Bertolucci: Choreographer for the Movie Camera

BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI is a true child of the cinema. His father, a poet and teacher of art history in Parma and Rome, was also a film critic, and little Bernardo tagged along with him to two or three films a day. Bertolucci made his first film--a ten-minute short--when he was 15, his first feature when he was 20. By that time, he had also published a prizewinning book of poetry, In Search of Mystery, and worked as an assistant to Pier Paolo Pasolini on Accattone! "He was just as virgin to the cinema as I was," Bertolucci recalls. "So I didn't watch a director at work. I watched a director being born."

Bertolucci was born as a director with his second feature, Before the Revolution, which brought him, at 23, the sort of critical tributes once lavished on the youthful Orson Welles. The film's title recalls Marx, but it is actually taken from Talleyrand: "He who did not live in the years before the revolution cannot understand what the sweetness of living is." The film is about a young man's struggle to reconcile radical politics with an almost lavish romanticism, to fuse Marx and Talleyrand in his lofty, poetic soul. Revolution has the intimate feeling of a personal memoir, of experience hardly assimilated and still freshly felt.

Revolution also set the pattern of Bertolucci's lush, visual style, a kind of free-flowing flamboyance that seems to be a celebration of the act of filmmaking. There were references to movies, countless movies, everything from early Godard to Red River. Bertolucci continues this tradition of paying homage to his mentors: In The Spider's Stratagem, made in 1969, the camera lingers briefly over a poster for Robert Aldrich's Wagnerian western The Last Sunset; in Tango there is a scene aboard a barge, between Maria Schneider and Jean-Pierre Leaud, that is meant to evoke Jean Vigo's classic L'Atalante.

Revolution's single most memorable scene--the young protagonist dancing with his aunt, with whom he is having an affair--has turned up, with appropriate variations, in every subsequent Bertolucci film. One of The Conformist's most elaborate set pieces was the late-night Paris cafe, where all the customers got up to dance, spontaneously crowding the floor; Tango's lingering and desperate ballroom interlude gives the film its title. Bertolucci is smitten by dancing the way Hitchcock is obsessed by staircases. Each motif gives the director occasion to employ the best elements of his visual style in full flourish. Bertolucci's dancers are not only orchestrated to the movement of the camera, but seem to embody it. All of his films have an overriding feeling of gentle, gliding movement, a ceaseless choreography for the camera.

"He has an inborn sense of beat, or rhythm," says the superb cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, Bertolucci's collaborator since The Spider's Stratagem. Storaro douses Bertolucci's films in ravishing light--working, as many cinematographers do, from ideas in painting. He and Bertolucci drew their inspiration for Tango not only from Francis Bacon but also from Vermeer.

An engaging bachelor with a string of love affairs behind him (one with Actress Adriana Asti, who played the lead in his first two films), Bertolucci loves to prowl through art galleries, and has stuffed his small flat in a Rome apartment hotel with records and books. "Literature was the past that I had to overcome and contradict with something," Bertolucci has said, "and that something was the cinema. If I had to talk about authors who formed me, I would say Fitzgerald and Hemingway, Chandler and Hammett." Another, even more perceptible influence might be Freud. Bertolucci went into psychoanalysis at the age of 28, and his films since then demonstrate his deep involvement. His earlier films, including the jumbled and frenetic Partner (1968), had moments of almost frivolous political digression. Psychoanalysis has apparently made him more thoughtful, less interested in political dynamics than in personal ones.

The technique he adopted with his actors in The Conformist and especially in Tango is based on an informal method of psychological investigation. To create a climate conducive to such probing, Bertolucci says, he "mixes the Hollywood studio with the techniques of cinema verite. This permits the best possible conditions for improvisation, and gives the public a continuous sense of risk and danger." It also means, as Bertolucci admits, that "it would be proper to put my analyst in the main titles, because he is the first person to whom I confess the ideas of my films."

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