Bertolucci enthralled audiences
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.
Bertolucci’s press office confirmed the death in an email. Italy ’s state-run RAI said Bertolucci died at his home in Rome, surrounded by family.
“He will be remembered among the greatest in Italian and world film,” said the Venice Film Festival, which awarded Bertolucci a lifetime achievement award in 2007.
Bertolucci’s movies often explored the sexual relations among characters stuck in a psychological crisis, as in Last Tango, which was banned in his own Italy for more than a decade. 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 Hollywood 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, despite the controversies that his sexually provocative work would stir and some commercial flops.
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 Directors 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 that it had been nominated for — including best movie and best director.
Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who often worked with Bertolucci and won one of his three Oscars with Last Emperor, compared the director to William Faulkner.
“His style is not unlike that of Faulkner, who’ll go on for 30 pages without a period. Bernardo doesn’t just use the camera to convey just one sentence. Everything flows into everything else,” Storaro said.
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.
Schneider herself would say she was traumatized by the movie. The actress, who died in 2011, was just 19 during filming and told The Daily Mail in 2007 that a rape scene involving a stick of butter was included without warning.
“I should have called my agent or had my lawyer come to the set, because you can’t force someone to do something that isn’t in the script. But at the time, I didn’t know that,” she said.
“Marlon said to me: ‘Maria, don’t worry, it’s just a movie,’ but during the scene, even though what Marlon was doing wasn’t real, I was crying real tears. I felt humiliated and to be honest, I felt a little raped, both by Marlon and by Bertolucci. After the scene, Marlon didn’t console me or apologize. Thankfully, there was just one take,” she said.
Born March 16, 1941 in the northern city of Parma, Bertolucci was the son of poet Attilio Bertolucci and his wife Ninetta, and originally he wanted to write poetry like his father. The family moved to Rome when Bertolucci was 13. He was married to the English writer and director Clare Peploe. They had no children.