Ingmar Bergman

Persona

Persona

By the midsixties, Ingmar Bergman had already conjured many of the cinema’s most unforgettable images. But with the radical Persona, he 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 cottage. While isolated together there, the women undergo a mysterious spiritual and emotional transference. Performed with astonishing nuance and shot in stark contrast and soft light by Sven Nykvist, the influential Persona is a penetrating, dreamlike work of profound psychological depth.

Film Info

  • Sweden
  • 1966
  • 83 minutes
  • Black & White
  • 1.37:1
  • Swedish
  • Spine #701

Special Features

  • New, 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
  • New visual essay on the film’s prologue by Ingmar Bergman scholar Peter Cowie
  • New interviews with actor Liv Ullmann and filmmaker Paul Schrader
  • Excerpted archival interviews with Bergman, Ullmann, and actor Bibi Andersson
  • On-set footage, with audio commentary by Bergman historian Birgitta Steene
  • Liv & Ingmar, a 2012 feature documentary directed by Dheeraj Akolkar
  • Trailer
  • New English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: An essay by film scholar Thomas Elsaesser, an excerpt from the 1970 book Bergman on Bergman, and an excerpted 1977 interview with Andersson

    New cover by Sarah Habibi

Purchase Options

Collector's Sets

Collector's Set

Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema

Ingmar Bergman’s Cinema

Blu-ray Box Set

30 Discs

$239.96

Collector's Set

CC40

CC40

Blu-ray Box Set

49 Discs

$639.96

Special Features

  • New, 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
  • New visual essay on the film’s prologue by Ingmar Bergman scholar Peter Cowie
  • New interviews with actor Liv Ullmann and filmmaker Paul Schrader
  • Excerpted archival interviews with Bergman, Ullmann, and actor Bibi Andersson
  • On-set footage, with audio commentary by Bergman historian Birgitta Steene
  • Liv & Ingmar, a 2012 feature documentary directed by Dheeraj Akolkar
  • Trailer
  • New English subtitle translation
  • PLUS: An essay by film scholar Thomas Elsaesser, an excerpt from the 1970 book Bergman on Bergman, and an excerpted 1977 interview with Andersson

    New cover by Sarah Habibi
Persona
Cast
Bibi Andersson
Nurse Alma
Liv Ullmann
Elisabet Vogler
Margaretha Krook
The doctor
Gunnar Björnstrand
Elisabet’s husband
Jörgen Lindström
The boy
Credits
Director
Ingmar Bergman
Written by
Ingmar Bergman
Cinematography
Sven Nykvist
Assistant camera
Anders Bodin
Assistant camera
Lars Johnsson
Editing
Ulla Ryghe
Composer
Lars Johan Werle
Sound
P. O. Pettersson
Sound
Lennart Engholm
Assistant director
Lenn Hjortzberg
Production designer
Bibi Lindström
Costume design
Mago
Makeup
Börje Lundh
Production manager
Lars-Owe Carlberg
Studio manager
Bo Arne Vibenius
Script supervisor
Kerstin Berg

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Ingmar Bergman

Writer, Director

Ingmar Bergman
Ingmar Bergman

The Swedish auteur began his artistic career in the theater but eventually navigated toward film—"the great adventure," as he called it—initially as a screenwriter and then as a director. Simply put, in the fifties and sixties, the name Ingmar Bergman was synonymous with European art cinema. Yet his incredible run of successes in that era—including The Seventh Seal, Wild Strawberries, and The Virgin Spring, haunting black-and-white elegies on the nature of God and death—merely paved the way for a long and continuously dazzling career that would take him from the daring “Silence of God” trilogy (Through a Glass Darkly, Winter Light, The Silence) to the existential terrors of Cries and Whispers to the family epic Fanny and Alexander, with which he “retired” from the cinema. Bergman died in July 2007, leaving behind one of the richest bodies of work in the history of cinema.