Persona
Short description
Persona follows a celebrated stage actress, Elisabet Vogler, who stops speaking during a performance and then withdraws from speech altogether. Medical tests find her physically and mentally healthy, so she remains in the care of a young nurse, Alma. The two travel to a house by the sea, where Alma talks to her silent patient, filling the quiet with her own thoughts and memories, and the relationship between them gradually shifts.
Ingmar Bergman wrote, produced and directed the film, the fourteenth of the twenty-four features he directed in chronological order, arriving between The Silence and Hour of the Wolf. Bibi Andersson plays Alma and Liv Ullmann plays Elisabet, with Margaretha Krook as the doctor and Gunnar Björnstrand as Herr Vogler. Bergman's screenplay confines the story largely to two women in an isolated setting, with Jörgen Lindström appearing uncredited as Elisabet's son.
Made in Sweden by SF Studios and running eighty-five minutes, the drama has drawn unusually strong ratings across audiences and critics. On IMDb it holds 8 out of 10 from around 140,000 votes, and on TMDB 8.1 out of 10 from a much smaller electorate of 2,487. A critics' rating of 9.5 out of 10 from fifty-eight reviews places it above both audience scores, indicating that professional assessments of the film have been notably higher than the already favourable response from general viewers.
What's left behind the scenes
- In ancient theater, the term 'Persona' referred to a mask through which an actor declaims their role. The term 'Persona' itself was borrowed by Ingmar Bergman from Carl Jung's philosophical theory concerning the relationship between 'Persona' and 'Anima' in life, where 'Persona' represents a mask portraying a specific role in society, concealing the true self. 'Anima,' or 'Animus,' is the collective image of the woman in a man's individual unconscious, and vice versa – an archetype opposite to the perfect image of the 'Persona.'
- The film was shot at a studio in Stockholm and on the island of Fårö.
- Ingmar Bergman wrote the screenplay with Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson in mind, between whom he noticed a strange physical resemblance.
- The original script underwent changes during production. According to Ullmann, actresses Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann, as well as cinematographer Sven Nykvist, improvised during the shoot.
- Bergman originally planned to title the film "Cinema" (the picture begins with a demonstration of a film projector lamp lighting up, frames flashing, somewhere in the middle the film breaks, and at the end of the film the lamp goes out). However, the producer prevented this.
- In the spring of 1965, Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007) fell ill with pneumonia and was hospitalized, where he wrote the screenplay for "Persona."
- Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann agreed to play their characters as if they were different sides of the same personality—which they believed to be that of Ingmar Bergman himself.
Auditions in India
Casting calls in USA
Castingi w Polsce
Кастинги в Україні
