Note on theatricality in Bergman's Persona

Lacan said that the obsessive's question is “Am I dead or alive?”, while the hysteric’s is “Am I a man or a woman?” In Bergman’s Persona, one character is a witness traumatized by the contemplation of contemporary historical evils, and the other a shallow young woman who uses another to act out her own conflicts. The one is like an actor/director who knows she is or can also be a character, and the other a naive person who is like an unreflective character who doesn’t know she is an actor who can make choices out of self-knowledge. One takes her own mundane motives and needs for granted; the other wonders if she even has any. Thus Elisabet’s question is “Am I in the world or only observing it?” while Alma’s question is “Am I you or me?” Both may be considered questions of theater.

For the principal questions being asked by the filmmaker, who worked in both disciplines, are “What is theater?” and, inevitably, “What is cinema?” The appearance in the film of markers of the cinematographic is hard to read in dramatic or other aesthetic terms, beyond framing the possibility of drama by placing them within that of cinema. A question of cinema may be, is this a story or an image of one that places it in a scene (mise-en-scène), and if it’s both, what does that mean? Does cinema use images to compose credible stories that innocent characters inhabit or identify with, or can it, and if so how, compose a serial or moving image of the dramatic character of a life as lived and/or observed? The filmmaker’s (and so the viewer’s) gaze is partly that of Elisabet, asking whether or how we are implicated in what we see, but it also seems to at least gesture beyond it, with reminders of the film apparatus through showing the camera and projector and an abstract cinematic montage of images, which is perhaps all that film would be without such dramatic stories. We know that recognizing historical images as traumatic ones to be contemplated by the gaze of a witness may ultimately be no less inadequate than being a person who acts in the world with little ability to step back from and contemplate this acting, someone childishly and emotionally too attached, as Alma is, to her feeling of satisfaction or lack thereof in getting the love and recognition that a narcissistic person might have when looking in a mirror and unsure if what she sees is self or other, or some strange mélange of the two. I think the question of the meaning of cinema in the film is one that it cannot answer, though Bergman urgently poses it, in a way that seems rigorous, and is also given a precise historical context (witnessing or seeing records of some of the century’s most catastrophic forms of civilizational barbarism) as well as personal one (Alma’s question is also Freud’s: what does a woman such as herself want—with the suggested possibilities of marriage, sex, babies, and nurturing job, as banal as Elisabet’s are sophisticated and mature), while Elisabet’s is also the philosophical question, if the enjoyment of perceptual experience is driven by the desire to understand, what is this desire’s proper object? And also a question posed by the events of the twentieth century, one that psychoanalysis tried to give a method for posing and answering: how to deal with trauma, which can be the personal one of the suddenly troubled and hitherto unreflective pursuit of the most ordinary ambitions, or the ‘political’ one that takes historical traumas for granted and asks, from the standpoint of an artist, how one might situate her- or himself in relation to them) as both a formal and ethical one.