Persona (Ingmar Bergman, 1966)

By Ingmar Bergman's standards, Persona (1966), the most famous of all his films, is experimental in its use of the medium. For an artist best known for the theatricality of his films, with their spare mise-en-scène and emphasis on dialogue, Bergman's techniques here--beginning with a disorienting opening sequence that's like something out of Buñuel--are certainly peculiar, but as Andrew Sarris rightly pointed out in his review of the film for the Village Voice in 1967, "students of Stan Brakhage are more likely to yawn." All of this is to say that Persona, for all of its "Pirandellian pyrotechnics," as Sarris calls them, is first and foremost a film about what its two characters say or don't say and the position of their faces within the frame when they say or don't say these things.

We first encounter the two characters in a clinic of some sort. Alma (Bibi Andersson), a nurse, is asked to take care of Elisabeth Vogler (Liv Ullmann), an actress who after a performance of Electra had a nervous breakdown and has since given up talking. The doctor of the clinic suggests that they both go stay at her summer house. Once there, Alma, confronted with a troubled woman whose silence masks some deep agony that neither of them fully comprehend, talks and talks and talks: first in vague platitudes ("I think you should be of importance to others," she says) then in achingly personal anecdotes (the memorable recounting of an orgy on the beach). Throughout these carefully-observed scenes, filled with shadows and puncutated by bursts of eerie music, Bergman builds his characters' personalities little by little, until eventually he starts pulling it all apart with equal exactness, blurring the line between the performances of the two actresses as they discard old roles and take up new ones.

Persona, in addition to being a great film, paved the way for some of the most interesting works by two contrasting directors, Robert Altman and David Lynch. In their 3 Women (1977) and Mulholland Drive (2001), respectively, they take up Bergman's subject--the curious psychological implications of the relationships between women--and ground them in very different settings. Bergman's film, deceptively simple and incomparably exquisite, is truly unforgettable.