The place of art cinema narration in Cléo from 5 to 7 and Persona Adrien Husson

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02/24/09

Introduction

David Bordwell’s article, “Art Cinema Narration”, lays out a set of

properties that attempt to describe what the conventions of art cinema are, as

opposed to mainstream cinema. In this essay, I will look at a film which

follows these conventions (Cléo from 5 to 7) and compare it to another art film

(Persona) which, although aware of them, rejects their intended use and

conveys meaning in a way that confuses any understanding based on these

conventions.

Cléo from 5 to 7 and Persona share formal traits but . They are both art

films from the 60s - one belongs to the French New Wave while the second

belongs to Scandinavian cinema's masterpieces. That means they use explicit

cinematic devices, for instance authorial commentary, subjective realism and

breaks in the narrative. As stories, they both use the existential angst of a

female performer as their starting point. Persona, however, departs from the

art cinema style described by Bordwell in “Art cinema narration”. It goes

further, blurring the distinction between subjective, objective and expressive

realism; being so ambiguous that it becomes ambiguous about what it is

ambiguous about; replacing the syuzhet1 with a perpetual confusion between

realism, symbolism and expressionism.

1 That is, the events depicted in the film (as opposed to the fabula, the story told by the film). Syuzhet is theoretically constant and shared by all the interpreters of a film, while the fabula depends on one’s interpretation.

Realism in Cléo from 5 to 7 and Persona

Cléo from 5 to 7 features an objective realism sometimes undermined

by authorial intrusion. Even though we follow Cléo’s gaze throughout the

film, sometimes with a subjective camera point of view, it is only stylistically

different from classical objective realism. The camera is free enough to

display reality in a way that does not make the audience subject to Cléo’s

interpretation of it. Moreover, the abundance of New Wave cinema

techniques reduces the submission to Cléo’s gaze while adding authorial

intrusion into the film. Explicit camera movements (the swinging just before

the singing scene), film-in-the-film, long driving takes, explicit camera angle

(i.e. a broken mirror that only reflects an eye) and montage (a series of inserts

when Cléo wanders alone in the street) all reveal the presence of the author

and prevent us from completely diving into the unfolding narrative.

This construction is typical of art cinema. It might confuse an audience

only used to more mainstream films, but the film adheres to codes and only

uses these techniques as a way of conveying something (I will not discuss the

themes at work in Cléo here). This fits into Bordwell’s definition of art

cinema, especially that its claim to ‘actual realism’ is just another style,

another framework of conventions.

Persona does not let the audience rely on a cultural common ground.

The difference between Cléo from 5 to 7 and Persona’s depiction of reality can

be made clear by looking at two similar scenes. In Cléo from 5 to 7, Cléo goes

to the cinema and watches a short film in which a man, because he put on

dark glasses, sees everything to be tragic. He invents the death of his loved

one by interpreting some signs (a woman lying on the ground, a car) as others

(a dead woman, a hearse). When he takes the glasses off, reality is restored

and the scene he witnessed plays back, allowing him to see that the situation

was not too tragic but also giving him a chance to intervene (instead of just

panicking as he did the first time). In Persona, Alma narrates Elizabeth’s

struggle with pregnancy and child birth. The camera looks at Elizabeth’s

reaction to the telling, and the scene is then repeated a second time, showing

Alma as she tells the story. The second time, Alma enters a state of confusion

and claims that she is not Elizabeth Vogler. Follows the famous shot where

the actresses’ faces are blended into one through a split double exposure.

These scenes both repeat the same action twice but under different

points of view (physical point of view in Persona, with or without dark glasses

in Cléo). Yet only one refuses to give a single clue about what is actually

(diegetically) happening. In Cléo, we are watching the film Cléo watches. It is

a story-in-the-story, so the main diegesis is unaffected by what happens in it.

Even within this smaller film, the stylistic conventions of slapstick comedy

are made clear from the outset. The repetition of the scene is slightly

surrealist, but the rest of the film - with people’s faces painted black when

seen through dark glasses and a man selling handkerchiefs on the shores of

the Seine – fits the pattern, reducing potential confusion. The scene is very

didactic since it makes explicit a part of what the film is about. Cléo herself

removed her dark glasses and started smiling some time before, when she

was in the Dôme, looking at everyone else. If the meaning of this subfilm

remains obscure, however, there is no disturbance in Cléo’s story. Any

confusion is restricted to the slapstick film and Cléo from 5 to 7 remains

narratively untouched.

Persona does not offer such a way out. The scene repeats and switches

emphasis from Elizabeth to Alma. There is no explanation for this doubling,

nor is there any obvious interpretation that could turn the scene into an

intrusion of the author. The transition to the blended faces obscures things

further. It is unclear whether this is an objective reality (the characters would

be mad enough to repeat the same conversation twice), a subjective one

(whose subjectivity?) or a break in the narrative (to say what?). The

conventions of art cinema are gone. The audience expects them to be used,

and therefore attempts to label this scene (and the others) according to a pre-

existing vocabulary. But the scene exists outside of these conventions, it

stands for itself and it is only by regarding it as such, detached from what

they would be if they were in another film, that one can start creating one’s

own understanding of them .

Ambiguity in Cléo from 5 to 7 and Persona

Bordwell describes ambiguity as a way to avoid the conflict between

realism and authorial commentary. He contends that art cinema's realism is

jeopardized by non-diegetic intrusions and that only through ambiguity can

the film retain its internal validity. Cléo from 5 to 7's singing scene makes such

a use of ambiguity. When Cléo sings the song that will trigger her internal

transformation (“Sans toi”), both the music and the image turn into signifiers

of spectacle; the apartment is replaced with a dark background, the diegetic

piano music becomes an orchestra score. This could be an authorial intrusion

pausing the narrative to provide the viewer with an abstract dramatization of

Cléo central problem (performance as the source of her objectification), but

the dark background is only a close-up of a black curtain, and the score could

be either non-diegetic or a token of subjective realism (Cléo thinking the

music as she sings the song). Both interpretations are valid, simultaneous and

inseparable; one ensures narrative continuity while the other offers privileged

information to the viewer.

Persona's central scene, in contrast, uses ambiguity with different

results. After Alma (the nurse taking care of the mute actress, Elizabeth)

discovers that Elizabeth has been analysing her behaviour and has betrayed

her trust, she hurts Elizabeth with a piece of shattered glass left on the floor.

The film (the material roll) then appears to stop, break and burn. Follows a

sequence reminiscent of the opening credits: a series of insert shots featuring

previous films by Bergman and the close-up of an eye.

The ambiguity is on a very different level. What might or might not

have happened is itself unclear: the film obviously did not break, for it is still

rolling. It could mean we are actually watching a film of a film, in which the

original film breaks and is then, through montage, re-inserted after the

breakpoint. Yet the event isn't wholly extra-diegetic, for this break is the start

of two things. Firstly, the relationship between Alma and Elizabeth becomes

conflictual only after this break.2 Secondly, it is also the end of the purely

narrative part of the film. Everything after this mid-point is ambiguous about

its reality status. We are not given clues about whether the next sequences are

part of the film's reality, Alma's reality, Elizabeth's reality or merely symbolic

2 Alma alone is being conflictual when she puts the shattered glass on the floor.

and external to the diegetic world. Yet their order and their nature forbids

them to all belong to the same level of reality.

Cléo's singing scene has two possible meanings. Both are clear, and

the point is not to decide between them but to absorb them as two layers

contained within one shot. Persona's midpoint, however, does not try to

balance realism and authorial commentary. Realism is thrown away by the

time the film makes its materiality explicit (by breaking and burning). The

shock of this discovery forces us to reinterpret everything that was before as

something else than what we thought it was – but what it is now is still

unclear, so the viewer enters a state of suspension, waiting for an anchor, a

clue that would tell what kind of reality is being shown. Because the work of

modern interpretation cannot begin without knowledge of what is being

interpreted, Persona forces interpreters to make a decision about what it is that

they are interpreting before even beginning the interpretation. Yet this choice

is in itself an interpretation, hence the interpreters are made aware that all

they are interpreting is a fabula constructed by them.

In other words, Persona also thwarts another of the elements identified

by Bordwell as specific to art cinema: the relationship between syuzhet and

fabula. In Persona, there is no syuzhet in the sense that although something is

happening on the screen, it could mean anything about what is happening in

the film. This is the probable origin of much divergence in the critic’s account

for what they see on the screen (Sontag 1976, 129, 137, 141) (footnote: as

shown by sontag, that guy about interpretation and myself).

Because interpreters have no ‘facts’ on which to base their

interpretation, they cannot claim to have understood anything about the film;

only that their Personal sensibility brought them to see this or that in the film.

As a result, Persona is closed to modern interpretation but open to both

postmodern deconstruction and emotional reaction. One has to give up on

building a coherent interpretative apparatus if one wants to be in control of

Persona as a material ripe for analysis – which is what I have attempted to do

in this essay.

References

Bordwell, David. "Art Cinema Narration." In Narration in the Fiction Film, by

David Bordwell, 205-233. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.

Sontag, Susan. "Bergman's Persona." In Styles of Radical Will, by Susan Sontag,

123-145. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1976.

Film Cited

Bergman, Ingmar,. Persona, 1967

Varda, Agnès. Cléo from 5 to 7, 1962