Bertolucci

Started by SoNowThen, October 01, 2003, 11:57:42 AM

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luctruff

that's one of my favorite films of all time.  was that the scene where he talks to his dead wife, So Now Then?  i've brought it up before in some other thread.  that part always gets me.  is it just me, or this film more about the young girl than the brando character?  has anyone ever read 'the picture of dorian gray'?  it seems to me to be like that one.  the young girl is torn between the loving fiance and the brutish man (not exactly like 'dorian' , but somewhat on the same lines).  i guess the ending could be similiar as well....
"Every time I learn something new, it pushes out something old! Remember that time I took a home wine-making course and forgot how to drive?"

SoNowThen

The monologue I quoted is from the part where Brando is washing Schneider in the bathtub, and she gets out and says she's in love, and he asks her why, and she says "because he (her fiance) makes me fall in love with him", or something, and Brando goes on to pose these questions-truths...
Those who say that the totalitarian state of the Soviet Union was not "real" Marxism also cannot admit that one simple feature of Marxism makes totalitarianism necessary:  the rejection of civil society. Since civil society is the sphere of private activity, its abolition and replacement by political society means that nothing private remains. That is already the essence of totalitarianism; and the moralistic practice of the trendy Left, which regards everything as political and sometimes reveals its hostility to free speech, does nothing to contradict this implication.

When those who hated capital and consumption (and Jews) in the 20th century murdered some hundred million people, and the poster children for the struggle against international capitalism and America are now fanatical Islamic terrorists, this puts recent enthusiasts in an awkward position. Most of them are too dense and shameless to appreciate it, and far too many are taken in by the moralistic and paternalistic rhetoric of the Left.

samuelclemens

i absolutely love 'last tango in paris' such a beautiful movie.  one of the best i've ever seen.  but most of his other films, based on the descriptions and reviews, don't sound so good....i know, i shouldn't care about that, but i'm very picky as to what i watch.  i must say, i would like to see 'the conformist', but i can't find it on netflix and no video store has it. anyway,
just remembering the part where he talks to his wife while she lies in the bed of roses almost brings a tear to my eyes.
Stupid babies need the most attention!

SoNowThen

I saw The Last Emperor (3 hour 40 min director's cut) on the weekend. Fucking great. Not a dull moment in the whole long massive thing. Transfer was kinda grainy on the dvd, but Storaro reigns supreme as a god among dp's. I wanna get his book through American Cinematographer -- Writing With Light. Anybody read it?


My Bertolucci watchings have so far been wonderful. I need to find Luna, Tragedy Of A Ridiculous Man, and the director's cut of 1900 next...
Those who say that the totalitarian state of the Soviet Union was not "real" Marxism also cannot admit that one simple feature of Marxism makes totalitarianism necessary:  the rejection of civil society. Since civil society is the sphere of private activity, its abolition and replacement by political society means that nothing private remains. That is already the essence of totalitarianism; and the moralistic practice of the trendy Left, which regards everything as political and sometimes reveals its hostility to free speech, does nothing to contradict this implication.

When those who hated capital and consumption (and Jews) in the 20th century murdered some hundred million people, and the poster children for the struggle against international capitalism and America are now fanatical Islamic terrorists, this puts recent enthusiasts in an awkward position. Most of them are too dense and shameless to appreciate it, and far too many are taken in by the moralistic and paternalistic rhetoric of the Left.

Pwaybloe

Quote from: SoNowThenMy Bertolucci watchings have so far been wonderful. I need to find Luna...

Since you live in Canada, you may get lucky.  But for those who live in the US, we aren't so lucky.  It's never been released here.  

For fun information on the movie, check here.

modage



In 1972, director Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris suggested a creative new way to incorporate butter in the boudoir, and the film became the first mainstream movie to earn an X rating. More than three decades later, Bertolucci returns to Paris with another eye-opening culinary twist on lovemaking in The Dreamers, proving that you can't make a ménage à trois without breaking a few eggs. This time, an NC-17 marks the spot of Bertolucci's latest adults-only film.

Daring? Sure, but scandal is nothing new for the Italian director, who has refused to shy away from sexuality on-screen his entire career. Four years after Last Tango in Paris, Bertolucci unveiled his most graphic movie yet, the ultraviolent five-hour political epic 1900, which was edited by nearly half an hour to justify its R rating in the States (the complete version was released in 1993 with an NC-17).

In the 20 years since, his vision has extended to embrace a global philosophy with The Last Emperor and Little Buddha before returning to the raw intimacy of Stealing Beauty, his vivid 1996 account of a young woman's sexual awakening. His latest foray, The Dreamers, interweaves politics, eroticism and an homage to the formative films in Bertolucci's life. Here, Bertolucci explains five of the movies that influenced his style.

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Rules of the Game (La Règle du jeu)
(1939, dir: Jean Renoir, starring: Nola Gregor, Marcel Dalio)
First of all, Jean Renoir has this incredible quantity of love. He loves all of his characters, including the "baddies" who are condemned to do bad things. He can't help it. I always saw Renoir as a bridge between the 19th and 20th centuries, possibly because his father, the painter [Pierre-Auguste Renoir], was a great artist of the century before, and I could sense the presence of his father in his vision. In The Rules of the Game, there is this extraordinary feeling that there will soon be a war with many people dying, [a foreboding] which is heaviest during the hunting sequence. Renoir was like a prophet and a poet. He creates a very strong feeling of a world which is disappearing, the old world of his father. There is a scene in Novecento (1900) where a wedding ends in a very tragic way. There's a moment when all the guests are shocked by the murder of a boy, and Robert De Niro says, "It's getting dark. It will soon rain. Everybody is asked to please reenter the villa," exactly like at the end of The Rules of the Game, as if we are seeing that is a society that is able to contain and repress all dramas, a society able to embrace people who are on the edge of a precipice.


La Dolce Vita
(1960, dir: Federico Fellini, starring: Marcello Mastroianni, Anita Ekberg)
Fellini knew that La Dolce Vita would have some troubles with censorship. As he was finishing postproduction, he asked a few friends and intellectuals in Rome to see it. I was 17 or 18 at the time, and my father took me to Cinecitta, where Fellini was hosting this little screening for 10 people. This was before the post-sync of the film [meaning that the final dialogue would be re-recorded later], so it was all in direct sound, Italian, French, German, a little bit of English, all with the constant presence of the voice of Fellini in the background: "Anita, don't be silly. Smile." He was like a real prophet, imagining and materializing a world on the screen that didn't exist in reality but would come to exist soon. They say, "Life imitates art," and Fellini invented the Via Veneto, he invented the paparazzi, he invented this kind of Catholic Roman aristocracy. Via Veneto was the most boring street in Rome, but after the film, it became famous, and because one photographer in the film was named Paparazzo, those photographers all became "paparazzi." La Dolce Vita really pushed me because it was both very realistic and magic, a kind of magic realism.


Breathless (À bout de souffle)
(1960, dir: Jean-Luc Godard, starring: Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg)
The language of Breathless, that kind of freedom, was very liberating. Jean-Luc Godard was using these provocative jump cuts which nobody had done so far. Jump cuts were considered a kind of mistake, like breaking the rules, and yet I had the feeling that within a few years, I would have seen the temptation to use jump cuts from some of the old American classic masters. These young French directors had all been trained at the Cinémateque Français. They made a kind of political stand against what they had called the "cinéma du papa," in which they would attack respected French directors like Réné Clement, Marcel Carné, but they were completely in love with other directors of the previous generation. There was a shuffling of the cards, inventing new hierarchies of taste. Breathless is this exploitation of Humphrey Bogart influenced by American directors like Samuel Fuller and Nicholas Ray. When Théo and Matthew meet outside the Cinémateque in The Dreamers, I cut a line because it was too much. After Théo says, "Do you know what Godard said about Nicholas Ray? 'Nicholas Ray is cinema,'" Matthew originally answered, "Oh, that says more about Godard than about Ray." I thought we were [indulging] the film buffs too much, and I didn't want to repel people who are not [obsessed with movies].


Happy Together
(1989; dir: Wong Kar Wai; starring: Leslie Cheung, Tony Leung Chiu-Wai)
I was also influenced by a movie called Happy Together by a young Hong Kong director named Wong Kar Wai. His vision of the cinema language -- the editing and light and camerawork, and also the freedom of how the story is structured -- reminded me a bit of Breathless. I think it's very important to recognize that cinema is in a state of constant mutation (many of my colleagues should know it, although they very often resist it). We recognize the major mutations from the silents to sound, from the black and white of dreams to color, which is more realistic because life is in color. Wong Kar Wai makes new mutations to the language and light; he celebrates a perfection of the imperfection. Now with the high-tech evolution, you have new mutations all the time. For instance, when the Avid [digital editing system] first showed up, some of my colleagues insisted, 'I need to be able to touch the film, to smell the film.' They were suffering, but I immediately jumped on it because I like the mutations, I like the changes. Even before Pietro Scalia and I switched to Avid on Stealing Beauty, I edited The Sheltering Sky on discs using a machine called the CMX 6000.


Sansho the Bailiff (Sanshô dayû)
(1959; dir: Kenji Mizoguchi; starring: Kinuyo Tanaka, Kyoko Kagawa)
I saw a Mizoguchi film called Sansho the Bailiff with [director Pier Paolo] Pasolini when I was very young, probably 15 or 16. They turned on the light before the film was really finished, and I saw that Pasolini was completely wet with tears. I love it because it was so different, because of the Japanese cultural difference. Mizoguchi had this quality that [Italian Neo-Realist director Roberto] Rossellini also used to have. The two of them knew exactly where the camera had to be, never too close and never too distant. There is a mysterious metaphysical point where they put the camera, which you don't consciously know, but you are positioned at virtually the perfect distance from the subject. When I'm shooting, the challenge is to be able to make the viewer feel what I am feeling in the making of it, which is a sensation in progress. I would like to create the illusion that the film is being made in front of your eyes, that it is in progress and not something pre-cooked.
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

lamas

SoNowThen - the Writing With Light book is fucking great.  filled with pictures from every film Storaro has worked on.  he talks alot about inspiration from paintings and gives examples of those paintings.  very cool but very expensive.  the book will REALLY piss you off that there aren't any good copies of The Conformist around.

themodernage02 - what site do those Take 5 director interview things come from?

SoNowThen

Quotethe Writing With Light book is fucking great

Aaargh!!!!!! Jealous jealous jealous! You lucky bastard....

does he give a lot of info as to his actual technical process, or is it more ideas and theory?
Those who say that the totalitarian state of the Soviet Union was not "real" Marxism also cannot admit that one simple feature of Marxism makes totalitarianism necessary:  the rejection of civil society. Since civil society is the sphere of private activity, its abolition and replacement by political society means that nothing private remains. That is already the essence of totalitarianism; and the moralistic practice of the trendy Left, which regards everything as political and sometimes reveals its hostility to free speech, does nothing to contradict this implication.

When those who hated capital and consumption (and Jews) in the 20th century murdered some hundred million people, and the poster children for the struggle against international capitalism and America are now fanatical Islamic terrorists, this puts recent enthusiasts in an awkward position. Most of them are too dense and shameless to appreciate it, and far too many are taken in by the moralistic and paternalistic rhetoric of the Left.

godardian

So nice to see Bertolucci giving props to Happy Together. Oh, yeah, the rest are good, too!  :wink:
""Money doesn't come into it. It never has. I do what I do because it's all that I am." - Morrissey

"Lacan stressed more and more in his work the power and organizing principle of the symbolic, understood as the networks, social, cultural, and linguistic, into which a child is born. These precede the birth of a child, which is why Lacan can say that language is there from before the actual moment of birth. It is there in the social structures which are at play in the family and, of course, in the ideals, goals, and histories of the parents. This world of language can hardly be grasped by the newborn and yet it will act on the whole of the child's existence."

Stay informed on protecting your freedom of speech and civil rights.

modage

Quote from: lamasthemodernage02 - what site do those Take 5 director interview things come from?
www.moviefone.com
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

lamas

[/quote]

Aaargh!!!!!! Jealous jealous jealous! You lucky bastard....

does he give a lot of info as to his actual technical process, or is it more ideas and theory?[/quote]

calm down.  i didn't say i owned it.  i'm broke as hell.  i just looked through it for a while at the bookstore one day.  i don't remember him getting TOO technical.  it was more about his theories on cinematography.  i'd definitely buy it if i had the cash.

lamas


modage

Quote from: Onomatopita
Quote from: themodernage02[Last Tango in Paris]

this was my first Bertolucci film and it was pretty terrible.  just.....awful.
You must expound on this, like, in the Bertolucci thread.  Because, while I thought the ending was a bit weak, I can't deny the greatness of the film as a whole, and the excellent performance by Brando.  So yes.  And see The Dreamers.  Or, wait, don't, because if you didn't like Last Tango, you'll probably LOATHE The Dreamers.
Quote from: godardian
Culturally important but vastly, vastly overrated Bertolucci: Last Tango in Paris. Same category as I Am Curious... and The Night Porter. Breaking taboos, but dragged down by being so focused on that. Some beautiful moviemaking in those, but all are dated at best.
yeah i am going to have to go with godardian.  i just did not dig this movie at all.  just sloppily written and put together with bad acting and dialogue.  shocking for shockings sake which is just so dated now.  i think the only thing that made this a landmark at the time was that it was shocking, but it just does nothing for me today.
Christopher Nolan's directive was clear to everyone in the cast and crew: Use CGI only as a last resort.

El Duderino

yes, i actually tuned into this movie a couple nights ago and it was just....bad. with all the kudos bertolucci gets on here, i thought'd it be good. i was wrong.
Did I just get cock-blocked by Bob Saget?

SoNowThen

Y'all are insane.

Brando at his PEAK.
Those who say that the totalitarian state of the Soviet Union was not "real" Marxism also cannot admit that one simple feature of Marxism makes totalitarianism necessary:  the rejection of civil society. Since civil society is the sphere of private activity, its abolition and replacement by political society means that nothing private remains. That is already the essence of totalitarianism; and the moralistic practice of the trendy Left, which regards everything as political and sometimes reveals its hostility to free speech, does nothing to contradict this implication.

When those who hated capital and consumption (and Jews) in the 20th century murdered some hundred million people, and the poster children for the struggle against international capitalism and America are now fanatical Islamic terrorists, this puts recent enthusiasts in an awkward position. Most of them are too dense and shameless to appreciate it, and far too many are taken in by the moralistic and paternalistic rhetoric of the Left.