It's hard to believe it has already been more than three years since I first saw Ingmar Bergman's Persona. The first Bergman film I saw was The Seventh Seal back in 2007 and I was immediately hooked. I quickly followed that up with Wild Strawberries and have since come to own many of the iconic Swedish director's films, and as much as I never believed anything he directed could effect me as much as Seventh Seal, Persona is a whole new level of filmmaking. I've been asked before if a film can still be enjoyable even if you don't entirely understand it. Persona is evidence that the answer is a resounding yes. The film came about after Bergman fell ill in 1959 as he was planning on beginning work on a film with Liv Ullman and Bibi Andersson titled The Cannibals. That film never came to fruition. While recovering in the hospital,...
- 4/3/2014
- by Brad Brevet
- Rope of Silicon
Ingmar Bergman’s Persona is now available in a sharp and stunning Blu-ray from Criterion. This 1966 production has attained a special place in critics’ hearts over the years, and stands proudly at #17 on Sight & Sound’s prestigious greatest films list; the highest ranking earned by any Bergman product. Persona contains many of the distinct elements – and a number of the iconic images – that have come to define the late Swedish master’s oeuvre, and at the time the film was considered an artistic breakthrough, tilling new grounds of style and substance.
In fact, Persona deals with universal themes that had deeply fascinated Bergman ever since his transition from interpreter to auteur in the early 1950s. The silence of God, and man’s floundering follies in response, is a major conceptual catalyst, surging through Persona’s bleak gray skies like a web of jangled nerves. What makes the film unique is...
In fact, Persona deals with universal themes that had deeply fascinated Bergman ever since his transition from interpreter to auteur in the early 1950s. The silence of God, and man’s floundering follies in response, is a major conceptual catalyst, surging through Persona’s bleak gray skies like a web of jangled nerves. What makes the film unique is...
- 3/25/2014
- by David Anderson
- IONCINEMA.com
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