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

Adrien Husson
403751072
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 syuzhet 1 with a perpetual confusion between
realism, symbolism and expressionism.

1That 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