“Persona” is a 1966 film by Swedish Director Ingmar Bergman. Shot entirely in black and white, it follows the relationship between two women, an actress who suddenly goes mute and her young nurse, who live alone together at an isolated beach house.
This six-minute prologue is deliberately unsettling, as we watch a boy touch a screen displaying an enlarged woman’s face. The sequence both references the history of film and blurs the boundary between film and viewer, inside and out. It never resolves this confusion and keeps the audience perpetually out of focus through abrupt transitions.
Exploring conceptions of art, cinema, and the self, “Persona” relies on black and white visual contrast to merge dream and reality. Light and dark fade together and suddenly reemerge in stark contrast. In a famous sequence later in the film, Bergman uses visual merging of the two protagonists’ faces to portray psychological merging of the two women’s souls.
This film underscores the power of black and white imagery in storytelling. Black and white separates the world of the film from the audience’s reality and reinforces the film’s motifs of duality and merging. It cuts out the noise and commands our focus, tempting us to lose balance.
