Hacker Cinema
Persona
1966 · Film · 85 min
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.
1 positive5 neutralfrom 6 commenters
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6 comments on Hacker News
Thanks! Here's the full list: 2001: A Space Odyssey, 8½, Aguirre the Wrath of God, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, All That Heaven Allows, Apocalypse Now, Ashes and Diamonds, A Woman Under the Influence, Barry Lyndon, Bicycle Thieves, Breathless, Casablanca, Céline and Julie Go Boating, Chinatown, Chinese Roulette, Citizen Kane, City Lights, City of Pirates, Contempt, Daisies, Damnation, Dishonored, Earth, Electra My Love, El Topo, Eraserhead, Eyes Wide Shut, Film Socialisme, Fitzcarraldo, Fuego en Castilla, Hiroshima Mon Amour, Holy Motors, Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome, In a Year with 13 Moons, India Song, Inland Empire, Irma Vep, Koyaanisqatsi, La Dolce Vita, La Jetée, Late Spring, L'Eau de la Seine, Le Voyage dans la Lune, Lolita, Los Olvidados, Lost Highway, Lucifer Rising, Man with a Movie Camera, Metropolis, Mirror, Mulholland Drive, Night Music, Ordet, Orpheus, Persona, Pickpocket, Playtime, Psycho, Rebecca, Rosemary's Baby, Rumble Fish, Scarface, Seven Samurai, Sherlock Jr., Singin' in the Rain, Stalker, Sunset Boulevard, Taste of Cherry, Taxi Driver, Testament of Orpheus, The 400 Blows, The Blood of a Poet, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, The Color of Pomegranates, The Green Ray, The Holy Mountain, The Isle, The Lady from Shanghai, The Night of the Hunter, The Passion of Joan of Arc, The Seventh Seal, The Spirit of the Beehive, The Tales of Hoffmann, The Tree of Life, The Turin Horse, Time of the Gypsies, Tokyo Story, Touch of Evil, Trans-Europ-Express, Ugetsu, Un Chien Andalou, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Vampyr, Videodrome, Wavelength, Werckmeister Harmonies, Wild Strawberries, Moonlight Sonata, Stellar, The Haunted House Biased toward European art cinema, experimental work, and directors who broke conventional narrative rules.
> I would love to see it become a golden era of the niche matinee where smaller theaters can flourish that show older films, art films, foreign films etc.
You should love the reality we live in, then, because that's exactly what's been happening and it's in some sense part of the problem.
My spouse and I go to the theaters as often as we ever have, but it's very noticeable that the lion's share of the movies we now watch in theater are special showings of older movie classics or "cinema of country X" type festival events, which than often select from the last ten years or so. This has held for the past half-decade across two countries.
When we lived in Seoul, there was a few years when it was a popular couple date option to go to open air rooftop cinemas showing modern classics like "Her" or "Before Sunrise", or to go to the Silver Cinemas originally subsidized for seniors where you'd watch old Hollywood classics from the 40s to 60s (we managed to watch a 70mm projection of all the 4 hours of "Lawrence of Arabia" that way). Now in Berlin, there's a large selection of small cinemas showing random movies from all eras. Our favorite is situated in an old DVD store and specializes in a combo of movies and serving specialty whisky ... it's as hipster as it sounds. I think the last movies we went to see there were "First Blood" and "Persona" and "Leon", I guess.
And it's fun, but at the same time it's kind of sad your only two options are watching the latest Marvel flick or All Time Top 250 movies from the 1970s. That still means so much that movies used to be is gone. The second-tier smaller blockbusters you had in the 80s and 90s for example, non-franchise original IP, or the even the lesser known movies from decades past. If you're not on top of the food order, you're just gone.
I'm not too doom-y and gloom-y overall on the state of movies, there's still more interesting movies each year than I can keep up with if I aggregate all the possible venues. But the selection in cinemas is, well, very two-note.
La Haine (1995)[0]: not so much that I saw it differently, more that I felt less crazy for seeing it as it was. I come from those exact areas and times, and even twenty years later there is a terrible amount of similarity in how things are unraveling.
Children of Men (2006)[1]: for the combination of cinematography and the dystopian atmosphere.
Departures / Okuribito (2008)[2]: the subtlety and elegance of the Japanese touch when brushing against Life and Death.
Persona (1966)[3]: I can and can't wrap my head around this movie. I think it left a trace on me in a way that my conscious self doesn't address but the subconscious plays with.
The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007)[4]: there are few things that can put a person against their own mind more than the locked-in syndrome. There's a lot of confusion, humility and strength to find in such apparent helplessness and lack of control. I think of it when I encounter people with ALS or other neuro-degenerative illnesses, and I think of it when I explore my own journey throughout the depths of mental illness.
Amour (2012)[5]: when you go through certain inevitable journeys with people you love, there's so much to be found in the most essentially simple things.
I'm sure there are other impactful things out there but my memory is pretty spotty at times.
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0113247/
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0206634/
[2] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1069238/
[3] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060827/
[4] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0401383/
[5] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1602620/
Strange that you think great audio is something only action films need. As soon as 5.1 mixing and encoding tools became cheap and widely available, even independent filmmakers writing "real dialog and stories" rushed to adopt them. And film schools emphasize how careful audio editing (and appropriate playback equipment) can bring a rich new dimension to one’s filmmaking, and some of the textbook examples that are used are 1960s auteur cinema like Ingmar Bergman’s Persona.
He talks about designing a film for the big screen experience but every film he mentioned except maybe "North by Northwest" is vastly superior in a good home theater. "Persona" by Ingmar Bergman is a wonderful film but would gain nothing on a modern digital screen with Atmos sound and speakers that can break windows. His preferred movies are intimate, patient and beautiful but do not in any way take advantage of the format. Many classic films are actual big-screen spectacles like "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly", "Lawrence of Arabia", "Wizard of Oz", anything by Akira Kurosawa and hundreds of others but his tastes strike me as explicitly and decidedly "small-screen" and almost anti-cinema if you consider the "cinema" distinction primarily the larger format. Small, intimate movies are great but are sub-par experiences in a cinema next to popcorn munchers and mobile phones. I am a huge movie buff who actually had a Filmstruck subscription and still pay for MUBI. I love the movies he loves but they do not work well in theaters. I would much rather watch these at home. I'll go to the theater for Marvel because those movies are much better in a theater. This is simply not true for his tastes.
Fantastic! Thanks.
Lynch holds a place in my heart for getting me deeply into abstract film early on, and then greater cinema in general, though I haven't watched him in ages now and don't really feel drawn toward revisiting. I guess I could say he prepared me eventually for the likes of Tarkovsky, Bergman (easy to see parallels with Persona in his work, though there're echoes of that one all over), Hou Hsiao-Hsien, etc.
I've been meaning to watch Philippe Grandieux, who I've read compares well with Lynch.