A new film explores and celebrates the many faces of Bernardo Bertolucci, through his films and in his own words
For cinephiles, Bernardo Bertolucci stands as one of the enduring pioneers of film. Lyrical, controversial, always articulate and full of feeling, the maestro who started out as a prize-winning poet has seen many revolutions over the years, both in his own work and in the cinematic landscape. From the excoriating treatment he received for Last Tango in Paris to sweeping the 1988 Oscars with The Last Emperor, he has gone from being cinema’s bête noir to its garlanded son. Despite a bleak recent decade confined to a wheelchair, his commitment to filmmaking is undimmed, and his most recent film Me And You is a charming study in fiction flourishing in confined spaces. As he tells Cath Clarke in our current issue, “I think I am ready to travel again… I love surprises.”
His influence on younger filmmakers is undisputed and now a documentary portrait, titled Bertolucci on Bertolucci, comes courtesy of I Am Love director Luca Guadagnino and his long-time editing partner Walter Fasano. Composed solely of interviews with Bertolucci, the film rifles through 300 hours of footage from the early 60s to the present day. Its wilful, joyful disregard of chronology, mixing and cutting together footage from across his career, elevates the documentary to a fantasy of agelessness, with Bertolucci as the ever-boyish, precocious talent, conversant in three languages as well as psychoanalysis and radical socialism.
“Cinema and Bernardo are one thing together. That was really always my sort of naïve aspiration: to be like Bernardo” — Luca Guadagnino
“Cinema and Bernardo are one thing together. That was really always my sort of naïve aspiration: to be like Bernardo,” says Guadagnino. A labour of love, the film took two years to make and involved countless hours poring over the archive material. Out of this archaeological process, he says, “the most powerful thing was to find the powerful love that me and Walter feel for Bernardo. Through the experience of this beautiful material, we became more and more fascinated. We began fascinated but now we are enchanted forever.” Fasano, who has worked with Guadagnino for 20 years, and whose precise and poetic edit got the thumbs up from Bertolucci himself, says his aim was to create a visual version of such seminal books as Lynch on Lynch or Scorsese on Scorsese, but with a quasi-fictional element. “It seemed to me that the material was incredibly emotional and looked to me like a fiction movie,” he says. “It was the story of a character, and it was a joy to combine and create the cut, to treat the interviews as if they were fictional, to use a soundtrack like it was a fictional film.”
“My personal contribution is more culinary,” says Guadagnino, whose love of gastronomy is clear in his work, particularly I Am Love, where Tilda Swinton’s character falls in love with a chef. “When you cook, you are trying to get from an ingredient a sort of essence. In the case of Bertolucci, I wanted to get to his real essence; it was a process of purification.” But he warns, “a director should always be aware of not indulging. Indulgence in a filmmaker for me is probably the greatest of sins. Self-indulgence is of course the worst”.
As the film travels around film festivals, Fasano and Guadagnino are working on new film Antonia, with Fasano editing and Guadagnino producing for director Ferdinando Cito Filomarino. They have just released the last in a series of short films for Salvatore Ferragamo, called Walking Stories, inspired by Woody Allen’s romantic comedies and starring Kaya Scodelario. As for Guadagnino’s upcoming projects, and his ongoing collaboration with muse Tilda Swinton, he prefers not to say, adding only “my life is a sort of plot with Tilda”.
Text by Laura Allsop
