly intended to communicate during the movie, it still leaves this weird sensation that it was something striking. Or maybe not. But I recall having felt that way. :)
The reason I was interested and clicked on the title to read this right now is because I'm currently writing my thesis on dreams in movies (inc. animation) and although I don't really remember, Personaalso has some dreams in it I think. I'll probably watch it again in the near future, together with Bergman's Wild Strawberries, which has some very significant dream sequences in it.
Anyway... I believe that the main reason most men don't seem to understand the language of women is because of women's lack of desire to be understood, or their inability to explain themselves for whatever reason. Deliberately or not women allow men to talk all the time. The "male supremacy", as you say. Consequently men reveal so much of themselves that there is very little left which they haven't yet talked about. Even if men try to talk about women, they're forced to do that from their own perspective, with a limited understanding, obviously. And somewhat sincere attempts to explore the reality of women, like Persona maybe, are rare, because of the difficulty of the task. So while there are ample resources for women(and men) to understand men, women remain mysterious in comparison. Like all the newly discovered, little understood species in the deep seas.
On the surface we still live in a world dominated by men. It's hard to tell who is really dominant but the kind of power men seems to have results in women understanding them much better than they understand women. And the women, with their secrets still kept hidden, rule the world from behind the scenes. Partially at least. And I suspect that many women are aware of this advantage they have, and I believe that many do use it, but they pretend as if there's nothing going on. You bastards... :)
Other than that I'm afraid I don't have much to say on Ullman, Sweden or any of the other things you've talked about.
The reason I was interested and clicked on the title to read this right now is because I'm currently writing my thesis on dreams in movies (inc. animation) and although I don't really remember, Personaalso has some dreams in it I think. I'll probably watch it again in the near future, together with Bergman's Wild Strawberries, which has some very significant dream sequences in it.
Anyway... I believe that the main reason most men don't seem to understand the language of women is because of women's lack of desire to be understood, or their inability to explain themselves for whatever reason. Deliberately or not women allow men to talk all the time. The "male supremacy", as you say. Consequently men reveal so much of themselves that there is very little left which they haven't yet talked about. Even if men try to talk about women, they're forced to do that from their own perspective, with a limited understanding, obviously. And somewhat sincere attempts to explore the reality of women, like Persona maybe, are rare, because of the difficulty of the task. So while there are ample resources for women(and men) to understand men, women remain mysterious in comparison. Like all the newly discovered, little understood species in the deep seas.
On the surface we still live in a world dominated by men. It's hard to tell who is really dominant but the kind of power men seems to have results in women understanding them much better than they understand women. And the women, with their secrets still kept hidden, rule the world from behind the scenes. Partially at least. And I suspect that many women are aware of this advantage they have, and I believe that many do use it, but they pretend as if there's nothing going on. You bastards... :)
Other than that I'm afraid I don't have much to say on Ullman, Sweden or any of the other things you've talked about.
,
May 31, 2009
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