Bernardo Bertolucci
Authors: Haaland Torunn 
Published: May 2016

By the time Bernardo Bertolucci (b. 1941–d. 2018) embarked on his first feature, The Grim Reaper (1962), he had shot two amateur documentaries, started and abandoned a literature degree, written the award-winning poetry collection In cerca del mistero (In search of mystery, 1962), and collaborated as Pasolini’s assistant on Accattone. Inherent in the experimentation with different registers and sources of inspiration there were, in nuce, the eclecticism that would position him so distinctly within the European art cinema and enable him, at the same time, to reach vast spheres of spectators. A panoramic view over Bertolucci’s sixteen features will, nonetheless, allow to identify in particular three lines of continuity: Marxist and Freudian thought, intertextual and epic narratives, and interpersonal and intercultural explorations. These elements tend to merge within individual works and have considerably shaped the critical literature. If it was the radical perspectives of Pasolini and, especially, Godard, that immediately drew critics’ attention to Before the Revolution, then the psychoanalytical vein of The Conformist and The Spider’s Stratagem conveys a search for autonomy that unfolds along self-reflexive dramatizations of ambiguities within Italy’s fascist past. This revisionist perspective assumes more explicitly Marxist tones in 1900, which adopts epic structures to represent class struggle and antifascist resistance in agrarian Italy during the first half of the 20th century. Both the careful narrative and psychological constructions and the emphasis on perceptive communication in these works encapsulate Bertolucci’s search for a distinct cinematic discourse, but it was the abandonment in Last Tango in Paris of ideological passions for passionless eroticism that finally declared his liberation from cinematic fathers. The provocative material caused polemical debates and legal obstacles, but the intentions, beyond the immediate scandal, would rather have been to question existing limits of cinematic representations. This appears clearer in light of later projects such as The Last Emperor, which starts from a pioneering Western-Chinese collaboration to demonstrate the cinema’s potentials as a mediator in intercultural exchanges. Both the attention to historical accuracy and the spectacular aesthetics convey, more specifically, a dedication to Oriental cultures that resonates in Little Buddha, which Bertolucci arranged to screen at a fundraiser event in Rome following the 2015 earthquake in Nepal. The commitment to promote cross-cultural understanding and solidarity informs, however, also less ambitious works such as The Sheltering Sky and Besieged. In both, the Western-African encounter unleashes silences, ambiguities, and intuitions, thus privileging the search for life’s mysteries that Bertolucci pursued from his artistic debut as a poet. The geographical anchorage of these films also emblematizes the distances his oeuvre has covered from his native town of Parma to spheres of urban sophistication and faraway civilizations. Bertolucci’s last feature, I and You, was released in 2012. When the director passed away six years later, he was commemorated as “an extraordinary director of visually outstanding cinema” (Concannon 2018, cited under Biographical Overviews and Catalogues) and as “a unicum” known for an oeuvre “so composite, so diversified, so exceptionally powerful” (di Paolo 2019, cited under Critical Monographs, Anthologies, and Journal Issues Dedicated to Bertolucci; author’s translation of the original).