Roeg and Bertolucci: Remembering the Masters

Two of the biggest names in recent arthouse history passed away in late November. It's with regret and respect, therefore, that Cinema Paradiso looks back on the distinguished and sometimes controversial careers of Nicolas Roeg and Bernardo Bertolucci.

They passed away within a few days of each other, on 23 and 26 November 2018 respectively. However, Nicolas Roeg and Bernardo Bertolucci had much more in common. Each served an apprenticeship that would serve him in good stead for his later career and both would go on to marry a key collaborator. In addition to pursuing singular visions within the arthouse tradition, Bertolucci and Roeg would also direct sex scenes that would spark contemporary controversy and become the subject of enduring debate about the lengths to which a film-maker should go to shoot a scene. Moreover, each director found it difficult to repeat former glories, despite retaining a trademark style that set him apart.

The Teaboy Who Made Good

Born in London on 15 August 1928, Nicolas Roeg first became interested in cinema at the Mercers' School, where he tried to set up a film society. So, having acted as the unit projectionist during his National Service in the Army, Roeg took a job as a gofer at the De Lane Lea dubbing studios in 1947. Three years later, having made tea and lugged film cans around Soho, he joined the cinematographic department at MGM's Borehamwood studios, where he slowly progressed to clapper boy, film loader, focus puller and camera operator.

Under the tutelage of such renowned cinematographers as Joseph Ruttenberg, Jack Hildyard, Ted Moore and Freddie Young, Roeg worked on an eclectic variety of projects, including George Cukor's Bhowani Junction (1956), John Guillermin's Tarzan's Greatest Adventure (1959), and Ken Hughes's The Trials of Oscar Wilde (1960). He graduated to director of photography on Robert Lynn's Information Received (1961) and was entrusted with second unit duties on David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962). However, they fell out early in the shoot for Doctor Zhivago (1965) and Roeg was replaced by Freddie Young, who went on to win an Academy Award.

Nevertheless, Roeg began to earn a reputation as a meticulous stylist on pictures like Clive Donner's The Caretaker (1963) and Nothing But the Best (1964), Robert Lynn's Dr Crippen (1963), Roger Corman's The Masque of the Red Death (1964), François Truffaut's Fahrenheit 451 (1966), Richard Lester's A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966) and Petulia (1968), and John Schlesinger's Far From the Madding Crowd (1967). He also took writing credits on Cliff Owen's A Prize of Arms (1962) and Lawrence Huntingdon's Death Drums Along the River (1963), and helped out old mentor Ken Hughes by shooting some additional scenes for the James Bond spoof, Casino Royale (1967).

The Poet's Son

According to Bernardo Bertolucci, he enjoyed 'a golden childhood' in a household full of servants and books. Born on 16 March 1941 in the northern city of Parma, he was the son of poet and film critic Attilio Bertolucci and literature teacher Ninetta Giovanardi, who was of Italian-Irish extraction and had been raised in Australia after her father had been forced into exile. Writing poems from an early age, Bernardo often accompanied his father to the cinema and asked for a 16mm camera for his school graduation present. He made two short films in the mid-1950s, following the story of a pig's daughter with a woodland quest for a mythical cable car that starred his brother, Giuseppe (who would also go on to make films), and their two cousins.

The family moved to Rome in the latter part of the decade and Bertolucci seemed destined to follow in his father's literary footsteps when he won the prestigious Viareggio Prize for his first volume of poetry, In Search of Mystery, which bore the influence of Dylan Thomas and Emily Dickinson. However, having made the acquaintance of Pier Paolo Pasolini, after Attilio had helped him publish his first novel, Bertolucci began to see cinema as his métier. Thus, having assisted Pasolini on his debut feature, Accatone (1961), the 21 year-old Bertolucci dropped out of university and made his own directorial bow with The Grim Reaper (1962), which was based on a five-page treatment bequeathed to him by Pasolini.

An Angry Young Man

Coming at a time when mainstream Italian cinema was dominated by sword-and-sandal adventures, giallo thrillers and the nascent Spaghetti Western, The Grim Reaper continued the drift away from postwar neo-realism that had been started by the likes of Federico Fellini and Michelangelo Antonioni. Likened by some to Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950) because of its multiple perspectives, the investigation into the murder of a Roman prostitute bore the influence of both Pasolini and Bertolucci's idol, Jean-Luc Godard. Indeed, the protagonist in his next outing, Before the Revolution (1964), goes to see Godard's A Woman Is a Woman (1961), as he wrestles with the contradictions between his comfortable lifestyle and his socialist ideals.

Although based on Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma, Francesco Barilli's political education clearly contains a degree of autobiography, which was reinforced when Bertolucci married leading lady, Adriana Asti. As he later revealed: 'Like most Communist intellectuals, I am condemned to be divided. I have a split personality, and the real contradiction within me is that I cannot quite synchronise my heart and my brain.' But, while he was still in a political quandary, Bertolucci was moving towards a personal style, even though the film was strewn with allusions to his key cinematic influences.

Despite winning a prize at Cannes, the accolade made it no easier to secure funding for another feature and Bertolucci had to content himself with producing three documentaries for television and 'Agony', a 1967 short that was released two years later alongside a vignette by Godard in the anthology, Love and Anger. Moreover, he joined forces with Dario Argento in helping Sergio Leone script the seminal Spaghetti Western, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), which gave him a taste for the kind of epic that would become Bertolucci's trademark in the middle part of his career.

His third feature, however, was another homage to Godard, as Bertolucci borrowed such Brechtian gambits as on-screen captions and direct addresses to the camera in adapting Fedor Dostoevsky's The Double as Partner (1968). Chronicling the efforts of idealistic drama teacher Pierre Clémenti to reconcile the contradictions embodied by his doppelgänger, this rattle bag of hot-button issues and revolutionary slogans sought to capture the spirit of the Soixante-Huitards demonstrating on the streets of Paris. However, it now feels very much a product of its time and is important primarily for persuading Bertolucci to think for himself and find his own cinematic voice.

Roeg's Winning Streak

Convinced by his second unit experiences on Daniel Mann's Judith (1966) that he was ready to assume the director's chair, Roeg began work on Walkabout in 1967. Armed with a 14-page script by playwright Edward Bond about two white children who are guided through the Outback by a young Aborigine, he started scouting locations in Australia.

However, he struggled to find a backer for such an ambitious debut project and Roeg opted to join forces with painter-turned-screenwriter Donald Cammell on Performance. In addition to lighting the images, he also received a co-directing credit for the technical advice he gave Cammell during the shoot. But the story of a pop star whose London home is invaded by gangsters was very much Cammell's creation and his career was the one that suffered most when Warner Bros shelved the project for two years before giving it a limited release in 1970.

Largely slated by the press, Performance went on to acquire cult status for depicting the flipside of the Swinging Sixties and for demonstrating that a film's style could be as exhilarating and challenging as its content. Roeg took these lessons to heart in making Walkabout (1971) and Don't Look Now (1973), which shared a simmering sense of foreboding, as well as some scenes of nudity that were considered provocative by conservative critics and audiences alike.

Recalling Roeg's previous collaboration with Julie Christie on Petulia, the latter was adapted from a Daphne Du Maurier short story and made bold use of montage, flashback, premonition and recurring motifs to question accepted screen notions of time, narrative logic and character identity. Roeg also utilised jump cuts and zoom shots to reinforce a poetic sensibility that was entirely new for British film-makers in this period. However, industry executives didn't always understand what Roeg was trying to achieve and, having teamed with Peter Neal on the rockumentary, Glastonbury Fayre (1972), he made The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) in the United States, only for Paramount production chief Barry Diller to withdraw a distribution deal because the story of alien David Bowie's search for water for his stricken planet didn't have an accessibly linear structure.

Bertolucci: Politics, Sex and Controversy

Bertolucci had spent the 1960s longing to 'think cinematographically, eat cinematographically, sleep cinematographically, as a poet, a painter, lives, eats, sleeps painting'. Having failed to mount an adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's pulp novel, Red Harvest, his chance to fulfil his dream came in 1970, when he produced two features that forged his relationship with cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and had a seismic impact upon such emerging New Hollywood auteurs as Francis Ford Coppola, Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese.

Inspired by the Jorge Luis Borges story, 'Theme of the Traitor and the Hero', The Spider's Stratagem reflected the fact that Bertolucci had recently joined the Communist Party and entered psychoanalysis, as he examined the legacy of Italy's Fascist past and his own feelings at having been raised in a bourgeois family. As in Partner, the leading actor doubled up, as Giulio Brogi plays a young man returning to his father's village in the Po Valley to investigate his partisan martyrdom in 1936. However, myth and truth diverge from the moment Brogi arrives and this sense of bewilderment as the anti-hero comes to realise he has been duped recurs in the case of Jean-Louis Trintignant's assassin in The Conformist, which Bertolucci adapted from a novel by Alberto Moravia.

Boldly rejecting linear storytelling, Bertolucci experimented with lavish décor, symbolic colour schemes, elaborate camerawork and flashbacks within flashbacks, as he sought to draw parallels between Benito Mussolini's Italy and his own times. However, it was his adapted screenplay that earned Bertolucci his first Oscar nomination and established him on the international scene. Yet, by making Trintignant a repressed homosexual who has a fling with his target's bisexual wife, Bertolucci was criticised in some quarters for equating sexual preference with political extremism. But this was nothing compared to the furore that erupted around his next feature, Last Tango in Paris (1972).

Centring on the desperate liaison between American widower Marlon Brando and Parisian teenager Maria Schneider, this often harrowing study of despair and isolation caused outrage with its depiction of Brando using butter to sodomize his lover. Schneider later revealed that she had felt violated by the scene, which had been devised over breakfast by Bertolucci and Brando and kept from the actress to ensure that Storaro's camera captured her genuine sense of shock and humiliation.

There's no excuse for this abuse of directorial power and the incident tarnishes Bertolucci's reputation, especially as his expressions of regret for causing Schneider any distress came after she had died in 2011 without receiving any form of apology. In 1972, however, Bertolucci seemed like the victim, as a court in Bologna found the film to be 'obscene, indecent and catering to the lowest instincts of the libido'. In addition to receiving a two-year suspended prison sentence, Bertolucci also had his civil rights curtailed for five years and he complained that he felt less of an Italian after losing the vote.

Nevertheless, influential American critic Pauline Kael claimed that Last Tango (whose French dialogue had been partially scripted by Agnès Varda) was the cinematic equivalent to Igor Stravinsky's 1913 musical landmark, The Rite of Spring. Moreover, while she asserted that 'Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form', fellow film-maker Robert Altman hailed the picture as 'a standard for looking at films of the past and judging films of the future'. When he next came to examine a doomed romantic relationship, however, Bertolucci was rather more circumspect, even though La Luna (1979) was an Oedipal melodrama that focused on the incestuous relationship between opera singer Jill Clayburgh and her drug-addicted teenage son, Matthew Barry.

The Perennial Outsider

Although Roeg has been cited as an influence by such directors as Ridley Scott, Steven Soderbergh, Danny Boyle and Christopher Nolan, he 'refused to join the club' and, as a consequence, often found it difficult to get backing for pictures that were considered commercial risks. Among his unrealised projects were adaptations of JG Ballard's High-Rise and Thierry Jonquet's Mygale, which respectively filmed in the 2010s by Ben Wheatley and Pedro Almodóvar (as The Skin I Live In). Roeg also missed out on Mike Hodges's Flash Gordon (1980), Wim Wenders's Hammett (1982) and Sydney Pollack's Out of Africa (1985), which won the Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director.

Instead, the mercurial Roeg courted more controversy by making Bad Timing (1980), a study of romantic obsession and voyeurism that starred singer Art Garfunkel as an American psychiatrist who has a decidedly unhealthy relationship with compatriot Theresa Russell in Cold War Vienna. Ignoring critical comparisons with Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1980), one executive at the Rank Organisation was so outraged by the scene in which Garfunkel rapes Russell during her attempted suicide that he branded the feature 'a sick film made by sick people for sick people'.

The resulting dispute over distribution left Roeg high and dry and subsequent collaborations with Russell (who became his second wife after he divorced British actress Susan Stephen) struggled to find their audience. Loosely based on the murder of gold mine owner Sir Harry Oakes, Eureka (1983) was largely overlooked, despite co-starring Gene Hackman and Rutger Hauer and being handled by Bertolucci's regular producer, Jeremy Thomas. Adapted from Terry Johnson's acclaimed play, Insignificance (1985) also divided opinion, even though it intriguingly brought together characters based on Marilyn Monroe (Russell), Albert Einstein (Michael Emil), Senator Joseph McCarthy (Tony Curtis) and baseball legend Joe DiMaggio (Gary Busey).

Similarly, Russell's tense encounter with Gary Oldman, as a housewife who wonders whether a backpacker is the son she gave up for adoption, in the Dennis Potter-scripted Track 29 (1988) failed to find favour. Audiences also stayed away from Cold Heaven (1991), a Brian Moore adaptation in which Russell's avowed atheist has a crisis of conscience after lover James Russo is killed before she can confess about their affair to husband Mark Harmon. However, he had more luck pairing Oliver Reed and Amanda Donohue in Castaway (1986), which drew on the bestselling memoirs of Lucy Irvine, while 'Un ballo in machera', his contribution to the operatic anthology, Aria (1987), was well received.

Intimacy on a Grand Scale

Such was the notoriety of Last Tango in Paris that it became an international box-office success and Bertolucci was entrusted with a $6 million budget to realise his epic alternative history of Italy in 1900 (1976). Opening with sons being born to families at different ends of the class spectrum, the action condemns the moral cowardice that allowed Fascism to flourish, as it explores the impact that Blackshirt Donald Sutherland has on the lives of complacent landowner Robert De Niro and noble peasant Gérard Depardieu.

Concluding with the Liberation at the end of the Second World War, the film originally ran for five hours and 15 minutes. However, producer Alberto Grimaldi was deeply unhappy with its sprawling self-indulgence and threatened to cut it down to 195 minutes. Having set out to become the Italian David Lean, Bertolucci was in danger of becoming the Erich von Stroheim of the Emilia-Romagna before a compromise cut running 245 minutes was agreed. He was not helped by the mixed critical response and it was only after the Director's Cut was released in 1990 that the full visual majesty and political potency of this flawed and occasionally historically fanciful masterpiece came to be appreciated.

Faced with a setback for the first time in his career, Bertolucci retreated into more modest offerings like La Luna and Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (1981), a political thriller that starred Ugo Tognazzi as the embattled owner of a cheese factory whose son is kidnapped by Marxist terrorists. Reflecting his shifting attitudes in the decade since he had made The Poor Die First (1971), a 16mm documentary about the living conditions of the Roman underclass, the film was scarcely seen outside Italy and, when he failed to produce another over the next six years, some wondered whether Bertolucci was a spent force.

However, he had been hard at work in Beijing's Forbidden City making The Last Emperor (1987), a monumental life of Pu Yi that he had scripted with Mark Peploe, the brother of his third wife, Clare, who had contributed to the screenplay of Antonioni's Zabriskie Point (1970) and would go on to direct The Triumph of Love (2001), which her husband produced. Lauded by the critics, this audacious comeback won nine Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Director and Screenplay. Yet, there was little sign of Bertolucci's cine-iconoclasm, as he courted mainstream audiences with an imposing, but accessible biopic of the last ruler of the Qing Dynasty, who was overthrown as a child in 1911 and installed as the puppet ruler of the Japanese state of Manchukuo before being incarcerated in a re-education camp following the Communist takeover in 1949.

There was more intimacy on a large canvas in The Sheltering Sky (1990) and Little Buddha (1993), which reunited Bertolucci with producer Jeremy Thomas, who father and uncle had been respectively responsible for the much-loved Doctor and Carry On series. Adapted from a novel by Paul Bowles, the former follows John Malkovich and Debra Winger on an ill-starred bid to revitalise their marriage during an arduous trek across North Africa, while the latter told parallel stories about the epiphany of the Nepalese prince, Siddhartha (Keanu Reeves), and a young Seattle boy (Alex Wiesendanger), who has been identified as a reincarnated lama by a Buddhist monk (Ying Ruocheng). In each film in this so-called 'Eastern trilogy', hope is pitted against despair. But neither film performed well at the box office and Bertolucci found himself having to scale down his ambitions.

Slow Fade Out

In 1987, Roeg drew criticism for the intimidating nature of the government's first public information films about AIDS and he was forced to divide his time between commercials and pop videos before making his TV-movie debut with Sweet Birth of Youth (1989), a relatively conventional take on Tennessee Williams's play about a fading movie star, who was played by Elizabeth Taylor. He bounced back and connected with a new audience when he was somewhat unexpectedly hired by Muppet supremo Jim Henson to direct The Witches (1990), However, Roeg succeeded in falling out with Roald Dahl when he changed the ending to his beloved novel and opted not to use the author's preferred conclusion after going to the trouble and expense of filming it.

Now divorced from Russell - with whom he collaborated for the last time on the 1995 short, Hotel Paradise, in which she plays a bride-to-be who wakes next to a chained and naked Vincent D'Onofrio - Roeg found himself confined to the small screen in adapting Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1993), the biblical story of Samson and Delilah, and Stephen Dobyns's novel, The Two Deaths of Señora Puccini, as Two Deaths (1996). But these contrasting outings were as coolly received as the erotic thriller, Full Body Massage (1995), and Roeg didn't make another feature before his interpretation of Fay Weldon's Puffball (2007). In all, he had produced just 13 features over 40 years and had enjoyed little commercial success. But Roeg leaves a legacy that has already inspired numerous film-makers and his complex, demanding and determinedly individual works are awaiting rediscovery and reappraisal by a new generation of cineastes.

A Man Out of Time

Returning to work in Italy for the first time in 15 years, Bertolucci revisited the notion of a protagonist searching for their father in Stealing Beauty (1996), as 19 year-old Liv Tyler heads to a Tuscan villa filled with artistic types to lose her virginity and uncover the identity of the man who had seduced her mother. Fitfully ravishing and amusing, but prone to pictorialism and preciousness, this low-key saga was followed by the Roman chamber drama, Besieged (1998), which accompanies Thandie Newton into exile from the African country in which her husband has been jailed for opposing the ruling dictatorship. She lands a job as a housekeeper to reclusive English pianist David Thewlis. But few were convinced by his bid to win Newton's heart by selling his belongings to fund a campaign to secure her husband's release and critics began to wonder whether Bertolucci's best years were behind him.

Ironically, having contributed 'Histoire d'eaux' to the portmanteau picture Ten Minutes Older: The Cello (2002), he demonstrated his continued relevance by retreating into his past with The Dreamers (2003), which was adapted from Gilbert Adair's novel, The Holy Innocents, and harked back to the May Days of 1968. Instead of being a new beginning, however, the film proved to be a fond adieu to the idealism that had fuelled his first films, as Bertolucci was confined to a wheelchair after a series of failed operations on his back and endured considerable discomfort to make Me and You (2012) in a basement close to his home in Rome. This reworking of Niccolo Ammaniti's novella was similarly set in a confined space, as Jacopo Olmo Antinori ducks out of a school skiing holiday to find some solitude in the basement of his mother's house. However, his peace is disturbed by his older half-sister, Tea Falco.

Imaginatively lit and photographed by Fabio Cianchetti, this felt like an afterthought by a director who was grateful still to be working. But, while Roeg crammed found footage into the dazzling montage short, The Sound of Claudia Schiffer (2000), and made a 60-second, one-shot contribution to the art project, The Film That Buys the Cinema (2014), Bertolucci had to content himself with working on a screenplay entitled The Echo Chamber while battling cancer. It remains to be seen whether this project will be entrusted to another film-maker, but Bertolucci's passing leaves Marco Bellocchio and Lina Wertmüller as the last survivors of the golden age that came to be known as the Second Italian Film Renaissance.