Persona [LAST SCREENINGS]

Staff Picks – Rébekka Beauchamp (café-bar)

“Persona is a film which blurs both that which separates its viewers from the film, and that which separates its characters Alma and Elisabet. In a film which explores audience and cinema, identity and vampirism, the self and desire, we become immersed in visuals which have influenced filmmakers across the world for decades, and invites us to question our own personas, and the role we as viewers have taken on in our everyday lives.”

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 cottbage. 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.