Peter Ohlin asks the question if it is really necessary to invoke the Holocaust in order to portray the spiritual crisis of a comfortably situated actress in 1960s Sweden? It is then revealed to us that after the death of Bergman’s parents he acquired a number of family photo albums and other photographs where he then made a short film called Karen’s Face. It show us that still images stand for loss and failure in Bergman’s mind.
The film is not a documentary of 1960s portrait of an actress and there seems little dealt with historical fact. At least on the surface it seems to deal with binaries, opposition, splits, divisions all in an abstract way. However the photograph of the little boy even while rooted in historical fact becomes clear that no photograph is entirely innocent. It comes accompanied by a lot of cultural baggage. The photo of the little boy begs a few questions such as: who took it, where was it taken? How was it used? What did this photo mean to Bergman when he put it in the film? Compared to some of the other documentary images of Jews cowering on the ground while soldiers surround them, there is little explicit violence in this image; nobody is physically dragging the people out the underground bunker is not visible (all we see is a doorway). What the image does portray is a devastating pathos, the image of the Jew as a helpless victim. Clearly, Stroop was not interested in demonstrating the heroism and independence of those Jews who bravely found in the ghetto to the bitter end instead the picture, from his point of view, emphasizes the helpless and submissive victimhood of the Jewish people.
In one sense, this is of course exactly what Persona is all about: how human beings, never mind photographs, can assume masks and become thereby representations without substance. The photo began to appear widely after the Eichmann trial in 1961. The trial generated an increased interest in the Holocaust, which together with the publication of the Stroop report in 1960, seems to have created the climate where the photograph would acquire a larger symbolic significance. It appears in Erwin Leiser’s documentary film about the Nazi Period, Den blodiga tiden. Bergman would have been immersed in Holocaust material at this time.
The little Jewish ghetto boy stands before us with a kind of accusation that is an amplification of the gaze of the little boy in the opening credits. The emphasis on the similar hand gestures as Törnqvist has pointed out makes the comparison explicit. In this context it may not matter whether the little boy in fact was looking at soldier with a gun or at somebody specifically asking him to hold his hands up at the camera. Camera or gun, it does not matter both are instruments of power. The photograph functions as a kind of double displacement.
Perhaps the most central issue is the role of motherhood. It is enacted most directly in the double monologue, which begins with the nurse Alma finding a photograph of Elsabet’s son (torn in two pieces but pieced together – a synecdochally reference to the film itself and our strategies for its comprehension such as Elisabet’s desire to play the role of motherhood (being an actress) rather than actually being a mother – to accusations – that Elisabet could not learn to love her child, that she wanted a dead child – to the desperate assertion that she, Alma is not like Elisabet – though earlier in the film, she has confessed to having an abortion after reckless sexual adventure. The film contains innumerable references to the possibilities of accurate visual reproduction, for example the many mirror sequences, which become memory and possibly just a memory of a dream, or the close-ups of the double monologue that suggest that I might be possible to get so close to a human being as to see the truth in her, or Elisabet’s pointing her camera straight at us and talking a picture.
The photograph of the little Jewish boy occupies such a crucial position in the film. It functions as an unvarnished document but also it becomes an almost totally symbolic and iconic representation of various universal meanings. This makes the picture an example of representation without substance. This is the way the photograph becomes a sign of the instability of imagery. Every image is subject to interpretation. In the world of imagery, Bergman seems to be saying is a representation without substance. Arbitrary, subjective, random, haphazard. The televised image of the burning monk is not mute, there is a segment of a documentary report on Vietnam playing in the background. Elizabet recoils in horror an puts a hand over her mouth and she is silent. The sounds on TV have no relationship to the case with the burning monk and there is a radical discontinuity between word and image. It has been pointed out that the monk’s protest is as mute as that of the ghetto boy; the frantic documentary commentary on the sound track emphasizes the silence of the monk and his commitment to action rather than speech.
In the end Alma just cleans up the house, closes it for the winter and waits for the bus. After the bus leaves with her, we hear and see the noises and some scenes from the film studio; then the film runs out of the projector and the carbon rods are separated and the light dims. The film is over and there is no significance to be had in this. The photograph of the boy in the Warsaw ghetto tells us nothing, except that the scene actually existed at a specific moment in time. “Any other meaning is extraneous” The image of Alma’s and Elizabet’s faces merged tells us nothing except that at a certain moment in time in the film it appeared.
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