Well I just saw this movie last night and I have to say I'm pretty fucking stunned. I mean I had only seen "The Silence" from Bergman before so I was expecting something artsy but more or less linear in storyline. And I got this. And I don't mean that to sound like I'm disparaging it in any way. "This" was fucking incredible. I'm stunned from just the power of the movie, regardless of interpretation. And an interpretation is still being worked out in my head. But I would like to know what other people thought. So please, anyone who saw this movie, feel free to comment!

When you figure out what it all means, clue me in. I've seen it several times and have never been able to make heads or tails out of it.

The critic John Simon wrote about the film, but I haven't gotten around to reading it.

Well my reading of the film as of now is that the beginning of the film contains within it a certain power, a significance that allows one to enter the film. I haven't quite worked out the exact meaning of the child reaching out for the blurry picture but it could be that is the actress's son reaching out across psychic space towards her and running into mere abstraction.
As the film progresses and we see a close interpersonal relationship develop between the actress and the nurse, some sort of identity shift occurs. Since the actress does not speak, the nurse can speak freely about subjects that she would never speak about in public, specifically the event with the young boys on the beach. This revelation contains with it a sort of psychological power in which the nurse is entrusting her inner world to the silent( and she assumes non-judgemental) actress. When the nurse discovers that the actress is in fact discerning and expressing feelings that pertain to the secrets she divulged, there is a sort of betrayal and tearing apart of bonds. This is expressed through the film skipping on it's reel and the horror movie footage being shown. It's as if the forces at work are so powerful as to nearly destroy the film. But this betrayal rather than pulling them apart, bonds them further together in their own sense of estrangement from themselves and from each other. The nurse, by being exposed to the harrowing story of the actress's ideas about childbirth, has doubts about he own secure future married to the faceless "Karl Heinrich." The actress on the other hand, by having another reveal to her the depth of her hatred both for herself and for her son is left in horror, and is further unable to bring her life into abstraction and unspecificity, for she is very much tied to life. The nurse is forced into the position of the actress, and the actress is forced to contend with fixed values of the nurse. It is the isolation of two people unexposed to anything but the pure psychic energy of each other's past, memories, and guilt which brings this about I believe... Phew that's about all I got.

This is my *third* favorite movie of all time

My take on Bergman in general is two-fold:
Bergman is Kierkegaard's Knight of Infinite Resignation.
Bergman believes we are "human all-too human."
The key to understanding Bergman has to do with the problem of being too close to another person, or not close enough. Persona is about both: the actress's withdrawal is actual the strategy of the spider God Bergman worships, drawing the nurse too-close, so she can suck her blood and drain her youth. And doesn't Bergman join Ullman in listening to Andersen's sex story, draining her, judging her, his ex-girlfriend, leaving her empty and used? Who is more cruel here? Does Bergman identify with anything anymore than Ullman?
Andersen's character perhaps saves her life when she leaves the broken glass on the ground out of spite. But then, just when a conversation could take place - oh, the director is having trouble...
The stuff in the beginning of the film has not been understood by anyone, I'm sure. It's deconstructionist - Bergman letting us knowing he's watching us watching him as he makes a film. There's certainly a lot of Christian crap going on with sacrifice, and his spider God makes an appearance, and then we open from what apparently is our beginning in the crucifixion and death of God himself first with the old people (who knows?) and then with Bergman, or is it us, this child? Awaking! Being born! Christ rising from the dead! Bergman seems to have had some developmental impairment when he was that age that he only really worked out in Fanny and Alexander - and this boy is roughly the same age as Alexander.

Ovid tells us in the beginning there was chaos. oh well.