Bernardo Bertolucci 1941-2018: a phantastic guy

Name a filmmaker who maybe, maybe, spent a shade too long in psychoanalysis; Woody Allen’s name might spring to mind. But it was true, by his own admission, of Bernardo Bertolucci, who famously greeted the winning of a barrel-load of Oscars with the quip that Hollywood had become, for him, ‘the big nipple.’ He couldn’t stop himself.

That same year, 1988, John Boorman had done the rounds of Hollywood functions because he, too, was promoting a movie with multiple nominations; and in his diaries Boorman recorded a wonderful exchange with his fellow auteur. He asked Bertolucci quite why he’d done so much time on the analyst’s couch, and the reply was, as I recall: ‘Because I kept on making beautiful movies and nobody went to see them.’

The thing is, you can see Bertolucci making that joke, in all candour, with the delighting, semi-rueful smile that travelled halfway up the side of his face.

But, of course, not nearly so neglected! Bertolucci was, is, will be famous for Last Tango in Paris and The Last Emperor. The Conformist is widely considered his masterpiece, one of the all-time great movies. Before the Revolution and The Spider’s Stratagem are hugely admired. Much else in his body of work is extraordinary and brilliant. That’s plenty, no?

It’s The Conformist for me, too. It’s about politics, about Italy and fascism; but it’s about cinema, too – helplessly, ravishingly. Bertolucci would own up, candidly, to a case of ‘the disease of cinephilia.’ In this movie, he made plain, you could see Ophuls, Sternberg, Welles. But you saw Godard, too – the father he offended by taking Paramount’s money to distribute the film. You saw Bresson: Bertolucci, who venerated the great man, cast Dominique Sanda fresh from Une Femme Douce because, he quipped, he wanted to steal one of Bresson’s virgins, put her in a beautiful dress and take her to a party.

Bertolucci was always honourable towards his great collaborators, too, as on The Conformist: the visual powerhouses Vittorio Storaro and Nando Scarfiotti, and Franco ‘Kim’ Arcalli, who helped him reconstruct The Conformist in the cutting-room (‘an ex-Partisan, fantastic guy!’ as Bertolucci would describe him to years later.)

Bertolucci’s cinema has given me so many more joys: that apartment in Last Tango in Paris, with its strange Christo-like shroud; the umbilical links in Luna, and the pop-culture joys of Marilyn Monroe in Niagara and Matthew Barry’s café-jukebox dancing; the toast in The Last Emperor to ‘The Lord of Ten Thousand Years!’; The Sheltering Sky’s heartbreaking scene between Malkovich and Winger on the rocky plateau, that film’s heartbreaking score, its exquisite ending with Paul Bowles…

Bertolucci’s ambitions were so grand and romantic, his conception of sex and politics so heady, that you’d be hard-hearted not to see the life-enhancing charm of them, even if he sometimes bit off more than he could chew. If I remember it correct he wanted Novecento to be co-founded by Hollywood and Mosfilm, with US and Soviet actors in the two leads, as a means of engineering a little creative détente. That plan was doomed, a shade too schematic: as is any cinema, in my view, that tries to score points based on theories, that wants to editorialise rather than dramatise. Some of Bertolucci’s movies aren’t as dramatic as they ought to be; but they’re always ravishing.

When I was a research student at the British Film Institute in the mid-1990s I wrote a thesis on Nando Scarfiotti and his work, to which Bertolucci, with great grace, contributed in loving memory of his friend and colleague. I met him on the Tuscan location of Stealing Beauty, where he was commanding matters with the charisma I expected. Darius Khondji was the DP – no mean substitute for Storaro, who wasn't available, as he sometimes hadn't been ever since he was, in Bertolucci’s impish words, ‘unfaithful to him with Coppola’ for Apocalypse Now. 

I will never ever forget that day, that conversation, all I saw on Bertolucci’s show. I have one or two friends who are filmmakers, and I like to address them as ‘maestro,’ jocularly, but in respect, too – because it’s very hard to make a good film. Bertolucci made some great ones, and when I watched him make cinema I was so struck by the easy way in which he was addressed repeatedly by his collaborators as ‘maestro.’ He certainly was.  Buona notte e buona fortuna, maestro.

Ken Adam's Imaginary Architecture

To BFI South Bank last week for a superb tribute to the late great production designer Ken Adam, he of numerous Bond films, Barry Lyndon, Dr Strangelove, etc.  The Broccoli family/EON Films, I believe, put the whole thing together; Chris Frayling emceed it fluently, and a very fine array of speakers paid tribute in-between some well-crafted clip montages.

Adam had quite some twentieth-century life experience before cinema. A German Jew who fled Berlin perforce in the 1930s, he served with valour in the RAF (the story is here), and one of the most memorable tributes on the night came from a current senior officer in 609 Squadron.

Among a few paeans delivered on film – Roger Moore was dryly funny, I must say – the most thought-provoking was perhaps from Lord Foster, who sounded truly enthused about the notion of an alternative history of architecture, based on the influence of buildings that were never actually built – or, rather, fabricated only temporarily, on a sound stage, as imaginative space for scrutiny by a camera lens. Any film-goer can name a favourite edifice in this regard, a space they would love to have inhabited or visited, except that it lives only in cinema. (Apparently Adam’s widow Laetitia would get quite emotional come the day of shooting day on any given Bond picture when an action sequence called for some glorious set of her husband’s to be blown to bits.)

I explored my own passion for production design in my long biographical study of Ferdinando Scarfiotti, and pictures that he designed as diverse as The Conformist and Scarface still work that sort of wish-you-were-there enchantment on viewers.

Alan Bennett, who became friends with Adam in the filming of his Madness of King George, attended the tribute in person and spoke intriguingly of a unique feeling he’d had and professed to not quite understand – namely that knowing Adam had made him feel part of a ‘European culture’. I briefly thought this might herald some reference to the EU referendum, but Bennett left the sentiment there, and it resonated. When the lights came out and I wandered out with the filmmaker friend who’d invited me long, we shared a few wistful thoughts of the ‘they don’t make them like they used to’ variety, related both to movies and to people. There’s an obvious aesthetic to the old movie world of built sets and spaces dressed for celluloid, one that gains lustre as more and more films are very evidently made by computers. And there’s no point being overly nostalgic for the sorts of costs that the old studio-style model necessitated.

But cinema is the supreme time-based art form, and so many pleasures, even of a melancholy variety, derive from that very truth.

A still-neglected piece of Adam finery (fine work, indeed, from the whole cast and crew) is Pennies From Heaven (1981). This is the sort of thing I’m talking about.

Scarfiotti, master builder

Jean-Louis Trintignant in The Conformist (1969)

A couple of years back I mentioned the MFA thesis I submitted to the BFI in 1995, an interview-based study of the life and work of the late production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti. It was, I hoped then and think now, a decent and useful piece of work, and I was especially grateful to Paul Schrader and Bernardo Bertolucci for their contributions, very evidently made out of the deepest regard for their friend and collaborator.

Anyhow, a few chunks from the thesis have ended up online, here and here, accompanied by some attractive frame-stills. Fine by me, as I'm correctly cited, and otherwise the thesis would have no meaningful afterlife other than for visitors to the BFI Library. Please do look for yourself, and remember one of the most quietly influential figures in twentieth century film style.

Ferdinando Scarfiotti 1941-1994: Excursions into style

One of the many incidental pleasures of my recent sit-downs with Sean Penn - in Dublin for an update of His Life and Times, then in New York for an upcoming magazine profile, both times on the set of This Must Be The Place - was the customary occasional discussion of films and filmmakers. For instance, in NYC we fell to chatting about Paul Schrader, his scripts for Taxi Driver and the far less luminous Rolling Thunder, also his directorial gift for designing title sequences (cf. Blue Collar and American Gigolo.) Mention of Gigolo, though, got me thinking back to that film's pristine design by the late, great Ferdinando Scarfiotti, longtime collaborator of Bertolucci (The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, The Last Emperor) and Visconti (Death in Venice plus numerous operas.)

When I was a research student at the British Film Institute in the mid-1990s I wrote a thesis on Scarfiotti and his work, to which Bertolucci and Schrader, inter alia, kindly contributed in loving memory of their friend and colleague. It seemed to me then that said thesis, however 'provisional' in its interview-derived biographical data, was the only substantive work on Scarfiotti in any language, albeit available only via the BFI library and in a truncated version courtesy of the scholarly journal Critical Quarterly.

Happily, however, that has changed: Zecchini Editore of Italy have newly published a biography/tribute called Nando Forever: what looks to be a very handsome tome, with a DVD attached, compiled by Luciano Gregoretti and Maria Teresa Copelli. And by the sounds of it this is just the commemorative/celebratory volume that this brilliant and unsung film artist has long deserved. The following trailer for The Conformist shouldn't really be listened to (dubbing!), enjoyed rather for the parade of imagery for which Scarfiotti gifted Bertolucci such a rich foundation through his exquisite design choices.

Jung at Heart: Sleeping Beauty

Round about this time last year I vowed here to blog my regular readings of Thomas Mann’s Joseph and His Brothers in diligent instalments. Can you guess what happened to that good new season's resolution? Instead, here are some more prattlings on the latest of the canonical Disney animated films that I now watch ad nauseam with my little daughter.
When you watch an old movie - if you’re old enough to have lived through, say, about half-a-dozen changes of government - then there’s a certain code or aura the movie holds or exudes that will telegraph to you more or less precisely what point in the twentieth century the movie was made – and this even before you reach up to get the Old Movies reference book off your shelf. Paul Schrader was the first person I heard making this shrewd point, and though he is quite the connoisseur I do believe that pretty well anyone of a certain vintage can play this game. It’s mainly a study in changing fashions.
Per Disney, the game is often elementary. Snow White is clearly a product of the late 1930s just on the basis of the Wicked Queen’s vampish curling-lip looks. The Jungle Book is similarly simple – mid-1960s – because it features a group of vultures with mop-top hair and Scouse accents.
Sleeping Beauty, my daughter’s latest crush, puzzled me for a while, though. In a way, the picture has hardly dated. The artwork (largely imagined by Eyvind Earle, one of whose production paintings appears above) has a certain imprssively dedicated medieval/Flemish feel to it. Some of the musical stings are lifted from Tchaikovsky. But let’s not make it sound too complicated. It had to have been made between 1950-1970. The Princess Aurora at times resembles the animated Elizabeth Montgomery in TV’s Bewitched, which aired in the mid-1960s. But who ripped off who?
I finally made my decision thanks to a spooky scene where Aurora is hypnotised by the evil Maleficent in the form of an unearthly light that bathes the room in a greenish glow and seems to turn Aurora’s skin blue. Jimmy Stewart! Kim Novak! Vertigo! At that point Earle’s way of drawing flowers even started to remind me of the blooms in Stewart’s ‘Carlotta’ nightmare in the Hitchcock picture. Vertigo was 1958, a good year at the movies. So down comes my Old Movies reference book and there it is: Sleeping Beauty, 1959.
With her horned raiment, yellow eyes and pointed chin, Maleficent is a fairly sinister villainess, albeit played for more comedy than Snow White’s Wicked Queen. But both are perfectly unproblematic viewing for my little girl. I’m not sure I’d take her anywhere near Henry Selick’s Coraline, now in cinemas, and being pitched as an unmissable entertainment for kids even though it contains a strong undercurrent of frightening, nightmarish, sadistic villainy. It’s also highly in debt to Hitchcock, specifically the ‘Gingerbread Gothic’ of Psycho. But a wonderful picture, nonetheless.
In the land of the vivid imagination it's hard to say what’s best for kids, and what’s best for adults. I’m fairly sure that people over 18 years of age shouldn’t be reading 'Harry Potter and the Tower of Nothing' (as I heard Stewart Lee call in on telly recently.) But per my recent musings on Angela Carter, I do think fantasy material that is created first and foremost for the tender of years and innocent of heart is more truly compelling for an adult to eavesdrop upon than more self-conscious mature-reader reworkings of fairytale and myth.
To wit: the aforementioned Paul Schrader once remade the old RKO horror picture Cat People with a script rich in Jungian archetypes, decors by the genius Italian designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti, and Nastassja Kinski – the It Girl of 1981 – dangerously exposed in the lead role. The poster described the movie as ‘An Erotic Fantasy’. Pauline Kael was mean-spirited but not far wrong when she said that every shot looked like the cover of an album you’d never want to buy.

Nothing If Not Critical Quarterly

This week I have been mostly reading the 50th Anniversary edition of the scholarly journal Critical Quarterly, edited as it has been since 1987 by my friend Professor Colin MacCabe. Colin first put me into CQ in 1996, publishing a thesis of mine about the Italian film/opera set designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti. These days I'm listed among two-dozen CQ Contributing Editors (among the others are Simon Frith, Christopher Hitchens, Isaac Julian, Denis MacShane MP, and Jon Savage.) That said, I've not actually written anything for CQ since about 2002. (Where does the time go? But then nor has Nigella Lawson, whose name is also on the masthead for reasons I can never quite remember.)
CQ makes for great reading on the London underground (much better than some free paper with the latest on Amy Winehouse's flea-hive) and the other morning I glanced up from Colin's essay 'Towards A New Cambridge Philology' and thought I saw George Steiner sitting some way down the carriage. If Colin is the cleverest man I know (and he is) then I daresay Steiner is the cleverest I've never met. Both men, funnily enough, have in the past endured unfathomable academic slights from Cambridge University - which seems to me queer, since I thought cleverness was meant to be Cambridge's Big Thing. I know that when Colin taught there c. the late 1970s he had some highly brilliant students, because I keep running across them in their developed incarnations, and not just at CQ events such as last week's 50th anniversary dinner, where one such alumnus - the actor Simon McBurney - read in memoriam (and superbly) a poem by CQ's founder Brian Cox, who died recently. (Of course Colin taught a few twerps there too, some of whom still went on to make their way in the meeja world, but then such are the wages of a Good University.)
This week I think Colin is in Cannes: now unofficially retired from film/TV producing but still drawn to the Great Festival, from which he routinely reports for CQ and where he is usually Treated Right on account of having done some jury service in the past. So in the hope he is having a good one, and perhaps bumping into Sean Penn at some well-lubricated function, I will tonight raise a glass of rosé (or maybe retsina? Whenever I've dined with Colin a la Grec he's usually ordered a bottle of same while pointing out that this was the stuff Homer drank...)