Bernardo Bertolucci

Promotional omnibus film, made for the 1990 FIFA World Cup in Italy, featuring portraits of 12 Italian cities.
For all those who will not be going to Italy for a vacation this year… here is the next best thing. A who’s who of Italian directors anno 1990 turn their cameras on a specific Italian city. Most of these (very) short films do not have dialogue of any kind, and rely instead solely on the beauty of the images and music to depict the various cities.

Directed by
Michelangelo Antonioni (segment “Roma”)
Bernardo Bertolucci (segment “Bologna”)
Giuseppe Bertolucci (segment “Bologna”)
Mauro Bolognini (segment “Palermo”)
Alberto Lattuada (segment “Genova”)
Carlo Lizzani (segment “Cagliari”)
Mario Monicelli (segment “Verona”)
Ermanno Olmi (segment “Milano”)
Gillo Pontecorvo (segment “Udine”)
Francesco Rosi (segment “Napoli”)
Mario Soldati (segment “Torino”)
Lina Wertmüller (segment “Bari”)
Franco Zeffirelli (segment “Firenze”)Read More »

Synopsis

Quote:
Bernardo Bertolucci’s vast historical melodrama used the massive popular, critical, and financial success of its predecessor, the scandalous LAST TANGO IN PARIS, to mount a production of epic scale. Cut down to four hours for its American release, the film utilizes an all-star Hollywood…
Bernardo Bertolucci’s vast historical melodrama used the massive popular, critical, and financial success of its predecessor, the scandalous LAST TANGO IN PARIS, to mount a production of epic scale. Cut down to four hours for its American release, the film utilizes an all-star Hollywood cast to tell its heavily Marxist tale of Italian peasants during the twentieth century. Two boys born on the same day are destined for divergent paths; Olmo (played by Gerard Depardeiu as an adult) is born to peasant parents and will become a passionate socialist, while Alfredo’s (Robert De Niro as an adult) bourgeois, landowning origins will lead him to ultimately embrace fascism. Driven by a sincere hope for and belief in political change, Bertolucci’s film is nonetheless made up of very humane individual stories; it concentrates on highly personal experiences of a politically-charged time, which color the little dramas of love, sex, family, and community. It is at once an epic poem and a political manifesto, and it is the product of a director who was unabashedly communist in his youth, contrasting markedly with later works like 2003’s THE DREAMERS.Read More »