Bernardo Bertolucci (1941-2018)

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MichaelB
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Bernardo Bertolucci (1941-2018)

#1 Post by MichaelB » Mon Nov 26, 2018 5:12 am


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TMDaines
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Re: Passages

#2 Post by TMDaines » Mon Nov 26, 2018 7:01 am

MichaelB wrote:
Mon Nov 26, 2018 5:12 am
Bernardo Bertolucci.
He's had a full life and a successful, broad career. Hope he died content. Il conformista is most likely my favourite film and one that really got me into cinema as an art.

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Big Ben
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Re: Passages

#3 Post by Big Ben » Mon Nov 26, 2018 11:04 am

TMDaines wrote:
Mon Nov 26, 2018 7:01 am
MichaelB wrote:
Mon Nov 26, 2018 5:12 am
Bernardo Bertolucci.
He's had a full life and a successful, broad career. Hope he died content. Il conformista is most likely my favourite film and one that really got me into cinema as an art.
With the resurgence of far right politics worldwide I wonder how how much of this reminded him of his post war youth, the death of Pasonlini etc. Great director regardless.

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perkizitore
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Re: Passages

#4 Post by perkizitore » Mon Nov 26, 2018 11:24 am

MichaelB wrote:
Mon Nov 26, 2018 5:12 am
Bernardo Bertolucci.
I had the pleasure of attending a Q&A at the BFI a few years back and I asked him about Storaro and his revisionist tactics, but he either seemed to evade the question or just din't care that much.
Last edited by perkizitore on Tue Nov 27, 2018 11:18 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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Mr. Deltoid
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Re: Passages

#5 Post by Mr. Deltoid » Mon Nov 26, 2018 3:32 pm

MichaelB wrote:
Mon Nov 26, 2018 5:12 am
Bernardo Bertolucci.
Rather a muted response to this on here and elsewhere (BFI buried the news in a solitary tweet, Sight & Sound haven't bothered to mention it at all). I hadn't realised that Bertolucci's cinema had fallen so out of favour. The Conformist is still as ravishing and elliptical as the day it was released, not to mention a hugely influential visual-template for many a future New Hollywood auteur (Coppola, Schrader, etc.) The fact that he made this back to back with The Spider's Strategem is quite astonishing. Storaro deserves a lot of credit for the look of those films, but the youthful arrogance that propels them is down to Bertolucci.

MongooseCmr
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Re: Passages

#6 Post by MongooseCmr » Mon Nov 26, 2018 3:58 pm

I can only speak from my experiences, but Bertolucci has definitely fallen into obscurity with younger people. Outside of a small handful of films he seems completely unseen (and two of those are known just for their sexual content.) I couldn’t say why this is. It’s the same odd phenomenon that’s happened to Fellini

j99
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Re: Passages

#7 Post by j99 » Mon Nov 26, 2018 4:14 pm

david hare wrote:
Mon Nov 26, 2018 3:41 pm
Even the AP syndicated obit, with no byline still peddles the old line about Maria Schneider being forced into “unconsensual” sex in the rape scene. Which was of course simulated and had been previously rehearsed and blocked. When an anonymous twit writing for the world’s second biggest wire services can print this lie into its obits, you can see how much damage has been done. I have no doubt the slurs over this have adversely affect his reputation.

If only Schneider had had the sanity to recognize what a wonderful part and performance he haad gotten from her.
Are you sure about this? Didn’t Bertolucci himself admit it was non consensual?

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gcgiles1dollarbin
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Re: Bernardo Bertolucci (1941-2018)

#8 Post by gcgiles1dollarbin » Mon Nov 26, 2018 4:24 pm

In an effort to avoid rehashing the controversy in an obituary thread, I provide here a link to a previous conversation we had about this.

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domino harvey
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Re: Bernardo Bertolucci (1941-2018)

#9 Post by domino harvey » Mon Nov 26, 2018 4:26 pm

It's worth going back to the middle of the third page of that thread to read it from the start, though


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colinr0380
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Re: Bernardo Bertolucci (1941-2018)

#11 Post by colinr0380 » Mon Nov 26, 2018 4:32 pm

Bertolucci was perhaps the best director for the way he was able to intertwine the historical, political and (often sexual) relationships together and show the ways that actions in one sphere often impact on the others. You are never totally acting separate from your politics or your historical age even when in an intimate relationship. And all areas have their, often negative and traumatising, effect on the psyches of the characters within them.

In a few days we have lost two of the greatest directors who used the sweep and scope of the wide world to explore their character's internal worlds above all.

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gcgiles1dollarbin
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Re: Bernardo Bertolucci (1941-2018)

#12 Post by gcgiles1dollarbin » Mon Nov 26, 2018 4:39 pm

domino harvey wrote:
Mon Nov 26, 2018 4:26 pm
It's worth going back to the middle of the third page of that thread to read it from the start, though
It's even brought up on the first page (back in 2007!)--it's a divisive subject--but here's a mid-third-page link beginning with your post.

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Mr. Deltoid
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Re: Bernardo Bertolucci (1941-2018)

#13 Post by Mr. Deltoid » Mon Nov 26, 2018 4:56 pm

colinr0380 wrote:
Mon Nov 26, 2018 4:32 pm

In a few days we have lost two of the greatest directors who used the sweep and scope of the wide world to explore their character's internal worlds above all.
Thinking back to The Conformist (it's been a good 17/18 years since my last viewing), the editing style, with it's ambitious flash-forwards/flash-backs seems very much of a stylistic-piece with Roeg's then-emerging temporal-fragmentation. There must have been something in the European waters in 1970. Wish we could bottle it and pass it around Hollywood today!

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Roscoe
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Re: Bernardo Bertolucci (1941-2018)

#14 Post by Roscoe » Mon Nov 26, 2018 5:08 pm

Mr. Deltoid wrote:
Mon Nov 26, 2018 4:56 pm
Thinking back to The Conformist (it's been a good 17/18 years since my last viewing), the editing style, with it's ambitious flash-forwards/flash-backs seems very much of a stylistic-piece with Roeg's then-emerging temporal-fragmentation. There must have been something in the European waters in 1970. Wish we could bottle it and pass it around Hollywood today!
Temporal fragmentation is the current gimmick du jour -- it's all over the place. WESTWORLD on HBO did two whole seasons of it, and THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE is following along. When it works, it works -- I like a lot of what WESTWORLD did.

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Mr. Deltoid
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Re: Bernardo Bertolucci (1941-2018)

#15 Post by Mr. Deltoid » Mon Nov 26, 2018 5:31 pm

Roscoe wrote:
Mon Nov 26, 2018 5:08 pm
Mr. Deltoid wrote:
Mon Nov 26, 2018 4:56 pm
Thinking back to The Conformist (it's been a good 17/18 years since my last viewing), the editing style, with it's ambitious flash-forwards/flash-backs seems very much of a stylistic-piece with Roeg's then-emerging temporal-fragmentation. There must have been something in the European waters in 1970. Wish we could bottle it and pass it around Hollywood today!
Temporal fragmentation is the current gimmick du jour -- it's all over the place. WESTWORLD on HBO did two whole seasons of it, and THE HAUNTING OF HILL HOUSE is following along. When it works, it works -- I like a lot of what WESTWORLD did.
Well I can't say I watch a lot of current television, certainly not those two that you mention, but Steven Soderbergh has employed a pretty good approximation of this style throughout his career, but then he's always been upfront about the influence of Roeg, Boorman, etc.

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colinr0380
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Re: Bernardo Bertolucci (1941-2018)

#16 Post by colinr0380 » Tue Nov 27, 2018 2:58 pm

One of the most interesting aspects of Bertolucci’s films is the way that his characters, like all of us really, are both pre-defined by the circumstances of their birth and eventually left adrift to try and find their own way in the world by applying the imperfect tools of education and socialisation based on past ways of being and modes of behaviour to new and quite frighteningly different contexts. This gets expressed in many different ways from the political early period (how much are you governed by the politics of your family that have been ingrained within you, how much is rebellion against that rather than naturally arising from your own thoughts, are you just following orders blindly), through veiled autobiographical approaches to parents (especially Brando’s railing at the dead mother in Last Tango In Paris set against the almost deification of a mother figure in La Luna) and off into the epic period which follows minor characters caught up in the sweep of historical events and fated to play a part that others have written for them. Characters that it sometimes feels that the wider world would prefer to untroublingly exist only in the historical record or as voiceless figureheads to be projected upon rather than as troublesome, often fatally flawed real, human figures.

Then the late period of the relationship dramas such as Besieged, The Dreamers and Me & You feels like a return to the intimate, claustrophobic scale of Last Tango mode and shifts the focus onto how outside influences of class, privilege, culture and upbringing (really ways of seeing the world) causes issues within private relationships. But it is less an entirely new theme than a shifting of such to the front of stage (with the events of May 1968 in The Dreamers more to the background, for example) in these later films.

But such ideas are still present in the bigger films. For example in The Last Emperor the wetnurse and the breast feeding gives way to the Peter O’Toole character giving proper instruction in the (Westernised) ways of the world in a manner befitting a new world leader who will have to act on an international stage, and both act as almost ersatz, employed mother and father figures. But both of these characters are suddenly removed, leaving Pu Yi alone with only his own thoughts and feelings about the situation to have to face the Japanese invasion and becoming a puppet emperor, then in turn being reviled for his collaboration in Mao’s China.

In a way another big theme along with parental figures, socialisation and circumstances of birth is the effect of being either oppressively trapped within or feeling a fundamental outsider to the culture surrounding a character. There are many characters who both cannot escape their milieu (of a family legacy, or of their actions as a hitman. As the Emperor of China, or as a potential reincarnation of the Buddha, both needing to abnegate individuality to become a vessel for other interests. Characters get torn between these two aspects of the inner and outer self, long after Partner literalised that dual nature into a literal split) but then often find themselves moving to stand outside of that world, either through choice or by forcibly being ejected from the place of stability, if not comfort: their family, their position, their country, their political context. It is how the characters react to that complete uprooting of the circumstances of their lives (with anger and lashing out, suicidally, resignation, with perhaps renewed determination), which perhaps defines them the most in a Bertolucci film.

All this is really to say that I would love a Criterion release of The Sheltering Sky at some point!

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dda1996a
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Re: Bernardo Bertolucci (1941-2018)

#17 Post by dda1996a » Mon Dec 03, 2018 5:04 am

Having just rewatched The Dreamers (which I still like, but less so when I first watched it four years ago), I can't find any source online to identify the color cinemascope film that is shown while Green and Pitt go on their date.
Also, Me & You and The Dreamers make for an interesting double bill indeed.

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okcmaxk
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Re: Bernardo Bertolucci (1941-2018)

#18 Post by okcmaxk » Mon Dec 03, 2018 9:35 am

dda1996a wrote:
Mon Dec 03, 2018 5:04 am
Having just rewatched The Dreamers (which I still like, but less so when I first watched it four years ago), I can't find any source online to identify the color cinemascope film that is shown while Green and Pitt go on their date.
Also, Me & You and The Dreamers make for an interesting double bill indeed.
The film they see is The Girl Can’t Help It, if I remember correctly.

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dda1996a
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Re: Bernardo Bertolucci (1941-2018)

#19 Post by dda1996a » Mon Dec 03, 2018 5:27 pm

A quick check online confirms your answer. Thank you! What other movies openly showed their move into cinescope ratio
besides Mommy


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Drucker
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Re: Bernardo Bertolucci (1941-2018)

#21 Post by Drucker » Wed Dec 05, 2018 12:45 pm



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