Persona

Ingmar Bergman's Persona, completed in 1966 after a hospitalisation that very nearly ended his career, divides his work in two. Everything before is accessible to the older critical vocabulary of philosophical drama; everything after operates with the formal radicality this film established. Persona sits permanently in the highest tier of every Sight & Sound poll, currently number 18 in the 2022 critics' chart.

The actress Elisabeth Vogler (Liv Ullmann) suffers a mid-performance breakdown of Electra and goes silent. She is sent to a remote island cottage with the young nurse Alma (Bibi Andersson), who is to care for her while she recovers. Alma talks; Elisabeth listens. Across weeks of summer light, the boundary between the two women begins to disintegrate. The famous merged-face shot, the prologue's hellish montage of cinema-history fragments, the moment a film strip burns mid-frame, Bergman is doing something that has no precedent in his earlier work, and that he never repeated in quite the same form.

Andersson's monologue about a beach orgy is widely considered one of the most charged extended dialogues in cinema, performed with an erotic candour shocking for 1966. Sven Nykvist's photography is the most precisely modulated of his Bergman collaborations. The film has generated more academic writing than any other Bergman work, and remains genuinely strange, sixty years on, it has not been domesticated by the critical apparatus that surrounds it.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The film that proved European art cinema could be a place of authentic experimentation, not just refined drama. Mid-career Bergman at his most formally daring, and Andersson's career performance.