Episode 194 — Ingmar Bergman’s Persona

Podcast: Download (Duration: 1:18:44 — 108.6MB)

This time on the podcast, Scott Nye, David Blakeslee, and Trevor Berrett discuss Ingmar Bergman’s 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.

Episode Links

• Persona (1966) – The Criterion Collection
• Three Reasons: Persona
• “The Persistance of Persona” – Thomas Elsaesser
• 10 Things I Learned: Persona – Abbey Lustgarten
• Persona (1966) – IMDb
• Persona (1966) – Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia
• David’s review of Persona – Criterion Reflections
• Trevor’s review of Persona – The Mookse and the Gripes
• Roger Ebert’s review of Persona

Episode Credits

• Scott Nye (Twitter/Website)
• David Blakeslee (Twitter/Website)
• Trevor Berrett (Twitter/Website)