{"id":191533,"date":"2018-11-28T04:08:52","date_gmt":"2018-11-28T09:08:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=191533"},"modified":"2018-11-28T04:08:52","modified_gmt":"2018-11-28T09:08:52","slug":"oscar-winning-director-bernardo-bertolucci-dies-at-77","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2018\/11\/28\/oscar-winning-director-bernardo-bertolucci-dies-at-77\/","title":{"rendered":"Oscar winning director Bernardo Bertolucci dies at 77"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Bertolucci’s movies often explored the sexual relations among characters stuck in a psychological crisis, as in \u201cLast Tango,\u201d which was banned in his own Italy for over a decade. (File Photo By Associazione Culturale Cinemazero from Pordenone, Italia – Bernardo Bertolucci 030, CC BY-SA 2.0<\/a>)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

ROME \u2014 Italian film-maker Bernardo Bertolucci, who won Oscars with \u201cThe Last Emperor\u201d and whose erotic drama \u201cLast Tango in Paris\u201d enthralled and shocked the world, died Monday. He was 77.<\/p>\n

Bertolucci’s press office, Punto e Virgola, confirmed the death in an email to The Associated Press. Italy’s 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.<\/p>\n

Bertolucci’s movies often explored the sexual relations among characters stuck in a psychological crisis, as in \u201cLast Tango,\u201d which was banned in his own Italy for over a decade. The self-professed Marxist also did not shy away from politics and ideology, as in \u201cThe Conformist,\u201d which some critics consider Bertolucci’s masterpiece.<\/p>\n

Despite working with A-list American and international stars, Bertolucci always defended his own film-making style against what he said was the pressure of the U.S. film industry. He maintained critical success for most of his career, weathering the controversies that his sexually provocative work would stir and some commercial flops.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen it comes to commercial cinema, I have the strange pleasure of feeling that I’m from another tribe, an infiltrator,\u201d he told Italian daily Corriere della Sera in 1990.<\/p>\n

He was honoured for lifetime achievement at the Cannes film festival in 2011, when he was already wheelchair-bound.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

\u201cMaybe 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,\u201d he said upon receiving an award from the Director’s Guild of America for his 1987 film \u201cThe Last Emperor.\u201d<\/p>\n

That movie handed Bertolucci his greatest success. In 1988 it won all the nine Academy Awards that it had been nominated for \u2014 including best movie and best director.<\/p>\n

The movie \u2014 the first Western feature film to win permission to shoot in Beijing’s Forbidden City \u2014 follows the life of China’s last emperor, from child-king at the end of the Qing Dynasty to war criminal and finally to an ordinary citizen in the People’s Republic.<\/p>\n

It was filmed in the lush and vivid style that was one of Bertolucci’s trademarks. It featured grandiose scenes and intimate moments, and a flashback structure that is typical of biopics.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe last emperor of Italian film is gone,\u201d said Oscar-winning director Roberto Benigni and his wife, the actress Nicoletta Braschi, on learning of his death. In a statement carried by the ANSA news agency, the couple said his work remains \u201camong the marvels of the 20th century.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, who often worked with Bertolucci and won one of his three Oscars with \u201cLast Emperor,\u201d compared the director to William Faulkner.<\/p>\n

\u201cHis 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,\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.<\/p>\n

He had originally wanted to be a poet like his father, but later turned to movies.<\/p>\n

He began his career while still a student at the University of Rome as an assistant director on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film \u201cAccattone.\u201d A year later, in 1962, he made his first film \u201cThe Grim Reaper,\u201d 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: \u201cBefore the Revolution\u201d in 1964, a reflection on politics and the middle-class set in the director’s hometown; \u201cThe Spider’s Strategem\u201d 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 \u201cThe Conformist,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

But it was with \u201cLast Tango\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

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 \u201cThe Rite of Spring\u201d 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 \u2014 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cI 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,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cMarlon 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,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Bertolucci then embarked on his most ambitious project, a four-hour epic tale on the lives of two boys \u2014 Gerard Depardieu and Robert De Niro \u2014 through the political upheavals of the past century in Italy. The movie \u2014 \u201c1900\u201d \u2014 won some critical praise, but ended up a spectacular commercial flop.<\/p>\n

Bertolucci’s later movies included \u201cThe Sheltering Sky,\u201d 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 \u201cLittle Buddha\u201d in 1993 with Keanu Reeves as Siddharta; \u201cStealing Beauty\u201d in 1996 starring Liv Tyler as a teenager discovering sex during a trip to Italy; \u201cThe Dreamers,\u201d again an erotic drama set against a political backdrop \u2014 in this case the 1968 student riots in Paris \u2014 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

Bertolucci was married to the English writer and director Clare Peploe. They had no children. Peploe is the sister of Mark Peploe, a screenwriter and close friend of Bertolucci’s who worked with the director on a number of projects.<\/p>\n

Punto e Virgola, the press office, said Rome’s city hall would host a wake for Bertolucci on Tuesday. A commemorative ceremony open to the public is being planned for a later date, it said.<\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/p>\n

Former AP writer Alessandra Rizzo contributed biographical material to this report.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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