Monthly Archives: January 2018

  • Persona

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ingmar Bergman (1966)

    Ingmar Bergman’s famous film has been subject to multiple explanations.  According to Wikipedia, ‘Bergman said that although he had an idea of what the story meant, he would not share it because he felt that his audience should draw its own conclusions.  He hoped the film would be felt rather than understood’. The same source notes that his leads, Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann, ‘agreed to play their parts as different sides of the same personality and they assumed that personality was Bergman’s’; and that Ullmann believed that the cinematographer Sven Nykvist ‘was also not informed of the director’s intentions and left to work intuitively’.  Ullmann is Elisabet Vogler, a stage actress who, midway through a performance, stops speaking.  Andersson is Alma, the nurse assigned to care for Elisabet in the aftermath of a breakdown that defies medical explanation.  Most of the action takes place in and around the seaside house where the two women go to stay, on the advice of Elisabet’s psychiatrist (Margaretha Krook).  The patient remains silent; the nurse talks and reveals more and more about herself.  Alma is increasingly exasperated.  Realising that she is exposing her own insecurity and vulnerability, she also feels threatened by Elisabet.

    Alma can mean (among many other things) soul or nourishing.  Elisabeth, when she decides to renounce the power of speech, is playing the title role in a production of Electra.  These are hints of Persona’s symbolic possibilities – and Bergman’s black-and-white images are even more richly suggestive.   Pauline Kael, though she surely didn’t mean to endorse his approach (she found the film as a whole ‘frustrating’), expressed a judgment not dissimilar to the attitude that Wikipedia attributes to Bergman, in the review that appears in Kael’s Kiss Kiss Bang Bang collection:

    ‘Though it’s possible to offer interpretations, I don’t think that treating Persona as the pieces of a puzzle and trying to put them together will do much more than demonstrate ingenuity at guesswork.  It’s easy to say that the little boy reaching up to the screen [in the montage of images that bookends the main narrative] is probably Bergman as a child; and he may also represent the nurse’s aborted baby and/or the actress’s rejected son.  But for this kind of speculation (and one would have to go through almost every image in the movie this way) to have any purpose, there must be a structure of meanings in the work by which an interpretation can be validated; I don’t think there is one in Persona.  If there is, it is so buried that it doesn’t function in the work.  We respond to the image of the little boy – not because he’s Bergman or an abortion but simply in terms of the quality and intensity of the image – but we don’t know why it’s in the film.’

    Exhaustive dissection of Persona is also liable to detract from how excitingly distinctive it is to watch (and watch again).  For example, a character analysis of Elisabet runs the risk of reducing her to a familiar figure:  the artist as an empty vessel, parasitic on others, too self-absorbed even for parenthood.  Yet the way Elisabet is played (and photographed) comes across as strongly original.    An implication that Elisabet stops communicating because she finds the world intolerable – she’s upset watching television news showing a self-immolation in the Vietnam War and by photographs of the Warsaw Ghetto – also has much greater impact than it sounds as if it should have.  I’ll keep the rest of this note to just a few observations – drops in the ocean of Persona interpretation.

    The received wisdom is that the film’s main themes include the fragility of personal identity and the idea that a human relationship is a power struggle; that the trajectory of Persona is towards a merging of the two women’s identities.  When Elisabet’s husband (Gunnar Björnstrand) pays a brief visit, Alma has to remind him (Vogler first appears wearing dark glasses) that she isn’t his wife.  Towards the end of their time together, Alma desperately insists to Elisabet that ‘I’m not you!’  Out on the veranda of the house, Alma breaks a glass, sweeps up the pieces but leaves a shard for Elisabet to step on; later, Alma cuts her own arm and allows Elisabet to suck her blood, an act of vampirism initiated by the ‘victim’.  Bergman realises the merged identities in spite of the fact that his two principals’ faces are really not all that alike:  the cunning visual compositions and superimpositions make them seem alike.    Another merging that takes place is between loss of individual personality and loss of authority:  Alma and Elisabet exchange roles as much as identities.  The nurse, who should be in charge, is increasingly at the mercy of her patient.  The potential analysand says not a word; the potential analyst repeatedly gives herself away.  Until Alma persuades her in the closing stages to say ‘nothing’ (instead of saying nothing), there’s only one point at which Elisabet definitely speaks – she does so instinctively when the infuriated Alma threatens to throw boiling water at her.

    Persona begins and ends with similar montages – a crucifixion and the killing of a lamb, a spider, a young boy (Jörgen Lindström) waking up in what seems to be a morgue and touching the blurred images of two women on a huge screen.  A few of these details are individually mystifying but the overall self-reflexive message of the prologue and epilogue comes over loud and clear:  Bergman wants to remind the audience that it is watching a film.  Shots of a projector and a strip of celluloid are repeated; at the end, the screen even shows a camera being manoeuvred into position by a crew.  In a piece that, for the most part, embodies the visual power of cinema and demonstrates the frailty and contingency of speech, it’s an ingenious twist that a shift in Alma’s attitude towards Elisabet is brought about through the written word.   Alma takes some letters to post; curiosity gets the better of her when she notices that an envelope addressed to the psychiatrist is unsealed.  She opens it, reads the letter it contains and is enraged, and feels betrayed, by what Elisabet has written:

    ‘My dear, I could live like this forever.  Silent, living a secluded life, reducing my needs, feeling my battered soul finally starting to smooth itself out.  Alma takes care of me, spoils me in the most touching way.  I believe that she likes it here and that she’s very fond of me … perhaps even in love in an unaware and enchanting way.  In any case, it’s very interesting studying her.  Sometimes she cries over past sins … an orgy with a strange boy and a subsequent abortion.  She claims that her perceptions do not correspond with her actions.’

    The Latin word persona means both mask and character.  In Jungian psychology, an individual’s persona is the mechanism whereby they conceal their true thoughts and feelings, especially in their adaptation to the outside world.  In theatre and film, a mask is, at one level, a means of concealment but it’s not unusual for a masked actor – thanks to feeling protected, by the disguise they’re wearing, from revealing their own self – to express the qualities of their character more freely than they might have done without the mask.  Bergman’s film is centrally concerned with the fracturing of Alma’s persona (in the Jungian sense) but his actresses, from the start, have nothing to hide behind:  the camera subjects the faces of Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann to exceptionally close and unrelenting scrutiny.  Elisabet’s silence and relative immobility afford Ullmann a degree of security:  the viewer can’t be sure what the character may be keeping to herself – whether her face is revealing emotional truth or dissimulating (Elisabet is, after all, an actress).  Although this is theoretically the case with Alma too, we assume that the combination of her face, words and physical movement is yielding up her innermost thoughts and feelings.  Bibi Andersson is fearless, especially in the ‘orgy’ monologue – which is not just an act of recollection but, in Andersson’s telling, a revival of the sensations that Alma originally experienced.  Her great acting amounts to a further reminder that Persona is inspired artifice:  the more Andersson’s character feels trapped and helpless, the more she imposes herself on us.

    9 January 2018

  • A Star Is Born (1954)

    Old YorkerFilm review

    George Cukor (1954)

    There are three versions of A Star Is Born and a fourth, starring Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper, is due for release this year.  The 1954 film is the most famous one (so far) and this is thanks to Judy Garland.  Her own life story was a Hollywood tragic melodrama.  Her performing style was remarkable for its all-out emotionality.  As a result, the distinction between Garland and the character she’s playing is often, in retrospect, blurred – from the teenage Dorothy singing ‘Over the Rainbow’ in The Wizard of Oz (1939) to the screwed-up superstar Jenny Bowman in I Could Go on Singing (1963), her last film, where the role has unmissable autobiographical flavours.  In A Star Is Born, Garland plays the antithesis of the popular image of who she was.  Vicki Lester, the title character, is professionally reliable, a devoted wife and an emotional tower of strength compared with her helplessly alcoholic ex-matinee-idol husband Norman Maine (James Mason).  Even so, the lead performance and the exposé of how cruelly studio-system Hollywood used and abused its stars, coalesce – so that the film’s subject seems to be Judy Garland.

    Moss Hart’s screenplay, adapted from that of the 1937 A Star is Born (by Robert Carson, Dorothy Parker and Alan Campbell), skewers not only the Hollywood machine but also the fickle public whose appetites it exploits.  The machine, represented chiefly by the nasty studio fixer Matt Libby (Jack Carson), is largely upstaged by hoi polloi, especially in the hysterical sequence in which a baying horde of Vicki’s fans (‘There she is!’) bursts into the foreground of Norman’s funeral and his grieving widow collapses in the press of bodies and an explosion of flash bulbs.  The lone bastard Libby doesn’t make a lot of sense since his boss, the studio head (Charles Bickford), is, much of the time, a model of dreary probity and a caring father figure to Vicki.   These clichéd character types are one example of how George Cukor’s film is a reflection rather than a critique of contemporary Hollywood.  The sumptuous, extravagant production, reinforced by the CinemaScope presentation, is another:  some of the sets and elaborate costumes for the chorus line get no more than a few seconds of screen time.

    In spite of which, the picture is insanely long – 178 minutes.  The only point at which George Cukor is at pains to save time and cut costs is shortly after the first encounter of Norman and Vicki – or Esther Blodgett as she still then is.  Cukor abbreviates what-happened-next to an extended sequence of black-and-white still photographs.  This temporary switch to monochrome has considerable impact because of the extraordinary richness of the film’s colour scheme, which often heightens its emotional effects.  (The DP was Sam Leavitt and the fashion photographer George Hoyningen-Huene a special colour consultant to Cukor.)  The stills shorthand is puzzling nonetheless:  Cukor doesn’t use it again and it’s not as if these are photographs of Norman and Vicki that will appear in the press.

    A Star is Born begins and ends with a benefit at the Shrine Auditorium.  At the opening benefit, Esther Blodgett is a showbiz hopeful, performing a song and dance number with others.  Norman Maine is a big star, his arrival eagerly awaited by the crowds lining the street outside the Shrine.  The closing event takes place shortly after his suicide; Esther-Vicki emerges from the depths of despair to attend.  She introduces herself from the stage, to tumultuous applause, as ‘Mrs Norman Maine’.  Because Judy Garland became a star thanks to talent rather than conventional beauty, there’s a resonance to the sequences that show the studio giving Esther Blodgett a disfiguring facial makeover.  There’s a minor resonance too in the heroine’s change of name:  Garland was born Frances Gumm.  The persisting connection, however, is between her personality and the themes of disintegrating fame and mental health pulsing through the story.  Garland is in fine voice but the voice, and the misery it’s difficult not to hear in it, consistently overpower the songs.  Her acting, alert and accomplished as it is, is sometimes hard to bear:  she seems to be emotionally electrified by the camera – so little of what she does registers as painless or casual.  Her dancing – I’m always surprised that her legs are so long and shapely – is the most comfortably appealing aspect of her repertoire here.  Her performance is phenomenal but exhausting.

    The best thing about the film is James Mason’s Norman Maine.  In the opening section at the Shrine Auditorium, Mason’s athleticism and smiling, sneering instability make the drunken Norman truly unpredictable and threatening.  (He eventually barges his way onto the stage where Esther and her colleagues are performing.  She resourcefully pretends he’s part of the act and saves the day for all concerned.)  Mason plays this quite brilliantly but he’s very good throughout, especially at conveying Norman’s sense of humiliation and a self-loathing that’s increased by Vicki’s love for and loyalty to him.  This on-the-skids character is a very familiar one, of course, and it may have helped Mason that his role was smaller than the leading lady’s.  Whatever the reasons, you increasingly want more of Norman and less of Vicki.

    Except for ‘The Man That Got Away’, the new songs by Harold Arlen and Ira Gershwin are undistinguished.  The film also reuses standards (‘Swanee’, ‘I’ll Get By’, ‘You Took Advantage of Me’, ‘The Peanut Vendor’ and more) but A Star Is Born seems to have as many melodramatic set pieces as it does song and dance numbers.   Standouts include a sequence at a racecourse, where Libby goads Norman – they both just happen to be there – into (1) a fist fight and (2) falling off the wagon; and the courtroom sequence in which a judge hands down sentences to a drunk and disorderly group that includes Norman.  When Vicki intervenes to appeal against her husband’s going to jail and insists that she’ll ensure Norman doesn’t reoffend, the judge relents and gives him a suspended sentence instead. (If only Cukor had had the non-celebrity drunks react and one of them say, ‘I wish my wife would do that for me’.)  Comfortably eclipsing these highlights, however, is the notorious Academy Awards ceremony scene.  This is not just a runaway winner in the competitive so-bad-it’s-good category in A Star Is Born but a masochistic classic of its kind.

    The clothes, the references to television, the mention of a dream sequence as an obligatory part of a new musical:  all these indicate that the film is set in the 1950s.  One immediately striking thing about the Oscar episode is that the guests at Cukor’s ceremony sit at little tables rather than in auditorium rows of seats:  the actual venue from 1950 to 1960 inclusive was the Pantages Theatre.  What’s more, Vicki Lester is one of only four nominees for Best Actress:  since 1936, there have always been five.  I’m not sure if these differences from the real thing were stipulated by the Academy – albeit pointlessly, since their name and statuettes are being used – but that’s by the by.  As she waits for the result to be announced, Vicki is as worried by Norman’s absence from the ceremony as she is about the outcome.  When her name is called, she comes onstage and begins her acceptance speech, only to be interrupted by a loud, solo handclap from the back of the room.  Norman has arrived:  he makes his inebriated way to the stage, hijacks his wife’s speech and, in an over-expansive arm movement, with his back to Vicki, inadvertently whacks her in the face.

    For Oscar nerds, however, even this on-screen episode is challenged by Judy Garland reality.  This is how Robert Osborne describes the Best Actress contest for 1954, in his book Academy Awards Illustrated:

    ‘It was a neck-and-neck race to the finish between two red-hot favorites:  Judy Garland, in the midst of a major career comeback, and Grace Kelly, the new golden girl of the movies.  On the night of the awards – March 30, 1955 – Garland was in Cedars of Lebanon Hospital, new mother of a day-old son.  NBC-TV, anticipating a possible Garland victory, had television equipment set up outside her hospital room, ready for on-the-spot coverage.  But when William Holden announced the winner …, it was newcomer Kelly who stepped up to receive the award. …’

    The NBC camera crew allegedly left Garland’s bedside with a grumpy lack of ceremony.  Groucho Marx cabled her to describe the Academy’s decision as ‘the biggest robbery since Brink’s’.  Judy Garland certainly deserved the award more than Grace Kelly in The Country Girl or any of that year’s other nominees (Dorothy Dandridge in Carmen Jones, Audrey Hepburn in Sabrina and Jane Wyman in Magnificent Obsession).  But Groucho’s judgment, for all that it’s a good line, is OTT.  As such, it’s a fitting capper to A Star Is Born.

    7 January 2018

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