“If all art is ultimately about itself, self-reflexive art draws the viewer’s attention to that fact.”
Susan Sontag on Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966):
“In the ways that Bergman made his film self-reflexive, self-regarding, ultimately self-engorging, we should recognize not a private whim, but the expression of a well-established tendency. For it is precisely the energy for this sort of ‘formalist’ concern with the nature and paradoxes of the medium itself which was unleashed when the 19th century formal structures of plot and characters were demoted.”
(Sontag, S. Styles of Radical Will. NY: Ferrar, 1976, p. 139)
Film Theory: Reflexivity, Self-Reflexivity
Charles Afron has observed:
“If all art is ultimately about itself, self-reflexive art draws the viewer’s attention to that fact.”
Susan Sontag on Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966):
“In the ways that Bergman made his film self-reflexive, self-regarding, ultimately self-engorging, we should recognize not a private whim, but the expression of a well-established tendency. For it is precisely the energy for this sort of ‘formalist’ concern with the nature and paradoxes of the medium itself which was unleashed when the 19th century formal structures of plot and characters were demoted.”
(Sontag, S. Styles of Radical Will. NY: Ferrar, 1976, p. 139)