‘The last emperor of Italian film is gone’
Critically successful director didn’t shy from controversy
ROME— Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, who won Oscars with The Last Emperor and whose erotic drama Last
Tango in Paris enthralled and shocked the world, died Monday. He was 77.
Italy’s state-run broadcaster RAI said Bertolucci died at his home in Rome, surrounded by family.
“He will be remembered among the greatest in Italian and world film,” the Venice Film Festival, which awarded Bertolucci a lifetime achievement award in 2007, said in a statement.
Bertolucci’s movies often explored the sexual relations among characters stuck in a psychological crisis, as in Last Tan
go. The self-professed Marxist also did not shy away from politics and ideology, as in The Conformist, which some critics consider Bertolucci’s masterpiece.
Despite working with A-list American and international stars, Bertolucci always defended his own filmmaking style against what he said was the pressure of the U.S. film industry.
He maintained critical success for most of his career, weathering the controversies that his sexually provocative work would stir and some commercial flops.
“When it comes to commercial cinema, I have the strange pleasure of feeling that I’m from another tribe, an infiltrator,” he told Italian daily Corriere della Sera in 1990.
He was honoured for lifetime achievement at the Cannes Film Festival in 2011.
Bertolucci’s movies also bore the imprint of the director’s own experiences in psychoanalysis. He always said that making films was his way of communicating with the audience. It was his personal language.
“Maybe I’m an idealist, but I still think of the movie theatre as a cathedral where we all go together to dream the dream together,” he said upon receiving an award from the Director’s Guild of America for his 1987 film The Last Emperor.
That movie handed Bertolucci his greatest success. In 1988 it won all nine Academy Awards it had been nominated for, including best movie and best director.
“The last emperor of Italian film is gone,” said Oscar-winning director Roberto Benigni and his wife, the actress Nicoletta Braschi, on learning of his death.
Bertolucci began his career while still a student at the University of Rome as an assistant director on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film Accattone. A year later, in 1962, he made his first film The Grim Reaper, about the murder of a prostitute.
Soon he established himself as one of the brightest young stars of international cinema. By his early 30s, he had already directed highly acclaimed movies: Before the Revolution in 1964; The Spider’s Stratagem in 1970 and The Conformist, which is based on an Alberto Moravia novel and depicts the struggle of a man to conform to society in Fascist Italy.
But it was with Last Tango that Bertolucci shot to stardom and notoriety.
The film, starring Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider as a middle-aged man and younger woman who engage in a brutal sexual relationship in a bare Paris apartment, shocked the world and incurred censorship in his native country.
But its raw and improvisational style also earned Brando and Bertolucci Oscar nominations, and was likened by New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael to Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring as a revolutionary work of art.
The movie was banned in Italy just after its release in 1972 and was not released again until 1987.
His later movies included The Sheltering Sky in 1990, featuring Debra Winger and John Malkovich as an American couple trying to inject new life into their relationship during a trip to Africa; Little Buddha in 1993 with Keanu Reeves as Siddhartha; and Stealing Beauty in 1996 starring Liv Tyler as a teenager discovering sex during a trip to Italy
Bertolucci was married to the English writer and director Clare Peploe.