48. My non-review of Persona (1966)
The things that words can't touch
Last night I watched Bergman’s Persona (1966).
I don't know if I liked it or if I didn't like it. I'm not sure that it is here to be liked. But it has prompted some thoughts on film analysis.
We watch a film. Credits roll. Time to discuss. Someone says: “I think the baker represents death.” We all mm and ahh, satisfied that now we really understand. We contentedly move on with our lives.
There is something silly about this. It's not that the baker doesn't represent death - sometimes he does, and sometimes that's enlightening. But when we treat analysis as something with an answer key, it's easy for us to depart from 'the experience itself.'
A film is not a word puzzle. The film is a temple in which the god still lives, unimpressed by our fumbling attempts at its capture.
Mishima described words as a caustic agent - an acid that works by the negation and destruction of the reality being described1. Interestingly, Carl Jung uses almost the exact same metaphor in talking about the psychological analysis of people - description as an acid or scalpel that will always be wielded carefully by a responsible doctor2.
Words reduce.
I do think it's valuable to talk about movies, to share our experiences, to make sure we’ve nailed down the plot or the motivations of some character. And I don't think it’s bad to venture thematic or allegorical analyses. Sometimes these discussions are my favorite part of a film experience. But I also think that sometimes an over-verbal process can lead us away from something more interesting, latent in our fading but still-living experience of a film, a kind of mobile spirit that resists articulation, one best met on its own terms.
It depends on the film. Persona is one of these. Check it out if you want to see things differently.
Addendum: Snav, whose Substack is great, adds: This aligns heavily with Tarkovsky's philosophy about film. People would ask what various things mean in e.g. Stalker, and he would counter that he's not trying to produce symbols but images, metaphors, which function differently. Here's some quotes: http://www.nostalghia.com/TheTopics/Symbols.html
This review first appeared on the Hallsong Media twitter account.
“In its essence, any art that relies on words makes use of their ability to eat away — of their corrosive function — just as etching depends on the corrosive power of nitric acid.” Mishima, Sun and Steel.