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Bernardo Bertolucci

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia:

Bernardo Bertolucci

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(born March 16, 1940, Parma, Italy) Italian film director. After writing poetry and an award-winning book, he entered filmmaking as an assistant to Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1961. His first films as a director, The Grim Reaper (1962) and Before the Revolution (1964), were followed by the well-received The Conformist (1970). The erotic Last Tango in Paris (1972) made him an international and commercial sensation. He later directed such films as 1900 (1976), The Last Emperor (1987, Academy Awards for direction and best film), and Stealing Beauty (1996).

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Gale Encyclopedia of Biography:

Bernardo Bertolucci

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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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"If New York is the Big Apple, tonight Hollywood is the Big Nipple."

AMG AllMovie Guide:

Bernardo Bertolucci

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Biography

Known both for sweeping epics and for helping to bring eroticism into general release with Last Tango in Paris, Bernardo Bertolucci is one of the pre-eminent international directors of the latter half of the twentieth century. The son of poet, film critic, and anthologist Attilio Bertolucci, he was born on March 16, 1940 in Parma. Surrounded by an atmosphere of comfort and intellectualism, Bertolucci began making 16 mm films as a teenager. In addition to making two short films about children, he also gained a certain amount of respect as a writer, winning the Premio Viareggio (one of Italy's top literary awards) for his first book, In Search of Mystery. Going on to study at the University of Rome, Bertolucci started his film career as an assistant director to Pier Paolo Pasolini. After working on Pasolini's Accatone, he left the University in 1961 and embarked on his own independent film study.

Bertolucci made his directing debut the following year with La Commare Secca (The Grim Reaper), a stark murder mystery filmed on location in Rome. Based on a script by Pasolini, the film went largely unseen; his next effort, Prima della Rivoluzione (Before the Revolution) (released in the U.S. in 1965) was also a commercial disappointment, but it won him recognition at the 1964 Cannes Film Festival. This recognition was followed by an almost five-year period during which the director was unable to secure funding for another feature-length film; he instead made a number of documentaries and assisted director Julian Beck on various productions.

In 1970 Bertolucci was back, directing La Strategia del Ragno (The Spider's Stratagem), a thriller about a young man's attempt to unravel some of the mysteries surrounding his long-deceased anti-fascist father. The film was seen as an improvement over Bertolucci's previous work, but it was not until the release of Il Conformista (The Conformist) (also 1970), that he received international acclaim for his work. A non-linear exploration of Mussolini's Fascist Italy and a character study of an individual (Jean-Louis Trintignant) who conforms to the era's ideological conventions, the film was shown in competition at the 1970 Berlin Film Festival, where it met with an ecstatic reception. Now bearing substantial credibility as a director, Bertolucci went on to explore sexual sadomasochism and societal hypocrisy with his infamous Last Tango in Paris in 1972. Starring Marlon Brando as an American widower who embarks on a torrid sadomasochistic relationship with a young Parisian (Maria Schneider), the film sparked no small degree of controversy when it was released. It was eventually recognized as an extraordinary, if polarizing, work, winning Bertolucci a Best Director Oscar nomination and a Best Actor Oscar nomination for Brando.

Bertolucci then embarked on his first epic, making the 311-minute Novecento (1900) in 1976. The story of two men (Robert De Niro and Gérard Depardieu) born in Italy on the same day in 1901, it explored the political forces that shaped Italy through World War II and the lives affected by these forces. Its epic scope was repeated eleven years later in the director's The Last Emperor. A decades-spanning tale about the deposed last emperor of China, it went on to win nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Director. Following a comparatively unsuccessful 1990 adaptation of Paul Bowles' The Sheltering Sky, Bertolucci returned to Asia to make Little Buddha in 1994. The film received relatively lackluster reviews and had a stodgy box-office performance, but the director rebounded somewhat in 1996 with Stealing Beauty. Returning to the golden hills of Tuscany to film the story of a young American (Liv Tyler) in search of her father and the boy to whom she wants to give her virginity, Bertolucci turned out a lush, measured piece of work that impressed more than a few critics and served as Tyler's breakthrough film. In 1998, Bertolucci took another look at the politics of love and desire with Besieged. Filmed in Rome, the film starred David Thewlis as a composer and Thandie Newton as the African political refugee he loves. Besieged received generally excellent reviews, further embellishing its director's epic resume. ~ Rebecca Flint Marx, Rovi
Wikipedia on Answers.com:

Bernardo Bertolucci

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Bernardo Bertolucci
Born March 16, 1940 (1940-03-16) (age 71)
Parma, Emilia-Romagna, Italy
Years active 1962–present
Spouse Adriana Asti (div.)
Clare Peploe (1990–)
Parents Attilio Bertolucci (1911–2000)
Ninetta Giovanardi

Bernardo Bertolucci (born March 16, 1941) is an Italian film director and screenwriter, whose films include The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, 1900, The Last Emperor, The Sheltering Sky and The Dreamers. In recognition of his work, he was presented with the inaugural Honorary Palme d'Or Award at the opening ceremony of the 2011 Cannes Film Festival.[1]

Contents

Biography

Origins

Bertolucci was born in the Italian city of Parma, in the region of Emilia Romagna. He is the elder son of Ninetta, a teacher, and Attilio Bertolucci, who was a poet, a reputed art historian, anthologist and film critic.[2] 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), where he met his first wife, Adriana Asti.

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 has worked on a number of films.

Bertolucci's first wife, Adriana Asti, starred in his early film Prima della rivoluzione. In 1978, he married Clare Peploe, a British screenwriter who has since directed a few films as well.

Starting out with Pasolini

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 22, he directed his first feature film, produced by Tonino Cervi with a screenplay by Pier Paolo Pasolini, called 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.

A poetic personality

Bertolucci soon left Pasolini's poetic ideas behind in order to follow his own personal idea about cinema based more or less on the individuality of people who find themselves having to deal with sudden changes in their lives, both on an existential as well as political level, yet they have no clear cut solution, nor are they looking for one in many cases.

Prima della rivoluzione

The above theme is present in almost all of Bertolucci's works, starting with his second film, Prima della rivoluzione (1964), where this theme is very clear in the story of a young upper-middle agrarian class boy from Parma (Francesco Barilli), who, incapable of dealing with his best friend's suicide, throws himself into a relationship with a much older distant relative from Milan (played by Adriana Asti). Both of them know the relationship can never last, and when she leaves, the young man has no choice but to marry his previous girlfriend, who he does not love, but who comes from a wealthy family of high standing, so the marriage makes his family happy.

The scandal of Last Tango in Paris

Bertolucci became famous in 1972, with the "scandalous" film Last Tango in Paris, with Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider, Jean-Pierre Leaud and Massimo Girotti, where sex is portrayed as the only possible answer, but not definite, to the conformity surrounding the characters; the protagonists in this film are, as they will be in many of the films to come, unstable beings, whose only way out is transgression. 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 an anal penetration sex 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. The original copy, and the copies that had been preserved abroad, were used to make the DVD.

Becoming World Famous

Bertolucci increased his fame with his next few films, from Novecento (1976), an epic depiction of the struggles of farmers in Emilia-Romagna from the beginning of the 20th century up to World War II with an impressive international cast (Robert De Niro, Gerard Depardieu, Donald Sutherland, Sterling Hayden, Burt Lancaster, Dominique Sanda) to La luna, set in Rome and in Emilia-Romagna, in which Bertolucci deals with the thorny issue of drugs and incest, and finally La tragedia di un uomo ridicolo (1981), with Ugo Tognazzi.

Red Harvest

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. That material had formed the basis for Kurasawa's Yojimbo, which in turn was the basis for Sergio Leone's Fistful of Dollars (Per un pugno di dollari), countless others have used its premise since. 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.

Academy Awards with The Last Emperor

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. 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.

His latest films

After The Last Emperor, the director went back to Italy to film, as well as to his old themes with varying results from both critics and the public. He filmed Stealing Beauty in 1996, then The Dreamers in 2003, which describes the political passions and sexual revolutions of two siblings in Paris in 1968.

In 2007 he received the Golden Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival for his life's work, and in 2011 he also received the Palma d'Oro at the Cannes Film Festival. [3]

As a screenwriter, producer and actor

Bertolucci has also written many screenplays, both for his own films as well as for films directed by others, two of which he also produced.

His only experience as an actor was in the film Golem-The Spirit of Exile directed by Amos Gitai in 1992. After his divorce from Adriana Asti, Bertolucci married Clare Peploe, screenwriter and director with Mark Peploe of Professione Reporter, and who had already collaborated with Michelangelo Antonioni.

Upcoming projects

Bertolucci is said to be working on a historical romance centering on 16th Century classical musician (and murderer) Carlo Gesualdo.[4]

Bertolucci's next feature film will be an adaptation of Niccolò Ammaniti's young-adult's book Io e te (You and Me), the first film he will create in 3D. The screenplay for the movie was written by Bertolucci himself, Umberto Contarello and Niccolò Ammaniti, and expected to release late 2012.[5]

Politics and personal beliefs

Bertolucci is an atheist.[6]

Bertolucci's films are often very political. He is a professed Marxist and 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 colors of the palace to the grey suit worn by his contemporaries to live out his life as a gardener.

On September 27, 2009, Bertolucci was one of the signers of the appeal to the Swiss government to release Roman Polanski, who was being held while waiting to be extradited to the United States.[7]

Awards

Cinematographic awards

Filmography

See also

References

  1. ^ "Bernardo Bertolucci to receive Palme d'Or honour". BBC News. April 8, 2011. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-13041286. Retrieved April 12, 2011. 
  2. ^ "Bernardo Bertolucci Biography (1940?-)". Filmreference.com. http://www.filmreference.com/film/34/Bernardo-Bertolucci.html. Retrieved September 14, 2010. 
  3. ^ "Speciale Palma d'Oro a Bertolucci". Cinematografo.it. http://www.cinematografo.it/cinemedia/palma_d_oro_speciale_a_bertolucci/00018504_Palma_d_Oro_speciale_a_Bertolucci.html. Retrieved 2011-08-02. 
  4. ^ Sheri Jennings, Bertolucci to receive Venice's special Golden Lion, Screen Daily.com, June 18, 2007. Retrieved January 10, 2010.
  5. ^ Gemmi, Nicoletta (February 18, 2011). "Bernardo Bertolucci girerà il suo prossimo film in 3D". http://www.primissima.it/cinema_news/scheda/bernardo_bertolucci_girera_il_suo_prossimo_film_in_3d/. 
  6. ^ "Interview to Mymovies". Mymovies.it. http://www.mymovies.it/critica/persone/critica.asp?id=37880&r=3121. Retrieved 2011-08-02. 
  7. ^ L'elengo dei firmatari è consultabile sul sito del SACD.

External links

Films directed by Bernardo Bertolucci
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