Ingmar Bergman
122 connections found
Filmography
Persona 1966 
Winter Light 1963 
Wild Strawberries 1957 
The Seventh Seal 1957 
Summer Interlude 1951 
Hour of the Wolf 1968 
Summer with Monika 1953 
The Magician 1958 
Through a Glass Darkly 1961 
The Silence 1963 
Smiles of a Summer Night 1955 
Fanny and Alexander 1982 
The Virgin Spring 1960 
Cries and Whispers 1972 
The Magic Flute 1975 
The Passion of Anna 1969 
The Serpent's Egg 1977 
A Lesson in Love 1954 
To Joy 1950 
Sawdust and Tinsel 1953 
Saraband 2003 
After the Rehearsal 1984 
Autumn Sonata 1978 
Face to Face 1976 
Dreams 1955 View:
Connections, in both directions
The creeping zooms of Sean Price Williams' 16mm camera close in on the faces of Moss and studio turned indie starlet Katherine Waterston, framed in "Persona"-like juxtaposition to instill in us the sickening feeling that these two women are two halves of a whole, as if some unholy astrological alignment were bringing them together to break all hell loose.
Perry’s psychological drama plays like a self-conscious American variation on Ingmar Bergman’s Persona.
Perry has acknowledged in interviews his desire to draw ideas for his own women-on-the-verge story from Polanski, from Ingmar Bergman (most obviously "Persona"), from Fassbinder's "Marriage of Maria Braun."
A deep-dish cinephile with a pronounced affection for late 1960s/early 1970s alt-Hollywood cinema, Perry is working this time in a style that seems equally influenced by doppelganger narratives like Bergman’s “Persona” and Brian De Palma’s “Sisters,” as well as by the claustrophobic domestic terror of “Repulsion” and Chantal Akerman’s seminal “Jeanne Dielman.”
Clearly Perry has a bookish nature: Though his new movie plays like a cousin to Ingmar Bergman’s gorgeously broken Persona, it has the intimate contours of a smartly conceived anthology short story, one in which a woman’s unraveling gains psychological impact from a concentrated time and place.
Largely a chamber piece for two women — Katherine Waterston and Elisabeth Moss, both excellent in hugely demanding roles — the film also welcomes, and indeed earns, Persona comparisons.
May December (2023)
Directed by Todd Haynes
influenced by Persona (1966)
Visuals Characters Plot Themes
Elsewhere his references skew higher-brow: When he positions Moore and Portman side-by-side in closeup, he evokes the dreamy surrealism of Ingmar Bergman's Persona and David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, as if to suggest that Gracie's and Elizabeth's identities are blurring together.
With Carol and Far from Heaven, the director nodded to the mid-century melodramas of Douglas Sirk, but May December somehow owes more to both the Lifetime variety of the genre and Ingmar Bergman works like Persona. With that dichotomy, May December possesses an eely quality; it slides between comedy and drama, from entertaining to unnerving.
But both leads do transfixing work with characters who constantly reveal different sides of themselves, which is fitting given that one of Haynes’ acknowledged inspirations was Bergman’s Persona.
Much of the pleasure of the film lies in its clash of styles. At certain moments, it is trashy and voyeuristic. At others, for example when Elizabeth and Gracie are alone together, it becomes closer to Bergman’s Persona, with its famous shot in which the faces of the actor played by Liv Ullmann and her nurse Bibi Andersson seem to merge.
May December is Haynes's entry in the “women swapping identities” subgenre (alongside Ingmar Bergman's Persona, Robert Altman's 3 Women, David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, and so on), but it's a fully original one, with its own perspective on the ever-shifting power dynamics at its core.
Reuniting for a fifth time with Julianne Moore, their latest collaboration is heavy on Bergman’s Persona (1966) motifs as well in this hothouse of blurred lines set in one strangely steamy Savannah summer in 2015.
Jay Kelly (2025)
Directed by Noah Baumbach
influenced by Wild Strawberries (1957)
Visuals Themes Plot Characters
It's a thing we've seen in, like, Fellini or Wild Strawberries.
Thematically, Jay Kelly seems to be trying to maneuver between two great classics – Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries and Federico Fellini’s 8 ½.
Yes, it’s mildly evocative of the Ingmar Bergman classic Wild Strawberries, from 1957, but it’s strikingly similar to Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value, released in the U.S. just a month ago.
These bits exploring the porousness between memory and reality recall Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, though their poignancy doesn’t make up for their clunky deployment.
Noah Baumbach’s Jay Kelly doesn’t have strawberries like Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries. But it does have an aging man reflecting on his life as he travels to collect a lifetime achievement award.
At times, Jay seems like a Hollywood version of the egotistical professor played by Victor Sjöström in Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries.
I would compare it visually to the architecture of a cathedral or church, where the black & white creates similar themes of what Ingmar Bergman did with The Seventh Seal , The Virgin Spring , Through a Glass Darkly , and Winter Light .
At different points, the look of “The Tragedy of Macbeth” will recall a silky foreboding film noir, a Val Lewton horror film, a Sirkian soap opera, the cloistered dreamscapes of Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “Ordet,” the fascist hellscape of Orson Welles’ “The Trial,” the hallowed glow of “The Chronicle of Anna Magdalene Bach,” the operatic catacombs of “Ivan the Terrible,” and Welles’ 1948 version of “Macbeth.”
It begins with the imagery, which is lushly rendered in a Bergmanesque gothic greyscale and is inspired by both that master’s more fantastical work ( The Seventh Seal is a pretty clear point of comparison), Olivier’s Hamlet , and Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood .
Emerging, croaking and genderless, lips cracked and limbs bending impossibly, Hunter appears as unsettlingly alien as Bengt Ekerot was as Death in The Seventh Seal .
The classic tale itself is powerful and influential and morbid (yet still not Shakespeare’s most adored work), though this adaptation primarily serves to offer different actors and a somewhat original visual presentation (reminiscent of “The Seventh Seal” and German Expressionism, with an unusually energetic, cinematic showdown), which will surely appeal only to a select audience.
When Jackson sees Rose up close, guessing correctly that she’s pregnant, Mike Nichols’ classic merges with Roman Polanski’s Rosemary’s Baby , before evolving again to suggest a psychological female relationship of unifying identities akin to Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (already a heavy inspiration for Madeline’s Madeline ).
It’s easy to cite Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? as inspiration for the machinations of Shirley , but it also taps into my favorite genre of cinema that I’ll simply refer to as “Persona-esque” (as insufferable as that sounds).
There are a lot of influences bubbling under the surface of Shirley, such as Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Bergman's Persona (a film with which feminist filmmakers seem to have a love/hate relationship), but the director's vision emerges as something more than the sum of its parts.
There’s a bit of “Persona” to the relationship, as which woman is the stronger is always in question until very nearly the end.
Clouds of Sils Maria (2014)
Directed by Olivier Assayas
influenced by Persona (1966)
Visuals Themes Characters Plot
The star effortlessly keeps pace with the filmmaker’s empathetic tricks and his nods to such foreign-language classics as Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona” and Michelangelo Antonioni’s “L’Avventura.”
There are certainly purposeful echoes here of hothouse, inside-out, binary inter-female theatrical dramas like Persona and All About Eve.
Here, the closest comparison might be Bergman’s Persona, as Maria, played by Juliette Binoche — the goddess of European cinema, and no stranger to meta-movies (Certified Copy, Mauvais Sang) — has not one, but two doppelgängers: Chloë Grace Moretz as the young, TMZ-attentive star Jo-Ann Ellis, who will play the role Maria made famous at her age.
The women’s personas (why, yes, I am deliberately hinting at Ingmar Bergman’s shape-shifting “Persona”) blur and overlap.
A more apt comparison, confirmed by a second screening, would be Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, a psychodrama of identity by a director whom Assayas, an astute student of human behaviour, has acknowledged as an influence.
Another of the festival’s best selections—and the last screened for the press—was Olivier Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria, a playful and captivating hybrid of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona, Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve, and quintessentially Assayas-esque meta-mischief.
Season of the Witch (2011)
Directed by Dominic Sena
influenced by The Seventh Seal (1957)
Themes Visuals
I am about out of astonishments for you, but buckle your seat belt for this one: The director, Dominic Sena , was inspired by Ingmar Berg man's “ The Seventh Seal ” (1957), that classic tale of a knight who returns from the Crusades and encounters Death on the road.
The Eastern European locations are sumptuous and the costumes authentic, but the dialogue is anachronistic and the climax mindless — though the lame film homages (The Seventh Seal!
Directed by Dominic Sera as a kind of giddy homage to Ingmar Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” — that is, if Bergman worked for Marvel Comics — “Witch opens with three terrified women accused of witchcraft.
A plague has ravaged everything and every place—at which point we realize that we’ve been watching the prequel for The Seventh Seal (1957).
It's The Seventh Seal meets Get Him to the Greek meets Lord of the Rings as if filtered through Uwe Boll's hack-tastic brain, only a guy named Dominic Sena (Swordfish, Gone in 60 Seconds) made it.
Now that they are back in the limelight, it's time to start spitballing ideas for a sequel (among them, an existential study of life's greatest conundrums, a 'la Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal").
The inside jokes on offer include references to The Silence of the Lambs, Boyz 2 Men, Danny Trejo, The Spy Who Loved Me, and, most hilariously, The Seventh Seal.
Alongside the more kid-targeted jokes we get some stuff for the adult crowd, too—hello, The Seventh Seal reference.
Featuring clever film references from The Seventh Seal to Silence of the Lambs, writers James Bobin and Nicholas Stoller are smart enough to fill this adventure with references to features that adults will appreciate.
Without revealing too much, the film starts to fold in on itself in a Persona-like manner, complete with shifting identities, repeated scenes, and even abstracted glimpses of the film’s own clapboards.
It's Queen of Earth meets Mulholland Drive , Passion with a dash of Persona , The Neon Demon in the atmospheric key of Martha, Marcy, May Marlene .
Discussions of long-held resentment and seemingly minor betrayals, filtered through the lens of genuine anxieties that the entertainment business brings, fester like a sore, eventually exploding in the film’s more Persona-inspired, reality-shattering, and ultimately filmsy final act.
This feminist psychological horror flick reminded some critics of Ingmar Bergman’s Persona and me of Sam Shepard’s play True West, with its two characters’ personalities start to bleed into each other’s.
That’s also when Always Shine‘s thematic connection to Ingmar Bergman’s two-women-in-an-isolated-house Persona becomes all the more apparent, down to intentional glimpses of the film crew.
On the surface, “Always Shine” is a tense thriller about failed female alliances — much of the time it seems poised to become a remake of “Persona,” as made by the horror director Alexandre Aja .
A feature debut for the director, Mr. Webb, the film is an odd combination of self-referential, in the spirit of its lovers, and insistently referential in its wink-and-nod homages to such classics as “The Graduate” and “The Seventh Seal.”
The script, by Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, references a lot of movies, from "The Seventh Seal" to "The Graduate," but the one it seems to be channeling the most effectively (and most unconsciously) is "Annie Hall."
(He’s less successful in a misguided parody of foreign-movie cliches: does anybody take “The Seventh Seal” as a touchstone anymore?) Deschanel doesn’t come off nearly as well, largely because Summer is rather a self-absorbed, hard character, and she plays it that way.
Marriage Story (2019)
Directed by Noah Baumbach
influenced by Fanny and Alexander (1982), Persona (1966)
Visuals
References don’t end at Scenes from a Marriage though; a scene where the couple and their child lie in bed together, physically close but their gazes wandering and unmet, directly references a scene from Fanny and Alexander, suggesting the immense spiritual distance between characters.
“Marriage Story” is an emotionally lacerating experience, a nearly flawless elegy for a beautifully flawed couple, a broken-family classic to set beside “Kramer vs. Kramer” and “Fanny and Alexander,” to name two films that Baumbach references visually here.
“Scenes from a Marriage” is the headline on a magazine article about Charlie and Nicole, and she even plays Electra onstage, as Liv Ullmann’s character does in “Persona” (1966).
For the movie’s assembly of close-ups of characters, Baumbach cites Bergman’s “Persona.”
Like the overlap between the protagonists’ professional and private lives, the hint at Bergman’s Persona is one of the predictable items that Charlie shares with the auteur archetype.
I was reminded repeatedly of Ingmar Bergman's Persona , which also examines at close range the relationship between two women, one of them an actress, and which is also awash in reflexive elements that turn its status as cinema back on itself.
Club Silencio leads directly into the latter; the former is shortly preceded by a moment in which Rita's panic causes the film image to double and overlap itself, a rupture of reality as intense as any in the 35 years separating Mulholland Dr. from Ingmar Bergman's Persona .
Rita loses hope, sports a blond wig and Mulholland Drive's women suddenly become one (Persona anyone?).
David Lynch's Mulholland Drive contends that the answer to the eternal struggle between what is real and what is fantasy comes in the form of a Keatsian confusion--it's the difference between Adam's dream and Eve rendered flesh, blurred in the mind of the creator and his audience.A film is a dream of the director made tangible, a conceit familiar from the fourth wall-breaking in Ingmar Bergman's Persona (banishing any mystery there might have been regarding the visual references to that film in Lynch's piece), and a movie's characters therefore become projections of its maker's sublimated longing (clarifying too the auteur's use of wardrobe and colour schemes from Hitchcock's meditation on objectification, Vertigo, as well as those of his first collaboration with inamorata Tippi Hedren, The Birds).
The Duke of Burgundy (2015)
Directed by Peter Strickland
influenced by Persona (1966)
Visuals Themes
Initially, The Duke Of Burgundy appears to be Strickland’s take on Seventies’ Euro erotica (with a nod, too, to Bergman’s Persona).
Strickland, a stylist of the highest ilk who carved out the edgy psychodramas “Berberian Sound Studio” (about a reclusive sound engineer’s descent into madness) and “Katalin Varga” (a woman travels with her child to the town of a man who raped her), which reflected his protagonists’ inner struggles outwardly with haunting effective moodiness, does so again here, and with deeper conviction, employing smears of Ingmar Bergman (especially “Persona”), Nicolas Roeg and Jess Franco (the ’60s Spanish horror-meister) to create a beguiling interweave.
The Duke of Burgundy, named for a variety of butterfly, synthesizes cultural sources as sundry as the Sapphic playacting of Jean Genet’s The Maids, the psychic conjunction of Bergman’s Persona, and the insect symbolism of Wyler’s The Collector.
The Lighthouse (2019)
Directed by Robert Eggers
influenced by Persona (1966), Through a Glass Darkly (1961), Hour of the Wolf (1968)
Themes Visuals
The other film that I found myself thinking about as the closing credits of The Lighthouse rolled was Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 drama Persona , in which a nurse moves to a remote cabin to care for an actress who has stopped speaking.
Increasingly outrageous behavior from both men, which appears to give “The Lighthouse” the feel of Bergman's “Persona” on acid, begins to feel like a chore.
That's about all you get for plot, yet it's enough for Eggers—who broke through four years ago with gothic horror masterstroke The Witch—to craft a moody, disorienting and utterly bonkers psychodrama about the insanity of isolation, one which bears traces of both The Shining and Ingmar Bergman's hallucinatory Persona .
It’s also a psychological thriller in the vein of Persona, an existential drama with shades of The Turin Horse, and is decidedly more funny—fart gags in tow—than Eggers’ debut, The Witch.
The first feature that he made there, “Through a Glass Darkly” (1961), creeps into Eggers’s movie in its shape, its tonal spectrum, and its fixation on delirium and neurosis.
There’s little doubt that this visual feast sets a disturbing tone, as “The Lighthouse” has an Ingmar Bergman-“Hour of the Wolf”-thing working greatly in its favor.
Indeed, Strickland references both Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona” and David Lynch’s “Lost Highway” in a hallucinatory scene in which the haunted sound studio shows Gilderoy a film of himself getting out of bed, shot only seconds earlier, which then catches in the projector, burns and disintegrates, destroying the wall that protects his work from his life.
Eventually, he finds himself going mad and then something really nifty happens on screen that I don't feel like spoiling, but it reminded me quite a bit of Ingmar Bergman's Persona .
By the end Berberian Sound Studio dives right off the deep end with a moment similar to Bergman’s Persona , but its abrupt ending doesn’t make for a conclusion that’s too fulfilling.
The second half of the movie tumbles with Maud down a spiral of female solitude and hallucinatory madness that invokes cinematic precedents as varied as Ingmar Bergman’s Persona , Roman Polanski’s Repulsion , and Lynne Ramsay’s Morvern Callar .
The influence of Ingmar Bergman's Persona, with which it shares certain plot points, looms large.
The ensuing dance between troubled ascetic and ciggy-smoking sensualist kicks off with shades of the psychological frictions of Persona , a major influence on Saint Maud , and goes downhill fast from there.
Following a series of acclaimed short films, Rose Glass blends Joan of Arc and Carrie by way of Persona in her striking, self-assured debut about obsession, faith, and why it’s best if you don’t give that book of William Blake paintings to an evangelical Christian with a penchant for sharp objects.
Morfydd Clark , who demonstrated such perfect comic timing in Armando Iannucci’s The Personal History of David Copperfield , is astonishing as the titular private carer nursing Jennifer Ehle’s Amanda, a once-celebrated dancer now facing the spectre of death.
The story is about Maud (Morfydd Clark, The Personal History of David Copperfield ), a young nurse starting out on a new palliative care placement.
Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019)
Directed by Céline Sciamma
influenced by Persona (1966)
Characters Visuals
Some in the audience may watch Héloïse and be reminded of the ghostly Carlotta Valdes in Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”; later, as she and Marianne lower their guards, they can’t help but evoke the leads of Ingmar Bergman’s “Persona.”
Much of that power belongs in the imaginative complexity of stillness in cinematographer Claire Mathon’s imagery, riffing on the imagery of men such as Persona and The French Lieutenant’s Woman .
With its dissonant soundtrack, it's an expressionistic opening reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman 's "Persona," only minus the emotion, the meaning and the interest.
Why, then, does Under the Skin remind me of Persona as much as anything?
The Phoenician Scheme (2025)
Directed by Wes Anderson
influenced by The Seventh Seal (1957)
Visuals Themes
…heavenly black-and-white sequences reminiscent of Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal (1957)…
Imagine The Seventh Seal meets Defending Your Life and you’re there.
They’re chilly matchbox approximations of Bergman and Tarkovsky…
A late-scene nod to Bergman’s “The Seventh Seal” swaps dread for hope, transforming death into an embrace instead of a void.
Return of the Jedi (1983)
Directed by Richard Marquand
influenced by The Seventh Seal (1957)
Visuals
Along the way we re-meet Jabba, the blob of evil from "Star Wars" and the Emperor himself (Ian McDiarmid), a black-cowled seventh cousin to Ingmar Bergman's Death in "The Seventh Seal."
We see a great deal more, however, of Darth and the Emperor, who looks uncannily like Death in "The Seventh Seal.''
As before, this movie incorporates influences from Silly Symphony to “The Seventh Seal,” from Tarzan to Pac-Man and combines these varying elements into a single story weave.