Persona (1966) opens with an abstract montage of black and white images--a movie projector, a spider, a sheep being slaughtered, a strip of cartoons on celluloid getting stuck in the gate, a morgue, and a child reaching out towards an unfocused image. It is not only aware of its being a film, but intentionally bringing our attention to it. This brings us back to Brechtian forms of alienation that I covered last month, in context to recent movies that use silent film aesthetics to tell a story. Persona director Ingmar Bergman is making spectators aware of the apparatus in order to make us consider the artificiality of the medium.
It is all an illusion, but as we get to know our two main characters Alma (Bibi Andersson) and Elisabet (Liv Ullmann) more closely, we consider if the identities that they take for granted are also illusory. Elisabet is an actress stricken with a mental illness that renders her mute. Alma is the nurse assigned to take care of her, but ends up doing far more performing than her patient. Bergman’s Brechtian approach allows us to experience their emotional connection, while also weighing it against our intimate connections to other people, and other characters in movies. Alma and Elisabet may or may not fuse into one entity, but at least the abstract narrative allows us to consider this possibility. Persona is a major departure from the mistaken identity films that Hitchcock made, for example, in that it provides an introspective look at one person’s identity becoming another. What if the mistaken part has to do with the two women being separate from the start? This is not to suggest that two beings have become one, but something more along the lines of one of the characters being a mental creation of the other. In the late 1960s and 70s there were many European films made about fractured identity, with Persona being one of the most revered.
Over a decade later, Rainer Werner Fassbinder directed another film about doubles, Despair (1978), adapted from the Vladimir Nabokov novel. Its story of protagonist Hermann Hermann (Dirk Bogarde) is sometimes like a noirish crime drama, but one that becomes more confusing and cerebral as it continues. Hermann is a Russian expatriate living in Germany in the early 1930s, right around the time of the Wall Street crash. Making a living as the head of a chocolate factory, he acts supremely condescending towards his wife Lydia (Andréa Ferréol), staff, and friends. One day he encounters a tramp named Felix (Klaus Löwitsch), who he thinks looks exactly like him, although the audience can easily see is a completely different person. Hermann comes up with an elaborate scheme to dress Felix up in his ownclothes and then murder him, intending to fake his death and reunite with Lydia later on with insurance money. After committing the crime, he flees to France, where in a seemingly delusional state, he is captured.
Despair works in an entirely different way than the source material, simply because film is a visual medium. In Nabokov’s novel, the reader doesn’t realize that Hermann and Felix look nothing alike until very late, after the murder is committed. Hermann’s first person perspective is one of an unreliable narrator, but we never really find out if he is intentionally deceiving us, knowing that Felix looks entirely different, or if he is just delusional the whole time. The book and film bring into question our own self-perception and how that can be entirely different from how the rest of the world perceives us. The plot synopsis sounds like a relatively straightforward noir mystery, but the lack of resemblance between Hermann and Felix brings it in the direction of a far more fractured art film that Fassbinder had proved himself capable of. Despair fails as a thriller, but succeeds as a conceptual film about a collision of identity. What is perhaps more fascinating is the division of Hermann’s identity within himself. In some scenes there are two Hermanns, one watching the other, usually when one of them is in bed with Lydia. As he states in the book: “Eventually I found myself sitting in the parlor--while making love in the bedroom.” (28) He observes his own sex act not unlike Meredyth Herold’s character in Singapore Sling (1990), which I wrote about last month. In one scene Hermann is dressed up in a leather cap and leopard print garb, with a riding crop, Lydia kissing his boot. Dressed in this leather daddy BDSM costume, we can’t help but ask--is this the real Hermann, or is the one looking on?
Although they have somewhat similar themes, Persona and Despair are very different films that don’t immediately come to mind as a pairing. But there are many similarities holding them together like so many celluloid tape splices. By now, the opening sequence of Persona is famous to the point of parody (like in Love and Death on Long Island (1997)), yet it defines the structure of the film and its message so well. It begins with close up shots of a motion picture projector itself. A cartoon image of a woman bathing projects upside down. Another sudden image is of a man in pajamas being scared by a skeleton and a vampire of sorts. In addition to the images mentioned at the start of this essay that are more documentary-like, or even part of the film’s diegesis, these cartoons and horror shorts show us material that the child we eventually see may be watching. We see him gazing at the out of focus image of his mother’s face. The imagery of this first sequence comes back here and there throughout Persona. The most pronounced instance is right after Elisabet cuts her foot on a piece of broken glass. Alma could have prevented this from happening, but said nothing. Directly after, we see the image of Alma get caught in the gate and break apart, as if it caught on fire. The relationship between the two women is specifically seen as a cinematic event, with their existence linked with the apparatus that allows us to see them.
In Despair there is a scene where Hermann, Lydia, and her cousin Ardalion (Volker Spengler) go to a movie theater and watch a silent cops and robbers film. At first it seems like the cop and the robber are shooting at themselves, only dressed differently, and we find out they are brothers. Off screen, the bad guy kills his cop brother, taking his uniform. The other cops ultimately machine gun him down. Hermann looks away from the screen and sees his double sitting far behind him in the theater. While Persona works the influence of cinema into the mechanics of the film, showing a montage of disparate images, Despair gives us a straightforward doppelganger film within the film. This achieves something similar in that we are aware of the influence that the medium has on the characters. A passage in Nabokov’s book gives us a similar situation that Hermann as narrator recounts: “On the screen I have seen a man meeting his double; or better to say an actor playing two parts with, as in our case, the difference of social standing naively stressed, so that in one part he is a slinking rough, and in the other a staid bourgeois in a car--as if, really, a pair of identical tramps or a pair of identical gents, would have been less fun.” (15) Movies about doubles are only interesting in how the two characters diverge from one another. In Despair, this is posed as a specific class issue. This is somewhat similar to Persona in that Alma is a nurse who is hired to serve Elisabet, a wealthy actress.
Elisabet’s occupation as an actress clearly provides a Brechtian sense of distance between the characters and audience. It crosses our minds that her illness could just all be an act. In an early scene Elisebet’s doctor (Margaretha Krook) states, “No one asks whether it’s genuine or not, whether you’re lying or telling the truth. Questions like that only matter in the theater, and hardly even there.” She is saying that life really has no meaning, and even the structure of beginning-middle-end does not really make sense. It is just a way that humans provide a sense of order to their lives in order to avoid existential dread. The way we structure meaning in our lives is often very similar to how narrative structure in movies works. Meanwhile, Alma essentially performs for Elizabet, with endless talk about her personal life. There are scenes of intimacy between the women, like they are becoming more close to each other, when in fact, the silent Elisabet is like a blank slate. Alma says, “I’ve learned so much from you,” although in actuality, she has just been projecting herself onto Elisabet the whole time. Their sense of intimacy is just an illusion, like the film editing concept called The Kuleshov Effect. In the early 1920s, Russian editor Kuleshov found that splicing two images together implies meaning between the two things even when there is none. For example, a close up of a man’s emotionless face, followed by a shot of a warm meal, makes us believe the man is hungry, when this may be completely incorrect. Throughout all of Persona, Alma believes she is getting closer to Elisabet, and when that does not turn out to be the case, she feels immense negative emotions of betrayal.
This atmosphere showing the influence of cinema in both form and content on the characters continues in the final scenes of Despair. Once Hermann is captured by the police, his exit from the hotel is reminiscent of Gloria Swanson’s famous walk down the staircase that concludes Sunset Boulevard (1950). “We are making a film here,” he says to no one in particular, “don’t look at the camera.” Dirk Bogarde’s line delivery is highly artificial, as we see his illusion being broken apart by the arrest. He may have believed that Felix looked identical to him, but the law is here to show him otherwise.
Despair and Persona are known as being films about intense introspection, but Bergman and Fassbinder both do an effective job of bringing in political commentary about external issues as well. Fassbinder is known as a director who continuously confronted Germany’s horrifying past in World War II, and he adds this into Nabokov’s story. Among Hermann’s preoccupations and the lavender world of his chocolate bonbons, we see the rise of Nazism occurring in 1930s Germany. This is seen first in a seemingly random poster of Hitler in the factory, followed by one of his workers coming in with brown uniform and swastika arm band--”“Have you joined the boy scouts, or something?” Hermann asks. We later see Nazi thugs smashing up a Jewish butcher shop, as Hermann looks on from across the street. While he stays out of the ruckus, he clearly appears stressed out, as he and Lydia are in part, if not fully Jewish. All of this is presented as a kind of side note, but it adds another layer to the theme of fractured identity. As I mentioned in my writing on The Student of Prague back in December, fascism forces the citizens living under it to live double lives--the one they present publicly, so as to avoid totalitarian murder, and the one that is truthful and critical, that must be repressed in order to survive.
Brutal images of war show up in Persona as well. At one point Elisabet finds a picture in a book that looks like it may be from a concentration camp, a young child holding his hands up. She is visibly upset by the image, and we can see a similarity between the child in the image, and her son at the beginning of the film, holding his hands up to the screen where Elisabet’s out-of-focus face is projected. We also see her coming across the famous news footage of Thich Quang Duc, the Buddhist monk who lit himself on fire to protest the Vietnam war. Bergman could easily have left war and politics out of Persona, in that it is such a personal film, but he is relating Elisabet’s and Alma’s existential despair with the state of the world around them. This world is brought to the characters through the media of still and motion picture photography. Much like Hermann’s identity is clearly influenced by the movies, cinema plays a part in how Alma and Elisabet make meaning and understand their environment.
These aspects of fractured identity and sociopolitical crisis in Despair and Persona are present in many other films. Both could easily be compared to Mr Klein (1976), which I covered last week. Whereas Despair hints at the rise of Nazism in Germany and greater Europe, Mr Klein shows how fascism continued to dehumanize people under the French occupation. Both films also have much in common with Roman Polanski’s The Tenant (1976), which I will be continuing on with next week. In that film, the protagonist Trelkovsky (Polanski) begins to believe he is turning into the previous tenant of his apartment, Simone Choule. Like in Mr Klein, many neighbors and people around town almost encourage this fusion of the protagonist becoming someone else. The final sequence of Despair, while much like that of Sunset Boulevard, is also quite similar to the conclusion of The Tenant. Polanski’s film continues the thread of the other two films into post-war Europe. The Tenant also has much in common with a less frequently seen Italian production called Footprints on the Moon (1975). In that, a translator (Florinda Bolkan) who blacked out for a few days, goes to a remote village, where she begins to suspect she may actually be someone else. The Tenant and Footprints on the Moon deal with the larger theme of identity transference, but in ways that focus more on femininity and gender fluidity.
Nabokov, Vladimir. Despair. New York: Vintage International, 1989 (original 1965)