The Nudity of the Visage: Ingmar Bergman and Persona
The Nudity of the Visage: Ingmar Bergman and Persona

Summary/Abstract: This research undertakes to analyze the most expressive technique in Ingmar Bergman’s films: the facial close-up. The Swedish director creates, by virtue of an objective lyricism, a fundamental correspondence between the cinematograph and the idea of visage. Therefore, the visage, the mask worn by a mortal human being, reveals the intimate existence and incorporates the special movements which are kept hidden by the rest of the body. Deleuze writes about an “affection-image” that represents in fact the symbolic substitute for the close-up and the face itself. Divided between light and shadow or in a particular relation with the unconsciousness, the visage in Persona seems to be split and, paradoxically, expanded and pressed. Not only do the two feminine characters exchange personalities, but also their faces are presented as a coalescent species. Indeed, the enormous visage emerges spectrally on the screen in order to describe the film’s enchantment with its own possibility to communicate in a cinematic language “from soul to soul,” moreover, with the artifice and the unmasked psyche. The film as a dream deals with a drastic atmosphere of bright white and deep black reconstructions; they point out a distinguishing and sui generis feature of the human face: its inhumanity and its desire to ingurgitate both the outer and inner reality.

• Details
• Contents