Directed by Ingmar Bergman • 1966 • Sweden
Starring Liv Ullmann, Bibi Andersson
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.
Up Next in Walter Reade Theater
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Dennis Lim on MULTIPLE MANIACS
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Multiple Maniacs
Directed by John Waters • 1970 • United States
Starring Divine, David Lochary, Mary Vivian PearceThe gloriously grotesque second feature directed by John Waters is replete with all manner of depravity, from robbery to murder to one of cinema's most memorably blasphemous moments. Made on a shoes...
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Stranger Than Paradise
Directed by Jim Jarmusch • 1984 • United States, Germany
Starring John Lurie, Richard Edson, Eszter BalintWith this breakout film, Jim Jarmusch established himself as one of the most exciting voices in the burgeoning independent-film scene, a road-movie poet with an affinity for Americana at it...
