Ingmar Bergman’s Persona as a Modernist Example of Media Determinism

Abstract

One of the key characteristics of modernist art is to be found in its implicit media de- terminism. As pointed out by Mallarmé (“poetry was made not of ideas but of words”), Cartier-Bresson (“the photo was made not of stories but of lines”), and others, it was the materiality of the medium that constituted the conditions of the possibility for the crea- tion and consequently the interpretation of a work of art. Two consequences immediately follow from this assumption: modernism’s ambivalent relation to technology and its reflexive nature, i.e. modernism’s focus on its own signifiers, irrespective of the referent extrinsic to the medium that immediately opens up space of undecidability in interpretation. Even though the film medium was born during the time of the rapid development of modernism, which took over almost all forms of art, mainstream narrative cinema joined this movement only after a considerable delay. On the one hand, this was due to the fact that film was not considered an art form, but merely a sort of entertainment for the mass- es; on the other, film held a strong relationship to the same kind of realism that modernism was so desperately trying to surpass. During the 1920s certain movements in cinema appropriated main ideas of modernism, but it was only after the WWII that modernism in cinema came to full bloom. Due to its reflexive nature and open-endedness, Ingmar Bergman’s film Persona (1966) is considered one of the finest examples of modernism in cinema. Persona is, nevertheless, also an exceptional example of technological determinism. In this film Bergman accomplishes a reversal of a crucial modernist problem related to technology: he does not show how to animate an apparatus, but rather how media technology have infiltrated the frame of mind so deeply that a psyche can at best be grasped through the medium itself.