Italian film-maker Bernardo Bertolucci, who won Oscars with The Last Emperor and whose erotic drama Last Tango in Paris enthralled and shocked the world, died on Monday. He was 77. Bertolucci\u2019s press office, Punto e Virgola, confirmed the death in an email to The Associated Press. Italy\u2019s state-run RAI said Bertolucci died at his home in Rome, surrounded by family.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe will be remembered among the greatest in Italian and world film,\u201d the Venice Film Festival, which awarded Bertolucci a lifetime achievement award in 2007, said in a statement. Bertolucci\u2019s movies often explored the sexual relations among characters stuck in a psychological crisis, as in Last Tango. The self-professed Marxist also did not shy away from politics and ideology, as in The Conformist, which some critics consider Bertolucci\u2019s masterpiece.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen it comes to commercial cinema, I have the strange pleasure of feeling that I\u2019m from another tribe, an infiltrator,\u201d he told Italian daily Corriere della Sera in 1990. He was honored for lifetime achievement at the Cannes film festival in 2011. Bertolucci\u2019s movies also bore the imprint of the director\u2019s own experiences in psychoanalysis. He always said that making films was his way of communicating with the audience. It was his personal language.<\/p>\n
\u201cMaybe I\u2019m an idealist, but I still think of the movie theatre as a cathedral where we all go together to dream the dream together,\u201d he said upon receiving an award from the Director\u2019s Guild of America for his 1987 film \u201cThe Last Emperor.\u201d That movie handed Bertolucci his greatest success. In 1988 it won all the nine Academy Awards that it had been nominated for including best movie and best director.<\/p>\n
It was filmed in the lush and vivid style that was one of Bertolucci\u2019s trademarks. It featured grandiose scenes and intimate moments, and a flashback structure that is typical of biopics. Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who often worked with Bertolucci and won one of his three Oscars with Last Emperor, compared the director to William Faulkner. \u201cHis style is not unlike that of Faulkner who\u2019ll go on for 30 pages without a period. Bernardo doesn\u2019t just use the camera to convey just one sentence. Everything flows into everything else,\u201d said Storaro.<\/p>\n
Bertolucci was born in the northern city of Parma on March 16, 1941, the son of poet Attilio Bertolucci and his wife Ninetta. The family moved to Rome when Bertolucci was 13. He had originally wanted to be a poet like his father, but later turned to movies. He began his career while still a student at the University of Rome as an assistant director on Pier Paolo Pasolini\u2019s film Accattone. A year later, in 1962, he made his first film The Grim Reaper, about the murder of a prostitute.<\/p>\n
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, a reflection on politics and the middle-class set in the director\u2019s hometown; The Spider\u2019s Strategem in 1970, the story of a man who returns to the scene of the killing of his father, an anti-Fascist hero, to discover a web of lies; and The Conformist, which is based on an Alberto Moravia novel and depicts the struggle of a man, Jean-Louis Trintignant, to conform to society and expectations in Fascist Italy. But it was with Last Tango that Bertolucci shot to stardom, and notoriety.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s The Rite of Spring as a revolutionary work of art.<\/p>\n
The movie was banned in Italy just after its release in 1972, and was not released again until 1987. The case went back and forth in the courts until the high criminal court banned the film in 1976 and ordered all copies confiscated and destroyed. Bertolucci, Brando and Schneider, as well as the producer Alberto Grimaldi, were sentenced to two months in jail and a fine of $40 each although the jail terms were suspended.<\/p>\n
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. \u201cI should have called my agent or had my lawyer come to the set because you can\u2019t force someone to do something that isn\u2019t in the script, but at the time, I didn\u2019t know that,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cMarlon said to me: \u2018Maria, don\u2019t worry, it\u2019s just a movie,\u2019 but during the scene, even though what Marlon was doing wasn\u2019t 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\u2019t console me or apologize. Thankfully, there was just one take,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Bertolucci\u2019s later movies included The Sheltering Sky, featuring Debra Winger and John Malkovich as an American couple trying to inject new life into their relationship during a trip to Africa. The 1990 work won Bertolucci a nomination at the Golden Globes.<\/p>\n
He also directed Little Buddha in 1993 with Keanu Reeves as Siddharta; Stealing Beauty in 1996 starring Liv Tyler as a teenager discovering sex during a trip to Italy; The Dreamers, again an erotic drama set against a political backdrop in this case the 1968 student riots in Paris starring Eva Green and Louis Garrel as cinema-loving siblings who strike up a friendship with visiting American student Michael Pitt. The film featured full-frontal male nudity but was released uncut in the United States.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Italian film-maker Bernardo Bertolucci, who won Oscars with The Last Emperor and whose erotic drama Last Tango in Paris enthralled and shocked the world, died on Monday. He was 77. Bertolucci\u2019s press office, Punto e Virgola, confirmed the death in an email to The Associated Press. Italy\u2019s state-run RAI said Bertolucci died at his home […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":48446,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[123],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-48445","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48445","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48445"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48445\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":48447,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48445\/revisions\/48447"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48446"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48445"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48445"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48445"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}