Persona [Kinematografi] (Original Swedish screenplay for the 1966 film) by Ingmar Bergman (director, screenwriter) - 1965

N.p.: N.p., 1965. Final Draft script for the legendary 1966 film, under the original Swedish title "Kinematografi." In Swedish.

"Persona" was in 2020 called "the greatest film ever made" by filmmaker and essayist Paul Schrader, a distinction he has considered probably as thoroughly as any cinema thinker of his generation. Schrader went on to note the ." . . [the stunning] feminine politics and the visual genius" of the film.

Two known copies of this script exist: one at the Svensk Film Institute, and one at the University of San Francisco Archives. This version of the script was called Script II by Bergman, was retitled Kinematografi by him, and has a prefatory note by him that is not included in the published screenplay for the film, a later revision, the content of which differs substantially from this example.

Some notable distinctions between this draft and the final script (the filmed version) include:

(1) A prologue consisting of only a short film strip with rapidly shifting images of nature (clouds, trees, moon landscape), followed by atmospheric sounds of words, after which Nurse Alma's face emerges, followed by the main narrative.

(2) There is no boy and no hospital morgue
where he wakes up, and the script does not mention the famous merging of Alma's and Elisabeth's face.

(3) There is no reference later on in the script that the film breaks during the confrontation between Alma and Elisabeth, though there is a meta-filmic insert just before the two women move to the doctor's house in Scene 13.

(4) Additional dialogue, notably a fairly long passage in which Elisabeth talks about her happy and hermetically close relationship with her husband.
The final script, a revision that followed the one offered here, was published in several languages in 1966, and has been reprinted in various forms in perpetuity ever since. This draft remains unpublished.

Criterion Collection 701. Ebert I. Rosenbaum 1000. Godard, Histoire(s) du cinema. Schrader, Canon Fodder 9. Vogel, "Film as a Subversive Art.