Persona (1966) (b/w)

Read more

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.

With some of the most iconic imagery ever committed to film, this "exceptionally beautiful specimen of movie-making" (The New Yorker) is recognized as a modern masterpiece and "a landmark in late twentieth-century art" (Time Out London).
Actress Elisabet Vogler (Liv Ullmann) has stopped speaking and withdrawn completely. Under doctor's orders, she's taken to a remote seaside cottage by a nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson). Alma chats to fill the silence and gradually begins to lay bare her entire identity...until she discover ist is being coolly sucked away from her. As the women battle for control and sanity, the question becomes not which of them is patient and which is caregiver, but are they two separate women at all?