The provocative and poetic films of Bernardo Bertolucci will be featured during a complete retrospective of the director’s work presented by Astoria’s American Museum of the Moving Image Feb. 14 through March 7. Bertolucci will participate in a
The series, Bernardo Bertolucci, consists of 16 feature films and an anthology program of rarely seen documentary and short works. Highlights include full-length versions of two epics: the director’s cut of “The Last Emperor,” which won nine Academy Awards in 1988, and the original theatrical version of “1900,” both of which feature the stunning cinematography of Vittorio Storaro. The museum will also screen a 70mm print of “Little Buddha” and a brand new 35mm print of “La Luna” (both also photographed by Storaro).
“Bertolucci is one of the world’s greatest living filmmakers,” said Peter Dowd, curator of film, “with a stylistically and thematically bold body of work. He is equally masterful at conveying the human story at the heart of such historical epics as ‘The Last Emperor,’ and in bringing out the political subtext in such intimate tales as ‘Last Tango in Paris’ and ‘Besieged.’”
At the age of 21, Bertolucci made two impressive debuts. He won a prestigious award for his poetry book “In Search of Mystery,” and he presented his feature film debut, “The Grim Reaper,” at the Venice Film Festival. The son of renowned poet and film critic Attilio Bertolucci, Bernardo soon learned to combine both of his family’s passions with an approach to filmmaking that fuses the lyrical and the dramatic.
While “The Spider’s Stratagem” and “The Conformist” established the young Bertolucci as a master filmmaker, it was the art-house blockbuster “Last Tango in Paris” that made him an international star. Bertolucci used this newfound creative clout to broaden his canvas, making the uncompromising five-hour epic “1900.” Its inspired images, its Marxist theme, and its notions of family and duality are hallmarks of the director’s films.
“La Luna” artfully explored Oedipal dynamics, foregrounding the Freudian concerns present throughout Bertolucci’s films, while “The Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man” showed his ability to create a small-scale gem. Bertolucci then created his largest canvas work to date, “The Last Emperor.” Since “The Last Emperor,” Bertolucci has taken chances, making films big and small, from his rapturous adaptation of Paul Bowles’ novel “The Sheltering Sky” to “Besieged,” produced for television and shot with hand-held cameras and almost without dialogue.
With “The Dreamers,” Bertolucci returns to the political upheaval in Paris of May 1968. The film’s passionate homage to the cinema recalls Bertolucci’s 1966 description of his own dream: “to arrive at the point at which one can live for films, can think cinematographically, eat cinematographically, sleep cinematographically.”
The series was organized by Peter Dowd and is presented with support from the Italian Cultural Institute: New York.
Schedule
Monday, Feb. 2
7 p.m. The Dreamers (Special Preview)
Special preview screening and Pinewood Dialogue with Bernardo Bertolucci
Fox Searchlight, 2004, 116 mins. Bertolucci’s bold and exquisite drama about three college students, obsessed with sex and movies, is set against the tumultuous backdrop of the 1968 Paris student riots. Bertolucci will be present for a Pinewood Dialogue following the screening. For tickets ($18 public/$12 Museum members), call 718-784-4520. At the DGA Theater, 110 West 57th Street, Manhattan.
Saturday, Feb. 14
2 p.m. The Grim Reaper (La Commare Secca)
Italy, 1962, 100 mins. Mixing stylized flashbacks and cinéma vérité interviews, Bertolucci creates a Rashomon-like examination of the murder of a Roman prostitute.
4 p.m. Before the Revolution (Prima della Rivoluzione)
Italy, 1964, 115 mins. With Adriana Asti. Bertolucci’s autobiographical portrait of a young bourgeois man inspired by political radicalism and by a tumultuous affair, pays stylistic homage to the French New Wave and breaks new ground in its breathtaking use of black-and-white and color.
6:30 p.m. The Conformist
Italy/France/West Germany, 1971, 115 mins. With Jean-Louis Trintignant, Dominique Sanda. Bertolucci’s breakthrough film about the rise and fall of Fascism in Italy established him as a world-class director, prompting Pauline Kael to write: “if anyone can be called a born moviemaker, it’s Bertolucci.”
Sunday, Feb. 15
2 p.m. The Oil Road (La Via del Petrolio)
Italy, 1967, 133 mins. Regarding his first documentary, commissioned by the Italian oil industry, Bertolucci said: “I tried to get away from the rules governing documentaries. I filmed the diggers as if they were pioneers of an archaic Western, and the helicopter pilots as if they were anarchist heroes, or solitary characters of Godard.”
4:30 p.m. Partner
Italy, 1968, 105 mins. With Pierre Clementi, Tina Aumont. Bertolucci’s most avant-garde work uses Dostoyevsky’s “The Double” as a springboard for a boldly experimental film about cinema, performance, and the artist. Clementi gives a bravura performance as a tormented drama teacher and his wicked doppelganger.
6:30 p.m. The Conformist
Italy/France/West Germany, 1971, 115 mins. With Jean-Louis Trintignant, Dominique Sanda. (See Saturday, Feb. 14 for description.)
Saturday, Feb. 21
2 p.m. Short Films by Bertolucci
1967-2002, 95 mins. This compilation includes “Agony,” with the Living Theater troupe in a drama about a dying man’s self-evaluation; the documentaries “The Poor Die First” and “The Canal”; the personal film essays “Postcard from China” and “Bologna”; and the recent “Histoire d’eaux” from the omnibus “Ten Minutes Older: The Cello.”
4 p.m. La Luna
New 35mm print. 20th Century Fox, 1979, 142 mins. With Jill Clayburgh. Bertolucci provoked controversy with this Freudian drama about a mother and son who leave New York for Rome and fall into an incestuous relationship.
6:30 p.m. The Spider’s Strategem (La Strategia del Ragno)
Italy, 1970, 100 mins. With Alida Valli. Bertolucci’s first pairing with cinematographer Vittorio Storaro is a dreamlike odyssey drawn from a story by Jorge Luis Borges. A young man returns to the small Italian town where his father was murdered, and his investigation uncovers a labyrinth of mystery and deception.
Sunday, Feb. 22
1 p.m. 1900 (Novecento)
Italy/France/Germany, 1977, 311 mins. With Robert DeNiro, Gérard Depardieu, Dominique Sanda. Restored to its original length years after being cut by more than an hour for its American release, Bertolucci’s ambitious epic follows two Italian families — one bourgeois, one working-class — from the beginning of the 20th century to the fall of Mussolini.
6:30 p.m. The Spider’s Strategem
Italy, 1970, 100 mins. With Alida Valli. (See Saturday, Feb. 21 for description.)
Saturday, Feb. 28
2 p.m. Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (La Tragedia di un Uomo Ridicolo)
Italy, 1981, 116 mins. With Ugo Tognazzi, Anouk Aimée. A wealthy farm owner in Parma sees his son kidnapped by masked bandits–but all is not as it seems in Bertolucci’s dreamlike and hyperrealist film.
4 p.m. The Sheltering Sky
1990, 138 mins. With Debra Winger, John Malkovich, Campbell Scott. “Perhaps Mr. Bertolucci’s most seductive, most hypnotic movie,” wrote New York Times critic Vincent Canby about this saga of three Americans on a journey deep into the Sahara desert.
6:30 p.m. Last Tango in Paris
Italy/France, 1972, 136 mins. Marlon Brando, Maria Schneider. As Pauline Kael famously wrote in The New Yorker following Last Tango’s premiere at the New York Film Festival, “Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form.”
Sunday, Feb. 29
2 p.m. The Last Emperor (Director’s Cut)
Italy/UK/China, 1987, 219 mins. With John Lone, Joan Chen, Peter O’Toole. Winner of nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Director, Bertolucci’s epic about the emperor Pu Yi, was succinctly described by its director as “the story of a man who wants to walk out of his house and they never allow him.”
6:30 p.m. Last Tango in Paris
Italy/France, 1972, 136 mins. Marlon Brando, Maria Schneider. See Saturday, Feb. 28, for description.)
Saturday, March 6
1 p.m. Little Buddha
70mm print. UK/France, 1993, 123 mins. With Keanu Reeves, Bridget Fonda. Completing his “Eastern Trilogy” (with “The Last Emperor” and “The Sheltering Sky”), Bertolucci interweaves two parallel tales; a modern-day Seattle couple is visited by a Tibetan monk who believes their son to be a reincarnated mentor, while (2,000 years ago), Prince Siddhartha begins his quest for Nirvana.
4:30 p.m. Stealing Beauty
Italy/France/UK, 1996, 113 mins. With Liv Tyler, Jeremy Irons. Returning to film in Italy for the first time in 15 years, Bertolucci wanted to “rediscover my country through the eyes of a foreigner.” A beautiful American teenager travels to Tuscany to find her unknown father, and discover her own sexuality.
Sunday, March 7
2 p.m. Besieged
Italy/UK, 1998, 93 mins. With Thandie Newton, David Thewlis. Bertolucci achieves a relaxed lyricism in this free-style film about an African woman who flees her country when her husband is arrested during a coup, and takes up residence with an enigmatic piano player.
4 p.m. The Dreamers
Fox Searchlight, 2003, 116 mins. With Michael Pitt, Eva Green, Louis Garrel. Paying homage to the revolutionary energy and cinematic fever of the spring of 1968, Bertolucci’s adaptation of Gilbert Adair’s “The Holy Innocents” captures the essence of one of recent history’s most explosive moments. Twins and lovers, Isabelle and Theo, welcome an American student to their apartment as political and sensual passions explode. (Note: Bertolucci will be present only for the Feb. 2 screening of The Dreamers).
The American Museum of the Moving Image is located at 35th Avenue and 36th Street in Astoria. For more information call 718-784-0077 or go to www.movingimage.us.
