Close Up

12 - 19 November 2018: Persona

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Persona
Ingmar Bergman
1966 | 83 min | B/W | Digital
Swedish & English with English subtitles

“Arguably Bergman’s most representative and iconic film, Persona is the pivot point between the director’s two great sixties trilogies (his crisis-of-faith trio and the island-set films with which he closed the decade), blending crucial elements of both into something spare, chilling and inimitable. Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson star as a traumatized actress and her caretaker, respectively, but are they really two different people at all? The most abstractly drawn of all Bergman narratives, Persona migrates the women from a nondescript hospital in an undisclosed location to a remote seaside cottage and back again, their initial nurse-patient dynamic deteriorating, flipping and finally exploding over the course of a fraught, dreamlike eighty-three minutes. Taking influence from the era’s avant-garde underground as well as from the modernist methods of filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard and Michelangelo Antonioni, Bergman fashions an expressionistic surface that mirrors the mental landscapes of his two sparring heroines, juxtaposing meditative landscape shots against stuttering montage freak-outs and ambitious, sculptural uses of the human face.” – Harvard Film Archive


Part of our season on Ingmar Bergman