10 Moments That Literally Stopped Movies

Ingmar Bergman's masterful 1966 psycho-drama Persona follows a young nurse, Alma (Bibi Andersson), whose sense of identity begins to disassociate while caring for a distressed actress, Elisabet Vogler (Liv Ullmann).

Bergman's film is experimental with a capital-E, jam-packed with fourth wall-breaking moments where the two central characters stare directly into the camera lens.

There are also myriad references to the film's own cinematic construction, namely opening and closing with a projector firing up and shutting down.

At almost exactly the movie's mid-point, as Alma and Elisabet's personas merge, the film itself appears to "break," the celluloid glitching across the screen until it melts.

This is followed by a few seconds of reversed dialogue and brief flashes of clips shown at the start of the film, before the story resumes.

On a superficial level one could call this a parody of the traditional cinematic intermission, though given Persona's intermingling of human memory and celluloid itself, Bergman's clearly saying much more than that.