The Cinematheque

“Persona is to film what Ulysses is to the novel.”

John Simon

Ingmar Bergman’s first film with actress Liv Ullmann is a certifiable masterpiece and a key work of modernist cinema. It is certainly the great director’s most formally innovative work: a disturbing, endlessly fascinating rumination on art, identity, personality, and cinematic reality. Ullmann plays a prominent stage actress suddenly stricken mute. Bibi Andersson is the talkative nurse tasked with her care at a remote seaside cottage. The personalities of the two women begin to break down and merge; occasional Godardian devices break down conventional cinema’s fourth wall. Sven Nykvist’s cinematography, employing intense close-ups to radical effect, is extraordinary.

“I feel that in Persona—and later in Cries and Whispers—I had gone as far as I could go … I touched wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover.”

Ingmar Bergman