Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13592 in DVD
• Released on: 2003-04-28
• Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
• Number of discs: 1
• Formats: Black & White, PAL
• Original language: Swedish
• Subtitled in: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 83 minutes

Amazon.co.uk Review
Made in 1966, Persona is among Ingmar Bergman's greatest, most vital movies, made during a difficult period in his life (Bergman's life is one short on easy times), having been hospitalised following a viral infection. It was while laid up that he conceived the notion of Persona, in which a famous actress, Elisabet (Liv Ullmann) suddenly lapses into a muteness from which, though mentally and physically healthy, she refuses to emerge. She is attended to by a young, naive nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson) who develops an obsession, bordering on infatuation with her silent charge. She finds herself jabbering all of her innermost secrets to her and, little by little, through dream sequences, repeated dialogue and trick photography, it's as if the consciousnesses of the two women have actually merged.

With its opening sequence of cryptic projected reel images (allusions to Bergman's previous work), jarringly atonal soundtrack and devices such as the audible chatter of camera crew, Persona contains an unusual share of avant-garde trimmings, which haven't necessarily stood the test of time. However, the relationship between Alma and Elisabet dominates the movie. Some confounded critics wondered if theirs was a lesbian relationship.

Actually, Persona is an occasionally cryptic but overwhelmingly powerful meditation on the parasitic interaction between Art and Life, the way the former feeds off the latter (Alma is distraught to discover a letter at one point which suggests Elisabet has been coolly observing her, as if for material). However, as an early scene featuring TV footage of a Vietnamese Buddhist monk torching himself as a protest against the war, it's also about the helpless incapacity of art to "say" anything in the face of grim reality. A small film budget-wise, but a colossal event in world cinema. --David Stubbs

Special Features
DVD 5
Swedish
Region 0
Dolby Digital Swedish
Dolby Digital
Star And Director Filmographies
Scene Selection
Original US Theatrical Trailer
Philip Strick Film Notes
Promotional Art Gallery
English

Synopsis
PERSONA is an intense and unsettling study of the symbiotic relationship between Alma, a nurse (Bibi Andersson), and Elisabeth (Liv Ullmann), an actress who has mysteriously lost the power of speech. To bring about her patient's recovery, Elisabeth's doctor asks Alma to accompany her to a private cottage by the sea. In this isolated setting, the two women fall into a strange state of codependency laced with jealousy and resentment, and eventually their identities begin to merge. PERSONA is considered one of Ingmar Bergman's greatest cinematic accomplishments and should not to be missed by anyone seriously interested in film.

Customer Reviews

irritating impersonation
this is an over-rated psychological drama which i find very irritating in it's pretexts at times ,

ingmar bergman is trying to show the rehabilitation of a disabled woman and the affects of the same on the therapist too , but he indulges in stylised images which look like stills from an artsy magazine and bibi and liv at times overact to the point of exaggeration in a really eccentric script which is very patronising towards the protagonists ,

as it evolves you see 2 very cold ,manipulative women who look artificial and at times talk like they are in a medical text-book .

the men are relegated to playing just secondary roles and are redundant .

the redeeming points are the exploration of the mother-son relation which is creative and makes you think but otherwise i was disappointed by the hype of this over-rated movie.

the b&w photography gets uneven with starchy and sparkling sequences alternating and the whole experience becomes rather theatrical then cinematic with some really profound and yet some very trite sequences ,

but it might have looked very fresh in 65 ,though it has not dated well .

it is worth watching but not essential cinema neither great art .

usman khawaja
- jbz7879
Readers' Reviews (1)

Troubling, abstract and essential.
One of Ingmar Bergman's most radical films, 'Persona' can be viewed as a journey in which personality, meaning and individuality blur between fantasy and reality. The tale of a famous actress Elizabet Vogler (Liv Ullman), who inexplicably stops talking, and the young nurse Alma (the astonishing Bibi Andersson) who cares for her at an isolated seaside cottage, this 1966 offering is for many, Bergman's finest film.
Pouring her troubles onto her charge, Alma appears to be strong willed and level-headed, slowly taking charge over her silent counterpart. But faced with this enigmatic patient, her cool facade slowly starts to crumble and she realises that nurse and patient aren't so very different.

The thing with Persona, is that it may baffle film fans who are new to Bergman's work. Recurring motifs like the image of the spider (God), lamb to the slaughter (Christian legacy), and the young boy in a cold room (the boy from 'the silence' 1963) may not mean much to people who haven't seen much of Bergman's work. So as a starting point to Bergman's films this may be too much (and for those who haven't seen any Bergman films, why?), but for any serious film fan, this is essential.

This was the film that cemented Bergman's reputation as not only a film maker, but as an artist. For many, the late, great nordic master comes across as too despairing, too bleak. No argument here. But viewed as a visual poem, this ranks high in the running with the world's best. Bergman's use of isolated location, taboo breaking content and technical wizardry (the two women's faces merge in one extraordinary shot), mean this is baffling, brilliant and at times, beyond words.

Bergman's Dissonance
Because of its incongruous mixture of images, the opening montage of this film brings to mind the adagio introduction at the beginning of the first movement of Mozart's String Quartet in C Major (K. 465), the so-called "Dissonance". The both introductions clearly create the feeling of angst.

This rather complex film reminds us how our knowledge of ourselves, and especially of others, has its natural, insurmountable limits. Because we all wear masks (at least to some degree) our knowledge of what exactly is going on inside someone's mind (including our own) simply cannot be complete. In this respect we do not live in some sort of a perfect, unambiguous, deterministic, Newtonian world, but rather we live in a world akin to that of quantum mechanics, with all its uncertainties and probabilities. Other people, no matter how hard they try, can never understand us completely.