In this session, we turned to Persona — a work often described as one of the most elusive and demanding in the history of cinema.
At its surface, the film follows the encounter between a silent actress, Elisabet Vogler, and her nurse, Alma. Yet what unfolds is not a story in the conventional sense, but a gradual disintegration of boundaries—between two women, between speech and silence, and ultimately between image and reality itself.
From the beginning, the film resisted stable interpretation. Critics recognized its precision and formal rigor, yet widely agreed that it defied clear analysis and simple categorization. Persona became, for many, a kind of “white whale”—a work that invites interpretation while refusing to be exhausted by it. Its very force lies in this: it cannot be reduced to a single meaning.
As Ingmar Bergman himself acknowledged, the film reaches toward something he did not wish to fully define—suggesting that in Persona he approached the limits of what could be said, touching a dimension that remains, in a sense, beyond words. The title itself—drawn from the Latin for “mask,” and echoing Carl Jung’s notion of the constructed persona—points toward the tension between appearance and what withdraws behind it.
Visually, the film is carried by an intensity of presence: stark compositions, radical close-ups, and the work of cinematographer Sven Nykvist, whose collaboration with Bergman gives the image its unsettling clarity.
Bergman resisted closing the film with explanation:
“I’ve really managed to make a film that has sparked a debate… It would be tactless of me to barge in on that debate and talk about what I really meant by the film… I prefer not to say anything at all. I played my part in this debate when I made the film.”Years later, he would still return to Persona as one of his most radical achievements—a moment in which cinema allowed him to reach toward what resists language.
A tender and visually immersive meditation on relational being and the fracture of closeness.
Set in the Belgian countryside, Close follows the evolving bond between two 13-year-old boys, Léo and Rémi, as their shared world — once seamless and bodily — becomes interrupted by the gaze of others.
Through silence, distance, and the ache of absence, the film opens a space where being-with reveals both its beauty and fragility. A luminous portrait of friendship, guilt, and the quiet grief of becoming separate — when presence withdraws, and the world no longer feels the same.
Winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes, and nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film.
Thomas Szasz (1920–2012) stood against the powerful tide of psychiatry throughout the 20th century. He insisted that what we call mental illness is nothing medical at all fact but a metaphor, a cultural construction spoken in a language that disguises freedom as disease. To label persons “mentally ill,” for Szasz, is already to strip them of dignity and to replace dialogue with them with control over them. For daseinanalysts, Szasz’s uncompromising critique speaks to our own concern: that existence should not be reduced to illness, disorders, a play of hidden mechanisms. His words force us to confront the ways in which society prefers security to individual responsibility, submission to the crowd to freedom. What is at stake is the very possibility of living one’s life as one’s own.
This film will disturb familiar narratives and invite reflection:
• How does psychiatry’s language obscure existence?
• Where do we see coercion hidden in the name of care?
• What does it mean to let freedom, rather than illness, be our starting point?
Szasz’s voice was controversial, but it remains a provocation we cannot ignore. His challenge is one we share: to defend human dignity by resisting every attempt to medicalize existence.