Persona (1966)
Directed by Ingmar Bergman
A young nurse, Alma, is put in charge of Elisabeth Vogler: an actress who is seemingly healthy in all respects, but will not talk. As they spend time together, Alma speaks to Elisabeth constantly, never receiving any answer.
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31 films influenced by Persona
Films critics say Persona influenced
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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 .
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).
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 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.
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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.