Bernardo Bertolucci was born in 1941 to a prosperous family in Parma, Italy. His father was a well-known poet and critic. Starting out himself as a poet Bertolucci spent his formative years enthralled with the cinema, due mainly to his father’s work as a film critic. Bertolucci initially shot two short films with his younger brother. By the age of 20 Bertolucci was working as an assistant to his father’s friend, Pier Paolo Pasolini, on the latter’s first feature, Accatone (1961). Bertolucci’s own first feature, The Grim Reaper (La commare secca) (1962), based on a treatment by Pasolini, was an episodic investigation into a murder seen through the different perspectives of the inhabitants of a park in Rome.

1964’s Before the Revolution (Prima della rivoluzione), the director’s second film, tells the story of Fabrizio (Francesco Barilli), a middle class youth torn between his revolutionary ideals and the decadent luxury of his environment, introducing a political aspect that would, in his later films, be more developed.

Bertolucci’s two major influences during this period were Pasolini and Jean-Luc Godard, and the latter’s influence is evident in Partner (1968), Bertolucci’s third feature, an attempt at the elliptical, politically committed style of Godard’s late 1960s work. Based on  Dostoevsky’s novella The Double, Partner is the story of a young idealist (Pierre Clementi) who is confronted with his revolutionary and psychotic doppelganger. Notable for its attempts at Brechtian alienation, narrative disruption, direct addresses to camera, the film is very much a transitional work in which the tension between Bertolucci’s lyrical vision and cinematic self assurance come up against the fragmented style of Godard’s overtly political films.

His work in the early 1970s provided the major breakthrough for Bertolucci. The Spider’s Stratagem (La strategia del ragno) (1970), based on Jorge Luis Borges’ short story “The Theme of the Traitor and the Hero”, and The Conformist (Il conformista), an adaptation of Alberto Moravia’s novel, are Bertolucci’s most highly rated works, with the latter especially considered to be his greatest achievement. Stratagem starts out as a contemporary tale about a young man, Athos Magnani Jr., (Giulio Brogi) arriving at a small town to investigate the death of his father, Athos Magnani (also played by Brogi), apparently at the hands of Mussolini’s fascists. The film then flashes back to scenes of the elder Magnani’s exploits as a Resistance fighter. Bertolucci incongruously casts the same older actors as Magnani’s comrades both in the present and the past, creating a jarring effect where the present and the past co-exist. A lyrical, symbolic work, marked by Bertolucci’s fluid camera and vivid scenes of colour it marked a leap forward in the young director’s faltering attempts to blend the self-reflexive with the mainstream.

The Conformist is the story of Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant), a young man in Mussolini’s Italy assigned to track down and murder his former teacher. Clerici travels to Paris where he becomes involved with his former teacher’s bisexual wife (Dominique Sanda). Bertolucci alters the linear sequence of the novel, starting his film close to the end, with Clerici in a hotel room awaiting the phone call to instigate the murder. The past then begins to unfold while Clerici travels in his car. Flashbacks unfold within flashbacks – leading back to a homosexual encounter as the locus of Clerici’s anxiety.

Bertolucci cleverly avoids traditional cinematic flashback indicators keeping the viewer unsettled and uncertain as the story unfolds. The Conformist was hugely successful and had a profound effect on a whole generation of filmmakers when it was released in 1970. Francis Ford Coppola described it as “the first classic of the decade,” its influence marked on his first two Godfather films, and the filmmaker and critic Paul Schrader commented, “To my mind, you can speak of pre-Conformist and post-Conformist design.”

Bertolucci with the aid of his cameraman Vittorio Storaro and production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti created a claustrophobic environment around the sexually ambivalent, reluctant hit-man Clerici through their expressive use of light and architecture. The bare white walls and furnishings of a psychiatric hospital; a bureaucrat’s desk in the centre of a vast empty room; mirrors that surround Clerici and trap him within his own anxieties – the film is a triumph of visual detail and design.

The Conformist remains Bertolucci’s most critically acclaimed film. Last Tango in Paris (1972), which followed, is his best known and most controversial work. The story of an older American (Marlon Brando) and a young French woman (Maria Schneider) engaging in a series of anonymous sexual encounters inside a Paris apartment, the film was a huge box office success due to its explicit sex scenes and Brando’s committed performance. Although dated in certain respects the film’s raw conviction still retains the power to shock. 

The success of Last Tango gave Bertolucci the freedom of a large budget and power to attract a superb cast for his next film, 1900 (Novecento) (1976) a lengthy and epic account of early 20th century Italian history starring Robert De Niro, Gerard Depardieu, Burt Lancaster and Donald Sutherland amongst others. The film’s running time and its pro Marxist politics resulted in a falling out between Bertolucci and his American backers, which ended up with a severely curtailed version of the film being released with limited publicity. 

After the disappointment of its failure Bertolucci went in a new direction, firstly with the complex lurid melodrama La Luna (1979) starring Jill Clayburgh then Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (1981) before Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (1988) a lavish biopic of the Chinese Emperor Puyi, brought Bertolucci commercial success and critical acclaim, winning nine Oscars in the process. 

Following its success Bertolucci adapted Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky (1990) a visually stunning account of the disintegrating relationships between three travellers in post-war North Africa as they succumb to hardship, moral collapse and fever in an alien clime. Bertolucci then directed Little Buddha (1993), an underwhelming attempt to fuse a double narrative structure into the tale of a modern American boy, who might be the incarnation of a great Buddhist teacher, with the story of the life of Prince Siddhartha. Both projects flopped at the box office. Bertolucci’s next film was Stealing Beauty (1996) a hesitant, unconvincing tale of an American girl’s sexual awakening in Italy while searching for her father. Besieged (1998) is a more satisfying, intriguing chamber work about an African medical student who supports herself as a live-in housekeeper in the villa of a reclusive English pianist. These two strangers are drawn to each other in a complex game of longing and desire that is never specified and unfolds entirely through editing, camera-work and spatial formation.

Bertolucci’s The Dreamers from 2004 was adapted by Gilbert Adair from his novel The Holy Innocents and tells the story of an erotic triangle set against the backdrop of the 1968 student uprising in Paris, replete with cinematic reference to the French New Wave of filmmakers. Bertolucci returned to directing with what turned out to be his final film Me and You (2012), adapted from a novel by Niccolò Ammaniti, a claustrophobic story in which a teenage boy and his older half-sister spend a week together in a cramped basement. 

Bertolucci died in 2018. Writing in The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw summed up his work thus: “Last Tango in Paris is now a subject for debate as much as reverence. It retains the power to shock, but also to put moviegoers into an eerie trance, especially in that inspired final shot of the last thing Brando’s character sees before dying. Admirers will also go back to the lavish pleasures of The Last Emperor and to the fierce intelligence of The Conformist and Before the Revolution – intense memories of his revolutionary nonconformism.”

The following excerpt is from an interview with Bertolucci from 1971 conducted by Amos Vogel for Film Comment magazine in which he discusses The Conformist and other issues.

FC: You said you wanted a precise script, but only to destroy it; but what is in the script—is it description of scenes and dialogue or detailed shot instructions, camera set-ups, and movements?

BB: It is only a script of situations and dialogue; it contains nothing about camera or its placement or about the actual shots. The script is a starting point for me—you have to have one-but that’s all …

FC: Yet, when one looks at your films, they are very complex and advanced, not merely stylistically, but in terms of Editing as well. This is why I am not quite clear why you counterpose editing to shooting. For example, there is a scene in Before the Revolution, which involves a young man, Agostino, on a bike. Agostino is distraught and this is conveyed by means of jagged camera movements, interrupted action, cutting from long-shot to closeup and zoom without any transition. It is a beautiful sequence, very short, mysterious and unpredictable, created by the way camera and actors move within the frame, and by editing, tempo, length, and order of the shots. The scene could have been killed in the editing.

BB: Well, I was there and I happen to know how it all happened; in fact, it’s an example of why I feel the film is conventional. I believe that a film should be “all there” at the moment of shooting. When I see a sequence like the one you mentioned, it smells of manipulation. I had shot this sequence with two cameras-one with a wide-angle lens, the other with a zoom lens. This already indicates to me that I was somewhat undecided about the sequence. I shot it as I would a boxing match, thinking that I would fix it up in the editing and this is not good for me. All you can get from editing is a little bit of manipulation.

FC: Well, “manipulation” is inherent in any sequence, in the way it was photographed, “set up” and edited to give it a particular tempo and character. Doesn’t art constantly—and inevitably—manipulate reality?

BB: Not in the shooting. The shooting is just “a happening” [in English], it’s a rapport between me, the camera and what is present…

FC: Do you think all editing is manipulative?

BB: The editing of Griffith, Eisenstein, Vertov was not manipulative, but a great invention.

FC: But Eisenstein, especially, has been accused of intellectual manipulation and even formalism.

BB: No, in my opinion editing becomes manipulative only when it is taken over by the producer. Before that, it’s a sublime invention. But even if my producer does not oppress me, the editing itself has today become manipulative.

FC: But what about independent or underground filmmakers who don’t even have a producer?

BB: In their films there is even more manipulation than in normal films because, in the underground cinema, there is the same refusal to accept the so-called commercial, establishment cinema that certain young bourgeois express against their fathers; but, as their fathers are, in a sense, far removed from them, the sons are somehow integrated into society anyway. The underground cinema is merely the other side of the coin of the Hollywood cinema; it’s a reaction that remains within the framework of Hollywood. In a more banal, simple sense, there is a great love for Hollywood in underground films; when they want to be perverse, or against the official morality, they are as innocent as young school girls. They do all the things their masters told them not to do; now, that is nice, but it’s not revolutionary. But remember that I speak of editing here not as a theoretician; I only express a certain unhappiness. In ten days, I might change my mind.

FC: There is a scene in The Spider’s Stratagem in which Athos, the young protagonist, leaves a building. He walks to the right, out of the frame; behind him is a startling, very blue wall; he has already left the frame, but you decided to have us look at this blue wall for another several seconds. Now this is an editing decision.

BB: No, it’s a shooting decision.

FC: But during the editing, you decided to keep this footage in the final film and not to cut when he leaves the frame?

BB: I had already decided this before the shooting ; otherwise I would have told my cameraman to cut.

FC: And so the “divine moment” is in the shooting, not in the editing?

BB: Not “divine”…

FC: The supreme human moment is in the shooting?

BB: Yes, definitely.

FC: This is very different from the views of many other directors, including the early Russian revolutionary directors. According to them, a film is born only in the cutting room.

BB: There is something fundamental I want to say about all this: When there are no ideas in the shots, you cannot insert them by means of editing. The idea has to be there during the shooting. Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons, for example, has long, long takes and no editing and is one of the more extraordinary examples of non-editing; or rather, filmic creation at the moment of shooting…

FC: But when you call editing an imperialist device, it’s really not the editing but rather the intervention of the producer you refer to?

BB: Yes, in fact, I said earlier that editing was a beautiful invention, an expressive device; just like the trade unions were great at one time; but in the next moment, capital stepped in and interfered in the unions, like in America.

FC: I am struck by the stylistic differences, between The Spider’s Stratagem and The Conformist and your earlier Before the Revolution. Do you consider these new films to be an advance aesthetically or do you merely wish to indicate that the staccato, avant-grade style of Before the Revolution was only appropriate for that particular, passionate, almost autobiographical subject? After all, the style of your last two films is much closer to conventional narrative cinema, with lyrical and poetic components.

BB: I believe that these films are like three different ways of loving three different women. There are different ways of loving. I made Spider’s Stratagem immediately before The Conformist, but even though there were only a few short months between them, my psychological situation was different. And that is why these two films are so different. I made The Spider’s Stratagem in a state of melancholic happiness and great serenity and The Conformist in a tragic state of great psychological upheaval. As to Before the Revolution, I do not remember.

FC: It’s in the film. As to The Conformist, it will easily be acceptable to the American art-theatre public, both politically—as an antifascist film—and aesthetically. This is not true of Before the Revolution, a very private, very special work, in fact, a cult film for a small group of cineasts and critics.

BB: I like that very much…

FC: That it has become a cult film?

BB: No, that with The Conformist, can now speak to a wider audience: it is possible that I make films because, in real life, I cannot communicate; and this way I communicate with lots of people. In this sense, Victor Fleming was a very fortunate person… He made Gone With The Wind… [Laughs] Fleming communicates with everybody.

FC: But this reminds me of the strange remark you made during your New York Film Festival press conference following The Conformist, when you affectionately referred to it as “your commercial film,” “a bit of whoring” on your part, and then smiled in a devilish way.

BB: Yes, I said it and I meant it and I hope it is true. What gave me a sort of devilish appearance is that I know that The Conformist is my most difficult film and that amuses me very much. It seems to be my easiest film, but actually it is the most difficult because it is the simplest one. One enters it on a first level of “reading” that was missing from Before the Revolution: that film had many other levels but there did not exist a first level of reading as soon as you saw it. In The Conformist, there is such a first level, so everybody enters it and poses no further problems to himself. Instead, the film is full of other levels. This is the trick of the great Hollywood directors: in Europe, we needed thirty years before some young French critics made us realize that the American cinema was something more than what had been thought of until that moment.

FC: At your The Conformist press conference, you also said: “The destruction of structures in Partner is, in The Conformist, followed by a very definite structure.” But isn’t the “destruction of structures” one of the signposts of contemporary cinema, the cinema of Godard and the underground; and also of modern literature, painting, music, poetry?

BB: Yes, definitely. In the cinema, Godard started it. In music, Schönberg. But The Conformist arrives at a moment when I myself, looking around in cinema, realize that this destruction of structures has itself become the new establishment, not only in my film but in those of others. I think we need more plot and structure now. Perhaps it is fear, I don’t know.

FC: Well, there was plot in Partner and Before the Revolution too, a looser, more dissociated, modern kind of plot.

BB: I mean, we need more solid structures. Maybe this is a fear of aestheticism and a feeling that the avant-garde is itself bourgeois…

–Excerpt from “Interview: Bernardo Bertolucci”. By Amos Vogel, Fall, 1971, Film Comment Magazine.