The secret wish of filmmaker Ingmar Bergman to become a writer is evident in at least two ways: (1) his repeated emphatic claims that he did not; (2) his way of sneaking in writing into his films. This article focuses on the latter. Seemingly unrevised and preliminary, textual information takes the shape of letters and notes written and/or read by the characters. When literary passages seemingly do occur (as in, for example, Persona), the quoted text in question is faked. If textual messages are emphasized in Bergman, it is less as literature than as the act of writing, a physical matter of paper, pen, or typewriter. This article investigates Bergman’s writing less in the auteur sense of him writing his own scripts, than in how writing permeates his work to the point where his films could be considered as productive detours. By looking at fictitious acts of writing in his films as well as the author’s own, peculiarly self-reflexive, writing habits insofar they are discernible in the Ingmar Bergman Archives, this article overturns the traditional notion of the screenplay as a kind of half-measure or necessary evil vis-à-vis the film.

The Face of AIDS Film Archive consists of documentation of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, shot all over the world beginning in 1988 by Swedish filmmaker and journalist Staffan Hildebrand. In this article, the archive’s particular characteristic of process is discussed and examined through four different perspectives: first, as an ongoing documentation of HIV/AIDS in the contemporaneous moments when it was filmed; second, as a commission of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm; third, as the product of a director with a strong personal vision and authorial presence; and finally, as an expression of Hildebrand’s self-defined AIDS activism.

Filmvetaren Anna Sofia Rossholm dyker ned i Ingmar Bergmans arbetsbok från Höstsonaten och hittar ett konstnärskap sprunget ur ett ständigt skiftande perspektiv mellan fantasi och verklighet, smärta och distans.

Via a combination of screenwriting theory and theories on literary manuscripts, this article approaches Ingmar Bergman’s screenwriting as process, from notebooks to script drafts and finished screenplays. It particularly emphasizes the playful dimensions in the early stages of the screenwriting process and the way the writing negotiates fiction and reality.

This article discusses the Ingmar Bergman Archive, a donation by Bergman himself, mainly consisting of notebooks, manuscripts, production documents and letters, as well as the screenwriting process behind the film Persona (1966). The study approaches the digital manuscript archive as an interface that lends itself to an understanding of the artwork as continuous movement of transformation across media, an understanding that also links to aesthetical ideas on the relations between words and images expressed in Bergman’s cinematographic work. The study opens with a discussion of these issues and continues with a reading of the self-reflexive film Persona in order to examine how the explicit reflections on the mediation are negotiated across notebook drafts and scripts. The different phases in the process of creation – from notes and drafts to script versions and film – reflect on the transitory nature of the text as well as drawing on the specificities of each form of expression.