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Bernardo Bertolucci, gravely ill, lay on a couch, above him, the computer. So he asked a few years ago to interview in his apartment in the Roman neighborhood of Trastevere. "What's a movie?", Ask two directors. He responds without thinking a second: "A way to make money with poetry."
That would have pleased his father, the famous poet Attilio Bertolucci. Bernardo liked his good word probably because he had always understood how to make a lot of money, even a lot, thanks to the poetry of his films.
The great utopia of a peaceful world
On another occasion, when he was asked about his scandalous success "The Last Tango in Paris," he explained, "He's allowed me to film Novecento." Novecento is an epic of several hours, a meditation on the first half of the twentieth century Italian. on the clbad struggle, on the labor movement, love and fascism, opulent as an opera. Great cinema.
The songs of the labor movement and the women's movement are sung, many red flags are brandished and the border to kitsch is constantly outdated. In 1976, the film hit the cinemas, a replica of 1968, an attempt to recall the flat time of the grand utopia of a pacified world that the children of landlords and farm workers build together. An illusion too, who knows that she is one. But she does not want to give up.
Bertolucci was an epic
Bernar-do Bertolucci was born in Parma on March 16, 1941. He grew up in the intellectual left wing of the post-war period. Piero Paolo Pasolini, with whom he was a friend, he had met thirteen or fourteen when the young poet Pasolini had visited his father. With Alberto Moravia, with Elsa Morante, whose novel "La Storia", Bertolucci had certainly encouraged the company, to undertake a project as huge as "Novecento", he was also a friend.
Bertolucci was an epic. In addition, "The Big Mistake" of 1970, based on a novel by Alberto Moravia, is designed for size, although it only lasts 111 minutes. The story of a man who leaves the fascist secret police for nothing but the need for an adjustment is staged with such an aesthetic sense for the superhuman bomb of fascist architecture that the spectator of the vast dark hall of the cinema – for which the films were intended – Jean-Louis Trintignant felt a lustful humiliation as he walked through the corridors.
A piece of alternative historiography
Greatness fascinated Bernardo Bertolucci. Nine Oscars received his film "The Last Emperor" in 1987. He thus ranks seventh among the most acclaimed films, a list directed since 1997 by "Titanic", which has received eleven Oscars. But Bertolucci also received the Oscar for Best Director and Best Screenplay for The Last Emperor. He certainly appreciated that. Also because the criticism of rival society is much easier to ignore if one is not one of their losers.
The last film I saw was "Dreamer" of the year 2003. More opera, but a chamber concert. Three young men who withdraw from the uprising in mid-May 1968 live their trios. The camera is in love with the skin and the flesh of the young people. What they say, on the other hand, is fading.
When they withdraw from the world, the director does the same. It's as if, decades later, he was trying an attitude vis-à-vis what had happened in 1968, which he had not adopted at the time. ;time. A piece, if you will, alternative historiography. As in "The Last Tango …" almost everything focuses on the intimate situation.
Heart and baduality
Both belong to Bernardo Bertolucci. He knew very well how closely the consciousness and the unconscious are intertwined, that one without the other does not mean it. How little is understood if we only follow their arguments. "The Heart," Blaise Pascal noted, "has its reasons that the mind has no idea."
And Bertolucci knew that in addition to the heart, there was also baduality, which in turn had its own reasons. We follow this, sometimes that one. Bertolucci liked to develop different possibilities and let the heroes of his epics continue to decide for a new fork on the road.
The last emperor becomes a gardener. It is the poetic idea of a totalitarian system. Bertolucci knew that such a thing is possible. "In Search of Secrecy" was the title of a poetry collection that he had published in 1962 and for which he had received one of the most prestigious Italian literary awards, the Premio Viareggio, the best first work. But he had already worked with Pasolini on his first film "Accattone" and discovered with him the secret of a new cinematic language.
Joy of contagious life
He had probably come to understand that whoever seeks a secret is not necessarily interested in his dissolution. Make life mysterious, cast a spell, that's how you make money in poetry. It was also Bertolucci's way.
He did not believe that where he was, I had to become. But he was anxious to examine the unconscious closely, to discover it, to make it accessible. Bernardo Bertolucci finished early. At age thirty, he was one of the most respected directors in the world.
Anyone who knows Italian and has access to the internet should take a look at the interviews that he has given in recent years, after disc surgery having failed on a wheelchair or on a couch . He is of friendly vigilance, of a contagious joie de vivre.
In search of the main actor
When he was looking for a protagonist for "The Last Tango in Paris", Gerard Depardieu refused, it was a bad. Alain Delon only wanted to be allowed to be a producer. Bertolucci refused, the film that he feared, so was no longer his film. Jean-Louis Trintignant did not want bad pictures.
Marlon Brando, while Bertolucci was trying to convince him very nervously and in a bad english of the film, was constantly watching the floor. "Why do not you look at me?" Bertolucci finally asked. "Because I'm waiting for you to keep your feet on the ground," Brando replied. He then gladly took the role.
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