Product: Persona (1967)
Rating: 4.0
A modernist masterpiece...
In the early '60s, Bergman's visual and narrative style became ever more austere in focusing on tormented souls seeking guidance and comfort from an empty heaven, thus paving the way for a stark foray into extreme close-up in the enigmatic "Persona."A modernist masterpiece, the film initiated an introspective trilogy about the ivory towers built by artists as a defense against the horror of existence... It was Bergman's first completely innovative work, acknowledging itself as artifice through the regular insertion of non-narrative images such as projectors burning, film breaking, fragment of silent movies..."Persona" depicts the vampiric relationship between a talkative nurse and an actress who refuses to speak or work after a traumatic realization of the futility of creation in a loveless world surrounded by war... Psychology, philosophy and social comment are mixed to brilliant effect in a complex, clear interrogation both of filmic illusion and of the illusory values of modern life...