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Bernardo Bertolucci
Biography from Baseline's Encyclopedia of Film
Occupation: Director
Born: March 16, 1940, Parma, Italy
Education: Rome University (modern literature)
BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI FILMOGRAPHY
At the age of 24, Bernardo Bertolucci established himself at the forefront
of international cinema with
Before the
Revolution (1962). Its operatic
sensibility, coupled with a precocious facility for visual style, set the
standard for the director's later works. Likewise, its focus on family romance
and psychological crisis, framed by a sharply defined political and social
context, staked out central concerns in Bertolucci's vision.
Influenced by
writers and artists as diverse as Freud, Marx and Verdi, Bertolucci always
shapes a set of rich associations in his cinematic texts, although never at the
expense of visual style, which remains primary. In
Partner (1968), which pays
homage to the French New Wave and particularly Jean-Luc Godard, Bertolucci began
to explore his fascination with the figure of the psychological double. The
doubling theme reappears in The Spider's
Strategem (1970), which traces a son's
search for his father through a surrealistic, complex narrative that
incorporates Verdi's Rigoletto and the work of Borges and Magritte. A later
film, Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (1981), reverses that narrative premise,
following a father's search for his son.
In The Conformist (1971), considered by
many critics Bertolucci's masterpiece, lighting, decor, costume and music shape
a stylized backdrop of Fascist Italy against which the hero attempts to resolve
his own sexual and political conflicts. The classic sequence in which the two
central women characters perform a tango is a Bertolucci signature: the dance as
metaphor. The dance also appears at the center of his controversial Last
Tango in Paris (1973). Considered obscene by some viewers, Last Tango in
Paris was for
others a breakthrough in the depiction of sexual politics in its presentation of
the passionate, conflicted relationship between an older man and a younger woman
in the enclosed psychological space of chamber cinema. As with The Conformist,
the visual style and themes of Last Tango in Paris were to influence a
generation of filmmakers. Controversy also surrounded Luna (1979) because of its
graphic portrayal of mother/son incest. The mythic subtext of the film focuses
once again on the search for a father: both the Italian sire of the young
American boy and the artistic father (Verdi) of his opera-singer mother.
Bertolucci returned to his northern Italian roots in the sweeping epic
1900
(1977). The film charts 45 years of social history and class struggle through
the friendship-and political enmity-of two men born, on different sides of the
social fence, at the turn of the century. Bertolucci again demonstrated his
adeptness with the epic form in The Last
Emperor (1987), winner of nine Academy
Awards, including best director and best picture. The film follows the shifting
fortunes of Pu Yi, who begins his life as the last emperor of China and ends it
as a gardener in post-revolutionary Pekin. Recurrent themes of sexual and
political identity are explored within the perverse ambience of the Chinese
court and during Pu Yi's subsequent political exile, imprisonment and political
"rehabilitation." Bertolucci's much-anticipated adaptation of Paul
Bowles's cult favorite The Sheltering Sky (1990), starring John Malkovich and
Debra Winger, proved a critical and financial disappointment. Romantic and
sensuous, Bertolucci's work is characterized by expressive mise-en-scène,
rhythmic editing, fluid camera movement and complex narration, typically backed
by an evocative musical score. He is at once heir to a generation of great
Italian filmmakers and a dominant force in international cinema today.