An elusive mystery across unresolved Oedipal terrain, Bernardo Bertolucci’s Strategia del ragno weaves a tapestry two of whose strands are Freudianism and anti-Fascism. Legend and historical myth fill in a young man’s “memory” of his father where there is no basis for firsthand memory of this father, whose shadow nevertheless becomes increasingly hard for the […]
Tag Archives: Bertolucci/Grunes
The following is one of the entries from my 100 Greatest Films from Italy, Greece, Spain and Portugal list, which I invite you to visit on this site if you haven’t already done so. — Dennis Ugo Tognazzi (best actor, Cannes; Italian critics) is ferocious and sharp as sixtyish Primo Spaggiari, who has pulled himself […]
Combining Marx and Freud, as was his wont in his early days, writer-director Bernardo Bertolucci, along with co-scenarist Gianni Amico, used Dostoievski’s 1846, pre-imprisonment novella The Double: A Petersburg Poem, which they moved to Italy and updated to the pro-Vietcong student-protest present, as a springboard for Il sosia, a dark, often opaque and arty, although […]
At his invitation, Bernardo Bertolucci completed Pier Paolo Pasolini’s script (along with Sergio Citti) and directed the result—beautifully. La commare secca thus became the 21-year-old poet’s auspicious film debut. An immense bridge, glimpsed from below, cuts diagonally through the frame; what resembles a burst of birds turns out to be a flurry of notepad pages […]
“Those who didn’t live in the eighteenth century before the [French] Revolution will never be able to know the sweetness of life.” — Talleyrand At 22 Bernardo Bertolucci made Prima della rivoluzione. Fabrizio, his young protagonist, concludes there’s no escaping his bourgeois past, no matter his Leftist political leanings. The oppressed whom he would help […]
Dennis Grunes 