SCENES FROM THE CLASS STRUGGLE IN SWEDEN
10 I
of film whose "content is not explicitly political, but in some way becomes so through criticism practiced on it through its form."15 There is some truth to Wood's argument that the self-reflexivity one finds in Persona is not the same as that of Godard. Bergman does not possess the French director's didactic political consciousness. When we encounter disruptive or self-reflexive moments in Pierrot le Fou or Weekend, our efforts to comprehend Godard;s formal concerns involve us in political reflection. Nevertheless, the editors of Cahiers are correct to suggest that even though Bergman is not following a precise political agenda, his film is "progressive" and arguably Brechtian because its form breaks down traditional or ideological ways of depicting reality so that its content takes on a political dimension. Initially, the term Brechtian cinema was applied to a body of politically informed self-reflexive films produced during the 1960s and early 1970s.16 One characteristic of the development of this movement was an increasing emphasis on alienating the spectator from an involvement with narrative, as in such films as Straub/Huillet's History Lessons (1972) and much of Godard's work after May 1968 (e.g., Tout va Men [1972]).17 Brecht affirmed that the kind of dramatic work he advocated was not interested in the "investment of the spectator's emotions,"18 but he nevertheless insisted that some degree of spectator identification was necessary in order for the work to achieve its political goals. In his "Notes to the Threepenny Opera/' Brecht states that the play is "concerned with bourgeois conceptions not only as content, by representing them, but also through the manner it which it does so. It is a kind of report on life as any member of the audience would like to see it. Since at the same time, however, he sees a good deal that he has no wish to see; since therefore he sees his wishes not merely fulfilled but also criticized . . ."19 As a melodrama centered around the plight of a disturbed actress, Persona clearly represents a bourgeois content to a bourgeois art cinema audience, thus fulfilling the wishes of that audience. Yet because Persona is also a subversive melodrama, repre-