Ingmar Bergman’s work was often erotic, even, or especially, when sex was not the ostensible subject matter. There is a stark sensuality and fascination in some of the bleakest situations; an eros to go with the thanatos. But the recently discovered screenplay Sixty-Four Minutes With Rebecka – which Bergman evidently intended to retitle The White Wall and make as an English-language movie, forming his part of a tripartite collaboration with Federico Fellini and Akira Kurosawa – really is notably sexy, even if the sexiness is coloured by his distinctive anxiety, self-inspection, self-reproach, and intimate marital anguish. For Bergman, like Socrates, the unexamined sexual life was not worth living.

From what we have been able to glean from extracts, and from the description offered by director Suzanne Osten, who will initially be mounting a radio production, the script is Bergman’s answer to the liberated excitement of the late 1960s, offering treatments of sexualities gay and straight, and the kind of contemporary political slant that he was sometimes attacked in his lifetime for avoiding. It was also composed in a period when Bergman was beginning to look outside Sweden for co-production opportunities.

A beautiful, pregnant young woman, Rebecka (Bergman planned to cast Katharine Ross, famed at the time for The Graduate) is a teacher of hearing-impaired children. Bored with her existence, she yearns for sexual and social liberation. There are violent, transgressive scenes involving a visit to a sex club.

Bergman had intended for Katharine Ross to play Rebecka. Photograph: Cine Text/Sportsphoto Ltd/ Allstar

At first glance, the project bears an eerie similarity to Richard Brooks’s 1977 shocker Looking for Mr Goodbar, starring Diane Keaton as a teacher of hearing-impaired children who goes on her own sexual quest. That was based on a 1975 novel, in turn based on a 1973 news story; there can be no link, other than the spirit of the times. One scene which has been published online describes Rebecka teaching a sullenly sexy and provocative young girl, Anna. The intense confrontation, the hint of unspoken understandings and sympathies, might conceivably put the audience in mind of Bergman’s Persona. Or the similarly intense generational resentment and rage bound up in the teacher-pupil relationship might recall Autumn Sonata. As for the other scene which has been published, we are on the familiar ground of intimate domestic discord, which Bergman was famously to dramatise in 1972 in Scenes from a Marriage.

As for Fellini and Kurosawa and their own planned contributions, this is an open question: La Strada and Rashomon were on Bergman’s personal list of 11 favourite films. He had made a little-liked pastiche of Fellini’s 8 ½ in 1964 called All These Women, and had a profound admiration for Kurosawa, calling his own The Virgin Spring a “lousy imitation” of that film-maker. Whatever was supposed to happen to the “Rebecka trilogy”, he and Kurosawa don’t appear to have had any close relationship. On Bergman’s 70th birthday, Kurosawa, then 77, wrote him what amounted to a fan letter that does not refer to their supposed joint venture, urging him to come out of retirement, because “a human being is not really capable of creating good works until he is 80”. Sixty-Four Minutes With Rebecka, written by the 51-year-old Bergman, promises to be intriguing.