I have a feeling disturbing to learn that Bertolucci has been fired from life. Or what that meant to him the existence cloistered in a wheelchair. I affects his disappearance, his films (regardless of whether I enamoraran some of his films and abominara of others) represents a time definitely extinct, in which the auteur was a cultural event and vital, nourished multiple, and obsessive conversations, required identification or refusal; in Hollywood, the teachers drew projects that today would be despised and rejected, the film buffs of any party (including the snobs and the members of the fashion) are interested in the european cinema that had its own voice. And had imposters, but also real artists. No one can argue back that essence to Bernardo Bertolucci.

Speak, memory. In my case, the impact that it was something that she brought this man to me will last till the last day. I was 19 years old. It was winter. Having little money, I went hitchhiking to the south of France. To see a film that was banned (like so many) in that Spain viscose. Its title was as lyrical as it is haunting last tango in Paris. There were endless caravans of spaniards to see it, I suspect that for reasons connected only with the curiosity and not with the art. Had that Brando sodomizaba in it the protagonist, with the pragmatic help of butter. It was very cold. It was snowing in Perpignan. I was going to live two hours in a state of hypnosis, also feel pain and fear, note that I removed all of those fibers are connected with the soul. The paintings of beings in the decomposition of the for me unknown, Francis Bacon, filled with the titles of credit and it was still very dim the saxophone of Gato Barbieri, that after aullaría, throw it moans, it would be sensual, to create the sound more romantic and desperate that I have heard from one screen. The first image, in the middle of a magical light and sad, was that of a man cursing God.

And then, a story in which everything is volcanic: the desire, the love, Dinamobet the flight, the desolation, the loss, the memory, the mystery, the vomiting of the soul, the need to scare that monster called loneliness. I understood too soon, still so young, that story of the wild, twilight and tragic, their beauty, their impossible happy ending. And every time I see and hear the monologue sadomasochistic Brando before the corpse of his suicidal wife, the crying bursts.

Bertolucci is much more than my unhealthy fixation with his unforgettable tango. And agree that plenty of the appearance of that clown’s hysterical called Jean-Pierre Léaud. I am also confident that Bertolucci had been sent to the stake. The announcement would have been punished by macho and nihilistic.

I don’t want to check by caution some of his films. I was fascinated by his films, admitting that his personality and his sensitivity were powerful, until the unease and more cloudy The conformist. But I remember with love the first part of Novecento, the friendship between the son of the farmer and the landowner In the second I just got bored of the flag waving. And it is beautiful, enigmatic, poetic and sicoanalítica the relationship between the mother and the son on The moon.

And Bertolucci also adapted their intimate universe to the spectacle of Hollywood telling us in the great The last emperor the progressive brokenness and the manipulation to which it is subjected to (separate you from everything you love) the one who was born to be a owner of an empire. His testament is also poignant: You and me. I don’t know the future of these two troubled siblings who reunite a few days in the basement of the family home, Bowie woos you with a version of Space Oddity in Italian Ragazzo solo, ragazza sola. How much he knew Bertolucci of the loneliness, the passion, the complexity of the feelings. What a beautiful was its aesthetics, to express it.