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| Biography: Bernardo Bertolucci |
Bernardo Bertolucci (born 1940), director of "Last Tango in Paris" and "The Last Emperor", is considered one of the modern masters of international filmmaking.
The grandchild of a revolutionary who grew up loving the fine arts and literature, Bernardo Bertolucci revolutionized the art of cinema with his frank films about politics and sexuality. The Italian director has made some of the landmark films of the modern era, earning international recognition and industry accolades along the way. He has worked with some of the finest actors in the world, including Marlon Brando, Gerard Depardieu, and Robert De Niro. Bertolucci's films have ranged from the exquisitely personal to the grand epic, but he has always kept his political and philosophical concerns front and center in his work. His resume of achievements includes multiple Academy Award nominations and a Best Director statuette for his 1987 masterpiece The Last Emperor.
Life of Leisure
Bertolucci was born on March 16, 1940 in Parma, Italy. His lineage was one of intellectual curiosity and radical politics. His maternal grandfather was an Italian revolutionary forced into exile in Australia. His mother, Ninetta, worked as a teacher. His father, Attilio Bertolucci, wrote poetry and taught art history. Bertolucci also had a younger brother, Giuseppe. The family lived in a large house filled with books and staffed by dedicated servants. Bertolucci enjoyed a very privileged upbringing that allowed him to pursue his artistic and intellectual interests.
At an early age, Bertolucci developed an interest in cinema. His father wrote a film column for a prominent newspaper. On many days Bertolucci would accompany him to see the latest releases. Since these trips often involved traveling to the big city, Bertolucci began to associate movies with the strangeness and wonder of urban life. Later on in his childhood, the family moved to Rome.
Begins Making Movies
When Bertolucci graduated from high school, he received a 16-millimeter camera for a present. He used it to make his first short films, using his brother and cousins as actors. He enrolled at the university in Rome and began studying modern literature. Besides filmmaking, his major passion during this period was writing poetry. In 1962, his first collection of poems, In Search of Mystery was awarded the Viareggio Prize. Encouraging Bertolucci in both his poetry and filmmaking was Pier Paolo Pasolini, a famous Italian director who also wrote poetry. Pasolini became a mentor to the young Bertolucci. He gave him the position of assistant director on his film Accattone (1961). Working with the great director convinced Bertolucci that filmmaking could be a kind of poetry in itself. He soon left Rome University to concentrate on a filmmaking career. "I had to find my own language," he told Time. "That language was cinema."
In 1962, Bertolucci directed his first feature, La commare secca (The Grim Reaper). The dark murder story was filmed on location with a cast of amateurs. It received mixed reviews, though many critics saw potential in the young director. Bertolucci's next effort came two years later. Prima della rivoluzione (Before the Revolution) (1964) was a love story set against political developments in contemporary Parma. Reviewers likened it to the works of great directors like Orson Welles, Jean-Luc Godard, and Luigi Visconti. It was given the young critics' award and the Prix Max Ophuls at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival.
Artistic and Political Growth
Critical acclaim did not make it any easier for Bertolucci to get the financial backing to make his films. During the mid-1960s, he worked for the Shell Oil Company making documentaries about the petroleum industry. He contributed to other people's films and wrote scripts in this period as well. It took until 1968 for him to direct another full-length feature. Partner concerns a man with an evil twin, and is based on the works of Edgar Allen Poe and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. That same year, Bertolucci joined the Communist Party. He went through a period of soul-searching that included psychoanalysis.
Now committed to the Marxist ideology, Bertolucci made his most political film yet, Il conformista (The Conformist). The movie concerns a decadent intellectual who is lured into the Fascist movement during the 1930s. Bertolucci's script received an Academy award nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay, and he was widely hailed as a filmmaker of international importance.
Cinematic Master
Bertolucci's next feature, Ultimo tango a Parigi (Last Tango in Paris) (1972) cemented his reputation as an international master. The controversial picture starred Marlon Brando as a lonely man grieving for his late wife who has a passionate affair with a young Parisian woman, played by Maria Schneider. The movie's sex scenes were quite graphic for the time, and it was dismissed as obscene by some. But most critics found it riveting and honest in its depiction of contemporary relationships. It became on of the most talked-about films of the year and earned Bertolucci an Academy Award nomination for Best Director.
In the wake of the success of Last Tango in Paris, Bertolucci made a very different film. The 1977 release, 1900, was a sweeping epic that spanned over 40 years of Italian history. It came in at over five hours and featured an international cast that included Robert DeNiro and Gerard Depardieu. The film was cut by over an hour when it was released in America, however, which enraged Bertolucci to no end. In 1991, the "restored" original version was finally released to American theaters.
In 1978, Bertolucci married Clare Peploe, an English woman whom he had been seeing since 1973. She collaborated with him on the script for his next film, La Luna (1979), which starred Jill Clayburgh as a woman who has an incestuous relationship with her son. The movie received mostly poor reviews and failed at the box office. Returning to Italian subjects, Bertolucci next made La tragedia di un uomo ridiculo (The Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man) (1981). A "small" movie about the kidnapping of a cheesemaker's son, it got a mixed critical reception and was largely ignored by audiences.
Gains Academy Recognition
Bertolucci scored a major hit by returning to the grand scale with The Last Emperor (1987), the epic story of Pu Yi, the last emperor of China. In the film, based on Pu Yi's autobiography, the child ruler survives court intrigues, Japanese invasion, and Communist revolution to end up a gardener in Peking. The film was shot on location in the People's Republic of China and immediately restored Bertolucci's international reputation. When it was nominated for multiple Academy Awards, Bertolucci could barely contain his excitement. "I got colitis, my heart began beating fast, I even started smoking again," he told Time.
The Last Emperor won the Academy Award for Best Picture, as well as eight others, with Bertolucci taking the prize for Best Director. In accepting his prize, Bertolucci tweaked Hollywood by referring to it as "the big nipple." "I wanted to say that I was overwhelmed by this gratification," he later explained to Time, "which poured forth like milk."
Films in the 1990s
Bertolucci moved into a new decade with his next release, The Sheltering Sky, about the collision between western and non-western cultures. The film was well cast and boasted some beautiful desert scenery, but critics found it a poor adaptation of Paul Bowles' novel. His 1994 feature Little Buddha starred teen heart throb Keanu Reeves as an ancient prince on a quest for meaning. Stealing Beauty (1996) was a more intimate film, about a 19-year-old American, played by Liv Tyler, who undergoes her rite of passage into adulthood at the Tuscany, Italy home of her dead mother's friends.
In 1988, Bertolucci told Time that he remains true to his radical convictions. He still votes Communist, he reported, and remains leery of the "Hollywood" lifestyle despite the freedom his success has given him. "Nothing has really changed," he remarked. "My movies are too risky. But it gives me a feeling of being more secure."
Further Reading
International Dictionary of Film and Film Makers, Volume 2 Directors, St. James Press, 1991.
American Film, October 1986; November 1987.
People, May 9, 1988.
Premiere, May 1994.
Time, April 25, 1988.
Vogue, March 1994.
Stealing Beauty,http://www.cecchigori.com/cinema/stealing/ (April 28, 1998).
| Quotes By: Bernardo Bertolucci |
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| Director: Bernardo Bertolucci |
| Filmography: Bernardo Bertolucci |
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| Bernardo Bertolucci | |
|---|---|
| Born | March 16, 1940 Parma, Emilia-Romagna, Italy |
| Years active | 1962 - Present |
| Spouse(s) | Adriana Asti (div.) Clare Peploe (1990-) |
Bernardo Bertolucci (born March 16, 1940) is an Italian film director and screenwriter, probably best known for such films as The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, The Last Emperor and The Dreamers.
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Bertolucci was born in the Italian city of Parma, in the region of Emilia Romagna. He was the elder son of his father, Attilio, who was a poet, a reputed art historian, anthologist and a film critic. Having been raised in such an environment, Bertolucci began writing at the age of fifteen, and soon after received several prestigious literary prizes including the Premio Viareggio for his first book. His father's background helped his career: the elder Bertolucci had helped the Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini publish his first novel, and Pasolini reciprocated by hiring Bertolucci as first assistant in Rome on Accattone (1961). But Bertolucci's potential had already been noticed by others, such as Sergio Leone, who asked him to write the storyline for Once Upon a Time in the West. Leone later rejected it as too cerebral for an American audience.
Bertolucci has one brother, the theatre director and playwright Giuseppe (b. February 27, 1947). His cousin was the film producer Giovanni Bertolucci (June 24, 1940 - Feb, 17, 2005), with whom he worked on a number of films.
Bertolucci's first wife was Adriana Asti, star of his early film Prima della rivoluzione. In 1978, he married Clare Peploe, a British screenwriter who has since directed a few films as well.
Bertolucci initially wished to become a poet like his father. With this goal in mind, he attended the Faculty of Modern Literature of the University of Rome from 1958 to 1961. As noted above, this is where his film career as an assistant director to Pasolini began. Shortly after, Bertolucci left the University without graduating. In 1962, at the age of 21, he directed his first feature film, La commare secca (1962) The film is a murder mystery, following a prostitute's homicide. Bertolucci uses flashbacks to piece together the crime and the person who committed it. The film which shortly followed was his acclaimed Before the Revolution (Prima della rivoluzione, 1964).
The boom of Italian cinema, which gave Bertolucci his start, slowed in the 1970s as directors were forced to co-produce their films with several of the American, Swedish, French, and German companies and actors due to the effects of the global economic recession on the Italian film industry. It has been speculated[citation needed]that this is the point in its history at which Italian cinema began to depend upon the international market.
In order both to finance them and to appear competitive in the now-international entertainment industry, directors were increasingly forced to co-produce their films with foreign companies and Bertolucci was no exception. Last Tango in Paris (1972), starring Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider, exemplified the new trend for Italian movies to attempt to make more money by employing foreign actors in starring roles: Last Tango in Paris included only one Italian actor, Massimo Girotti, in a main role. Bertolucci's 1900 (1976), starring Burt Lancaster, Donald Sutherland, Robert de Niro, and Gérard Depardieu, is often said to mark the point at which the Italian film industry's dependence on the international market began to contribute to the disintegration of its national identity,[citation needed] although the film itself is entirely focused on an Italian theme: it chronicles the lives of two men during the political turmoils that took place in Italy in the first half on the 20th century.
Bertolucci might not regret this disintegration: he is actively political, and a professed Marxist. Like Visconti, who similarly employed many foreign artists during the late 1960s, Bertolucci uses his films to express his political views; hence they are often autobiographical as well as highly controversial. His political films were preceded by others re-evaluating history. The Conformist (1970) criticised Fascist ideology, touched upon the relationship between nationhood and nationalism, as well as issues of popular taste and collective memory, all amid an international plot by Mussolini to assassinate a politically active leftist professor of philosophy in Paris. 1900 also analyses the struggle of Left and Right. The 1987 epic The Last Emperor (recently re-released at an extended 219 minutes) allowed Bertolucci to influence politics both through his characters and through the act of making the film itself. He was granted unprecedented permission to film in the Forbidden City of Beijing, and the film's central character Pu Yi undergoes a decade-long communist re-education under Mao which takes him from the peacock colours of the palace to the grey suit worn by his contemporaries to live out his life as a gardener.
Many critics[who?] see the defining characteristics of Bertolucci's films to comprise of three things: sex, politics and cinephilia. Last Tango in Paris examines sex in an extremely carnal and disturbed way. It is seen as an erotic film which opened the door to eroticism in general-release films. The Conformist is based political themes, more specifically, fascism, and the relationship between personal comfort and ideals. The film deals with Fascist Italy and can be seen as both artistic and intellectual. This film is thought to demonstrate his excellence as a director. While he has directed, written, or been otherwise involved in dozens of movies over five decades, and his range is extremely broad, these themes nonetheless figure prominently throughout his work, especially in his most noted and most recent releases. Stealing Beauty offers little heterogeneity and The Dreamers manages to include all three subject matters and little else. Whether this narrowness is Bertolucci's intent or merely a symptom of the narrowness some critics accuse him of, he has used the controversy aroused by his films iconoclastically to encourage people to reconsider themselves and their society; he is often considered successful in pushing back the boundaries of propriety. Bertolucci enthusiasts will also notice the similarities between characters in films, particularly in the two most recent (Stealing Beauty, 1996, and The Dreamers, 2003). For example, the two female leads in both films (Liv Tyler and Eva Green), are fair of skin, slender, dark haired and blue eyed. Both characters are heavy smokers during the fashionable ages of youth, and both are shown losing their virginities at the age of nineteen (the same age of actress Maria Schneider during the production of Last Tango in Paris). Tyler, Green and Schneider appear in full frontal nude scenes. In both Stealing Beauty and The Dreamers, Bertolucci speaks of 'proof of love,' using almost the exact same lines each time.
Bertolucci also has a talent for putting the human soul under the microscope. Psychoanalysis is as central to his films as it is to Woody Allen's, and Marlon Brando claimed that Bertolucci's sharing of psychoanalytical confidences with the star on the set of Last Tango in Paris helped elicit the performance that many consider Brando's best. Bertolucci himself is also known for the number of psychologists who have followed him everywhere, even interpreting his dreams, as a subject of dissertations and research on the creative artist. His interest in understanding the human condition has led to the many explicit scenes in his films.
Last Tango in Paris presents Brando's character Paul as he finds comfort in an anonymous affair after the death of his wife in violent circumstances. The film caused controversy in Italy for a sodomy scene, and it was sequestered by the censorship commission and all copies were ordered destroyed. An Italian court revoked Bertolucci's civil rights for five years and gave him a four-month suspended prison sentence. Many years after, when the general modesty had changed and the censorship commission had been abolished, the film reappeared (because Bertolucci had kept a clandestine copy) and was projected in a slightly censored version.
In this and other films, Bertolucci examines the power of sexual relations in people's lives. Stealing Beauty gives a visual account of a girl growing into a woman during a summer abroad. His latest work, The Dreamers, has been criticised not only for its extensive sex scenes but also for the inclusion of male masturbation. In it, the sexual relations of three main characters serve to expose their thoughts. For instance, when Theo is shown to masturbate it is in the context that the one he loves the most, his sister, seems to be growing away from him and he can see the development of a relationship between the newcomer and his sister that excludes him. The film hints at a relationship between brother and sister, a relationship that borders on incest. The chaos in ordered family relationships mirrors the chaos on the streets outside as France experiences the turbulent May 1968 days of the student revolt.
During the making of Last Tango in Paris, Bertolucci toyed with the idea of adapting Dashiell Hammett's book Red Harvest into a feature film. The reason for this was his wanting to branch out into other forms of cinema. Bertolucci wrote two screenplays, the first draft was written almost entirely as a political film, from which emerged a story inspired by socialist syndicalism of the late '20s in America. The second draft was more faithful to Hammett's original story and changed the setting to 1934. Actors considered for the role The Continental Op were Robert Redford, Clint Eastwood and Jack Nicholson. In Rome, Bertolucci and Warren Beatty talked in great detail about the film, and in 1982 Bertolucci left Europe for Los Angeles where he was to shoot Red Harvest, but five years went by and the film was never made.
In 1987, Bertolucci directed the epic The Last Emperor, a biographical film telling the life story of Aisin-Gioro Puyi, the last Emperor of China. The film was independently produced by noted British producer Jeremy Thomas, who became Bertolucci's preferred producer. Bertolucci has worked almost exclusively with Thomas from then on. The film was independently financed and three years in the making. Bertolucci won the Academy Award for Best Director. The movie starred John Lone, Joan Chen, Peter O'Toole, Ruocheng Ying, Victor Wong, Dennis Dun, Ryuichi Sakamoto, Maggie Han, Ric Young, Vivian Wu, and Chen Kaige. Bertolucci co-wrote the film with Mark Peploe. The Last Emperor uses Puyi's life as a mirror that reflects China's passage from feudalism through revolution to its current state.
At the 60th Academy Awards, The Last Emperor won all nine Oscars for which it was nominated: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Costume Design, Best Art Direction-Set Decoration, Best Music, Original Score and Best Sound
The Last Emperor was the first feature film ever authorized by the government of the People's Republic of China to film in the Forbidden City. Bertolucci had proposed the film to the Chinese government as one of two possible projects. The other film was La Condition Humaine by André Malraux. The Chinese government preferred The Last Emperor, and made no restrictions on the content. The Last Emperor became the first western film made in China and about the country to be produced with full Chinese government cooperation since 1949.
Bertolucci is said to be working on a historical romance centring on 16th Century classical musician (and murderer) Carlo Gesualdo. It is also known that frequent Bertolucci collaborator Mark Peploe worked on the screenplay. Working titles include Heaven and Hell l and Love Song.
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