Word: bergmans
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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PERSONA. Swedish Director Ingmar Bergman's 27th film (and first in 2 years) is a difficult but rewarding study of the psychological transference between an actress (Liv Ullman), who stops participating in life, and a nurse (Bibi Andersson), whose personality becomes enmeshed in that of her actress-patient...
Beyond Recall. The new thrust in movies took inception from the collapse of Hollywood in the early '50s and the revival of Europe as a center of film production. Since the European industry was small and loosely organized, such directors as Vittorio De Sica, Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Alain Resnais, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard could pretty well shoot them as they saw them and let the censor take the hindmost. As a result, they made a number of fine far-out films (The Bicycle Thief, Wild Strawberries, 8½, L'Avventura, Hiroshima, Mon Amour...
Persona. Director Ingmar Bergman is modern cinema's most persistent observer of the human condition. He examines the Eden that is Sweden and sees-much as Bruegel once did in Flanders-that the occupants are really having a Hell of a time. Persona, his 27th film, fuses two of Bergman's familiar obsessions: personal loneliness and the particular anguish of contemporary woman. It is the story of a great stage actress (Liv Ullman), suddenly become mute and detached while starring in a production of Electra. She is afflicted with what medieval theologians called accidie-a total indifference...
...Bergman has tricked out his static, enigmatic story with flashes of his familiar images: a fat spider, which represented God in Through a Glass Darkly, and here seems only to be arachnid revulsion; a flickering silent movie of Death dancing comically around a table, a la Seventh Seal; a nail being pounded into the palm of a hand. In sequences reminiscent of The Silence, a little boy is twice shown on a hospital cot, reaching out to a wide, white wall that becomes the face of the nurse, as if he were a fantasy of her unborn child. Time...
Persona (the ancient Latin word for mask) is too deliberately difficult to rank with Bergman's best. But in an era when the director who dares to repeat himself is rare indeed-when the cinematic world is full of one-shot wonders, Bergman's consistency is itself refreshing. His bleak, unsparing vision of the condition of man remains his private property. Persona is one more acre of that estate-often tilled, perhaps, but still worth the plowing...