Bernardo Bertolucci – the difficult Emperor

With the movie "last Tango in Paris" triggered Bernardo Bertolucci 1972 a fierce controversy. Now, the Italian film-maker, has died at the age of 77 years.

In one of the most beautiful scenes of the masterpiece "The last Emperor" explains Peter O'toole as a teacher of the Chinese rulers, what is the meaning of the words. "If you don't say what you think, not think what to say." For Bernardo Bertolucci, the man who wrote the screenplay, and the Film has been staged, it was a confession of faith.

Film research for the Italians, more and more, to tell stories in pictures, although he refused, in his work, according to messages. But it is obvious how much Bertolucci's films are Essays on the essence of freedom. The Director, who originally started out promising as a writer, not only put emphasis on the visual language, but also on what he makes his characters say.

+ Bertolucci in 1987 behind the camera during the filming of "The last Emperor".©Reuters / Neal Ulevich

"The last Emperor" is his greatest Triumph, with nine Academy awards to be awarded. At the same time, the Film is a Prime example of how Bertolucci cinema uses to make clear what he means, for instance, that absolute Power is devastating. That every person needs a task. "What is so bad about that, to be of any Use?", you will be asked of the Emperor of China, as he quarrels Adiosbet with fate. The movie from 1987 is also a song in praise of humility, education, and communism.

Bertolucci, 1941 in the traditionally deep-red in the province of Emilia-Romagna born, is life, an ardent Communist. He comes from a middle-class house, but grew up among farmers and instinctively on the side of the Weak. In the Italy of the post-war period among Intellectuals is not unusual, only in the case of Bertolucci's remarkable how much he remains the ideology arrested, without getting tangled up in dogmatic spinning. Injustice, oppression, the struggle for sub-topics, which he followed always are – Agitprop he turns but never.

+ Bernardo Bertolucci (li.) in a conversation with its principal place of Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider during filming performers to "last Tango in Paris" in 1972.©dpa

As an assistant to Pier Paolo Pasolini, he begins, in the sixties, a name and celebrates in 1972 with the controversial "last Tango in Paris," its first worldwide Triumph. The story of a washed-up man who, contrary to totter to the precipice, and with excessive Sex life want to keep, due to explicit scenes for wild discussions. Until today, because Maria Schneider reported later that she felt raped in the infamous sequence in which Marlon Brando takes her by force from behind, actually. Bertolucci has already a lot of empathy for female characters. Avant-garde of world revolution or not, only men think are the end of being. In this regard, it will remain the province of Macho, for all its artistic brilliance.

Also in the late work "The dreamers" (2003), in the optimism of 1968, women are objects of desire. In addition, you have to suspect that he "has made sense and seduction" (1996), to the then very young Liv Tyler back with the camera on the Pelle. This, after all, Bertolucci dominated breathtakingly good.

+ Bertolucci, 2013, with his Hollywood-star.©AFP/ VALERIE MACON

He is one of the few filmmakers who actually put every picture, every scene meticulously, the camera man stays a lot more than the light. The result of phenomenal pictures of towers that can hypnotize. At the most grandiose, perhaps, in "1900" (1976), the secret and the Declaration of love to his homeland. In the epic of two contrasting friends, everything, what concerns the man, is basically: the abhorrence of fascism, the injustice of the circumstances, the fatal tendency of mankind to prepare themselves with a terrible fate, the naive Belief in a better future and the disappointment that this future never starts, because we live too much in the past. In the end, he has taken this recipe again for "The last Emperor" and then sent his heir managed to put without a great creative Impulse. But what does it mean in such an Oeuvre.

The last few years dedicated to Bertolucci, because of a back complaint confined to a wheelchair, with a passion to the fight for accessibility in Rome and Lamenting the cultural decline of Italy. Now the man who was arrested in Yesterday Morning died, in Rome. A more difficult type for many reasons. And a true artist.

Zoran Gojic

Date Of Update: 12 December 2018, 14:04