Bergman ‘masterpiece’ to hit the screen
DISCOVERED in Ingmar Bergman’s archive, a previously unknown manuscript about sexual and social revolution in the 1960s is to be turned into a movie, nearly a decade after the Swedish director’s death.
Sixty-four minutes with Rebecka, written by the legendary filmmaker when he was aged 51, was found in 2002 when Bergman donated his work to an institute in his name, shelved among thousands of letters, completed screenplays and photographs.
“Finding an unknown but finished Ingmar Bergman screenplay would be the equivalent of finding a manuscript by Hemingway or if not Shakespeare,” Jan Holmberg, head of the Ingmar Berman Foundation said.
Bergman portrays the main character Rebecka as an emotionally alienated teacher of deaf mutes, seeking sexual and political liberation during the tumultuous 1960s.
“This is the mature artist at his very best, making one of his masterpieces,” Holmberg said.
The married Rebecka visits a sex club while she is pregnant and decides to leave her forgiving husband in the hand-written script, which touches on gay relationships, desire, guilt and mental suffering.
Bergman, who was an introverted and conservative filmmaker, portrays the era’s frenetic sexual and social revolution in the script, which was originally meant to be a movie collaboration between Bergman, Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa, a trio of directing giants.
The son of a Lutheran minister and a nurse, Bergman was born in 1918 in the Swedish town of Uppsala and had a strict religious upbringing, noticeable in many of his films. Bergman, who married five times and had nine children, also directed the psychological drama Persona and Fanny and Alexander, which won four Academy Awards in 1984.
He died in 2007 at the age of 89 in Faro, a Swedish island in the Baltic Sea.—