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Persona

Country: Sweden, Language: Swedish, 85 mins

  • Director: Ingmar Bergman
  • Writer: Ingmar Bergman
  • Producer: Ingmar Bergman

CGiii Comment

Hailed as a masterpiece...who exactly does all this hailing?

The first five minutes are composed entirely of arty-farty junk...if it's Bergman then it's got to be a masterpiece...!

Try telling that to a film school tutor when one of his students delivers something that quibbles the mere notion that Persona is not a masterpiece. An instant fail.

This is intense tedium and wholly unsatisfying - Bergman needs to be re-appraised and down-graded...forthwith.

A masterpiece...indeed, it is not....ooops, instant fail!


Trailer...

The(ir) Blurb...

A young nurse, Alma, is put in charge of Elisabeth Vogler: an actress who is seemingly healthy in all respects, but will not talk. As they spend time together, Alma speaks to Elisabeth constantly, never receiving any answer. Alma eventually confesses her secrets to a seemingly sympathetic Elisabeth and finds that her own personality is being submerged into Elisabeth's persona.


What’s so qu**r about this Swedish auteur? More, perhaps, than one might expect. “The first important lesbian images in cinema for me were: Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona,” the writer Sarah Schulman recently explained, “particularly the moment where their intensity of feeling burned up the celluloid.” One of the filmmaker’s most enigmatic works, Persona is the story of an actress who was suddenly fallen mute, and retreats to the countryside with her nurse to convalesce. But this bucolic interlude exacts a psychological toll on the two women, especially the garrulous caretaker, who grows increasingly intimate with, and ultimately resentful of, her silent charge. Aided by Sven Nykvist’s elegant camerawork and artful punctuations in the sound design, an air of violent eroticism prevails throughout. Persona, one of the great movies about the precarious nature of identity, shudders with neurotic life.

Cast & Characters

Bibi Andersson as Alma, The Nurse;
Liv Ullmann as Elisabeth Vogler, The Actress;
Margaretha Krook as The Doctor;
Gunnar Bjornstrand as Mr. Vogler;
Jorgen Lindstrom as The Boy, Elisabeth's Son