Persona: Ingmar Bergman’s stone-cold classic

Essential reading, viewing, and listening from the EI editors.

I first saw Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, his stone-cold classic of 1965, as a teenager, and God knows how many times I have seen it since. It has the greatest opening sequence in cinema: a percussive, rapid-fire montage that can never be wholly accommodated or understood. The film’s story is, however, a simple one (even if its Jungian resonances are deep and complex). A celebrated actress, Elisabeth Vogler (one of Liv Ullmann’s defining roles), is struck dumb, having dried up in the middle of a performance of Electra. Three months later, still speechless, she is granted a nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson), who, fearing silence, cannot stop talking to and at her patient. Elisabeth becomes the audience, Alma the performer, and the two personalities intertwine against a biblical monochrome landscape of sand, rock and water. More than 60 years on, it remains inexhaustible, never to be entirely absorbed, intimate, stark and utterly compelling.

Flaubert’s women

Some novels are predicated on such an ambitious premise that one worries for them. Think of Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey: My Own Life, re-imagining that of the eponymous 17th-century polymath through a fictionalised autobiographical diary. Well, here’s another that could have gone horribly wrong but didn’t: the Anglo-Turkish writer Elif Shafak’s In One Brief Moment All Eternity. Half of it is a chronological life of the great French novelist Gustave Flaubert (whose relationship with Istanbul rings especially with Shafak). With the rest of it told from the perspective of the women in his life: real, as in the case, for example, of George Sand, a writer of immense popularity during her lifetime, though now acquainted always with Frédéric Chopin, and, in later life, Flaubert; and fictional, as with, inevitably, Emma, Madame Bovary, indicative of the 30 or so women contained within ‘whose voices were not heard in history books’. That includes Emma’s real-life model, the similarly ill-fated Delphine Delamare. As Shafak declares, this fine, revelatory work of historical fiction is ‘a love letter to literature’, and a moving one, too.

Mozart’s youthful splendour

Mozart’s piano concertos remain among the peaks of the composer’s output, and the emerging cycle of them performed by the South African-born Australian fortepianist Kristian Bezuidenhout is sounding like one for the age. The latest release offers the listener one of the most familiar – and greatest – of the canon, the D minor, No. 20, K466 (just listen to its exquisite second-movement Romance). But it is a testament to the quality of these performances that the less well-known D Major concerto, K175, feels a work of almost equal splendour given the combination of the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra’s spring and propulsion, and the resounding then glassy tone of Bezuidenhout’s fortepiano. Mozart was 17 when he wrote this work, his first truly original composition in the genre. The E-flat major concerto, K449, rounds off this wonderfully uplifting collection.