È director Bernardo Bertolucci died this morning in his home in Rome. Bertolucci, winner of two Oscars in 1988 for 'The Last Emperor', was 77 years old and had been ill for some time. The director passed away surrounded by his family.
.He has directed some of his cinematic masterpieces such as Last Tango in Paris, The Sheltering Sky, Little Buddha, Novecento and The Last Emperor. This film earned him the Oscar for best director and best non-original screenplay. In 2007 he was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 64th Venice International Film Festival and in 2011 the Honorary Palme d'Or at the 64th Cannes Film Festival. The last film he directed was Io e te (You and Me) in 2012, based on the novel by Nicolo' Ammaniti. Parma was everything to Bernardo Bertolucci, the firstborn of the poet Attilio, raised on cinema by Pier Paolo Pasolini (he was assistant director between '60 and '61) and on poetry by his father who encouraged him to publish his first collection In Search of Mystery with which he won the Viareggio Prize in '62. In the same year Bernardo made his debut as a director with The Grim Reaper based on a story by Pasolini, and two years later, with Before the Revolution, he earned the undisputed fame of being the best author of a new generation of filmmakers in which creative inspiration goes hand in hand with civil commitment. After years of experimentation between the Living Theatre and Sergio Leone (for whom he wrote the story of Once Upon a Time in the West with Dario Argento), he acquired international stature in 1970 with two masterpieces: The Spider's Stratagem and The Conformist based on a story by his friend Alberto Moravia. Two years later he scandalized the entire world with Last Tango in Paris (sent to the stake in Italy in 76 with a final sentence). And in the same year 1976 he united his poetic soul, strongly tied to his native land, and his international soul, the product of American moods and cinema seen as a marvelous prodigy, by signing the flowing Novecento divided into two acts. After some minor directorial works in which, see La luna in '79, he dedicates an act of love to his favorite melodrama, he moves to London, adopted by Hollywood to which he gives the exotic trilogy, the nine Oscars of The Last Emperor, the desperate journey of The Tea in the Desert, the inner peace of Little Buddha. Returning to Italy with a renewed desire to capture its restlessness with the now detached eye of the great traveler, he was preparing a Novecento Atto III destined to end on the threshold of the new century. A wise filmmaker, faithful to his collaborators (from the editor Kim Arcalli to the photographer Vittorio Storaro to the costume designer Gabriella Pescucci), in love with beauty and lyricism, Bertolucci has bent all his cinema to the taste of melodrama and the physicality of life in which an inner peace must be sought that perhaps coincides with Buddhist meditation.
Article published on November 26, 2018 - 09:35
