Persona

"The frenzy on the wall," and then some. The Big Bang of a projector's carbon arcs launches the famous opening flurry of symbols—the celluloid serpent and the upside-down cartoon, a tarantula rhymed in the hand with a nail driven through it, crucifixion and resurrection alongside slapstick and entrails. (The boy caressing the glassy membrane of a blurry lens is surely the "Instant Ingmar" recognized by Sarris at the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey.) The actress (Liv Ullmann) goes silent during a production of Electra, as valid a protest as any against the world of the Holocaust and the Vietnam War. Hers is "the hopeless dream of being. Not seeming, but being," a spell at the coastal cottage with the voluble nurse (Bibi Andersson) is the therapy prescribed. "I always wanted a sister." Ingmar Bergman's enigma of enigmas, a haze of abstract anxieties made astoundingly visceral, a sustained ethereal shock. Women in wide-brimmed sunhats by the pebbly beach, studies in light and skin. Chatterbox regales Sphinx with an erotic incantation, a memory of sunbathers and peepers that floods the darkened chamber with the force of imagistic language. The patient may be researching for a role, the wounded healer retaliates with a broken shard, the Beckettian rupture between the two is a literal tear on the filmstrip itself. "None of it fits together." Penn's The Miracle Worker is a salient mainstay, Polanski in The Tenant repays the compliment to Repulsion. The intruder in the short-circuiting sorority is the thespian's husband (Gunnar Björnstrand) or possibly a specter or a reverie, there's also the son in the ripped photograph as the crux of the fulminating monologue twice repeated. "I think I could change myself into you if I tried," the resulting split-screen chimera is a warped Braque to contrast with Warhol's fractured Picasso (Outer and Inner Space). Bergman runs the blur of communion and exorcism to the limits of intensity, "ingenting" on Ullmann's lips prepares the darkness. Invaluable responses flow from Cammell-Roeg and Altman and Cassavetes and Lynch. Cinematography by Sven Nykvist. With Margaretha Krook and Jörgen Lindström. In black and white.