Taking cues from August Strindberg’s 1889 play The Stronger, Bergman chose the title Persona as this was both the Greek word for ‘mask’ and the term coined by Carl Jung for the outer self that opposed the inner ‘alma’. He also picked Elisabet’s surname carefully, as Albert Emanuel Vogler had sapped the energy of others for his artistic endeavors in his earlier film, The Magician (1958).
In the first of a series of legendary performances for Bergman, Liv Ullmann plays a stage actor 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 undergo a mysterious spiritual and emotional transference. Performed with astonishing nuance and shot in stark contrast and soft light by Sven Nykvist, the influential Persona is a penetrating, dreamlike work of profound psychological depth.