Join the Boston Sunday Night Film Club this Sunday, Sep 2nd at 7p for Persona at the Brattle Theatre. Look for Dan wearing a multicolored shirt in the theatre lobby about 15 minutes before the film. As always, after the film we will descend on a local establishment for dinner/drinks/discussion.
By the mid-sixties, Ingmar Bergman had already conjured many of the cinema’s most unforgettable images. But with the radical PERSONA, this supreme cinematic 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 cottage. 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.