In this essay I aim to analyse Ingmar Bergman’s ‘Persona’ (1966) which tells the story of a star who stopped speaking, her nurse and identity to examine how form, how the film is put together and meaning, are integral to the film.
Reflexivity in film is distinguished as a film that is self-aware. A film that is aware of the process that has been taken to produce a film, the illusion that is usually created in main stream cinema is not present instead the audience are made aware that the film is simply an illusion i.e. “The fictional nature of a story can be suspended only by a direct communicative act, which is not mediated by the conventions of the fiction itself. Reflexivity creates a hole, so to speak, in the texture of the fiction through which the viewer is directly connected to the aesthetic apparatus of the fiction […] The ultimate goal of reflexive procedures is to create a direct discursive relationship between the auteur and the audience, whereby the auteur may say something not only according to the aesthetic rules of a genre but also about the rules themselves according to which the work of art in question was made”. (A. B. Kovas, 2007. P.225)
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The break in the middle shows it is turning back and beginning again. At the end, the film runs out of the camera and the light dies from the lamp and the film is over.” (R. Ebert, 2001) There is a point being made about the simplicity of cinema and art, Bergman is ‘returning’ to the beginning of the film mid-way through must be done in order to reach the end of the narrative, “Bergman is showing us that he has returned to first principles. "In the beginning, there was light." (R. Ebert,