Shooting came to an end on 15 September 1965. The next day, Bergman wrote in his diary that now the filming was over, Bibi was off to America, Sven to Zurich and Liv to Oslo, he was left alone, depressed and self-pitying. "On Monday the endless saga at the Royal Dramatic Theatre begins again. How will I put up with it?" A few months later he resigned his post as head of the theatre.
Persona was premièred at the Spegeln cinema on 18 October 1966. The editor Ulla Ryghe has described how the famous scene where the film burns up, often interpreted as if the actual celluloid cannot stand the friction between the two main characters, caused a number of problems at the initial screenings. After a number of projectionists had stopped the film, the film cans themselves had to be marked with red labels assuring them that the actual film does not catch fire, even though it appears that way.
The Stockholm press was largely respectful and appreciative, yet almost unanimously perplexed by a film, the content of which, symbolic or otherwise, was shrouded in mystery. Dagens Nyheter's Mauritz Edström wrote a long review (most of the reviews were unusually long) under the heading "Bergman's victory over silence" (most probably a reference to the earlier film The Silence, at the same time as conveying a view that many critics have subsequently repeated):
"Ingmar Bergman's new film "Persona", as I see it, is a reminder of our proximity to the ultimate borderline, where language breaks down, images are rent asunder and reality dissolves. It touches me as a personal confession, a howl of despair or a cry against darkness and silence [...] A defiant cry, an attempt to ward off the threat that lies in this despair."
Edström's words bear an uncanny similarity to those of the director himself. He could hardly have known that on 24 July - just before he started to write Persona - Bergman had written in his workbook almost exactly the same thing: "Even if prayer is just a cry into an empty space, we should not desist from that cry."
The editor of Dagens Nyheter, Olof Lagercrantz, who both panned Bergman (his review of Smiles of a Summer Night is legendary), and praised him in equal measure, wrote a cutting yet amusing reflection in response to the film under the heading "Person(a)cult": "The halo has been pressed down to the level of the sweat band of the world famous director's beret. The head of SF, Kenne Fant, can once again proclaim with a tremor of idealism in his voice that it it is a great honour to lose money on a film like 'Persona'. He said the same thing about the box-office hit 'The Silence'."
France was the country where Bergman reaped his first major successes at the end of the 1950s. Yet during the 60s his star had been on the wane. Persona helped to restore his reputation: Les cahiers du cinéma called Persona his most beautiful film, and one daily newspaper declared that sixty years after its birth, the cinema had now found its most promising form. Reactions in America were mixed: Susan Sontag's famous essay in the magazine (albeit British) Sight & Sound is an example of praise, whereas the short notice in Films in Review is the opposite: "a film about lesbians and lesbianism".
Bergman insisted that all marketing material for the film, including stills, should feature the perforated edge of the film strip in order to emphasise the markedly filmic quality of the work.
"At some time or other, I said that Persona saved my life - that is no exaggeration. If I had not found the strength to make the film, I would probably have been all washed up. One significant point: for the first time I did not care in the least whether the result would be a commercial success. The gospel according to which one must be comprehensible at all costs, one that had been dinned to me ever since I worked as the lowliest manuscripts slave at Svensk Filmindustri, could finally go to hell (which is where it belongs!)
Today, I feel that in Persona - and later in Cries and Whispers - I had gone as far as I could go. And that in these two instance, when working in total freedom, I touched wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover."
Lloyd Michaels (ed.), Ingmar Bergman's Persona (Cambridge/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Maaret Koskinen, Spel och speglingar
”Möte med mästaren”, Stockholmstidningen 16 July, 1965.
Person(a)kult, Dagens Nyheter 23 October, 1966.
"Werle-musik i 'Persona': ’Anvisningar hämmar ej'", Svenska Dagbladet 21 October, 1965.
"Dialogue on Film: Bibi Andersson." American Film, March 1977.
Persona eng script