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.
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
