Review: The Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man by Bernardo Bertolucci

1984 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 57-63
Author(s):  
Brooke Jacobson
Keyword(s):  
Bernardo Bertolucci

A Conversation with Bernardo Bertolucci

1966 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Bragin ◽  
Bernardo Bertolucci
Keyword(s):  
Bernardo Bertolucci

: The Last Emperor . Bernardo Bertolucci, Jeremy Thomas.

1988 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 47-52
Author(s):  
Fatimah Tobing Rony
Keyword(s):  
Bernardo Bertolucci

Coming of age in Milano: Ermanno Olmi from sponsored cinema to feature filmmaking

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 411-428
Author(s):  
Jim Carter
Keyword(s):  
Coming Of Age ◽  
Italian Cinema ◽  
Modern Life ◽  
Cinema Studies ◽  
The Past ◽  
Michelangelo Antonioni ◽  
Feature Films ◽  
Bernardo Bertolucci ◽  
Critical Process

This article argues that a full understanding of Ermanno Olmi’s feature films will require a deep engagement with the sponsored cinema he made as director of the Sezione Cinema Edisonvolta. It begins by spelling out some of the stakes and challenges of a ‘sponsored turn’ in Italian cinema studies, which during the past decade has inaugurated the long archival and critical process of revaluing the corporate roots of auteurs like Michelangelo Antonioni, Bernardo Bertolucci and, to a certain extent, Ermanno Olmi. It then elaborates on the relation between Olmi’s sponsored cinema (1953–61) and feature filmmaking (1961–2014) by analysing two films that mark the director’s transition from the small to big screen: Michelino 1 a B (1956) and Il posto (1961). The central contention is that these films tell two different versions of the same coming-of-age story: a young boy from the provinces finds work in a downtown office building, where he must come to terms with the fact that he will remain there all his life. The distance between the two films is a measure of Olmi’s own coming-of-age as an intellectual: from a resolved promoter of the guiding role of business in modern life to a sceptical interrogator of white-collar mundanity. After a comparative reading that reveals general similarities of structure and specific scenes of quotation, the article concludes with some remarks about education, a concept through which Olmi’s feature films show themselves to be aware of – even commenting on – sponsored cinema.

Bernardo Bertolucci

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Torunn Haaland
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Class Struggle ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Panoramic View ◽  
Art Cinema ◽  
Grim Reaper ◽  
Award Winning ◽  
Historical Accuracy ◽  
Bernardo Bertolucci ◽  
Critical Literature

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).

The Last Emperor Bernardo Bertolucci Jeremy Thomas

1988 ◽  
Vol 42 (2) ◽  
pp. 47-52
Author(s):  
Fatimah Tobing Rony
Keyword(s):  
Bernardo Bertolucci

Bernardo Bertolucci, 1900 and the Myth of Fascism

1989 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 37-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Bosworth
Keyword(s):  
Bernardo Bertolucci
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