On October 18, Ingmar Bergman's Persona turns 60. The film started with a slide of Bibi Andersson and Liv Ullmann sunbathing side by side. Bergman looked at it and noticed that their faces were almost the same. By then he had seen Ullmann neither on stage nor in a film. He decided to cast her while going through slides from the shoot of Pan.
The story grew out of that resemblance. Alma, a nurse, looks after a famous actress who has suddenly stopped speaking, and gradually stops being able to tell herself apart from her. The best-known shot in the film is two faces merged into one.
Filming began on July 19, 1965, on the Filmstaden soundstages in Stockholm. Bergman later remembered the first days as a nightmare: the footage came out badly and he was worn out. Things got better once the crew moved to the island of Fårö.
Bergman wanted to cut Alma's monologue about a sexual experience on the beach from the script. Andersson insisted that it be shot and changed some of the words herself. The director was happy with the result. Sven Nykvist was the cinematographer, working in very tight close-ups, and in the middle of the film the film stock seems to tear. It all opens with a seven-minute prologue: the carbons of a film projector light up, a boy wakes in a room that looks like a morgue and walks up to a screen where the faces of two women alternate.
Persona is Latin for "mask". For years the film has been read through Jung, through motherhood, through cinema itself, and Thomas Elsaesser compared analyzing Persona to climbing Everest. The 2014 Criterion edition includes 18 minutes of silent footage from the set, with commentary by Bergman scholar Birgitta Steene.
