Bernardo Bertolucci, the last frontier of a generation of Italian directors will be able to transform the film universal, has passed away this Monday at age 77 in his home in the roman Monteverde Vecchio. Author of monuments such as The last tango in Paris, Novecento and The last emperor, which won nine Oscars in 1988, among others, best director and best screenplay, I had spent years in a wheelchair fighting against a long illness. In the last two decades, following the premiere of Besieged in 1998, just released two films: the Dreamers (2003), a particular vision of may ‘ 68, and his last film, You and I, 2012, based on a short novel by Niccolò Ammaniti.
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Born in Parma in 1940, he was the son of poet Attilio Bertolucci and professor Ninetta Giovanardi. He was a close friend of Pier Paolo Pasolini and advocate, lover of the Communist Party. In 2007 he received the Golden Lion to the career of The Venice film Festival and, in 2011, the Golden Palm of Honor of the festival of Cannes. Throughout his career, filmed a fortnight of films, including productions, colossal and tiny, experimental works and more traditional, and left a stamp unforgettable of author in the Italian cinema and international. He was also a screenwriter, producer, poet, and “polemicist”, as reminded by the Italian media.
Bertolucci called the attention gaining still rather young Award Viareggio for the book of poems In near the mistero. “I wrote poetry, but I decided not to continue because he was too good and couldn’t beat him,” recalled the filmmaker to his father. Hence, of the literary tradition and music, also emerged the taste for the text, the dramaturgy and film-capable of portraying a time. But Bertolucci always acknowledged the enormous influence on his film Pasolini, whom he met because his father had edited his Ragazzi di vita and had moved to the same building. The filmmaker explained it this way in an interview with James Franco in Il Corriere della Sera: “One day, when I was 21 I found myself in front of the door and said to me: ‘Hey, you like movies, right? Because I’m going to roll a and I want you to do wizard in the direction. It will be called Accattone’. I told him I had never done wizard, and he answered me that, nor had directed any film.” In fact, the first tape that he signed, The crop to be sterile, she left a Betgram story of their own Pasolini.
Thus was born a career that led him to direct a handful of films and that it absorbed also the aroma of the innovations of the Nouvelle Vague in French, which was discovered pasted whole afternoons in the seats of the Cinémathèque in paris in the sixties. There later, he experienced the may ‘ 68 that he lived too intensely in Italy and painted the portrait, for some of a somewhat frivolous, in Dreamers. There were No studies or technical training. At the beginning, as he saw to do to Pasolini, resigned to professional actors and flirteó with the current experimental.
expand photo Bertolucci, in the presentation in London of ‘The last tango in Paris’, on march 14, 1973. Central Press/Hulton Archive/
But the passport of Bertolucci in the pantheon of cinema, the issuing The last tango in Paris, his film more controversial, with allegations of rape of Maria Schneider Marlon Brando, the director of photography, Vittorio Storaro, declined after. Released in 1972, the film was banned in Spain, and could not be seen until the 16 of January, 1978. In an interview in the el pais newspaper in 1985, the filmmaker commented on the importance of the personality of Marlon Brando in the film: “Yes, influenced a lot. Brando is a monster prehistoric to the cinema of the past. In principle not going to interpret it. The actors chosen were Jean-Louis Trintignan and Dominique Sanda, but it turned out that Trintignan was a shy and dared not to make the scenes of the abandoned house and Dominique Sanda was pregnant, so I had to give up both.”
Novecento is a monument from all points of view. A massive chronicle of the first five decades of the Italy of the TWENTIETH century, from the death of Giuseppe Verdi in 1901. Just the day you are born the two friends who star in the film and that will account for both time after two italies that, in some way, still cross today every morning in the street. Communism and fascism; the revolutionary left, and the bourgeoisie, former much later. The closing of the ports and which today, sadly, has been silenced.
The great epic (314 minutes), produced by Alberto Grimaldi with Hollywood stars such as Robert De Niro or a Donald Sutherland that put a face to a fascism with some tics not so distant, had influence even in the records of newborns, where a whole generation of parents of the progresía Italian signed up to their stems with the name of Elm: as the character that Gerard Depardieu gave life to the combatant worker.
twentieth century was the affirmation of a definitive to the cross-section of Bertolucci, also to the other side of the Atlantic. But will the recognition in Hollywood came with The last emperor (1987), the tragic and romantic story of Pu Yi , the last representative of the dynasty, the manchu, perhaps one of his works less gracious, but the only one that has earned a Italian director, the Oscar for the best direction.