Lilia Pavin-Franks

Film event producer, programmer and writer with a focus on LGBTQ+ and female-led cinema. 

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Persona + introduction by Lilia Pavin-Franks


This is a written version of the introduction I gave at the British Film Institute on Wednesday 28th August. 

Welcome to this evening’s screening of Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film, Persona. My name is Lilia Pavin-Franks and I work on the Events team here at the BFI, so you might be used to seeing me running around with a clipboard and radio, rather than standing at a lectern like this.

It feels like a great honour to be able to introduce this film for you today, especially considering film historian and professor Thomas Elsaesser once said that "[writing about Persona is] for film critics and scholars what climbing Everest is for mountaineers: the ultimate professional challenge.”

Ranking 18th in 2022’s edition of the Sight and Sound Greatest Films of All Time critics poll, and 9th in the directors poll, it’s been said that Persona is “probably the most written-about film in the canon [besides Citizen Kane]”, so herein lies the pervasive challenge of presenting a Big Screen Classics intro to you: offering something new to the engaged audience that hasn’t been said before.

It’s interesting, then, to consider this film in the context in which it’s being screened for you today: as part of our Big Screen Classics strand, but most notably within the August theme of ‘Going Nowhere’. Almost seven years ago is when I first encountered Bergman’s Persona, when I – a third year university student – was on the precipice of my own journey into possibly going nowhere, the looming anxiety of a life post-graduation threatening to thrust me into a world far from the security of academia.

Studying at the University of Warwick, I proposed an undergraduate thesis on the cinematic aesthetic of the uncanny, delving into readings of doubles, dreams and other psychoanalytic staples and applying them to a handful of what ended up being horror or horror-adjacent films. One film I considered, but that didn’t make the final cut, was Persona; a tale about a young nurse named Alma (played by Bibi Andersson) and her patient Elisabet: a suddenly mute stage actress, who doctors diagnose with "the hopeless dream to be" (played by Liv Ullmann). A period of convalescence by the sea swiftly turns into a confrontation of identity and existence for the two women, and though it didn’t make the final cut in my selected filmography, Persona and my reading of it continued to haunt me.

In her now famous essay on the film – one that I believe is sampled on your programme notes tonight – Susan Sontag states that “it would be a serious misunderstanding to demand to know exactly what happens in Persona; for what is narrated is only deceptively, secondarily, a ‘story’ at all”. And it appeared that Bergman himself agreed, saying in an interview shortly after the release of the film that “the idea that you can never really understand a film like this [is very important to him]. It isn’t even about understanding. It’s always about experiencing it emotionally”. Roland Barthes once posited that modern art had become “a mask pointing to itself” – a cannibalistic medium constantly asking itself the single, self-absorbing question of its own identity. It’s also interesting to note here is the Latin root of the word ‘persona’, literally meaning the mask worn by an actor. If we are to agree with Sontag and view Persona as ‘beyond interpretation’ narratively, then what might we be able to take from it if we are to see it as a mask for both filmmaker and audience? Ultimately, what might Persona – and Bergman – be saying about itself?

In 1963, Bergman took on a newly appointed role as the head of the Royal Dramatic Theatre in Stockholm, where he said he found himself in an “insoluble and incomprehensibly chaotic situation”. Refusing to subsequently slow down on his film work, his health declined and he was hospitalised with double pneumonia and acute penicillin poisoning in the spring of 1965. It was during this stay that he wrote the majority of the screenplay for Persona.

Reflecting on this period of recovery, Bergman notes the ‘happiness’ he found in ‘existing and not existing’ as a result of periodic anaesthesia from surgeries. Allowing himself to drift into states of unconsciousness absolved him from the pressures of existence and the anxieties that plagued it.

A chance encounter on the street in 1964 with previous collaborator, Bibi Andersson, led to him being introduced to another striking young actress who had happened to be walking along with her friend that day: Liv Ullmann. Captivated by Ullmann’s face, he had hoped to originally cast both her and Andersson in a separate project called The Cannibals, however his illness caused this to be abandoned. Spurred on by the paradoxical draw of the unconscious within the conscious, and infusing his current position in life into his art, he got to work on a new project. And thus, through nine weeks of medical delirium and an uncanny resemblance between two young women, Persona – arguably Bergman’s magnum opus and the film he claimed “saved his life” – was born.

I mentioned in the beginning that the genesis of my relationship with Persona came from the film’s connection to my undergraduate dissertation on the uncanny in cinema. With this and my contextual mentions of duplication, repetition and doubling in mind, I’d be remiss to not touch further upon some of Persona’s other psychoanalytic themes for you to consider when watching the film. Freud characterises the uncanny as something that is ‘strangely familiar’. It reminds us of unconscious, repressed impulses, of the fears that manifest themselves from such in the form of ghostly doubles, dark dreams and divided selves. But, considering the very title of the film, a Jungian approach may be more fitting, particularly if one is to interrogate the role of mask and mirror.

You may simply find the experience of watching Persona uncanny in itself; relish in the Buñuel-esque opening sequence, with its discordant, disturbing images reminiscent of Un Chien Andalou (a film I did write about in my dissertation) as the creeping dread seeps in. And perhaps this is exactly what Bergman wanted; a visceral reaction to what you see on screen. Not necessarily decoding the images before you, but being driven by deep rooted emotion as they flicker before your eyes. The doubling of film as art and film as object present – an uncanny, tangible, metatextuality constantly reminding you of the act of watching.

Writing about his 1972 film, Cries and Whispers, critic Molly Haskell noted that Bergman uses the women of his films as "projections of his soul". Though proposed in a negative tone, there is merit to this reading. Patricia Erens concurrs, saying that, "Bergman's women in such films as Persona and Cries and Whispers are not simply objects of abuse, but creatures through whom Bergman can express his own subjective fears, his many frustrations and failures at preserving autonomy of self and control of reality". Through expression via cinematic means, Bergman is perhaps recreating that happiness felt by ‘existing and not existing’, the camera lens a mirror to see himself.

Speaking at the BFI two years ago, Liv Ullmann reminisces on a moment shared with Bergman upon completing filming for Persona. Sat on the very same beach on Fårö (fore-uh) island where she played a woman so inextricably tied to Bibi Andersson’s character, Bergman tells Liv of a dream in which it is in fact he and she that are “painfully connected”. At twenty-five years old, she thought this was a kind of romantic proposal, but with time she has grown to interpret it as a declaration that they would forever be bound together in the films they proceed to make – souls forever interwoven in both life and art. Manifested in these two beings is the complex, symbiotic purpose of Persona itself – the need to confront oneself through film.

Watching Persona at twenty forced me to confront a version of myself I didn’t yet recognise or, perhaps, was too afraid to know. But rewatching it at twenty-seven and being tasked with reacquainting myself with the anxieties it originally possessed me with, oddly induced a calming period of self-reflexivity. According to Carl Jung, the goal of the psyche is to be whole, and we are all on a quest to achieve what he called ‘individuation’, wherein the conscious and the unconscious sides of the same self are in harmony. Have I achieved that harmony in my years since graduation? Did Bergman achieve that harmony in writing and directing Persona? Or might it be that the harmony is in fact the acceptance of the ephemeral nature of being; acceptance in the impossibility of ever truly understanding oneself?

Through his bewitching, enigmatic tale about “the hopeless dream to be”, Bergman invited me to look into a mirror of past, present and future, existing, as Sontag suggested, in space as well as time.

So tonight, I invite you to use the NFT3 screen as your mirror. To harness the power of cinema and shape it into, as Elsaesser puts it, “a portal, a window, a passage you can enter or (almost) touch, and [...] a prism that gives you back only what you project onto it”. To go everywhere, and nowhere, all at once. I hope you enjoy the film. 


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