Bernardo Bertolucci Biography

Bertolucci began writing at the age of fifteen and won numerous prominent literary awards shortly after, including the Premio Viareggio for his debut novel. Bernardo Bertolucci's father had helped Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini publish his first novel, and Pasolini had returned the favor by hiring Bernardo as his first assistant in Rome on Accattone (1961). Others, like Sergio Leone, had seen Bertolucci's promise and invited him to develop the plot for Once Upon a Time in the West. It was eventually rejected by Leone, who thought it was too intellectual for an American audience. He directed his debut feature film, La compares secca, at the age of 21 in 1962. (1962) The film is a short murder mystery that follows the homicide of a prostitute. Bertolucci used flashbacks to put together the incident and its perpetrator. His famous picture Prima della rivoluzione followed soon after (Before the Revolution, 1964). Due to the consequences of the worldwide economic slump on the Italian film industry, the boom in Italian cinema that gave Bertolucci his start slowed in the 1970s, as filmmakers were compelled to co-produce their films with a number of American, Swedish, French, and German firms and performers. In order to fund their films and look competitive in the now-international entertainment business, directors were increasingly required to co-produce them with French, American, Swedish, and German corporations. Bertolucci was no different. Although the film itself is entirely focused on an Italian theme: it chronicles the lives of two men during the political turmoils that occurred in Italy in the first half of the twentieth century, Bertolucci's 1900 (1976), starring Burt Lancaster, Donald Sutherland, Robert de Niro, and Gerard Depardieu, is often said to mark the point at which the Italian film industry's reliance on the international market began to contribute to the disintegration of its national identity. Bertolucci, who is aggressively political and a professed Marxist, may not be disappointed by this breakdown. Bertolucci, like Visconti, who recruited a large number of foreign artists in the late 1960s, utilizes his films to reflect his own political beliefs; as a result, they are frequently personal and very contentious. Others who re-evaluated history came before him with their political films. The Conformist (1970) was a film that criticized Fascist ideology, explored the relationship between nationhood and nationalism, as well as issues of popular taste and collective memory, all set against the backdrop of Mussolini's international plot to assassinate a professor of politics in Paris, France. The conflict between the Left and the Right is also examined in 1900. Bertolucci used his characters and the act of producing the film to influence politics in the 1987 epic The Last Emperor (just re-released at an expanded 219 minutes). He was given unprecedented permission to film in Beijing's Forbidden City, and the film's central character, Pu Yi, goes through a decade-long communist re-education under Mao that transforms him from the palace's peacock colors to the grey suit worn by his contemporaries in order to live out his life as a gardener. Many reviewers believe that Bertolucci's films are defined by sex and politics. Last Tango is a film that addresses sex in a very carnal and disturbing way. Bertolucci also has a knack for peering into the soul of a person. Bertolucci's films include as much psychoanalysis as Woody Allen's, and Marlon Brando said that Bertolucci's sharing of psychoanalytical secrets with the star on the set of Last Tango in Paris helped elicit the performance that many believe to be Brando's greatest. Bertolucci is also well-known for the slew of psychologists who have followed him, even analyzing his dreams, and for being the topic of dissertations and studies on the creative artist. His desire to comprehend the human condition has resulted in several graphic moments in his films. After his wife's murder in horrific circumstances, Marlon Brando's character Paul seeks solace in an anonymous affair in Last Tango in Paris. The picture was seized by the censorship authority in Italy because of a sodomy scene, and all copies were ordered destroyed. Bertolucci's civil rights were terminated for five years, and he was sentenced to a four-month suspended jail sentence by an Italian court. The picture returned and was presented in a somewhat modified version many years later when general modesty had changed and the censorship committee had been dismantled. Bertolucci investigates the power of sexual encounters in people's lives in this and other films. Stealing Beauty depicts a young girl's transformation into a lady over the course of a summer abroad. His most recent film, The Dreamers, has been panned for its raunchy sex scenes as well as the presence of male masturbation. The sexual relationships of three key characters are used to uncover their thinking throughout the film. When Theo is seen masturbating, for example, it is in the backdrop of his sister, whom he loves the most, moving apart from him, and he can watch the building of a bond between the newcomer and his sister that excludes him.

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