Persona

By the mid-sixties, Ingmar Bergman had already conjured many of the cinema's most unforgettable images. But with the radical 'Persona,' this supreme artist attained new levels of visual poetry. In the first of a series of legendary performances for Bergman, Liv Ullmann plays an actress who has inexplicably gone mute; an equally mesmerizing Bibi Andersson is the garrulous young nurse caring for her in a remote island cottage. While isolated together there, the women perform a mysterious spiritual and emotional transference that would prove to be one of cinema's most influential ideas. Acted with astonishing nuance and shot in stark shadows and soft light by the great Sven Nykvist, 'Persona' is a penetrating, dreamlike work of profound psychological depth.