sontag already said it in her first sentence, that Persona must not be taken for granted. for me, this is true because the film is open to a lot of interpretation, even though it visually presents very little. The simple "naked" scenes that you pointed out were visually static, the cameras don't move, no one talks. I was like a voyeur who did not know the reason why i was there in the first place, making voyeurism a double trouble of sorts.
Persona speaks. It is a film wrought with philosophical underlinings. One is the essence of the persons, Elisabet and Alma, and how their "being-themselves" encroach upon the other woman. Alma, the talkative one, expresses, presents and describes herself almost unconsciously. Elisabet on the other hand expresses herself without words, but with expressions which underline (spoken) words. Eye twitches, glances, sighs, frowns, not blinking her eyes are her own way of impinging herself upon Alma.
A philosopher, Levinas, criticized the centrality of "Being" as the totality of all things existing. He derided that the Being (in Persona, can be Alma or Elisabet) is conscious of its existence, thereby excluding the Other (another person). By being self-conscious, only filtering the Other person through his perception, can the other person have any sense of meaning. This taken-for-granted self-conscious, self-centeredness, that which puts the "I" above the "Other" is what Levinas reasons to be why Nazism spread and the Jews killed, because of their "difference", their otherness to Germans, which prompted ancient hatreds and all the violence thereafter.
And this is where violence comes in. If that philosophy, that way of thinking prompts violence, even in an existential form, Bergman weaves this in persona as that literal bombardment of image, talk, reaction. If we are the "I"'s, the film watchers, and the film is that "Other", then how come we are being affected by that two-faced "persona", newly created by the film's narrative, by the double-monologue? If it makes me ask myself, review myself or evaluate myself in relation to others, I do not become another person, I become more of who I am. Alma and Elisabet, though gradually they confuse us, or even tire us or bore us, they never become other persons. They become their characters. The characters become their personae. They reveal and unfold what was hidden, as is what real people actually do: self-revelation. But should I (myself) be formed/or revealed to myself by others? THis, I think is Persona's true conflict: there is a resistance, a defence, shields that Alma and Elisabet took up… but they are also on the attack. Defense can always be the best offensive.
Violence can be subjective in the film, it can be violent or non-violent to other people. But precisely, because of the character's assault on one another, we ourselves are assaulted…we come to ask the question, "what makes me who I am" even though we resist it… it is violent because it does not allow us to escape it. In Persona, at least for its duration, we can see it only as a film. But because it is just a film, and it provoked me in this way, there is that kind of violence, if muted or unnoticed. The disgust, the shock we feel when the faces look at us directly. It's as if there is a forcible entry.
