Chapter 3: Cinema as Mirror – Face and Close-Up

Persona – Béla Balázs – Close-Up and Face – Face as Mirror of the Unconscious – Christian Metz – Jean-Louis Baudry – Apparatus Theory – Early Cinema and the Close-Up (Tom Gunning) – Reflexive Doubling in Modern (Art) Cinema – Mirror Neurons – Paradoxes of the Mirror

We see glimpses of a small film projector, running, followed, in a rapidly edited sequence, by an image strip made up of old silent films, children’s hands, a lamb being slaughtered, nails driven into hands, a scorpion, trees in dirty snow, the corpses of two elderly people, a child in bed, the same child trying to touch the large, blurry image of a face of a woman with alternately open and closed eyes. By making the projector and the film strip visible, the opening sequence of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (SE 1965) draws our attention to the fact that we are about to see a film: a technology and an artefact which should not be mistaken for real life. Furthermore, the close-up of the woman’s face projected onto a translucent surface and tentatively touched by the boy, pictures an archetypal relation enacted by the cinema: that of serving as a mirror. The many ways of theorising this moment, when we are confronted with an image as if with our own reflected self, will be the focus of this chapter.

Persona, a film in which the mirror motif is intensely deployed, revolves around the emotionally fragile actress Elisabeth Vogler (Liv Ullmann) who, after having suffering a nervous breakdown on stage, finds herself placed in the care of nurse Alma (Bibi Anderson). The ensuing rapprochement and eventual closeness between the two women gives rise not only to intimacy, but also to tensions and conflict, depicted as a temporary blurring of their identities – to such a degree that even the spectator can at times no longer be sure to tell them apart. At one point, a composite face is generated by combining one half of each actress’ face, looking into a mirror – or is the face looking at us?¹ When studying Bergman’s filmography, one realises that several film titles announce the centrality of mirrors and faces in his oeuvre: Ansiktet (SE 1958, The Face), Såsom i en spegel (SE 1961, Through a Glass Darkly), Ansikte mot ansikte (SE 1976, Face to Face), Karins ansikte (SE 1986, Karin’s Face).² But what exactly are the implications of the spectator looking into the eyes of a face that is larger than life? Should it be interpreted in terms of phenomenology, psychoanalysis, or neuroscience? Approaches from all these disciplines have been brought to bear on the question.