Paolo Taviani, half of acclaimed Italian filmmaking duo, at 92
Paolo Taviani, a movie director who worked in inseparable tandem with his brother to create some of the most lauded works in modern Italian film, among them “Padre Padrone” and “The Night of the Shooting Stars,” died Feb. 29 at a hospital in Rome. He was 92.
The cause was pulmonary edema, said his son, Ermanno.
Paolo and Vittorio Taviani codirected more than 20 movies together in a career that lasted more than half a century. They were not the only celebrated sibling duo in the industry; in the United States, Joel and Ethan Coen made films including “Fargo” (1996) and “No Country for Old Men” (2007), and Lana and Lilly Wachowski gave audiences “The Matrix” (1999).
But among connoisseurs of international cinema, the film critic Terrence Rafferty once observed, the Tavianis were known as “the greatest cinematic brother act since Louis and Auguste Lumière,” the Frenchmen who in 1895 invented the cinématographe and made one of the first motion pictures.
Vittorio, born in 1929, and Paolo, who followed two years later, grew up in a small Tuscan town, San Miniato, where they had few opportunities to see films beyond “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” and other animated Disney features.
The sons of an antifascist lawyer, they lost their home in a German attack during World War II and were living in Pisa when they saw “Paisà,” director Roberto Rossellini’s 1946 drama depicting the Allied liberation of Italy in the searingly spare style called neorealism.
“There on the screen was everything that had happened to all of us just a few months before,” Vittorio Taviani told The New York Times in 1986, speaking, as both brothers often did, for the two of them. “Seeing it unreel before us was glorious and tragic, and we realized at once that film was the one means we had to understand our own reality.”
Neorealism, which prevailed in Italian cinema in the late 1940s and early 1950s, was in essence the opposite of escapism, projecting on the screen the deprivations endured by the Italian population after the war.
Deeply influenced by the social and political commitments of neorealism, the Taviani brothers added to it a poetic style all their own.
“They charted a very important path in postwar Italian cinema,” said Millicent Marcus, a professor of Italian studies and film studies at Yale University, counting the brothers among the filmmakers who “elaborated on the neorealist premise of making films that matter.”
Among their best known works was “Padre Padrone” (1977), translated in English as “My Father, My Master,” which received the Palme d’Or, the top prize awarded at the Cannes Film Festival in France.
The film, originally made for Italian TV, was based on the memoir of Gavino Ledda, an illiterate shepherd who had known no world beyond the hills of Sardinia until he escaped his sadistic father, moved to the Italian mainland with the army, pursued a university education, and became a scholar of linguistics.
In the neorealist tradition of including nonprofessional actors on screen, the Tavianis cast the real-life Ledda as a narrator. In another decision that was a hallmark of their work, they featured sweeping vistas of the Italian countryside, revealing its beauty without romanticizing the reality of rural existence.
“The film is vivid and very moving, coarse but seldom blunt, and filled with raw landscapes that underscore the naturalness and inevitability of the father-son rituals it depicts,” reviewer Janet Maslin wrote in the Times.
The brothers turned to their own experience in “The Night of the Shooting Stars” (1982), which is set in Tuscany during the war and depicts the villagers of San Miniato who escape the occupying Germans by fleeing south toward the advancing Americans. Many of the villagers who remained behind were killed when the cathedral where they took shelter was destroyed.
Paolo, Vittorio, and their family had been among the fleeing villagers, whose story is recounted in the movie by a woman looking back on her childhood. The story is brutal, but the brothers give to it what New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael described as the “full fresco treatment.”
“This setting is magical, like a Shakespearean forest, and the woman’s account has the quality of folklore and legend,” Kael wrote.
On the set, Paolo and Vittorio Taviani worked so closely together that they gave the impression of being a single director. The actor Marcello Mastroianni, who starred in their post-Napoleonic historical drama “Allonsanfan,” addressed them as “Paolovittorio” and remarked after shooting the 1974 film, “there were two of them?”
When one brother was behind the camera, the other stepped aside, watching but never intervening. Then they traded places, and traded places again.
“A few years ago, we met the Coen brothers,” Vittorio Taviani told the Guardian in 2013. “We asked them: ‘How do you work together?’ They replied: ‘No, you started this whole thing — you tell us.’ But then the four of us agreed that it must remain a mystery.”
Mr. Taviani was born in San Miniato, in the province of Pisa, on Nov. 8, 1931. He and Vittorio had three siblings. Both their father and their mother, who had been a teacher before she was married, were antifascists.
The parents introduced their children to the arts, taking them to the opera in nearby Florence, and instilled in them the liberal ideals that Paolo and Vittorio would carry forward into their filmmaking career.
After the war, both brothers enrolled at the University of Pisa, where Vittorio studied law and Paolo studied literature. After they saw “Paisà,” they abandoned their schooling and immersed themselves in film.
One of their first major films, written and directed with Valentino Orsini, was “A Man for Burning” (1962), about a union organizer who attempts to confront the Mafia.
With their keen literary sensibility, the Taviani brothers won critical acclaim for “Kaos” (1984), an adaptation of several short stories by the Nobel Prizewinning Sicilian writer Luigi Pirandello.
They also adapted works by Leo Tolstoy, including the Russian writer’s story about an imprisoned revolutionary, “Divine and Human,” which the Tavianis remade as the 1972 film “St. Michael Had a Rooster.”
They made their directorial debut in English with “Good Morning Babylon” (1987), about a pair of impoverished Italian workmen who immigrate to the United States and find themselves building sets for the film director D.W. Griffith’s 1916 silent movie “Intolerance.”
For years, the brothers spent every morning walking their dogs together in a park in Rome, reflecting on life and film. Vittorio, who died in 2018, once remarked that “we have different characters but the same nature” and that “our choices in life and art are the same,” wryly conceding that “we do have different wives.”
Mr. Taviani’s wife of 66 years, Lina Nerli Taviani, a costume designer, worked with her husband and brother-in-law as well as many other noted Italian film directors. Besides his wife and his son, he leaves a daughter, Valentina, who is also a costume designer, all of Rome; a brother; two sisters; and four grandchildren.