How Ingmar Bergman Films Helped Me Grow Up in America

I rented Ingmar Bergman’s Persona from Blockbuster and watched it as I did most “serious” films: alone and on the floor, leaning back against my metal-framed bed. I was fourteen, the age when most of my peers had their own bedrooms like it was no big deal. For me, it meant that my mother slept in the living room, giving up all claims to privacy, even when she was dating.

This was only four years into our emigration from Ukraine and rents in San Francisco were mostly unaffordable on her massage-therapist income. But she conceded that an American teenager needed her own room, for decorating with Alanis Morissette posters and watching MTV late into the night. I balanced my intake of pop with art house films to acquire cultural capital. I wasn’t aware of the concept, but instinctually felt the need to overcompensate for an upbringing that didn’t include outings to the theater or museums.

What I saw initially bewildered me. The film opens with high-pitched music and violently incongruous images, including an erect penis, slaughtered animals, and people on hospital gurneys. I was grateful when it switched to a conventional structure to tell the story of Elisabet, an actress and psychiatric patient, alone on an island with her nurse, Alma. I found their manipulative relationship to be baffling and beguiling; I didn’t understand why they shared their traumas only to later humiliate each other.

I was also hypnotized by Alma’s and Elisabet’s faces, framed in intense close-ups. And I was taken by the most iconic scene in the film, when, in the middle of the night, Alma gets a visit from Elisabet and, rather than acting surprised, responds by laying her head on her patient’s chest. The two women then turn to the camera, admiring their faces, as if in a mirror. Elisabeth pushes back Alma’s bangs, before wrapping her in a vampiric embrace. Whether that embrace was symbolic or genuinely sexual I couldn’t say, but I was intrigued by the ambiguity.

After Persona, I sought out other Bergman films—Wild Strawberries, The Seventh Seal, Fanny and Alexander—watching them in my bedroom by myself. I couldn’t discuss them with my mother. She had no experience with experimental films and, I assumed, no bandwidth to engage with them after long days of work. On the rare occasion that we watched movies together, she picked such romantic epics as Burnt by the Sun and East/West, both of which starred her favorite Russian heartthrob.

My peers didn’t share my interest in old Swedish films either. My closest childhood friend called Gone with the Wind her favorite film. Although in high school I made new friends, who accompanied me to such art house hits as Requiem for a Dream and Dancer in the Dark, Bergman still felt too out there and I didn’t disclose my ever-growing obsession. I even came to appreciate that watching Bergman was for me alone.

This degree of exclusivity came with loneliness but also a sense of pride. I liked that I had access to a world of aesthetic expression, mysterious as it was. I knew that there was something important about occupying the liminal space of not fully understanding, though I couldn’t yet name this concept. The self-regard that came with watching Bergman films helped me feel rich in something, for the first time since arriving in America.

That sense of wealth faded when I got to my liberal arts college, where I felt more foreign and poor than ever before. I shared a dorm room with a “hippie” whose father drove a convertible and worked on Wall Street. She arrived flinging her things everywhere, the sarongs and sage, the new laptop. I came with a duffel bag bulging with my comforter. My mother would drive down the rest of my stuff on her day off. But I already feared that there wouldn’t be any room for my “final sale” clothes and bulky desktop, so quickly had my roommate put her stamp on the place. Not all my peers were inconsiderate, but many couldn’t fathom life without a car or credit card. They went on volunteer trips to Central America, but were confounded by my identity as a Ukrainian Jew, so I let them call me “Russian.”

Bergman films helped me feel rich in something, for the first time since arriving in America.

Even my first crush intimidated me, being not only a rich kid who hung out in New York, but also a talented artist with paint-splattered shorts and a shaved head. He has since transitioned and opted for male pronouns, but at the time, I was impressed by his ability to be out and proud as a queer woman. I, on the other hand, was de facto straight, but increasingly skeptical.

Long before either of us expressed our mutual attraction, we found reasons to be together. Once, we collaborated on a mural for our “Feminist Art” class. I had no artistic skills and my crush was not inspired by the prompt to create something body-image-related. We stayed up all night, blasting Patti Smith and laughing at our ugly artwork—an androgynous figure hanging from a tree against a background of poetic phrases.

The terrible mural notwithstanding, I admired my crush and yearned to be admired in turn. I also considered transferring to a college where students were less wealthy and more engaged. I longed for an intellectual connection and Persona presented a good test. If we could share an appreciation for this film, then I would feel less alone in a place I didn’t belong.

We watched the film in the common room of one of the suites in a hall primarily reserved for upper-class students. My crush was socially active and lived in the “Involvement Tower,” which was reserved for residents who were expected to be engaged in the community and keep up the school’s politically active reputation. We bargained with his roommates to have access to the TV to watch our rented VHS. After shutting off the lights, we sat together on the couch, just far enough to avoid contact.

As the movie started, I began to experience a mingling of contrary feelings. For the first time, I knew the thrills and terrors of sharing an aesthetic experience with another person. Initially, it was terrifying. I suddenly realized that showing a film I loved to someone I respected was a serious gamble. What if he hated it? The unanticipated stakes actually made me break out in a sweat. A lot was riding on this casual viewing.

We didn’t speak at all and the silence was heavy. I also wasn’t watching the film, not as I normally would. I was trying on another’s gaze, imagining what it was like to watch as this other person. It was a game of second-guessing, directed mostly back at me. I found myself getting hung up on aspects of the film I used to simply enjoy. The scene of Elisabet and Alma contemplating their image and then folding into one another now appeared overtly queer. And by showing it to my crush, wasn’t I being suggestive?

The thought of this was embarrassing but also exciting because it made me feel adventurous and bold. I looked nervously out of the corner of my eye to catch a reaction and found that my co-viewer was knitted-browed and enthralled.

Perhaps even stronger was my fear that my crush would find the film pretentious. I particularly felt it during the most laborious scene in Persona. Alma confronts Elisabet with a monologue about her fraught relationship with her son — the unwanted pregnancy, attempted abortions, difficult birth and resentment for taking her away from the theater. While she speaks, the camera moves into Elisabet’s face, lingering on her silent agony. It’s a long few minutes and when they’re over Alma repeats the same monologue, almost verbatim, so the viewer bears witness, for the second time, to testimony about maternal failure and guilt.

Even someone accustomed to art house films could think such a choice unreasonably demanding. Did my crush find it obnoxious? I also wondered if he, who presented in such a masculine manner, could appreciate Elisabet’s anxieties and regrets. I’d found myself reflected in the monologue from the first viewing. My mother had me when she was twenty, conforming to Soviet norms, and though she didn’t wish the same fate for me, she, along with the rest of my family, expected me to marry a man and bear children. But even from a young age, I felt incapable of conjuring up maternal instincts; my life goals revolved around artistic and intellectual aspirations.

For them, I was willing to make sacrifices, the kind that Elisabet made for as long as she could get away with it. Could my love interest sympathize with any of this? It was too soon to pose such a question, even in the context of friendship; nor was I willing to break the spell of the viewing to ask. But I did notice that he didn’t yawn, or roll his eyes, or look away, and this was important to me because it meant that we sat with the scene, together.

I did notice that he didn’t yawn, or roll his eyes, or look away, and this was important to me because it meant that we sat with the scene, together.

In a way, I envied my crush’s position of seeing the film for the first time. And yet, I wouldn’t have traded places. The pleasure of attempting to see as him was that great. Yes, that pleasure was mixed with panic, but it was the panic that gave the pleasure texture and depth. During one of the closing moments of the film, I noticed my love interest acknowledge, with a knowing smile, Bergman’s direct callback to an earlier scene. After packing up the vacation house, Alma stands in front of a mirror, swiping away her bangs, at which point, Bergman uses double exposure to take the viewer back to the bedroom, where Elisabet and Alma first became intimate.

Watching my crush respond to this visual cue gave me that the sense of elation that comes with realizing that another person receives pleasure from that which is deeply significant to you. It had an erotic dimension. I felt myself becoming more drawn to my fellow viewer because of his willingness to intellectually engage with the difficult film. In my attempt to seduce, I became seduced by what I perceived to be his capacity for aesthetic appreciation.

There are shades of narcissism to this kind of attraction and unexamined politics of value and taste that I would later question. At the time though, I was overwhelmed by the erotics of role-playing that comes with attempting to see as another, a task that is more about fantasy than empathy. And then there was simply the illicitness of sharing a moment in the dark with someone you want to but dare not touch.

After the lights came on, we discussed the film and I learned that my crush was puzzled and moved by it, but this was already secondary to the emotional roller-coaster of shared viewing.

We didn’t get together right away. But, that summer, we wrote letters to each other. I also found myself back in my childhood bedroom, on the floor alone, now watching films by directors who identified as female and gay: The Incredibly True Adventure of Two Girls in Love, The Watermelon Woman, High Art. The following year we became off-campus roommates and then lovers and then partners in my most committed relationship yet.

A good portion of our time was spent viewing queer films. We always watched them in the only room with a TV in the house, the big master bedroom occupied by one of our roommates. When she stayed with her boyfriend, we cuddled up on her giant bed, devouring films we found trashy and fun, such as Female Perversions, or gorgeous and heartbreaking, such as Aimée & Jaguar.

Female Perversions was my partner’s guilty pleasure—a melodrama about a judge with repressed childhood memories and a taboo sex life. I mocked my lover terribly for this film, forgetting my own stress about sharing cinematic obsessions. Still, we savored every cliché second of it because the judge was played by Tilda Swinton, and we worshiped at the altar of Tilda.

Aimée & Jaguar inspired a different tangle of emotions. This was another film that my partner shared with me and I was moved by it in ways he probably didn’t expect. It was in college that I began to re-examine my Jewish identity, as opposed to accepting it as a biological fact. Watching a film about the love affair between the wife of a Nazi and a Jewish woman who took part in the underground resistance made me unexpectedly aware of my otherness as Jewish and queer. Looking at my partner, I thought about the fact that both of us would’ve been vulnerable, but only I doubly so, and, for a moment, I felt alone in an otherwise entwined relationship.

Our relationship ultimately couldn’t withstand the temptation of new lovers and adventures, and we painfully separated less than a year later. In subsequent years, with new romantic interests, the constant in my life was Bergman. I continued to rely on Persona as a means of seduction and a litmus test for potential beloveds. Would the object of my affection get this black and white film from 1966? And, in the process, would they get me?

Even now that I’m not seeking to seduce or gain cultural capital, I still feel the thrills and terrors when I share films I love with people I love. With Bergman’s films, these feelings have lost their sharpness but gained complexity over time. Watching Persona with another person is no longer a matter of acceptance or rejection. What it offers is the potential to deepen a relationship, to bond in a way that’s new, but rich with old connections.

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