Persona
Directed by Ingmar Bergman • 1966 • Sweden
Starring Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson
By the midsixties, Ingmar 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 undergo a mysterious spiritual and emotional transference. Performed 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.
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Persona
Directed by Ingmar Bergman • 1966 • Sweden
Starring Liv Ullmann, Bibi AnderssonBy the midsixties, Ingmar 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 perf...
Extras
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PERSONA’s Prologue: A Poem in Images
The following visual essay by Ingmar Bergman scholar Peter Cowie, produced in 2013, focuses on the first seven minutes of PERSONA.
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Edgar Wright on PERSONA
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Paul Schrader on PERSONA
Writer and director Paul Schrader has long been a fan of Ingmar Bergman’s work. In this 2013 interview, Schrader discusses the lasting impact of PERSONA.
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Ingmar Bergman on PERSONA
In the following excerpt, taken from an interview recorded for Canadian television in 1970, director Ingmar Bergman recalls a stay in the hospital when the idea for PERSONA came to him.
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Liv Ullmann on PERSONA
In this 2013 interview, actor Liv Ullmann goes into detail about the making of PERSONA, her connection to the character of Elisabet Vogler, and what she took away from this life-changing experience.
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Bibi Andersson, Ingmar Bergman, and Liv Ullmann on PERSONA
In the following excerpt from an interview originally recorded for Swedish television in 1966, PERSONA’s director and lead actors discuss the evolution of the film and their individual interpretations of it.
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PERSONA On-Set Footage
The following 18 minutes of silent, black-and-white footage was shot during the production of PERSONA. It is presented here with audio commentary by Ingmar Bergman scholar Birgitta Steene.
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Megan Abbott on PERSONA
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Richard Peña on PERSONA
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Queersighted: The Ache of Desire
The following conversation between Queersighted series programmer Michael Koresky, author of Film Comment’s Queer & Now & Then column, and film critic and editor Melissa Anderson was recorded in 2019.
