Ingmar Bergman / 英格玛·伯格曼 · 1966
Persona
Persona
The close-up progressively withdraws the face’s functions of individuation, social role, and communication. Composite half-faces, the twice-told story of motherhood, and burning film detach affect from private psychology and expose the face’s terror before emptiness.
Film details
- Original title
- Persona
- Director
- Ingmar Bergman / 英格玛·伯格曼
- Year
- 1966
- Region
- Sweden
Film analysis: how shots organize concepts
Close-up withdraws the face’s identity-functions, placing two faces, two voices, and the film apparatus in an unstable relation.
- 01Apparatus interrupts character
Projector, white screen, burning film, and image ruptures appear at the narrative threshold.
The face is first marked as image-material, not a guarantee of stable personhood. - 02Identity-functions withdrawn
Silence, gaze, and repeated close-ups progressively suspend individuation, social role, and communication.
The face becomes a surface bearing pure affect. - 03Two faces lose fixed assignability
The same maternal account falls across Alma’s and Elisabet’s faces, then their halves form one composite.
Voice, memory, and identity remain distinct yet cease to belong securely to one person.
Close-reading questions
- 01How do the projector, film strip, white screen, nailed hand, and boy touching a giant face in the prologue first dismantle the cinematic apparatus and then return the face as an unstable image?
- 02As Alma speaks and Elisabet remains silent, how do sustained close-ups gradually abolish stable divisions between nurse and actor, speaker and listener?
- 03When the same account of motherhood is placed first over one face and then the other before two half-faces are fused, how does repetition make identity an exchangeable facial surface?
Analysis and scene sources
Shots and scenes
Primary texts, scholarship, and locators
Theory coordinate: Cinema 1, Minnesota 1986, ch. 6, pp. 99–101; ch. 7, p. 105
- 01Cinema 1: The Movement-Image
Standard Minnesota English translation and a principal citation edition in Anglophone scholarship.
Open the atlas source record →
This film in books and research
《缠绕的诗学：德勒兹思维方法研究》 · Atlas extension
Persona
Film relation: Site extension: superimposed faces, audiovisual fissures, and film rupture test how identity and image-material destabilize together.
Shot question: When do the faces form a zone of proximity, and when does narrative force them back into two persons?
Viewing gateways and editions
- Criterion Collectioncriterion.comOpen film page ↗
- Source type
- Distributor or streaming platform