Bernardo Bertolucci transformed Italian history into cinema through images of desire, power, memory and political conflict.
The Gate of the Forbidden City Opens
Thousands of extras fill the courtyards of the Forbidden City. The camera moves through red walls, yellow roofs, ceremony and impossible scale as a small child is turned into an emperor. The Last Emperor seems very far from the intimate, politically agitated cinema Bernardo Bertolucci began making in Parma and Rome. Yet the subject is familiar: a person discovers that identity is a role designed by history and performed inside architecture.
The production received extraordinary access in China and became the first Western feature permitted to shoot extensively inside the Forbidden City. At the Academy Awards it won all nine categories in which it was nominated, including Best Picture, Best Director and adapted screenplay. Bertolucci became the first Italian-born director to win the directing Oscar for an Italian-led international production of this kind. The triumph looked like the final arrival of a filmmaker who had spent his career attacking boundaries between national cinema, sexuality, politics and spectacle.
But Bertolucci’s story cannot be told as a simple ascent from youthful rebellion to imperial success. His films contain beauty and serious ethical failures, political intelligence and romantic self-deception. He believed the camera could enter desire as if entering a dream. At his best, that movement revealed the way Fascism, class and family live inside the body. At his worst, the dream protected the director’s authority from the person standing in front of the lens.
Parma, Poetry and the Father Whose Shadow Was a Garden
Bertolucci was born in Parma on 16 March 1941. His father, Attilio Bertolucci, was an important poet, critic and historian of art; his mother, Ninetta Giovanardi, was a teacher. The family home near the countryside placed literature, landscape and conversation close to daily life. Bernardo wrote poetry as a teenager, made short films with a small camera and initially imagined himself continuing his father’s vocation.
The privilege of that upbringing gave him access, but it also created the central anxiety of his early work: how does a bourgeois son become politically and artistically independent without turning rebellion into another luxury? Before the Revolution would make that question explicit. It was already present in the young filmmaker trying to move from words into images while being recognized as Attilio’s son.
The family moved to Rome, where Attilio helped Pier Paolo Pasolini enter literary life by supporting publication of his first novel. Pasolini later hired Bernardo as assistant director on Accattone. The exchange was more than useful connection. Pasolini showed the younger man a cinema grounded in bodies, dialect and locations, created by someone who had arrived from literature without conventional film-school authority.
Bertolucci soon abandoned university studies and poetry as his primary medium. Yet he never stopped treating cinema as a poetic structure. Camera movement, colour and music in his films do not merely illustrate scripts. They create associations that characters cannot explain. His recurring conflict with fathers—biological, artistic and political—would become one of those associations.
La commare secca: Directing a Story Written by Another Voice
Bertolucci directed his first feature, La commare secca, in his early twenties from a story associated with Pasolini. A prostitute has been murdered near the Tiber; the film reconstructs the preceding hours through the accounts of several men questioned by police. The structure invites comparison with Rashomon, but Bertolucci’s attention is already moving toward weather, youth, performance and subjective time.
The Roman marginal world belongs to Pasolini’s territory, yet the camera is more fluid and lyrically restless. Flashbacks do not simply supply evidence. Each testimony creates a different relation between memory and self-protection. The young director was learning how narrative could be reorganized by point of view.
The film did not make him an immediate commercial force. Its importance lies in the act of separation. Bertolucci had entered cinema through Pasolini, but he could not remain Pasolini’s cinematic son. His second feature would move back toward Parma and into his own contradiction.
Before the Revolution: A Young Marxist Who Cannot Leave Home
Before the Revolution follows Fabrizio, a young bourgeois man in Parma attracted to Communist politics and involved with his aunt Gina. The title comes from a remark attributed to Talleyrand about the sweetness of life before the French Revolution, and the film understands how radical desire can become inseparable from the privileges it claims to reject.
Fabrizio wants history, intellectual certainty and escape from provincial expectation. He is also drawn toward the familiar world of family, class and landscape. Gina’s emotional instability prevents the political story from becoming abstract. Their affair is transgressive, but it does not free either of them. By the end, Fabrizio returns to the marriage and social order prepared for him.
The film’s editing, direct address, cinephile references and mobile camera show the influence of the French New Wave. Its emotional geography is specifically Emilian: streets, riverbanks, opera and political culture become part of the protagonist’s divided identity. Contemporary Italian response was limited, while international critics—particularly in France—recognized a major new voice.
Bertolucci’s Marxism remained important, but the film exposed the position from which he embraced it. He would later describe the mixture of love, passion and despair involved in being a bourgeois who chooses Marxism. That sentence could serve as a key to much of his work. Politics is never outside desire; class consciousness does not cancel class formation.
The Spider’s Stratagem: Anti-Fascism Inside a Labyrinth
The Spider’s Stratagem, made for Italian television and inspired by Borges, sends a young man to the town of Tara to investigate the death of his anti-Fascist father. He discovers that the heroic public story was manufactured around betrayal and a chosen martyrdom. The son is gradually trapped inside a town that turns memory into architecture.
Giulio Brogi plays both father and son, collapsing generations. The device makes political inheritance physically visible: the son enters the father’s image before he understands the fraud supporting it. Streets, squares and theatrical rituals produce an Italy where anti-Fascist myth can become another form of control if it refuses ambiguity.
The film’s collaboration with cinematographer Vittorio Storaro developed a visual language that would reach international recognition in The Conformist. Bertolucci’s camera moves as if seduced by the very structures it is exposing. Beauty is not a reward for truth; it is one of power’s instruments.
The Conformist: Fascism as a Desire to Disappear
Adapted from Alberto Moravia, The Conformist follows Marcello Clerici, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, who joins Fascist structures and agrees to participate in the assassination of his former professor. Marcello wants to be normal. His political crime grows from a desire to dissolve private uncertainty into collective obedience.
Storaro’s cinematography turns Fascist architecture, venetian blinds, winter forests and Paris interiors into psychological forces. The famous scene at the Ministry places Marcello inside an enormous rationalist room where scale humiliates the individual. In a Paris dance hall, Dominique Sanda and Stefania Sandrelli move together while political conspiracy and erotic fascination cross the floor.
The assassination in the forest is one of Bertolucci’s most controlled sequences. Trees create vertical bars; snow and blue light make the landscape beautiful; Marcello watches from a car while Anna begs for help. His passivity is the final form of participation. The scene refuses the comforting division between active killer and innocent observer.
Georges Delerue’s music, Franco Arcalli’s editing and Ferdinando Scarfiotti’s design join Storaro in creating a film whose style became enormously influential. Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese and many later directors absorbed its use of colour and architecture. Yet imitation can reduce the film to elegant Fascist chic. Bertolucci’s deeper point is that the hunger for normality can become murderous when power promises to remove the burden of selfhood.
Last Tango in Paris: Artistic Revelation and an Ethical Wound
Last Tango in Paris began from Bertolucci’s fantasy of meeting an anonymous woman and having sex without names. Marlon Brando plays Paul, an American in Paris shattered by his wife’s suicide; Maria Schneider plays Jeanne, a young woman preparing to marry. They meet in an empty apartment and try to create a space outside biography.
Brando’s performance contains material drawn from his own life and improvisation. The scene in which Paul addresses his dead wife exposes rage, humiliation and grief with unusual rawness. Storaro’s warm, enclosed colour and Gato Barbieri’s saxophone score give the apartment a physical emotional climate. The film’s premiere produced extraordinary critical excitement, commercial success, censorship and legal action in Italy. Bertolucci received an Academy Award nomination for directing.
No contemporary account can stop at artistic achievement. Schneider later described feeling humiliated during the filming of the assault scene involving butter. The act in the scene was simulated, but the specific use of butter was not disclosed to her beforehand; Bertolucci later acknowledged that he and Brando wanted her reaction as a girl rather than as an actress. His explanation confirms a grave abuse of directorial power. The ethical issue is not whether the performance is powerful. It is that he treated a young performer as material whose informed participation could be sacrificed for an effect.
The controversy became newly prominent decades later, sometimes through inaccurate claims that a real rape had been filmed. Accuracy matters: the sexual violence was simulated, Schneider had agreed to the scripted scene, and the undisclosed element and method violated trust. Clarifying the facts does not diminish the wrongdoing. It allows criticism to rest on what occurred rather than sensational distortion.
Last Tango remains a major film about grief, anonymity and masculine destruction, but it also stands as a warning against the auteur myth. A director’s wish for emotional truth does not outrank an actor’s autonomy. Bertolucci expressed regret about not apologizing to Schneider before her death, yet regret cannot repair the set. The film’s legacy must hold art and harm in the same frame.
1900: Five Hours of Italian Class War
With 1900, Bertolucci attempted a vast history of twentieth-century Italy through two men born on the same estate on the same day in 1901: Alfredo, heir to landowners, and Olmo, child of agricultural workers. Robert De Niro and Gérard Depardieu lead an international cast that includes Burt Lancaster, Sterling Hayden, Dominique Sanda and Donald Sutherland.
The film moves through peasant labour, socialism, Fascist violence, sexuality, war and liberation. Storaro photographs Emilia’s seasons as historical rhythm. Ennio Morricone’s score gives collective memory melodic force. The production’s scale allowed Bertolucci to stage political history through fields, meals, animals and bodies rather than a chain of speeches.
Its politics are passionately leftist and sometimes simplified. Sutherland’s Fascist Attila becomes grotesque evil, while the relationship between Alfredo and Olmo carries contradictions the larger allegory cannot always resolve. Different release versions and distributor-imposed cuts affected reception. The full film demands more than five hours, and its unevenness is inseparable from its ambition.
The liberation scene turns class judgment into popular theatre, then history refuses complete revolutionary closure. The landowner cannot be executed because the social identity he represents has supposedly died; of course, power survives the declaration. Bertolucci’s Marxist epic ends with friendship, rivalry and class returning in old age. History changes the stage, but the two men remain bound.
La Luna and the Family as a Dangerous Theatre
La Luna centres on an opera singer, played by Jill Clayburgh, and her troubled adolescent son. Incestuous emotional and physical boundaries, heroin addiction, performance and absent paternity create one of Bertolucci’s most divisive films. The operatic surface makes maternal love feel grand and suffocating at once.
The film is not easily defended through provocation alone. Some scenes turn psychological confusion into spectacle without sufficient distance. Yet La Luna belongs to Bertolucci’s continuing investigation of family roles as performances that organize desire before individuals can understand it.
Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man, starring Ugo Tognazzi, responds to the Italy of kidnapping, political violence and industrial uncertainty. A factory owner tries to recover his abducted son while information becomes unreliable. The film deliberately withholds the clarity audiences expected from a thriller. Its opacity led to divided reception, but it captures a society in which political categories and private motives have become difficult to separate.
The Last Emperor: History as a Series of Rooms
Producer Jeremy Thomas helped make possible Bertolucci’s long-planned project about Puyi, the last emperor of China. The production required international financing, negotiation with Chinese authorities and an enormous logistical structure. Mark Peploe co-wrote the screenplay; Storaro photographed; James Acheson designed costumes; Ryuichi Sakamoto, David Byrne and Cong Su contributed music.
The film frames Puyi’s life through imprisonment and recollection. As a child he is treated as divine inside the Forbidden City yet has almost no control over his own body. The great courtyards magnify his smallness. Later, Japanese imperialism turns him into ruler of Manchukuo, another role whose ceremony conceals dependence. Communist re-education finally asks him to reinterpret his life through a different official language.
Bertolucci’s access created images no studio reconstruction could fully replace. But access also raised questions about historical simplification and the viewpoint of a European director filming Chinese history. The film is strongest when it shows power as theatre—doors, uniforms, rituals, lessons and permissions—and weaker when vast political transformation becomes background to one man’s personal awakening.
At the 1988 Academy Awards, The Last Emperor won nine Oscars, including picture, director, adapted screenplay, cinematography, editing, art direction, costume design, score and sound. The sweep changed Bertolucci’s international position. The rebellious poet of Before the Revolution had made a globally celebrated epic without entirely abandoning his subject: a child trapped inside the history others call destiny.
The East, the Desert and the Risk of Beautiful Distance
The Sheltering Sky, adapted from Paul Bowles, follows an American couple travelling in North Africa as their marriage and sense of identity disintegrate. Storaro’s landscapes and Sakamoto’s score create overwhelming beauty. Debra Winger and John Malkovich play travellers who call themselves something other than tourists, a distinction the film steadily undermines.
The production attracted criticism for exoticizing North Africa and using local space as a theatre for Western crisis. That criticism applies more broadly to Bertolucci’s so-called Oriental trilogy, completed by Little Buddha. His visual curiosity could open cultures to international audiences while centring Western spiritual need.
Little Buddha intercuts a modern story with the life of Siddhartha, casting Keanu Reeves in the historical strand. The film’s sincerity and colour did not persuade all critics, and it underperformed relative to its scale. These works reveal both Bertolucci’s desire to move beyond Europe and the difficulty of escaping the cultural position from which he looked.
Returning to Italy, Bodies and Smaller Rooms
Stealing Beauty brought Bertolucci to Tuscany with Liv Tyler as a young American seeking information about her mother and entering a community of expatriate adults. The landscape is sensuous, the coming-of-age design accessible, and the film renewed his connection to contemporary bodies after historical epics.
Besieged is more concentrated. Thandiwe Newton plays Shandurai, an African woman studying medicine and working in the Roman home of an English pianist, played by David Thewlis. His declaration of love begins as intrusion; he gradually sells his possessions to help free her imprisoned husband. The film communicates through rooms, music and objects more than dialogue. Its politics remain open to debate, but the reduced scale restores precision.
The Dreamers returns to Paris in 1968. An American student enters the sealed apartment world of French twins played by Eva Green and Louis Garrel. Cinephile games, sexuality and political unrest overlap. The film celebrates cinema’s intoxicating intimacy while questioning the privilege of retreating into images when the street demands action.
After years affected by severe back problems and wheelchair use, Bertolucci directed Me and You, adapted from Niccolò Ammaniti. A teenage boy hides in a basement and unexpectedly shares the space with his half-sister, who is struggling with addiction. The small setting and Italian language give the final film the quality of return: not to innocence, but to two young people trying to stop performing long enough to recognize one another.
The Moving Camera and the Politics of Beauty
Bertolucci’s camera often moves with desire. It glides through architecture, approaches bodies, circles rooms and turns space into psychological choreography. The influence of Max Ophuls, the French New Wave, Visconti and Pasolini becomes material for a signature built with collaborators.
Vittorio Storaro was central. Their work on The Conformist, Last Tango, 1900, The Last Emperor and other projects treated colour as narrative structure. Light could express historical regime, emotional enclosure or the division between public and private identity. Franco Arcalli’s editing helped create fluid memory; Ferdinando Scarfiotti and later production teams built spaces the camera could think through. Music by Morricone, Delerue, Barbieri and Sakamoto gave different phases their emotional architecture.
Actors were asked for exposure, sometimes producing remarkable work and sometimes crossing ethical boundaries. Brando, Trintignant, Sandrelli, Sanda, Cardinale, De Niro, Depardieu, John Lone and others entered a cinema in which the body carries political history. The lesson of Schneider requires a clear limit: vulnerability cannot be authentic if consent is manipulated.
A Legacy That Cannot Be Made Innocent
Bertolucci received lifetime honours at Venice and Cannes and remained an emblem of internationally ambitious Italian cinema. The Conformist transformed visual language; Last Tango changed representations of sexuality and performance; 1900 attempted a popular Marxist epic; The Last Emperor proved that a European art-film director could command global historical spectacle.
He died in Rome in 2018. By then, public understanding of power on film sets had changed significantly, and the Schneider controversy had become inseparable from his reputation. This does not require erasing the films. It requires looking at them with the seriousness they demand: beauty is not evidence of innocence, and artistic importance is not moral exemption.
Return to the Forbidden City. Doors open one after another, but the child at the centre is not free. Bertolucci understood power as the ability to design the room in which another person discovers who they are supposed to be. His cinema remains important because it made those rooms visible—and troubling because the director did not always recognize his own power to build them.
Bernardo Bertolucci’s Place in Italian History
Within Italian history, Bertolucci’s films remain provocative records of fascism, class struggle, private desire and the changing political imagination of postwar Europe.
Thank You from ItalyStories.com
Thank you for exploring Bernardo Bertolucci’s cinema, from Parma and Fascist architecture to Paris, Beijing and the private rooms of desire. ItalyStories.com invites you to discover more stories about Italian filmmakers, writers, history and culture.