Rolf Lindfors

Curator of the Archival Film Collections at the Swedish Film Institute. Born in Byske, Västerbotten.

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After studies at Uppsala University, where he also ran the local ciné-club, Rolf Lindfors was in 1968 hired by Harry Schein, founder and then-CEO of the Swedish Film Institute, to become the Curator of the Archival Film Collections, a position he held until 2003. When Lindfors began at the institute, the collections were still held at the Museum for Science and Technology, and together with Schein he ensured that the new facilities of Filmhuset, when they were ready to take in use in 1971, included one of the first sub-zero climate controlled vaults in the world for the preservation of film prints.

In the 1980s and 1990s, together with his life partner Bertil Wredlund, he published "Långfilm i Sverige", a series of volumes on all Swedish and non-Swedish feature films submitted to the Swedish censorship authorities since the practice started in 1911. The publication included facts about lengths, cuts, distribution titles, release dates etc, which over the years has proven to be an invaluable source of information for scholars and journalists, and arguably the most consulted publication in the daily work of the Stockholm archive staff.

Lindfors was a keen champion of the global archival movement, and he was involved in hosting the FIAF congress twice (in 1983 and 2003) in Stockholm. He served on the FIAF Cataloguing Commission between 1979 and 1997, during which time he worked on the current FIAF cataloguing rules. This experience made Rolf the key figure in the conversion of the catalogue card holdings into the first database of the Swedish Film Institute in the 1990s, which together with the the content in the 10-volume book series "Svensk filmografi" today lives on in the form of the Swedish Film Database.

Rolf Lindfors was also involved in the establishment of the film archive in Grängesberg, the first Swedish archive for small-gauge and non-professional film, for which he worked as a consultant in his final year at the Swedish Film Institute before retiring in 2004. He was also a member of the executive committee of Svenska filmakademin (the Swedish Film Academy) for many years, and he enjoyed touring all corners of Sweden with illustrated lectures, screening films with local relevance.

Jon Wengström (2015)