The greatest leap in home video technology since Criterion released its first DVDs 15 years ago or so is the amazing improvement in mastering technology. With the digital revolution making digital prints the standard for cinema projection, the combination of elevates standards for film-to-digital quality and the HD standard of Blu-ray has brought near-cinema quality to home theater.
Persona (Criterion, Blu-ray+DVD Combo) is the most recent of Criterion’s world classics mastered from 2K digital, this one a 2011 digital restoration by Svensk Filmindustri. And like the greatest restorations, this disc brings the best of film texture and digital clarity together for a stunning image. Persona is a film dominated by light and white, with stark figures against neutral backgrounds, warm sunlight, and the bright glare of a film projector, and those values are the kinds of things that get muddied in poor prints and digital masters. This disc looks like a 35mm fresh from the lab has been projected directly on my flatscreen.
Liv Ullman is revered stage actress Elisabeth Vogler, who is suddenly stricken speechless, and Bibi Andersson is the adoring young nurse Alma, who watches over her at a quiet seaside retreat, doing all the talking for both of them while she lays her soul bare to the actress. When Alma discovers the insensitive and condescending words about her in a letter Elisabeth has written, the roles of their relationship begins to shift and the intensity of feeling builds to point that, quite literally, stops the film dead. For a brief moment, Bergman reaches back to the origins of cinema, as if to recreate the artform in brief, abstracted images and rebuild the film around the two women.
Sven Nykvist’s silvery photography is not entirely in close-up, but it sometimes seems that way. The intimacy and the intensity of the camera’s focus and the increasingly naked confessions and accusations in the dialogue create one of the most intense character pieces put on film. It’s one of Ingmar Bergman’s masterpieces and a landmark film of the 1960s.
The film opens with an odd and startling prologue and Ingmar Bergman scholar Peter Cowie contributes the new 20-minute visual essay “Persona‘s Prologue: A Poem in Images,” commenting on the avant-garde elements as the director’s challenge to the nouvelle vague filmmakers and tracing the way the imagery echoes shots and scenes in previous Bergman films. There are also new video interviews with actor Liv Ullmann and filmmaker Paul Schrader, excerpts from archival interviews with Bergman and actors Bibi Andersson and Ullmann, on-set footage from the production with commentary by Bergman historian Birgitta Steene, and the 2012 documentary Liv & Ingmar directed by Dheeraj Akolkar. The accompanying booklet features an essay by film scholar Thomas Elsaesser, an excerpt from a 1969 interview with Bergman, and an excerpt from a 1977 conversation with Andersson.
This is, by my count, the ninth Bergman film that Criterion has released on Blu-ray since they entered the HD market in 2009 with The Seventh Seal, which was also mastered from a 2K. The releases have been a revelation. Gunnar Fischer’s shadowy black and white brings the life of the landscape out in every frame in The Seventh Seal and the clarity and intensity of the Blu-ray image gives it renewed power to cast a spell, and that’s just one example. I reviewed most of these over the years and was always pulled in by the imagery, constantly surprised over and over by Bergman’s visual control and by the delicate photography of his two great photographers: Gunnar Fischer, who photographed almost all of Bergman’s films up to 1960, and Sven Nykvist, who took over as Bergman’s most important collaborator with the 1960 The Virgin Spring.
The Criterion Bergman Blu-ray collection now consists of (in chronological order):
Summer Interlude (1951) (TCM)
Summering With Monica (1953) (Parallax View)
Smiles of a Summer Night (1955) (Parallax View)
The Seventh Seal (1957) (Parallax View)
Wild Strawberries (1957) (TCM)
The Magician (1958) (Parallax View)
Persona (1966)
Autumn Sonata (1978)
Fanny & Alexander (1982)
I look forward to their next Bergman Blu-ray.
Calendar of upcoming releases on Blu-ray, DVD, Digital, and VOD