Week 4/2026

“A correct understanding of Persona must go beyond the psychological point of view,” wrote philosopher and art critic Susan Sontag in the 1967 autumn edition of Sight and Sound. Ingmar Bergman’s now acclaimed film had been released the year before and provoked mixed reactions from the audience; many spectators and critics deemed Persona to be “unnecessarily obscure”. The images and dialogue of the film, showing us the young nurse Alma caring for the actress Elizabeth Vogler’s character who has become mute and nearly catatonic, are indeed “puzzling”, Sontag writes, as “the viewer is not able to decipher whether certain scenes take place in the past, present or future; and whether certain images and episodes belong to ‘reality’ or ‘fantasy’”. Sontag urges frustrated spectators not to anxiously cling to the idea that there must be “a story”. Rather, she draws attention to the cinematic collage of images at the very beginning and at the end of the film, for they are the basis of Persona: here, Bergman indicates the film as an object, which can be seen as the principal value on which the film is built.

Also on Tuesday, KASKcinema is hosting the event Re:Score: Vittorio de Seta X Rosa Butsi, where five early documentary shorts of Italian director Vittorio de Seta will be shown, accompanied by live music from Rosa Butsi and featuring Marie Cocriamont. De Seta, originally trained as an anthropologist, stays close to home with these documentaries shot in the South of Italy in the fifties, where he registers ways of living in Sicilia, Sardinia and Calabria that were on the verge of disappearing. Poetically, he invokes the harmonious relationship between man and his environment, his work, his leisure and the animal kingdom.

On Saturday, Cinematek is screening Benvenuta, preceded by the official “making of”-short by Thierry Bonnaffé and a bilingual introduction by Catherine Delvaux & Bruno Mestdagh. André Delvaux’s Benvenuta – praised by directors such as Alain Resnais – is based on the novel La Confession anonyme by Belgian author Suzanne Lilar, which tells the tale of the writer Jeanne living a lonely life in Ghent. A young filmmaker visits her, hoping to unveil the inspiration behind one of her books, in which she writes about a doomed romance between a pianist and an Italian magistrate. As the relationship between Jeanne and the filmmaker grows more passionate, fiction and reality fade into each other. Delvaux depicts this complex intertwining of relationships with a masterful use of magical realism.