Persona

Director: Ingmar Bergman

1966 / 85min / DCP

Liv Ullmann is a famous actress who has suffered a nervous breakdown and been rendered mute, and Bibi Andersson is the young nurse to whom she’s been entrusted for care at a countryside retreat—at least that’s how it seems at first. Through the course of Bergman’s stark, startling, boundary-busting psychodrama—the movie he referred to as “a breakthrough”—however, their personalities and images seem to merge, until the dividing lines between them practically disappear. Troublingly erotic, lensed with bleak beauty by cinematographer Sven Nykvist, and filled with new stylistic gambits from Bergman, including a famous moment in which the heat of emotion onscreen seems to destroy the film itself.