Persona

Persona is about a famous actress who experiences a nervous breakdown during a performance of ‘Electra’. She abruptly stops acting and even speaking. The crisis proves rooted in her guilt towards her son: she feels incapable of combining her acting career with motherhood. To her, theatre is no replacement for life.

Liv Ullmann plays the actress in crisis, who is committed to an institution and is mute. Bibi Andersson portrays her nurse. Together they leave for an isolated house on the waterside where they become increasingly intimately acquainted – to the extreme.

Controversial

Ingmar Bergman psychologically portrays these two women as they swap identities. Persona would go on to become Bergman’s most successful film and one of the first to explicitly concentrate on female relationships and emotions, which would become his trademark. The film’s themes of abortion and homosexuality meant it was long considered controversial.

Persona has been the subject of an exceptionally large number of critical and academic analyses and interpretations – the film is known as the ‘Mount Everest of film critique’.