Arguably Bergman’s most representative and iconic film, Persona is the pivot point between the director’s two great sixties trilogies (his crisis-of-faith trio and the island-set films with which he closed the decade), blending crucial elements of both into something spare, chilling and inimitable. Liv Ullmann and Bibi Andersson star as a traumatized actress and her caretaker, respectively, but are they really two different people at all? The most abstractly drawn of all Bergman narratives, Persona migrates the women from a nondescript hospital in an undisclosed location to a remote seaside cottage and back again, their initial nurse-patient dynamic deteriorating, flipping and finally exploding over the course of a fraught, dreamlike eighty-three minutes. Taking influence from the era’s avant-garde underground as well as from the modernist methods of filmmakers like Jean-Luc Godard and Michelangelo Antonioni, Bergman fashions an expressionistic surface that mirrors the mental landscapes of his two sparring heroines, juxtaposing meditative landscape shots against stuttering montage freak-outs and ambitious, sculptural uses of the human face.