ROMA.- He film-maker Italian Paolo Taviani – who directed important films with his brother Vittorio, including Master fatherPalme d’Or in Cannes in 1977 – died today – February 29 – at the age of 92, announced the mayor of Rome.
“With Paolo Taviani, we are a great master of cine Italian. With his brother Vittorio (died in 2018 at age 88, NDLR), he filmed unforgettable, deep, committed films,” said Roberto Gualtieri in X.
The secular funeral of Paolo Taviani, who died in Rome due to a brief illness, will be held on Monday in the Italian capital, according to the local press.
Legacy of the filmmaker
Paolo and his brother Vittorio Taviani wrote some of the most beautiful pages of Italian cinema, in an atypical work that mixes history, psychoanalysis and poetry.
He was a unique gift who always spoke with a single voice and wrote in four hands about his indignation and anger, but also about his love for art and beauty.
“We don’t know how we could work without each other… as long as we can breathe mysteriously at the same rhythm, we will make films together,” said the filmmakers who, in 1977, compared themselves to coffee with milk. “It is impossible to say where the coffee ends and where the milk begins!”
Highly inspired by the master of neorealism, Roberto Rosselini, but also by Vittorio De Sica, both were interested in social issues from the beginning, in the 1960s.
After a series of documentaries, the Taviani brothers made their first feature film, You have to burn a man (1962), which tells the story of a Marxist unionist who fights against the Sicilian mafia.
A year later, the couple addresses the issue of divorce with the comedy The outlaws of marriageplayed by Ugo Tognazzi and Annie Girardot, before directing Under the Sign of Scorpio, an allegory of the events of 1968.
“We never give up”
It was in 1974, with Allonsanfanan evocation of post-Napoleonic Italy and the failure of the revolutionary movements that broke out at the time, obtained their first international success.
Most of his films are inspired by literary works. Con The elective affinities adapted Goehte and in Master father They were based on a novel by Gavino Ledda that talks about the harsh fate of a Sardinian boy raised by a shepherd.
The theme of childhood is also present in The night of San Lorenzo (1982), Special Grand Prize of the Cannes Jury.
Vittorio and Paolo traveled five years later to the United States, where they filmed Good morning Babiloniaa satirical portrait of Hollywood.
Great admirers of the Sicilian playwright and novelist Luigi Pirandello, they adapted several of his stories in Kaosa surreal film in two installments.
After returning to the documentary with Another possible world, filmed during the G8 in Genoa (2001) with director Gillo Pontecorvo, which denounces the devastating effects of globalization; They returned to fiction with The fate of Nunik (2007).
prison world
In 2012, they approached the prison world differently with Caesar must dietold through the preparation of a Shakespeare play in the Roman prison of Rebibbia.
The film, awarded the Golden Bear at the Berlinale, tells how detainees free themselves from their prisons thanks to art, while at the same time becoming aware of their confinement.
“We never give up. They say that when you get older you are more generous and more tolerant. It’s a lie. We always have the same instinct to rebel,” they said then.
For the first time in almost half a century, Paolo made his first feature film alone in 2017, A private mattera love story in the context of the Piedmont resistance of 1943.
And Paolo, after the death of his older brother, directed his last film alone, Leonora Goodbyepresented at the Berlinale in 2022.
FUENTE: AFP
