The Night Hidden Behind the Mask: Summer Dreams and the Memory of "Persona" (July 1974)

The Night Hidden Behind the Mask: Summer Dreams and the Memory of "Persona" (July 1974)

When I saw Bergman's Persona, it took my breath away. The silent actress and the nurse. In this relationship, a question that had been floating around in my mind like a fog for a long time, formed a clear image. An actor's "face" is both a mask and a crevice through which he reveals himself. I thought to myself: When one goes on stage, one loses one's face. But without a face, acting is not possible. It is in this contradiction that we stand.

I remember that summer night. The faces of the young actors gathered in the rehearsal room, the love-like words exchanged secretly offstage. The strange silence as we stood in front of an empty auditorium. On stage, I wandered the border between dream and reality. To undress in front of an audience does not necessarily mean to be naked. Then to whom was I undressing? The question went around and around in my mind, as if refusing to answer.

To perform, for me, was not to abandon the self, but to play with the self that cannot be abandoned. I was constantly encountering myself on stage, playing someone else. It was like sinking into a dream. It is a wonder that the most realistic outlines of myself emerge in a place that is not real.

Even now, as I write this, I feel as if I am on a stage. In a mixture of fragments of metaphors, memories of the past, and afterimages of Bergman's images, I am quietly continuing to ask questions. Is it only when I am wearing a mask that I can see my true face? Am I acting or am I silent? The feeling of that summer night, too vivid to be called a dream and somehow too dim to be called reality, still lingers within me.