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The Reflexive Function of Bergman's "Persona"

1979; University of Texas Press; Volume: 19; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/1225421

1527-2087

Paul Newell Campbell,

Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism

The critical concept of reflexivity in film is now well established. Work of considerable importance remains to be done, however. For instance, one may wish to distinguish between the film that is reflexive in an obvious but uninteresting sense and the film with a reflexive dimension of artistic and/or critical importance. A film that simply tells a story about the making of a motion picture (Day for Night) may be reflexive in quite a straightforward fashion, but it is not clear that the critic need treat such a film differently from the conventional narrative work. By contrast, the film whose form and content are inseparable does require a special critical approach; and that approach may well differ depending on whether the film is about film and filmmaking in general (8?1), is about society as filtered through the films of a period (Amarcord), or is about itself and its relationship to its audience. It is to this final category that Bergman's extraordinary Persona1 belongs, and it is in this final category that still another distinction between kinds of reflexivity must be made. A film can be reflexive in the sense of using parts of itself to refer to its maker and/or to other films by the same, or by another, author. Persona is especially rich in this sort of reflexivity. John Simon has pointed out that Bergman and his cameraman, Sven Nykvist, appear in a key shot in this film, that Bergman's voice narrates one scene of the film, that bits of what seem to be an old slapstick comedy are actually from Bergman's earlier Prison, that the young boy reading a book in the opening segment was the son in The Silence and was seen reading the same book in that film, that the same characters' names occur in Persona and in others of Bergman's films, and on and on.2 Such reflexive devices can be critically rewarding, for one may find items that unify a filmmaker's works or that throw new light on her or his intentions in a particular film. At the same time, there are difficulties in dealing with such devices, for they can easily lead away from the film and toward a kind of psychological or biographical inquiry. In contrast with such references to the filmmaker or to other films is the kind of reflexivity that exists in the formal structure of the artwork itself and that includes the audience as part of that structure. Reflexivity of this sort is