Product: Persona (1967)
Rating: 5.0
Bergman's Dissonance
Because of its incongruous mixture of images, the opening montage of this film brings to mind the adagio introduction at the beginning of the first movement of Mozart's String Quartet in C Major (K. 465), the so-called "Dissonance". The both introductions clearly create the feeling of angst.This rather complex film reminds us how our knowledge of ourselves, and especially of others, has its natural, insurmountable limits. Because we all wear masks (at least to some degree) our knowledge of what exactly is going on inside someone's mind (including our own) simply cannot be complete. In this respect we do not live in some sort of a perfect, unambiguous, deterministic, Newtonian world, but rather we live in a world akin to that of quantum mechanics, with all its uncertainties and probabilities. Other people, no matter how hard they try, can never understand us completely.