Bertolucci, Bernardo

(1940– )

   The son of a literary critic and poet, Bertolucci’s own first book of poems won the prestigious Viareggio prize in 1962. In the same year, he directed his first feature film. Two years later, his first critically acclaimed movie, Prima della rivoluzione (Before the Revolution, 1964), which tells the story of a young aristocrat who flirts with revolutionary politics before settling down into a conventional marriage, won the Prix Max Ophuls at Cannes.

   In 1968, Bertolucci joined the Partito Comunista Italiano/Italian Communist Party (PCI), which was the prelude to an extraordinary burst of creativity at the beginning of the 1970s. La strategia del ragno (The Spider’s Stratagem, 1970) and Il conformista (The Conformist, 1971) won Bertolucci international acclaim. The latter film, which describes a tormented young fascist intellectual coming to terms with his homosexuality, was a spectacular critical success. The film received an Oscar nomination and won the National Film Critics’award. In 1972, Bertolucci’s fame turned to notoriety after the production of L’ultimo tango a Parigi (The Last Tango in Paris, 1972). Its graphic sex scenes caused the film to be banned in Italy, and Bertolucci was deprived of his vote for five years. Critical opinion on the film’s merits continues to be divided, with some regarding the film as a watershed for the cinematic art, others as embarrassingly overblown and pretentious. Bertolucci’s real masterpiece is arguably the 1976 five-hour epic 1900, which was shot in his native Po River valley with an international cast that included Burt Lancaster, Robert De Niro, Gerard Depardieu, and Donald Sutherland. A violent, squalid, heroic panorama of Italian life and politics from 1900 to 1945, the film contains some of the most moving—and most disturbing—images ever portrayed on film. In recent years, Bertolucci has moved into the commercial mainstream. The Last Emperor (1987), shot on location in China, was an epic film of glorious beauty that told the tale of Pu Yi, the last emperor of China, who survived Japanese invasion and the cultural revolution to end his life as a gardener in Beijing. The film won several Academy Awards, including best picture.

   See also Cinema.