PERSONA
Genre
Drama
Language
VOSTA
Duration
82
Rating
Synopsis
SURREALIST SATURDAYS
60th anniversary
By the midsixties, Ingmar Bergman had already conjured many of the cinema’s most unforgettable images. But with the radical Persona, this supreme artist 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 that would prove to be one of cinema’s most influential creations. Acted with astonishing nuance and shot in stark contrast and soft light by the great Sven Nykvist, Persona is a penetrating, dreamlike work of profound psychological depth.
PROGRAMMER’S NOTE: Ingmar Bergman’s PERSONA, an essential work of cinematic surrealism, demonstrates how the language of cinema is uniquely suited to expressing the complexities of the human subconscious. Produced at the height of modernist experimentation, PERSONA advances the legacy of early surrealist film while drawing directly from psychoanalytic theory, using fragmentation, doubling, and abstraction to dissolve the boundaries between identity, desire, and self.
Release year
1966
Release date
March 28, 2026
Directed by
Ingmar Bergman
Country
Sweden
Actors
Bibi Andersson, Liv Ullmann, Margaretha Krook, Gunnar Björnstrand, Jörgen Lindström