BERTOLUCCI, Bernardo 1940-

PERSONAL: Born March 16, 1940, in Parma, Italy; son of Attilio (a poet, film critic, and teacher) and Ninetta (a teacher) Bertolucci; married Adriana Asti (marriage ended); married Clare Peploe (a director and screenwriter), 1978. Education: Attended University of Rome, 1960-62. Politics: Communist. Hobbies and other interests: Literature, opera.

ADDRESSES: Home—Via del Babuino 51, Rome, Italy. Agent—International Creative Management, 8942 Wilshire Blvd., Beverly Hills, CA 90211.

CAREER: Screenwriter and director of motion pictures. Worked as assistant director for Pier Paolo Pasolini on motion picture "Accatone," 1961. Lecturer at Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY, 1969. Director of films, including La Commare secca, Last Tango in Paris, and The Dreamers.

AWARDS, HONORS: Premio Viareggio, 1962, for In cerca del mistero; Critics' Award from Cannes Film Festival and Max Ophuls prize, both 1964, both for Prima della rivoluzione; best director award, National Society of Film Critics, and Academy Award nomination for best foreign-language film, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, both 1971, both for Il Conformista; Raoul Levy Prize and Silver Ribbon, both 1973, both for Last Tango in Paris; Academy Award for screenplay based on material from another medium, 1987, for The Last Emperor; numerous other filmmaking awards.

WRITINGS:

SCREENPLAYS; AND DIRECTOR

(With Pier Paolo Pasolini and Sergio Citti) La Commare secca (title means "The Grim Reaper"; adapted from the story by Pasolini; released by Cinematografica Cervi, 1962), G. Zibetti, 1962.

(With Gianni Amico) Prima della rivoluzione (also known as Before the Revolution), Iride Cinematografica, 1964.

"Il fico infruttuoso" (title means "The Infertile Fig Tree"), Vangela 70, Castoro Films, 1967.

(With Gianni Amico) Partner (adapted from The Double by Fyodor Dostoevski), Red Films, 1968.

(With Marilu Parolini and Edoardo De Gregorio) La Strategia del ragno (also known as The Spider's Strategy; adapted from Theme of the Traitor and the Hero by Jorge Luis Borges), Red Films, 1970.

Il Conformista (also known as The Conformist; adapted from the novel by Alberto Moravia), Mars Film/Marianne Productions/Maran Film, 1970.

(With Franco Arcalli) Last Tango in Paris (United Artists, 1973) published as Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris, with essays by Pauline Kael and Norman Mailer, Delacorte (New York, NY), 1973.

(With Franco Arcalli and Giuseppe Bertolucci) La Luna (title means "The Moon"), Twentieth Century-Fox, 1979.

(With Franco Arcalli and Giuseppe Bertolucci) Novecento (two volumes; also known as 1900, Paramount, 1977), Einaudi (Milan, Italy), 1976.

Tragedio dell uomo ridicuolo (also known as Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man), Fiction Cinematografica, 1981.

(With Mark Peploe and Enzo Ungari) The Last Emperor (adapted from the autobiography From Emperor to Citizen by Pu Yi with Li Wenda), Columbia, 1987.

(With Mark Peploe) The Sheltering Sky (adapted from the novel by Paul Bowles), Warner Bros., 1990.

(With Mark Peploe and Rudolph Wurlitzer) Little Buddha, Miramax, 1994.

(And author of story) Susan Minot, Stealing Beauty (Twentieth Century-Fox, 1996), Grove Press (New York, NY), 1996.

(With wife, Clare Peploe) Besieged (also known as The Siege; adapted from a story by James Lasdun), Fine Line Cinema, 1998.

"Histoire d'eaux," (short; title means "The History of Water"), in Ten Minutes Older: The Cello, 2002.

Also writer and director of teleplays La Via del petrolio (contains Le Origini, I Viaggio, and Attraverso l'Europe), for RAI-TV, 1965-66, and documentary I Poveri muoino prima, 1971, and La Salute e malata, 1972. Coauthor of screen story for Once upon a Time in the West, Rafran-San Marco, 1969. Also author of unproduced screenplay Red Harvest (adapted from the book by Dashiell Hammett). Contributor of poems to Italian periodicals.

OTHER

In cerca del mistero (poetry; title means "In Search of Mystery"), Longanesi, 1962.

Agonia (based on "Il Fico infruttuoso"), produced by Living Theatre, 1967.

(With Don Ranvaud and Enzo Ungari) Bertolucci by Bertolucci, Plexus (London, England), 1987.

Bertolucci's "The Last Emperor": Multiple Takes, edited by Bruce H. Sklarew and others, Wayne State University Press (Detroit, MI), 1998.

Bernardo Bertolucci: Interviews, University Press of Mississippi, 2000.

Contributor of poems to Italian periodicals; contributor of articles on films and filmmaking to periodicals, including Cahiers du cinema, Film Comment, Film Quarterly, and Rolling Stone.

SIDELIGHTS: As a self-described autobiographical artist, Italian filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci creates films that are alternately obscure and overt in their expressions of subconscious fears and anxieties. "Movies are made of the same stuff as dreams," he once contended, adding that it is the act of self-expression that makes "the irrational become lucid." The act of filmmaking then becomes a process of self-liberation for Bertolucci, a process that has found expression in such films as Il Conformista, The Last Emperor and The Sheltering Sky.

Bertolucci also wants his films to be popular, and he unites the violent with the sentimental and the melodramatic with the realistic in an effort to engage audiences. And because he tries to engage audiences with relevant subjects, he considers his films to be political. His ability to sustain an audience's interest has, according to many critics, largely been dependent on his skill at depicting sexuality, particularly in its most controversial forms, such as lesbianism and incest. In Il Conformista lesbianism serves as background to a tale of treachery and murder; Last Tango in Paris embraces sadomasochistic elements; 1900 similarly delves into such sexual bizarreness as a menage à trois with a convulsing epileptic, and child molestation; and Luna melodramatically renders the psychological implications of mother-son incest. The Sheltering Sky portrays the sexual misadventures of a married couple traveling in Algeria to allay their romantic malaise, while Stealing Beauty revolves around a young American woman's desire to discover her parentage and to loose her virginity. In Besieged an Englishman living in Italy becomes obsessed with his African maid, a refugee who awaits the arrival of her husband.

Such pessimistic depictions have inspired wildly conflicting reactions from Bertolucci's critics. In Life Pauline Kael hailed the "primitive force, the . . . thrusting jabbing eroticism" of Last Tango in Paris as perhaps "the most liberating movie ever made," while other reviewers characterized the numerous acts of male dominance as a celebration of chauvinism. Similarly, the intimations of incest in Luna prompted RollingStone contributor Jonathan Cott to praise the filmmaker for "reawakening . . . the possibilities of the cinema." The same film, however, inspired New Republic's Stanley Kauffmann to declare that Bertolucci is "a clever, cheap exploiter of everything that comes to his hand, including the talent he began with."

Bertolucci's art was largely inspired by his father's own poetry and enthusiasm for films. The father encouraged his son's poetic and filmmaking endeavors. At twelve young Bernardo had already published his poems; at fifteen he completed his second sixteen-millimeter film. When he entered the University of Rome in 1960, Bertolucci was already steeped in film lore culled from viewing as many as four motion pictures per day, and his familiarity with English-language literature included the writers of the "Lost Generation" as well as such poets as Emily Dickinson and Dylan Thomas.

During his second year at the university, Bertolucci met Pier Paolo Pasolini, an eminent writer and friend of Bertolucci's father. Pasolini was preparing to direct Accatone, his first film, and he engaged Bertolucci as his assistant director. Working with Pasolini thrilled Bertolucci, and when the film—detailing the actions of pimps and prostitutes in Roman slums—was applauded by critics for its grueling and unflinching style, Bertolucci decided to quit school and direct his own films.

In 1962 Bertolucci visited Paris, where he frequented cinemas featuring the work of "New Wave" directors such as François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. Stimulated by Godard's unconventional techniques, especially the jump-cutting and freewheeling camerawork of Breathless, Bertolucci returned to Italy and accepted an offer from Pasolini to direct The Grim Reaper. The novice filmmaker overcame severe budget restrictions by completely rewriting Pasolini's original script; then he produced a film that is both a thriller and a tale of budding political consciousness. Reviewers cited Bertolucci's affinity with Godard and praised his disdain for sentimentality. "Bertolucci's style establishes itself as a passionate romanticism," declared Film Quarterly reviewer Henry Heifetz; "he uses a restless, widely moving camera, with jump-cuts derived from Godard but without Godard's elegance or his watered emotion." While awaiting the premiere of The Grim Reaper, Bertolucci was awarded the prestigious Premio Viareggio for a collection of his poetry, In Search of Mystery, most of which recalled his childhood and life in the Italian countryside. Bertolucci had already abandoned verse, however, in favor of filmmaking, calling cinema "the true poetic language."

Most critics considered Bertolucci's next film, Before the Revolution, precisely poetic. It concerns a young intellectual's flirtation with Marxism before succumbing to the bourgeois life, and most reviewers were amazed by twenty-four-year-old Bertolucci's skill in fashioning a film that is both political and intimate. "Astonishingly, he has managed to assimilate a high degree of filmic and literary erudition into a distinctively personal visual approach," contended New Yorker reviewer Eugene Archer, who called Bertolucci "a new talent of outstanding promise." John Thomas of Film Quarterly held a similar view, noting that "Bertolucci tries something new in every scene; like Godard, [he] often fails; like Godard, [he] sometimes succeeds spectacularly."

After the success of Before the Revolution Bertolucci turned to several small projects. He directed a series of short films and documentaries for television, then contributed "The Infertile Fig Tree" to the omnibus Vangelo 70, a segmented film that also features shorts by Pasolini and Godard. The influence of these two filmmakers is also evident in Partner, which in 1968 marked Bertolucci's return to the feature-length format. The film details the schizophrenic nature of a radical professor whose obsession with Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty compels him towards violence—he drowns a girl in a washing machine—which repulses his passive personality. Most critics expressed dissatisfaction with the use of Godardian devices, such as discontinuity and gyroscopic camerawork, that frequently obscure the narrative. In a review for New Republic, Stanley Kauffmann called Partner "heavily dated" and added, "cinematically it's redolent of high sixties rhetoric and gesture." Bertolucci was also displeased with the work. He deemed it "sadomasochistic" to the audience and himself and later explained, "In the sixties, when I was making a dolly shot, I used to think the audience had to understand that the camera was on wheels—it was like every movie was asking the great question of what cinema is." He also admitted that he "tried to hide the emotions behind any kind of alibi—like existential characters or political statements."

Bertolucci's next film, The Spider's Strategy, marks a departure from the pyrotechnics and explicit politics of his previous work. The film is a meticulously crafted account of a young man's efforts to discover the killers of his martyred, war-hero father. After returning to the site of his father's death, the son learns that his father had actually turned against his fellow anti-fascists during World War II and had consented to his own murder as a means of rectifying his betrayal. The subdued quality of The Spider's Strategy impressed critics as an improvement over the flashy technique of Partner. A reviewer in New York deemed the film Bertolucci's "simplest and most glowing work," and in the New York Times Vincent Canby called it "a handsome film."

With Il Conformista—The Conformist Bertolucci's other work of 1970, he clinched his separation from the excessive experimentation that had marred Partner. The Conformist does feature Bertolucci's signature floating camerawork, but most of the work subordinates flashy technique to the plot: young Marcello shoots his sexual assailant, matures into an opportunist willing to murder his old professor to please his fellow fascists, and learns that his assailant from childhood survived the shooting. The film ends with Mussolini's fall, after which Marcello exposes the other fascists to curry favor with the new regime.

Most reviewers hailed The Conformist as Bertolucci's finest work, and several critics accorded special attention to his recreation and portrayal of decadent fascist society. Canby called the film "a superior chronicle" and cited "scenes of . . . unusual beauty and vitality," such as Marcello's visit to a mental hospital and a portentous tango between the professor's wife and her lesbian lover. In Film Ruth Kreitzman wrote: "From start to finish [The Conformist] has been immaculately conceived and constructed. Bertolucci's keen eye for architecture here reaches its most perfect synthesis yet, and each shot is constructed as though traced from a drawing-board." And Bill Nichols, writing in Cineaste, cited Bertolucci's fusion of sumptuous cinematography and camerawork with such topics as lesbianism and fascism. "Bertolucci avoids the melodramatic pitfalls that claim many socially conscious films," Nichols declared, "crafting a work of considerable polish and remarkable unity." He added that the film's "greatest value is in the beauty of its own, unique appearance." The Conformist was re-released in 1994 with added footage.

The popularity of The Conformist at film festivals in Cannes and New York City led Bertolucci to an increased awareness of his purpose as an artist: to be both an experimenter and an entertainer. He intended to fuse both aspects in his next work by exploring the present nature of sexuality. When Last Tango in Paris premiered at the New York Film Festival in 1972, audiences were shocked by the fairly explicit sexuality in Bertolucci's tale of two people meeting for brutally sexual purposes. It was Brando's character, Paul, that some observers found particularly outrageous. As a profane American widower whose sole diversion from despair is his position as caretaker of a flophouse, Paul indulges in several monologues on humiliation and cruelty. In many of their encounters, he forces Jeanne, his nubile partner, into unwilling sodomy and other, more psychically jarring, acts. "The excitement of Brando's performance here is in the revelation of how creative screen acting can be," wrote Kael. She attributed much of the film's success to Brando's performance and claimed that both Brando and Bertolucci "have altered the face of an art form."

Despite critical appraisal to the contrary, Bertolucci insisted that Last Tango in Paris is not an erotic film, "only a film about eroticism," and attributed the film's erotic aspects to the initial sexual nature of the relationship between Paul and Jeanne. In an interview in Film Quarterly, he also maintained that Last Tango in Paris recalls Partner in its intensely cinematic nature. "I find Tango very close to Partner," he revealed, "because in Tango there is a continual enquiry in filmic terms, a research on the use of the camera, an attempt to question the structures of cinema." Kael offered the same view, according particular attention to the cinematography. "The colors in this movie are late-afternoon orange-beige-browns and pink—the pink of flesh drained of blood, corpse blood," she asserted. "They are so delicately modulated . . . that romance and rot are one." She added: "The film is utterly beautiful to look at. The virtuosity of Bertolucci's gliding camera style is such that he can show you the hype of the tango-contest scene . . . by stylizing it . . . and still make it work."

Buoyed by the overwhelming critical and popular success of Last Tango in Paris, Bertolucci undertook his then most ambitious project, 1900, a film intended to portray peasant culture, living from the land. To fashion this epic he procured $5 million from producer Alberto Grimaldi, thus making 1900 one of Italy's most expensive productions.

Once filming began, Bertolucci's original conception of 1900 was replaced by a recounting of events culminating in the rise of communism in Italy in 1945. He persevered with 1900 for more than three years before filming was completed in 1976 and released in a version that cut ninety minutes off the original running time of over five hours. As a tale of two men—landowner Alfredo and one of his peasant workers, Olmo—spanning the first half of the twentieth century, 1900, according to most viewers, exhausted its appeal in the first two hours. The film begins with Alfredo's birth in 1900, continues with the death of the two men's grandparents, details the conflicts between the peasants and the landowners, completely omits World War I, and concludes its first half with premonitions of fascism. "By the end of 'Act One,'" wrote Jack Kroll in Newsweek, "most viewers will be dazzled and excited by two hours of almost relentless beauty and power."

The film's second half, however, was faulted by Time's Frank Rich as a "good-guys v. bad-guys melodrama." The rise of Fascist leader Attila, an employee of Alfredo's family, precipitates several ghoulish murders, including the impaling of a woman on a spiked fence. After Alfredo slaughters several peasants in retaliation for his own public humiliation—they bombarded him with horse manure—Olmo leads a revolt against the Fascists and the wealthy landowners. The action culminates in Alfredo's death and a renunciation of Italy's class society. "The padrone is dead," the peasants announce during an elaborate celebration of communism. Rich called the finale a "propagandistic pageant" and asserted, "By the time 1900 reaches its flag-waving Liberation Day climax, the sloganeering and confusion are almost unbearable."

Despite reservations regarding the film's political slant, many reviewers still found much to praise in 1900. Rich hailed its "voluptuous emotional texture" and conceded, "If Bertolucci irritates as much as he dazzles, he never bores: his extravagant failure has greater staying power than most other directors' triumphs." Kroll acknowledged the acting and cinematography as "marvelous" and contended, "It's a huge work and its faults are the excesses of a huge talent." Perhaps the film's most exuberant acclaim came from Kael. She recognized flaws in some of the characterizations, but charged that "it's like a course to be enrolled in." "The film is appalling," she added, "yet it has the grandeur of a classic visionary folly. Next to it, all other new movies are like something you hold up at the end of a toothpick."

In Luna, Bertolucci returned to the sexual sensationalism of Last Tango in Paris. Luna follows a potentially incestuous relationship between an opera diva, Caterina, and her son, Joe. Following the death of her second husband, Caterina returns to Italy with Joe, there to resume her musical career. What follows is a harrowing tale of drug addiction and perversity, as Caterina tries to cope with Joe's heroin use. Their relationship culminates in a series of violent encounters: after witnessing Joe's initial withdrawal symptoms, Caterina gives him the necessary heroin but reveals that she has disposed of his syringe. Enraged, Joe tries to pierce his vein with a fork, then collapses against Caterina, who proceeds to suckle and masturbate him. Later, Joe abandons his mother after she has changed a flat tire on their car. They rendezvous at an inn, whereupon Caterina tries to seduce Joe. He resists, however, and begins searching for his father. The quest ends with Joe and his father reunited as they watch Caterina rehearse. Moments before, she had reached an oblique understanding, if not reconciliation, with Joe.

The critical reception for Luna was mixed. Rich called it "perfect," and Cott noted its "intensity and cinematic brilliance." But other viewers were appalled by Bertolucci's unabashed exploitation of incest. John Simon deemed it "a dreadfully poseurish film," and Kauffmann called it "ludicrously bad." He added, "When the film isn't being portentously symbolic, it's being empty—one or the other." Kauffmann dubbed Bertolucci "a monstrous and disgusting artist, not a failed authentic one."

In response to the negative reviews, Bertolucci charged critics with "irresponsibility." "I've been through very hard times with critics on Luna," he told an American Film writer. "I've read things almost personally offensive, like 'There is not a second in this movie that is acceptable.' It's a very experimental movie." In an interview with Cott, Bertolucci also explained that Luna is actually "autobiographical" and that he may have been using the film to psychoanalyze himself. He also conceded that "the movie gravitates between melodrama and psychoanalysis," but both elements are necessary because "the characters are either epicallyrical or determined by their own subconsciouses."

Bertolucci's style was more subdued in his following film, The Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man. Departing from the sensationalized sex and violence that marked Last Tango in Paris, 1900, and Luna, he fashioned, according to Canby, "a distant meditation on Italian politics" in the manner of The Spider's Strategy. The "ridiculous man" of the film's title is Primo, a factory owner faced with ransom demands from his son's kidnappers. After learning of his son's possible murder, Primo nonetheless continues compiling the ransom for business purposes. Canby was especially impressed with Bertolucci's attention to characterization in the film; The Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man "is sometimes poetic and warm-hearted, then cooly satiric and finally surreal," Canby observed. "The reality of the characters, however, is never in doubt."

Bertolucci continued to make films of epic grandeur, including the 1987 production The Last Emperor, which tells the story of Pu Yi, the final emperor of China before the communist revolution felled the monarchy. The film chronicles Pu Yi's life, from his childhood in the Forbidden City to his old age as an "ordinary man." With permission of the Chinese government, Bertolucci filmed most of the motion picture, based on Pu Yi's autobiography, in the Forbidden City, which had not been seen by outsiders in person or on film in decades. The Last Emperor won nine Academy awards, including best picture and best director, giving Bertolucci's lagging directing career new life. In 1998 The Last Emperor was re-released with new footage. About the 1998 release, Variety's Godfrey Cheshire commented: "Easily one of the most intelligent and genuinely artistic historical epics in cinema history, . . . [the film] remains extremely impressive on every technical level." Yet John Simon in the National Review begged to differ. He likened The Last Emperor to "a set of splendid picture postcards whose text side can be ignored" because the screenplay does not "get into the protagonist's inner life, let alone that of any other character."

Upon Bertolucci's request, screenwriter Mark Peploe wrote the script for the 1990 film The Sheltering Sky, based on the 1949 book of the same name by Paul Bowles. In this work, which Time's Richard Corliss dubbed "swank, sexy, bleak and very beautiful," viewers follow the Moresby couple's desire for adventure in the hope that it will relieve their ennui, and as Bertolucci explained it to Corliss, "the impossibility of love. It is about the impossibility of being happy within love." Reviews of the film varied dramatically: Stanley Kauffmann, in the New Republic, described both the book and film as "vapid and pretentious," while Corliss asserted that the film's "beauty . . . is that it ultimately locates a married couple's humanity." Returning to the Far East for inspiration, Bertolucci collaborated with Peploe and Rudolph Wurlitzer on the screenplay for Little Buddha. Although it is another historical piece, this film is dually plotted in the past—telling the story of Indian prince Siddhartha's rejection of his royal status and transformation into the first Buddha—and the present—telling of Buddhist monks who try to determine which of three children might be the true reincarnation of a Tibetan lama. Several reviewers wrote in lukewarm fashion about Little Buddha. Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman, for example, complained that Buddhism "gets short shrift" and that "the movie flops egregiously . . . in its parallel contemporary story." Kauffmann found the Little Buddha screenplay "flaccid" and suggested that Bertolucci intended that the pictorial exoticism carry the film.

In a departure from his far-reaching historical dramas, Bertolucci's next film, Stealing Beauty, is a nostalgic comment on "life lived before the upheavals of sex and loss, before the corruption of innocence," to quote Peter Rainer in Los Angeles magazine. With the story focusing on Lucy, a nineteen-year-old American who is summering in Italy with friends of her deceased mother, Bertolucci and American novelist Susan Minot "joined the sensibility of romance schlock fiction with a lament for blasted bourgeois lives. It's Harlequin Chekhov," quipped Rainer. Both Ty Burr in Entertainment Weekly and Rainer likened Stealing Beauty to soft-core pornography, and Kauffmann went so far as to assert that the middle-aged Bertolucci is simply "infatuated" with star Liv Tyler, who, as Lucy, wants to solve the mystery of her parentage and lose her virginity. "Trying to capture her awakening soul, Bertolucci remains a tourist, his film an album of beautiful snapshots," concluded Newsweek's David Ansen.

Clare Peploe and Bertolucci teamed up to write the screenplay for Besieged, based on a short story by James Ladsun, which Peploe had long liked. This tale revolves around the reclusive Kinsky, an Englishman living in an Italian villa, who falls obsessively in love with his maid, Shandurai, an African woman who has fled the chaos of her homeland. When Kinsky professes his love for Shandurai, she retorts that if he really love her, he would help free her husband, who is a political prisoner in Africa. As in the past, some critics were at odds over what to make of the film. Kauffmann found it lacking in "character conviction" and criticized it as poorly constructed and skimpily filmed, while Schickel complained that the many silent moments create a "distancing and annoying" foreboding. The film's ironic ending also elicited comment, with Schickel suggesting that even O. Henry, master of the surprise ending, would have pause about this denouement. In contrast, Entertainment's Lisa Schwarzbaum, who dubbed the work a "deeply felt love story," predicted that O. Henry would have appreciated the "extraordinarly elegant plot spiral" that concludes Besieged.

Bertolucci's next film, The Dreamers, follows a screenplay by novelist Gilbert Adair, based on Adair's novel The Holy Innocents. The Dreamers tells the story of an American college student, Matthew, who becomes involved, both intellectually and romantically, with a fraternal set of French twins, Theo and Isabelle. While the student riots of 1968 take place outside the twins' family's apartment, the students play psychosexual games, their motivation described by Variety's David Rooney as "inaccessible to many audiences." In Interview Erika Abeel saw similarities between The Dreamers and Last Tango in Paris, likening the former to an à trois version of Bertolucci's controversial 1973 motion picture. Rooney noted, "The eroticism and nudity [of The Dreamers] are even more explicit here [than in Last Tango in Paris], yet somehow oddly repressed for a film set during the sexual revolution. And the issues being addressed seem diluted. In fact, the whole spirit of rebellion, passion and protest that should be a driving force for the characters play more like a cultivated affectation." While Rooney expressed confusion over Bertolucci's intentions with the film, he was certain of its workmanship, calling it "meticulously crafted on all technical levels." After its fall, 2003, premiere in Venice, Italy, The Dreamers underwent editing to eliminate much of its frontal nudity in order to make it acceptable to the American movie raters. It was slated to open in North America in March of 2004.

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Bertolucci, Bernardo, Bernardo Bertolucci: Interviews, edited by Fabien S. Gerard, T. Jefferson Kline, and Bruce Sklarew, University Press of Mississippi (Jackson, MS), 2000.

Burgoyne, Robert, Bertolucci's "1900": A Narrative and Historical Analysis, Wayne State University Press (Detroit, MI), 1991.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Volume 16, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1981.

Gelmis, Joseph, The Film Director As Superstar, Doubleday (Garden City, NY), 1970.

International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers, Volume 2: Directors, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Kline, T. Jefferson, Bertolucci's Dream Loom: A Psychoanalytical Study of the Cinema, University of Massachusetts Press (Amherst, MA), 1987.

Kolker, Robert Philip, Bernardo Bertolucci, Oxford University Press (New York, NY), 1985.

Loshitzky, Yosefa, The Radical Faces of Godard and Bertolucci, Wayne State University Press (Detroit, MI), 1995.

Mellen, Joan, Women and Sexuality in the New Film, New Horizon Press (New York, NY), 1973.

Negri, Livio, and Fabien S. Gerard, editors, The Sheltering Sky: A Film by Bernardo Bertolucci Based on the Novel by Paul Bowles, [London, England], 1990.

Sklarew, Bruce H., and others, editors, Bertolucci's "The Last Emperor": Multiple Takes, Wayne State University Press (Detroit, MI), 1998.

Tonetti, Claretta, Bernardo Bertolucci: The Cinema of Ambiguity, Twayne Publishers (New York, NY), 1995.

Ungari, Enzo, Bertolucci by Bertolucci, translated by Donald Ranvaud, Plexus (London, England), 1987.

PERIODICALS

American Film, October, 1986, Don Ranvaud, "After the Revolution," pp. 19-21; November, 1987, John Powers, "Last Tango in Beijing," pp. 34-40; December, 1990, Harlan Kennedy, "Radical Sheik," pp. 30-35, 56.

Boston, July, 1996, Jeffrey Hogrefe, review of Stealing Beauty, pp. 96-98.

Chatelaine, February, 1991, Gina Mallet, review of The Sheltering Sky, p. 12.

Christian Herald, February, 1988, Harry Cheney, review of The Last Emperor, p. 56.

Christianity Today, April 8, 1988, Stefan Ulstein, "Last Emperor, Lost Emperor," pp. 57-58.

Christian Science Monitor, May 21, 1998, Gloria Goodale, review of Besieged, p. 18.

Cineaste, spring, 1971; fall, 1999, Bruce Sklarew, "Returning to My Low-Budget Roots" (interview), p. 16.

Cinema Journal, Volume 28, number 3, 1989, Robert Burgoyne, "Temporality As Historical Argument in Bertolucci's 1900."

Commonweal, December 23, 1977; December 18, 1987, Tom O'Brien, review of The Last Emperor, pp. 747-748.

Detroit Free Press, October 26, 1979; October 30, 1979.

East-West Film Journal, Volume 7, number 2, 1993, Yosefa Loshitzy, "The Tourist/Traveler Gaze: Bertolucci and Bowles' The Sheltering Sky."

Entertainment Weekly, January 28, 1994, p. 76; June 17, 1994, Owen Gleiberman, review of Little Buddha, pp. 32-34; November 11, 1994, Kathleen Cromwell, review of Little Buddha, p. 89; November 25, 1994, Kenneth M. Chanko, review of Little Buddha, p. 101; June 14, 1996, Ken Tucker, review of Stealing Beauty, p. 43; August 22, 1997, Ty Burr, review of Stealing Beauty, pp. 136-137; May 21, 1999, Lisa Schwarzbaum, review of Besieged, p. 52.

Film, spring, 1971, R. Kreitzman, "Bernardo Bertolucci, an Italian Young Master."

Film and History, February, 1980, A. Horton, "History As Myth and Myth As History in Bertolucci's 1900."

Film Comment, May-June, 1974; November-December, 1979, P. Schwartzman, "Embarrass Me More!"; November-December, 1987, Tony Rayns, "Model Citizen: Bernardo Bertolucci on Location in China," pp. 31-36; July-August, 1989; May-June, 1991, David Thomson, review of The Sheltering Sky, pp. 18-23; July-August, 1994, Robert Horton, "Nonconformist: Bernardo Bertolucci's Little Buddha," pp. 26-28; March, 1999, Dave Kehr, review of Besieged, p. 6.

Film Heritage, summer, 1976, D. Lopez, "The Father Figure in The Conformist and in Last Tango in Paris."

Film Quarterly, fall, 1966; winter, 1966-67; summer, 1972; spring, 1973; fall, 1975; fall, 1986, Robert Burgoyne, "The Somatization of History in Bertolucci's 1900"; fall, 1988, review of Bertolucci on Bertolucci; winter, 1988, Fatimah Tobing Rony, review of The Last Emperor, pp. 47-52.

Films in Review, September-October, 1996, Andy Pawelczak, review of Stealing Beauty, pp. 66-67.

Glamour, January, 1988, Joy Gould Boyum, review of The Last Emperor, p. 108; July, 1996, Juliann Garvey, review of Stealing Beauty, p. 58.

Guardian (London, England), March 14, 1973.

Harper's Bazaar, July, 1994, Polly Frost, review of Little Buddha, p. 39.

History and Memory, Volume 3, number 2, 1991, Yosefa Loshitzky, "'Memory of My Own Memory': Processes of Private and Collective Remembering in Bertolucci's The Spider's Stratagem and The Conformist."

Hollywood Reporter, 1988, pp. 22, 70.

International Film Guide, 1972.

Interview, May, 1988, pp. 74-78; October, 2003, Erika Abeel, Eva Green, p. 66.

Journal of Film and Video, spring, 1998, Vincent Hausmann, reviews of La Luna and The Sheltering Sky, pp. 20-41.

Jump Cut, November, 1977, W. Aiken, "Bertolucci's Gay Images."

Life, August 13, 1965, Pauline Kael, "Starburst by a Gifted Twenty-Two-Year-Old."

Literature-Film Quarterly, July, 1998, Allan James Thomas, "The Sheltering Sky and the Sorrow of Memory," pp. 196-203.

Los Angeles, July, 1996, Peter Rainer, review of Stealing Beauty, pp. 114-115; Merrill Shindler, review of The Sheltering Sky, p. 121.

Los Angeles Times, July 31, 1991, Kevin Brass, "Bertolucci Film Festival Honors His Early Works," p. F1; June 27, 1994, Karl Springer, review of Little Buddha, p. F3; June 21, 1996, Jack Matthews, "Bertolucci's Beauty Searches for Identity, '60s Idealism," p. 6; October 18, 1996, Kevin Thomas, "The Filmmaker Looks Back at His Work While Exploring New Realms" (interview), p. 6; May 16, 1999, David Gritten, "Bertolucci's Next: The Opposite of X" (interview), p. 17; May 21, 1999, Kevin Thomas, "Bertolucci Captures the Seductive in Besieged," p. 6.

Maclean's, July 8, 1996, Brian D. Johnson, review of Stealing Beauty, p. 49; November, 5, 2001, "The Sheltering Cinema: Bernardo Bertolucci Tries to Bridge Cultural Divides," p. 61.

Massachusetts Review, autumn, 1975.

Millimeter, December, 1981, R. Gentry, "Bertolucci Directs Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man."

Nation, June 24, 1996, Stuart Klawans, review of Stealing Beauty, pp. 34-36.

National Review, December 21, 1979; December 18, 1987, John Simon, review of The Last Emperor, pp. 54-58; July 15, 1996, John Simon, review of Stealing Beauty, pp. 52-53.

New Republic, March 3, 1973; February 9, 1974; October 20, 1979; December 14, 1987, Stanley Kauffmann, review of The Last Emperor, pp. 22-23; January 7, 1991, Stanley Kauffmann, review of The Sheltering Sky, p. 33; June 13, 1994, Stanley Kauffmann, review of Little Buddha, p. 32; June 24, 1996, Stanley Kauffmann, review of Stealing Beauty, p. 32; June 21, 1999, Stanley Kauffmann, review of Besieged, p. 30.

New Statesman, March, 1988, Georgina Born, review of The Last Emperor, pp. 30-31; February 4, 1994, Jonathan Romney, review of The Conformist, pp. 41-42; April 29, 1994, Boyd Tonkin, review of Little Buddha, pp. 57-58.

Newsweek, November 18, 1974; September 27, 1976; October 17, 1977; October 28, 1979; June 24, 1996, David Ansen, review of Stealing Beauty, p. 83; May 24, 1999, review of Besieged, p. 74.

New Times, November 11, 1977.

New York, November 30, 1987, David Denby, review of The Last Emperor, pp. 76-78; June 6, 1994, David Denby, review of Little Buddha, p. 53.

New Yorker, October 28, 1972; October 31, 1972; November 20, 1987, Pauline Kael, review of The Last Emperor, pp. 98-104; December 17, 1990, Pauline Kael, review of The Sheltering Sky, pp. 118-121; May 30, 1994, Anthony Lane, review of Little Buddha, pp. 97-99; June 10, 1996, Anthony Lane, review of Stealing Beauty, pp. 90-92.

New York Post, February 3, 1973.

New York Review of Books, May 17, 1973; February 18, 1988, John K. Fairbank, review of The Last Emperor, pp. 14-16.

New York Times, September 25, 1964; September 18, 1970; September 19, 1970; October 16, 1972; February 2, 1973; February 11, 1973.

Observer (London, England), January 6, 1980.

People, May 9, 1988, p. 63; June 24, 1996, Leah Rozen, review of Stealing Beauty, p. 20.

Premiere, October, 1990, Rob Medich and Sally Weltman, review of The Sheltering Sky, p. 78; December, 1990, Kitty Bowe Hearty, review of The Sheltering Sky, p. 22; July, 1996, Todd McCarthy, review of Stealing Beauty, pp. 35-36.

Rolling Stone, November 15, 1979; January 14, 1988, Lynn Hirschberg, "Romancing the East," p. 33; January 7, 1991, Stuart Klawans, review of The Sheltering Sky, p. 22; June 24, 1999, Peter Travers, review of Besieged, p. 75.

Sight and Sound, spring, 1971, Richard Roud, "Fathers and Sons"; spring, 1973; fall, 1973, Marsha Kinder and Beverle Houston, "Bertolucci and the Dance of Danger"; spring, 1978; May, 1999, Sally Chatsworth, review of Besieged, p. 40.

South Atlantic Quarterly, Volume 91, number 2, 1992, Jody McAuliff, "The Church of the Desert: Reflections on The Sheltering Sky."

Spectator (London, England), April 30, 1988, review of Bertolucci by Bertolucci, p. 36.

Time, January 22, 1973; May 24, 1976; October 17, 1977; October 8, 1979; December 3, 1990, Richard Corliss, review of The Sheltering Sky, p. 95; May 31, 1999, Richard Schickel, review of Besieged, p. 99.

Times Literary Supplement, February 26, 1998, Richard Harris, review of The Last Emperor, p. 220.

Variety, November 23, 1998, Godfrey Cheshire, review of The Last Emperor, p. 48; May 22, 2000, p. 74; September 8, 2003, David Rooney, review of The Dreamers, pp. 31-32.

Video Review, April, 1991, Glenn Kenny, review of Last Tango in Paris, pp. 91-92.

Village Voice, October 8, 1979.

Vogue, March, 1994, Joan Juliet Buck, "The Last Romantic."

Washington Post, December 18, 1987, Rita Kempley, "The Last Emperor: China Dull," p. G7; January 11, 1991, Hal Hinson, "Bertolucci's Clouded Sky," p. D6; May 25, 1994, Desson Howe, "Little Buddha: Bertolucci's Spiritual Glow," p. C1; November 25, 1994, Hal Hinson, "The Conformist: Bertolucci at His Best," p. B7; June 11, 1999, Stephen Hunter, review of Besieged, p. C5.

Western Humanities Review, Volume 44, number 2, 1990, L. K. Bundtzen, "Bertolucci's Erotic Politics and the Auteur Theory: From Last Tango in Paris to The Last Emperor."*