On Showing Bits of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona to my Seven-Year-Old

On Showing Bits of Bergman’s Persona to my Seven-Year-Old

“How many times have we heard how in adolescence one’s life was changed by watching Ingmar Bergman’s films?” someone recently said to me, to which I had to reply that I just recently started my own blood even earlier. At seven, one is perhaps susceptible to cinema in a way one might not be in another year, or even six months further on. Certainly I took it for another reality at five in 1979, when entertainment choices were more limited, and I was hauled into Kramer vs. Kramer and given a sledgehammer dose of reality I never would have asked for — or a few months later that horrible minute of The Shining (through fingers covering my eyes) to get me over my fear.

Persona comes to my daughter on the computer screen, but we have a projector as well, and she endured parts of 2001 very well. The thing about Bergman is, I can see anew through her eyes — and I’ve often watched films askance, trying to find what it was doing for the person next to me. All these years — seeking out some invisible nexus that might never come. Where did I think I was and where did I think I was going? Maybe I was simply headed toward my own couch and my own daughter. The face, so prominent in Bergman, is the nucleus of the whole operation — one doesn’t need the subtitles (as my daughter didn’t) to discern what was going on in the early hospital and island house scenes; Liv and Bibi’s faces were showing an abundance of human feeling which gets communicated most emphatically and honestly in the face — the area of our soulfulness most seen. Funnily enough, her overarching questions were, Why isn’t she talking? and Is she ever going to talk? These questions were certainly spurred by images and sounds — no dialogue was needed. When you see one person talking to another and the other never responds…that is out of the ordinary, there is a certain tension. From my older eyes to her breathing eyes taking in light from the MacBook Air on the Criterion Channel and the digitized grain of the film as shot by Sven Nykvist from July to September 1965 — the journey is as incredible as it is unorthodox.

Why should a seven-year-old be watching Bergman, if only to satisfy a father’s whim? The taste of and for art — is it acquired? A gene handed down? Surely, at least partially. How many silly animal videos, whether human or not, can one digest before a simple yen for something beautiful that people spent countless hours on to capture via emulsification? Once in a while can’t be too much, can it? If we are such stuff as dreams are made on, then true cinema should be exercised for those dreams of ours to cast off on. Then Gaston Bachelard’s words (adopted as my mantra) that the poetic image “expressing us by making us what it expresses; in other words, it is at once a becoming of expression, and becoming of our being,” have the best chance of success, as my daughter can start to see that two women are “making” her what they magically express just as she expresses them. Holy transmission.