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Persona is a 1966 Swedish film directed by Ingmar Bergman and starring Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann. Persona’s central story revolves around a young nurse named Alma (Bibi Andersson) and her patient, a well-known stage actress named Elisabet Vogler (Liv Ullman) who, in the middle of performing Elektra, ceases to speak. The attending psychiatrist sends the actress to a remote seaside cottage to facilitate her recuperation under Alma's care. At the beginning, the two seem perfectly suited: a genuine, cheerful and talkative nurse, who becomes the voice of the two individuals and a cryptic, sophisticated, and silent patient. Alma becomes a little enamoured of the actress and talks incessantly about her life, opening her soul to the outwardly sympathetic patient. Soon Alma discovers that Elisabeth's interest is more than mere courtesy or voyeuristic curiosity when the nurse finds the letter which describes her as an amusing study for the actress. The relationship between the women becomes strained and the border between dream and reality becomes blurred. By the end of the film the identities of Alma and Elisabeth begin to merge and Bergman has turned that metamorphosis into a metaphor for the fate of art, language, and consciousness itself.

Persona is considered one of the major works of the 20th century by essayists and critics such as Susan Sontag, who referred to it as Bergman's masterpiece. Other critics have described it as "one of this century’s great works of art". In Sight and Sound’s 1972 poll of the ten greatest films of all time, Persona was ranked at number five. In the 2012 British Film Institute list of The Top 50 Greatest Films of All Time, Persona is tied at 17 with Akira Kurosawa's "Seven Samurai."

Plot
Persona begins with images of camera equipment and projectors lighting up and projecting dozens of brief cinematic glimpses, including a crucifixion, an erect penis, a tarantula spider, clips from a comedic silent-film reel first seen in Bergman's Prison (depicting a man trapped in a room, being chased by Death and Satan), and the slaughter of a lamb. The last, and longest, glimpse features a boy who wakes up in a hospital next to several corpses, reading Michail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time ("Vår Tids Hjälte" in the film), and caressing a blurry image of Elisabet and/or Alma's faces.

A young nurse, Alma (portrayed by Bibi Andersson), is summoned by the head doctor and charged with the care of stage actress Elisabet Vogler (portrayed by Liv Ullmann), who has, despite the lack of any diagnosed impairment, become mute. The hospital administrator (portrayed by Margaretha Krook) offers her own seaside cottage as a place for Alma to nurse Elisabet back to health. Though Elisabet is nearly catatonic when the film begins, she does react with extreme panic upon seeing a Vietnamese Buddhist monk's self-immolation on television, and laughs mockingly at Alma's radio soap opera. As the two women leave the hospital together, Alma reads aloud a letter Elisabet's husband has sent her, which includes a photograph of her young son.

Together in the administrator's cottage, Elisabet begins to relax, though she remains completely silent and non-responsive. Alma speaks constantly to break the silence, at first about books she is reading and trivial matters, then increasingly about her own anxieties and relationship with her fiancé, Karl-Henrik, who scolds her for lacking ambition – "though not with my career, I suppose in some greater way." Alma constantly compares herself to Elisabet and begins to grow attached to her. As the act closes, Alma confesses to cheating on her fiancé in a ménage à quatre with underage boys. She became pregnant, and had Karl-Henrik's friend abort the baby; "and that was that". She is not sure how to process the abortion mentally. Elisabet is heard to say "You ought to go to bed, or you'll fall asleep at the table", but Alma dismisses it as a dream. Elisabet will later deny speaking.

Alma drives into town, taking Elisabet's letters for the postbox, but parks by the roadside to read what she wrote. She discovers in Elisabet's letters that Elisabet has been analyzing her and "studying" her. Alma returns distraught, accidentally breaks a drinking glass on the footpath, and leaves the shards there to cut Elisabet. When Elisabet's feet start to bleed, her gaze meets Alma's knowingly, and the film itself breaks apart: the screen flashes white, scratch marks appear up and down the image, the sound rises and screeches, and the film appears to unwind as brief flashes of the prelude reappear for fractions of a second each.

When the film resumes, it is following Elisabet through the house with a thick blur on the lens. The image clears up with a sharp snap when she looks out the window before walking outside to meet Alma, who is weepy and bitter. At lunch, she tells Elisabet she has been hurt by Elisabet talking about her behind her back, and begs her to speak. When Elisabet does not react, the nurse flies into a rage. Alma tries to attack her and chases her through the cottage, but Elisabet hits her during the ensuing scuffle causing Alma's nose to start bleeding. In retaliation, Alma grabs a pot of boiling water off the stove and is about to fling it at Elisabet, but stops after hearing Elisabet wail "No!" Alma explains that Elisabet wouldn't have spoken had she not feared death. Alma goes to the bathroom, washes her face, and tries to pull herself together. She then goes to Elisabet and frustrated by her unresponsiveness tells her, "You are inaccessible. They said you were healthy, but your sickness is of the worst kind: it makes you seem healthy. You act it so well everyone believes it, everyone except me, because I know how rotten you are inside." Elisabet tries to walk away, but Alma pursues and continues to accost her. Elisabet flees, and Alma chases her begging for forgiveness. That evening, Elisabet opens a book she is reading and finds a famous Stroop Report photograph of Jews being arrested in the Warsaw Ghetto. Elisabet stares at details in the photograph, but mostly at the boy with his hands raised.

That night, Alma watches Elisabet sleep, analyzing her face and the scars she covers with makeup. She hears a man yelling outside, and finds Elisabet's husband, Mr. Vogler, in the garden. Mr. Vogler (portrayed by Gunnar Björnstrand) mistakes Alma for his wife, and despite her repeatedly interjecting with "I'm not your wife", delivers a monologue about his love for her and the son they have together (repeating words he wrote to Elisabet in the opening act – "We must see each other as two anxious children"). Elisabet stands quietly beside the two, holding Alma's hand, and Alma admits her love for Mr. Vogler and accepts her role as the mother of Elisabet's child. The two make love with Elisabet sitting quietly next to the bed with a look of panic on her face, and afterward, Alma cries. The image of Elisabet becomes blurry.

The climax of the film comes the next morning: Alma catches Elisabet in the kitchen with a pained expression on her face, holding a picture of a small boy. Alma then narrates Elisabet's life story back to her, while the camera focuses tightly on Elisabet's anguished face: at a party one night, a man tells her "Elisabet, you have it virtually all in your armory as woman and artist. But you lack motherliness." She laughs, because it sounds silly, but the idea sticks in her mind, and she lets her husband impregnate her. As the pregnancy progresses, she grows increasingly worried about her stretching and swelling body, her responsibility to her child, the pain of birth, and the idea of abandoning her career. Everyone Elisabet knows constantly says "Isn't she beautiful? She has never been so beautiful", but Elisabet makes repeated attempts to abort the fetus. After the child is born, she is repulsed by it, and prays for the death of her son. The child grows up tormented and desperate for affection. The camera turns to show Alma's face, and she repeats the same monologue again. At its conclusion, one half of the face of Alma and the other of Elisabet's visage are shown in split screen, such that they appear to have become one face. Alma panics and cries "I'm not like you. I don't feel like you. I'm not Elisabet Vogler: you are Elisabet Vogler. I'm just here to help you!" Alma leaves, and later returns, to find that Elisabet has become completely catatonic. Alma falls into a strange mood and gashes her arm, forcing Elisabet's lips to the wound and subsequently beating her. Alma packs her things and leaves the cottage alone, as the camera turns away from the women to show the crew and director filming the scene.

Production
Bergman wrote Persona during nine weeks while recovering from pneumonia. During filming Bergman wanted to call the film A Bit of Cinematography. His producer suggested something more accessible and the title of the film was changed. Although five actors appear on-screen, Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann are the only ones to appear for more than a minute, and Elisabet Vogler (Ullmann's character) speaks only fourteen words in the film. The imagery is dominated by extreme contrast, with the cottage scenes being drenched by intense sunlight that washes the image out in a white glare, and the actors wearing solid black costumes, simple hairstyles, and no make-up.

Bergman writes in his book Images, he writes: "Today I feel that in Persona—and later in Cries and Whispers—I had gone as far as I could go. And that in these two instances when working in total freedom, I touched wordless secrets that only the cinema can discover." He also said: "At some time or other, I said that Persona saved my life—that is no exaggeration. If I had not found the strength to make that film, I would probably have been all washed up. One significant point: for the first time I did not care in the least whether the result would be a commercial success..."

According to Bergman, the origins of Persona trace to an accidental meeting on a Stockholm street corner where Bibi Andersson introduced him to Liv Ullmann. […] his mental association of the two women guided the idea for the new film into place. In another account, consistent with the first, he states that its seminal image – of two women “wearing bug hats and laying their hands alongside each other” – derived from the “uncanny resemblance” he noticed in a slide he was shown of Andersson and Ullmann sunbathing.

Cast

 * Bibi Andersson as Alma, the Nurse
 * Liv Ullmann as Elisabet Vogler, the Actress
 * Margaretha Krook as the Doctor
 * Gunnar Björnstrand as Mr. Vogler
 * Jörgen Lindström as the Boy, Elisabet's son

Themes and Interpretations
Lloyd Michaels sums up what he calls "the most widely held view" of Persona’s content. According to this view, Persona is "a kind of modernist horror movie." Elisabet’s condition, described by a doctor as "the hopeless dream to be", is "the shared condition of both life and film art". Bergman and Elisabet share the same dilemma: they cannot respond authentically to "large catastrophes" (such as the Holocaust or the Vietnam War).

Frank Gado sees Persona as relying on a double-threaded process of discovery involving motherhood. The principal thread concerns Elisabet. The psychiatrist guesses that the role of motherhood caused her problems. Alma later confirms this in the dream in which she becomes Elisabet. Motherhood, she explains, was the one role the actress could not slough off; she returned the son´s love with hatred and withdrew into silence. The nurse realizes, that she has done precisely what Elisabet tried and failed to do: erase a child from her life. Significantly, the woman who “was never quite real” to anyone else; through maternity, became “real”. By aborting the fetus, Alma destroyed that reality. Furthermore, the abortion of one child and the rejection of the other testimony to life’s emptiness to the evanescence of the mirage of hope.

Susan Sontag suggests that Persona is constructed as a series of variations on a theme of "doubling". The subject of the film, Sontag proposes, is "violence of the spirit". Marilyn Johns Blackwell´s argument is similar to Sontag´s. Blackwell argues that the attraction between Elisabet and Alma and the absence of male sexuality cohere with their identification with each other and the permeability of boundaries between the self and the other. Thus creating a doubling which reveals the “multiple, shifting, self-contradictory identity”, a notion of identity that undermines male ideology. […] This theme of mergence and doubling surfaces early in the film in Alma’s statement that she went to see one of Elisabet’s films and was struck by the thought that they were so much alike. Film scholar P. Adams Sitney offers a completely different reading, arguing that "Persona covertly dramatizes a psychoanalysis from the point of view of a patient".

Censorship
Two scenes are frequently cut from versions of the film; a brief shot at the beginning depicting an erect penis, and segments of Alma’s nighttime monologue about her abortion and ménage à quatre (the American print makes no reference to ages; in the original, it is implied that they are twelve or thirteen).

When MGM archivist John Kirk restored Persona as part of a larger restoration project, he worked with the original, uncensored version with the brief shot of an erect penis. He also created new subtitles by commissioning several language experts to provide new, accurate translations for the dialogue; this is particularly noticeable during Alma’s graphic sexual descriptions, which some were reluctant to translate without toning down the language. The original, uncensored version wasn’t widely available in the U.S. until 2004, when MGM’s home video department reissued Persona on DVD, utilizing Kirk’s work. It is, however, important to note that this DVD is heavily cropped.

Influence on other films
Stanley Kubrick's admiration for Bergman is portrayed in the letter of praise he sent him in 1960.

Bergman features prominently in Woody Allen’s films. Love and Death references Persona in its final minutes; two characters are lined up, one facing the camera, the other at a 90-degree angle, with their mouths in the same space, just as in Persona.

Robert Altman’s impressionist film 3 Women is also influenced by Persona as Shelley Duvall and Sissy Spacek begin to shift roles/identities.

Reception
Persona seems to defy the generic categories of mainstream cinema. Two dominant traits of the art film are authorial expressivity and ambiguity. The initial responses to Persona’s ambiguity reflected a 1960s film culture by auterism and new criticism and amount to an unresolved critical debate over what the film’s author was actually expressing.

Persona won the 1967 National Society of Film Critics awards for Best Film, Best Director (Bergman) and Best Actress (Andersson). The film was selected as the Swedish entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 39th Academy Awards, but was not accepted as a nominee. The film was included in The New York Times Guide to the Best 1,000 Movies Ever Made. In 2010, it was ranked #71 in Empire magazines "The 100 Best Films Of World Cinema".

It currently holds a 92% "Fresh" rating at Rotten Tomatoes.