Ingmar Bergman Centennial: PERSONA

Director: Ingmar Bergman

1966, Sweden, 83

Screenwriter: Ingmar Bergman

Cast: Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson.

 

By the midsixties, Bergman had already conjured many of the cinema’s most unforgettable images. But with the radical Persona, he attained new levels of visual poetry. In the first of a series of legendary performances for Bergman, Liv Ullmann plays a stage actor who has inexplicably gone mute; an equally mesmerizing Bibi Andersson is the garrulous young nurse caring for her in a remote island cottage. While isolated together there, the women perform a mysterious spiritual and emotional transference. Acted with astonishing nuance and shot in stark contrast and soft light by Sven Nykvist, the influential Persona is a penetrating, dreamlike work of profound psychological depth.