SIX MIGHTA-BEENS

by Ramya Yandava

I will never forget the first time I saw the scene in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, in which Alma tells Elisabet the story of her first love affair. Alma is on a beach, sunbathing nude with a friend, when two boys come up to them. One of the boys makes love to Alma’s friend, then to Alma. The other boy joins in. Sun, sand, bodies, boys — none of it is shown on screen. Instead we see only Alma’s face, the bedroom, Elisabet smoking in the shadows. A fissure is cleaved between cinema’s two tracks, audio and image. On screen there is one thing but in the viewer’s mind there is another. The mind-image — produced by the sound, by the voice, by a woman’s voice — and the screen-image overlap, blur, inform one another. If Bergman had shown us this scene in flashback, it would be forgettable. But on the screen of the mind all appears blazingly vivid, not in black-and-white like the rest of the film but in full color. We sense the salt smell of the sea, the heat of the sun, sweat and skin and sex. A dream woven into being by the soft spell of Bibi Andersson’s lisping Swedish syllables. It shocks us. It intrigues us. It immerses us. It arouses us. It makes the heat stir in the blood. To be shown such a scene would only bring us into the realm of pornography, would soil the scene with a sense of something dirty. We would turn away with disgust or embarrassment. But here, in this dark room, where the two women sit in their white nightgowns, we feel with Alma, transmitted through her voice, all the desire and regret and confusion and ecstasy of that day.

Must everything be shown simply because there is a screen for images and a camera to create them? Why should audio and video chug along two parallel tracks? We all know that parallel lines never meet. Whereas if you were to set one or both tracks aslant, they might run into each other, knock, collide, strike, explode. Filmmakers could reach their hands into the slit between sound and image, push and push, make a chasm between them. Audio and image did not, after all, have to be like horse and carriage, man and wife, heads and tails. They could be severed, liberated. Then cinema could unspool its million possibilities.