Film Forum

(1966) Nurse Bibi Andersson’s increasing frustration with mute actress Liv Ullmann (in her Bergman debut), under her care after an on-stage breakdown, leads to deeply personal confessions – including “one of the rare truly erotic sequences in movie history” (Pauline Kael) – and an identification with the patient. DCP restoration. Approx. 83 min.

Reviews

“Persona unbelievably, lasts for eighty-three minutes, though you may need half a lifetime to get over it, and, with a splintered narrative (the image actually cracks at one moment, under the strain), its modernist strategies make most of the stuff you go to see on a Friday night—either at a thunderous multiplex or at your local arthouse, if you have one—seem lazy, stretched-out, old-fashioned, and dangerously safe.”
– Anthony Lane, The New Yorker

“THE SUMMIT OF BERGMAN’S CAREER. With uncomfortably intense closeups, disorienting angles, harsh contrasts, and abrupt editing, along with dream imagery and fantasy sequences, he evokes his prime subject: the inner life, and, above all, his own turbulent visions.”
– Richard Brody, The New Yorker

“A SHATTERING, SELF-REFLEXIVE ENIGMA. With its disorienting images, searing performances and probing of the boundaries between acting and living, speech and silence, Persona has continued to influence countless films, such as David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive and Olivier Assayas’ Clouds of Sils Maria.” 
– Kristin M. Jones, The Wall Street Journal