Legendary film director Ingmar Bergman has donated 45 crates of archival material to the Swedish Film Institute. The donation includes correspondence, scripts, notebooks, sketches, photographs, and behind-the-scenes footage from the making of 18 of his movies. The collection, which will be managed by the Ingmar Bergman Foundation, will be housed in a research and reference room in the institute’s Stockholm library, the Associated Press reported June 10.
“It is a donation of great national importance. It is very rare that you find an artist of international significance who has documented his own life in the way that Bergman has,” said Aase Kleveland, director general of the institute. Most of the material was shipped from Bergman’s home on an island in the Baltic Sea, but other items came from his office at Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theatre, where he has directed 36 plays.
Berman, 83, who retired from film directing in 1983, is preparing to return to movies with a sequel to his 1973 Scenes From a Marriage, scheduled to begin shooting in September.
Posted June 17, 2002.