Criterion releases Persona

As the company puts it:

By the midsixties, Ingmar Bergman had already conjured many of the cinema’s most unforgettable images. But with the radical Persona, this supreme artist attained new levels of visual poetry. In the first of a series of legendary performances for Bergman, Liv Ullmann plays a stage actor who has inexplicably gone mute; an equally mesmerizing Bibi Andersson is the garrulous young nurse caring for her in a remote island cottage. While isolated together there, the women perform a mysterious spiritual and emotional transference that would prove to be one of cinema’s most influential creations. Acted with astonishing nuance and shot in stark contrast and soft light by the great Sven Nykvist, Persona is a penetrating, dreamlike work of profound psychological depth.

• New, 2K digital restoration, with uncompressed monaural soundtrack on the Blu-ray
• New visual essay on the film’s prologue by Ingmar Bergman scholar Peter Cowie
• New interviews with actor Liv Ullmann and filmmaker Paul Schrader
• Excerpted archival interviews with Bergman, Ullmann, and actor Bibi Andersson
• On-set footage, with audio commentary by Bergman historian Birgitta Steene
• Liv & Ingmar, a 2012 feature documentary directed by Dheeraj Akolkar
• Trailer
• New English subtitle translation
• PLUS: A booklet featuring an essay by film scholar Thomas Elsaesser, an excerpt from the 1970 book Bergman on Bergman, and an excerpted 1977 interview with Andersson