Italian writer, poet and director Pier Paolo Pasolini described Bernardo Bertolucci in his poem "Ad un Ragazzo" as a young man who often used to sit down with older people and carefully listen to the debates and discussions of the grown ups surrounding him. The opening lines of that poem portraying Bertolucci as a shy boy probably came back to mind to many film fans as news spread this morning about his death in Rome.
Born in Parma in 1941, Bertolucci showed his passion for films from a very young age and, between 1956 and 1957, shot two silent movies - "La teleferica” (The cable car) and "La morte del maiale" (The pig's death). Bertolucci first met Pasolini in Rome: at the time he was 15 and the poet was living in the same building as Bertolucci's family.
The first encounter was rather bizarre: on a Sunday afternoon Bertolucci went to open the door and found a man who asked to see his father. He looked a bit rough and Bertolucci thought he was a thief, so he just shut him out without saying a word. Attilio Bertolucci and Pasolini were indeed good friends (Attilio had helped a very young Pasolini to publish his first novel) and soon the friendship extended also to Attilio's son, Bernardo.
Reminiscing about his friendship with Pasolini, Bertolucci once stated, "As soon as I finished writing poems I would run downstairs to the second floor – we lived on the fifth floor – where Pier Paolo lived. I rang his door and if Pier Paolo was home, I immediately had him read them…In a certain way I even saw Pier Paolo as a paternal figure…I tended…to absorb his way of seeing reality and even a little of his style. There are certain poems of mine that I believe were never published because they were very Pasolinian, really written in Pasolini's style."
In 1961 Pasolini offered Bertolucci the chance of working as assistant director on his first film, "Accattone" (The Procurer). After this film another opportunity arrived: producer Antonio Cervi bought from Pasolini the rights to turn one of his stories into a film that should have been shot after "Accattone".
Yet, once he finished the latter, Pasolini decided to move on and focus on another story that later on became "Mamma Roma" (Mamma Roma, 1962), so he suggested Cervi to ask Bertolucci and writer/director Sergio Citti to work on the screenplay for the film he wanted to produce. Cervi was so enthusiastic about the screenplay that he ended up asking Bertolucci to direct the film. Released in 1962 "La commare secca" (The Grim Reaper) was dubbed by critics as "a Pasolinian film without Pasolini".
The story took place in Rome's suburbs and the main characters were the so-called ragazzi di vita, local juvenile delinquents, so the place and the protagonists somehow reminded of the characters that populated Pasolini's universe.
"Prima della rivoluzione" (Before the Revolution) followed in 1964, and, in the same year, the film represented Italy at the Cannes Film Festival. It was a flop and four frustrating yet very active years passed (during them Bertolucci shot a documentary for Italian TV, "La via del petrolio"; the segment "Agonia" (Agony) for the film "Amore e rabbia" and wrote with Dario Argento and Sergio Leone the screenplay for "C'era una volta il West") before his next proper film, "Partner" (Partner, 1968), followed by the psychological thriller "La Strategia del ragno" (The Spider's Stratagem, 1970).
"Il Conformista" (The Conformist), taken from a famous novel by Alberto Moravia, was released in 1970 and nominated in 1972 for an Academy Award for Best Screenplay.
Bertolucci's next film, "Ultimo tango a Parigi" (Last Tango in Paris, 1972), caused a huge scandal in Italy. An Italian court even revoked Bertolucci's civil rights for five years and gave him a four-month suspended prison sentence. Many years later, in 1987, after the censorship commission was abolished, the film reappeared and was screened in a different version, with fewer cuts, but controversy kept on surrounding it especially after Bertolucci admitted he and Brando didn't inform actor Maria Schneider they were going to use butter as lubricant in the scene in which Brando's character anally rapes his lover.
Four years later Bertolucci went back to political cinema with a film about class struggles and the conflicts between peasants and landowners, "Novecento" (1900, 1976), followed by "La Luna" (Luna, 1979) and "La tragedia di un uomo ridicolo" (Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man, 1981).
"L'ultimo imperatore" (The Last Emperor, 1987) – winner of nine Academy Awards in 1988, among them also the award for Best Directo – marked the beginning of Bertolucci's trilogy of blockbusters that continued with "Il tè nel deserto" (The Sheltering Sky, 1990) and "Piccolo Buddha" (Little Buddha, 1993).
In the mid-90s he directed "Io ballo da sola" (Stealing Beauty, 1996), "L'assedio" (Besieged, 1998) and a film about the youth movement and the 1968 protests, "I sognatori" (The Dreamers, 1998). After his film "Io e Te" (Me and You, 2012), adapted from a novel by Niccolò Ammaniti, Bertolucci shot the "Red Shoes" segment of the documentary "Venice 70: Future Reloaded". New York's MoMa dedicated to the Italian director a retrospective in 2010. Bertolucci was married to film-maker Clare Peploe, but never had children.
Bertolucci's most fashionable film remains "The Conformist": through it the director etched a rich, complex and multi-textured portrait of Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant) part of the decadent middle-class that supported the Fascist regime. Clerici, a fascist spy ordered to kill anti-fascist Professor Quadri, is obsessed by a traumatising incident that happened in his childhood that pushed him as a grown up man on a constant search for conformity.
Marcello rejoices about the fact that he has turned into an ordinary man who does exactly what the other human beings around him do: he smokes the same cigarettes everybody smokes; he marries an ordinary middle-class woman and makes love to her because it is his duty to do so; he supports Franco in Spain and Mussolini in Italy not because he believes in what they represent, but because all the other average Italians do so. In a nutshell, Marcello is happy to be part of an unthinking collective entity.
The story of Bertolucci's "Il Conformista" is much more complex than the story in his previous films and it is characterised by a non linear plot, with continuous flashbacks and reliance upon psychoanalytic theories. The narration also proceeds through a sort of accumulation of different elements and themes: love and sex; fascism/anti-fascism; the influence of a father figure in Clerici's life; the past that comes back; the theme of the journey with its traumatising arrival and departure phases, and ambiguity (see the famous tango scene between his wife Giulia and Anna, the wife of Professor Quadri, with its quickly shifting camera angles, graceful motions and skilful editing).
Architecture also plays a prominent role in the film: Bertolucci shot a lot of scenes in Rome's EUR area, developed under Mussolini and inspired by fascist ideology, and in particular in the Palazzo dei Congressi, and used austere buildings and spaces to create the perfect backgrounds in which Clerici the obsessive conformist moves.
This elegant film, meticulously photographed by Vittorio Storaro (who took the choreographed style of the musicals and melodramas Bertolucci admired and applied them to the director's story) and with costumes by Gitt Magrini (who also worked on the costumes for "Last Tango in Paris" and on many Antonioni's films), was, according to Bertolucci, informed by the memories of American and French movis from the '30s.
The bedroom in "Il Conformista" reminds of the bedroom in "Flesh and The World Moves On" by John Ford, while the film is also indebted to the poetic style of Josef von Sternberg, Max Ophüls and Orson Welles (when Marcello visits Professor Quadri for the first time, the shadows of the two men talking are projected on the wall; oblique frames characterise the scenes before Quadri’s murder and the house of Marcello's mother looks like a typical house from the '30s).
The film also inspired Francis Ford Coppola (who hired Storaro for "Apocalypse Now"), Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg and Paul Schrader, and, throughout the decades, "The Conformist" often appeared on the mood boards of different fashion designers.
One of the strongest links between this film and fashion is represented by the house of Versace: during the 1998 Florence Biennale, ten Italian fashion houses were called to restore a film that, for its atmosphere and costumes, represented an inspiration for them. Versace chose Bertolucci's "Il Conformista" not only for its style, but also because it somehow reminded the members of the Versace family of the time when, as kids, Gianni and his brother and sister went to the afternoon shows at the cinema in Reggio Calabria.
Ten years ago instead Missoni's Autumn/Winter 2008/09 campaign (shot by Steven Meisel and featuring models Iselin Steiro, Kinga Rajzak and Mathias Lauridsen) also moved from the elegant yet oppressive atmospheres of "The Conformist".
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