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Dec 1, 2007 17:47:09 GMT -5
Post by owen on Dec 1, 2007 17:47:09 GMT -5
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manho
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Dec 1, 2007 18:16:51 GMT -5
Post by manho on Dec 1, 2007 18:16:51 GMT -5
"is this any good?"
does the pope shit in the woods?
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Dec 1, 2007 18:48:54 GMT -5
Post by owen on Dec 1, 2007 18:48:54 GMT -5
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manho
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Dec 1, 2007 20:04:40 GMT -5
Post by manho on Dec 1, 2007 20:04:40 GMT -5
High noon for a western hero
This elegant, perceptive examination of the life and death of Jesse James is also a striking study in the deadly perils of hero worship Philip French Sunday December 2, 2007 Observer
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (160 mins mins, 15) Directed by Andrew Dominik; starring Brad Pitt, Casey Affleck, Sam Shepard, Sam Rockwell, Mary-Louise Parker
There are certain defining characters and incidents in the history of the American West that generated a popular mythology during the 19th century and to which Hollywood has regularly returned to re-examine them in the light of changing social and political attitudes. The greatest of these concern the Earp brothers and the gunfight at the OK Corral in Arizona, Billy the Kid and the Lincoln County War in New Mexico, and the escapades of the James brothers in Kansas and Missouri, all of them the subject of major movies in every decade since the late Thirties.
It's noteworthy that the latest addition to the James legend, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (based closely on Ron Hansen's novel), should be directed by Andrew Dominik with music by Nick Cave, both from Australia, a country famous for making heroes out of outlaws.
The cinematic image of Jesse was first established in Henry King's 1939 Jesse James, where Tyrone Power's glamorous outlaw is a Robin Hood figure, a creation of post-Civil War injustice and, by implication, of the Great Depression. The following year, in Fritz Lang's The Return of Frank James, his equally heroic and misunderstood elder brother was played by Henry Fonda, between impersonating the future President in Young Mr Lincoln and the honest, persecuted Tom Joad in The Grapes of Wrath. In the mid-Fifties, Nicholas Ray's The True Story of Jesse James, a movie originally planned with James Dean in mind, presented Jesse as a mixed-up rebel without a cause.
Philip Kaufman's 1972 The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid captured the antiheroic zeitgeist by having Robert Duvall play Jesse as a psychotic religious fanatic in a world of random violence and capitalist cynicism. In the next James gang saga, Walter Hill's The Long Riders (the first western shown in competition at Cannes), crime was seen Godfather-style as a way of life with the outlaws participating in community activities when not robbing banks and trains.
The next film touching on this particular legend was Ang Lee's Ride With the Devil of 1999, which dealt with Southern guerrilla bands, most famously Quantrill's private army, west of the Mississippi, engaged in a vicious sideshow to the Civil War. They were the preparatory school for the idealistic innocents, farm boys, preachers' sons, opportunists and psychopaths who spawned the postwar crime wave led by the James brothers.
If Lee's film can be seen as a prologue to the story of the James gang, The Assassination of Jesse James can be viewed as its complement, an epilogue to the saga. It's a long, quiet, meditative work that largely takes place over a period of about eight months, beginning in 1881 with the 38-year-old Frank James (Sam Shepard) and his 34-year-old brother Jesse (Brad Pitt) meeting the 19-year-old Bob Ford (Casey Affleck) and his brother Charley (Sam Rockwell), all of them the sons of rural preachers. Their conduct is stiffly formal, their vocabularies and cadences influenced like those around them by the King James Bible and The Book of Common Prayer. The gang's great days concluded in 1876 with the debacle of the bank raid in Northfield, Minnesota, which resulted in the break-up of the James-Younger gang and drove Frank and Jesse into permanent hiding, the latter living with his wife and small children under a pseudonym.
After that, they did occasional jobs and are currently planning a small train robbery with a pick-up team of inexperienced, unreliable, trigger-happy country boys, including Jesse's future assassin, the hero-worshipping Bob Ford.
This is a typical theme of American crime movies: ageing men once proud of their professionalism, now forced to work and ride with inferior companions. James is a sick man, mentally and physically burnt out by his thirties. Like his brother, he's only living off, and for, the popular legend. They bring hope and pride to the local common folk and excitement to those on the tame Eastern Seaboard who read dime novels relating their adventures. 'In Europe, there are only two Americans everyone knows - Mark Twain and Jesse James,' says someone proudly of these two great Missourians. So this is a story of celebrity, of having a public persona that competes with one's real identity.
In addition to hero worship and celebrity, the movie is about the complex relationship between assassin and victim and we think of the killers of Lincoln, Trotsky, Gandhi and even John Lennon. Casey Affleck subtly traces the way Bob Ford both identifies himself with Jesse and develops a bizarre hatred for him, until eventually they're unconsciously involved in a form of suicide pact. We sense Jesse's death wish in the way he tracks down his suspected betrayers, in bizarre gestures like firing his revolver at the frozen river on which he stands and in the pristine pistol he gives Ford shortly before his death.
The movie does not end with Jesse's assassination, but with the following decade in which Ford himself becomes a puzzled, guilt-ridden celebrity and, like Lee Harvey Oswald, the target for another self-justifying, publicity-seeking assassin.
This is a subtle, perceptive, ruminative film, with little violent action and a deal of eloquent talk. The acting is understated, undemonstrative and the striking images, the work of the fine British cinematographer Roger Deakins, are cold, dark and bleak. Among the many incidental delights is the brief appearance of James Carville, the 'Ragin' Cajun' who managed Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign, as the vindictive governor of Missouri. I wish the film-makers had mentioned that a couple of weeks after Jesse's death in St Joseph, Missouri, the celebrities' celebrity Oscar Wilde appeared on 18 April 1882 at the town's Tootle's Opera House during his exhausting coast-to-coast lecture tour. He wrote from there about the looting of Jesse's effects by souvenir hunters, remarking that Americans 'always take their heroes from the criminal element'. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
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david
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Dec 1, 2007 23:11:23 GMT -5
Post by david on Dec 1, 2007 23:11:23 GMT -5
That Jesse James film is really good. Very highly recommended.
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Dec 6, 2007 11:00:00 GMT -5
Post by tronno on Dec 6, 2007 11:00:00 GMT -5
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Dec 10, 2007 11:28:12 GMT -5
Post by Cat Stevens on Dec 10, 2007 11:28:12 GMT -5
gordon bleedin' bennett! how 'bout this owey-boy, not many vids out there of Sir David Jason being interviewed, this one was on Parkinson 2001: www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tm-eGlrI0tc
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Dec 10, 2007 13:58:45 GMT -5
Post by owen on Dec 10, 2007 13:58:45 GMT -5
hehe...funny comment about woody
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Dec 26, 2007 11:59:30 GMT -5
Post by Cat Stevens on Dec 26, 2007 11:59:30 GMT -5
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Steve
New Member
GabbaGabba Hey!!!
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Dec 26, 2007 17:04:00 GMT -5
Post by Steve on Dec 26, 2007 17:04:00 GMT -5
Tyreen got the Simpsons movie for xmas. Thatll be a good watch. And I got season 7 with Homerpalooza!!!
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manho
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Dec 28, 2007 5:06:26 GMT -5
Post by manho on Dec 28, 2007 5:06:26 GMT -5
'We've killed a lot of animals'
Joel and Ethan Coen have never shied away from death, and their latest film is one of their bloodiest - and best. They tell John Patterson about Texas, torture and a 'fantastic' haircut
John Patterson Friday December 21, 2007 Guardian
I'm framing up the Coen brothers as if they're appearing in one of their own movies. From where I'm seated, I can see Joel, the longer, skinnier, more languid of the pair, stretched out almost full-length in the foreground, his legs on a coffee table and his torso resting almost horizontal on a couch. He fills the lower half of my frame, looking vaguely reminiscent of Henry Fonda balancing on his chair outside the barbershop in My Darling Clementine. Brother Ethan meanwhile is more animated, providing a more compact, roving vertical in the middle distance to balance the supine Joel, and tittering where Joel is prone to drawl.
And yes, they do finish each other's sentences. Sort of. Like this, for instance, in answer to the question "How many animals have you killed in your movies?"
Joel: "Oh ... plenty."
Ethan: "Uh ... cows in O Brother, Where Art Thou?"
Joel (pensively): "Couple of cows in that one. Blew up a rabbit and a lizard, another dog in this one ... "
Ethan (chuckling): "Yeah, we've killed a LOT of animals!"
In the next few weeks, expect to hear the phrase "return to form" used incessantly about the brothers Coen. Their searing adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's most approachable, albeit most pulpy, novel, No Country for Old Men, has earned admiration and mainstream attention in America of an intensity which hasn't come the Coens' way since the Oscar success of Fargo or the rapturous cult that has coalesced around The Big Lebowski.
After two comedies - Intolerable Cruelty and a remake of Alexander Mackendrick's The Ladykillers - generally deemed the least interesting outings of their career, the Coens have delivered a manhunt-thriller of mesmerising violence and remarkable narrative leanness, an almost academically precise exercise in the building and maintenance of unbearable tension and anxiety in the audience, and superficially reminiscent of the Texas noir of their debut, Blood Simple. Shot under merciless southwestern skies by their usual cinematographer, Roger Deakins, and telling of the inexorable destruction of three men with utterly conflicting moral codes, it's the soberest movie they've yet made: arid, spare, and mercifully free of the self-defeating collegiate cynicism that sometimes mars even their best work. It has the starkness of Fargo (though it is yellow where Fargo was a symphony in white), the random viciousness of Miller's Crossing, and the ecstatic stylisation of The Man Who Wasn't There. No Country for Old Men proves that the Coens' technical abilities, and their feel for a landscape-based western classicism reminiscent of Anthony Mann and Sam Peckinpah, are matched by few living directors.
Peckinpah is the director whose themes and concerns - masculinity and self-preservation among them - sit foremost in the mind when reading the McCarthy novel and when seeing the movie, which is a faithful, almost verbatim adaptation. The brothers are amenable to the comparison. Ethan: "We were aware of the basic link just by virtue of the setting, the south-west, and this very male aspect of the story. Hard men in the south-west shooting each other - that's definitely Sam Peckinpah's thing. We were aware of those similarities, certainly." Joel: "Especially in the section of the movie where Woody Harrelson makes an appearance. He reminded us of a Peckinpah character in a certain way." Ethan: "Yeah, you show a hard-on guy in a western-cut suit and it already looks like a Peckinpah movie. Same kind of shorthand."
No Country for Old Men, set in 1980, follows three men in the aftermath of a drug deal gone wrong, out in the hostile desert borderlands. A man named Llewellyn Moss (Josh Brolin) finds $2m in cash among many corpses while out hunting antelope, and is subsequently pursued throughout the movie, across the border and back, by a terrifying freelance assassin named Anton Chigurh, whose literally unspeakable name is redolent of the evil he does - he murders two people in the first five minutes, garrotting the first with a pair of handcuffs, killing the second with a compressed-air slaughterhouse stun-gun. Chigurh is played by Javier Bardem in an extraordinary moptop haircut borrowed from ... well, Peter Tork maybe, or one of the Rutles. Meanwhile, local sheriff Tommy Lee Jones pursues them both, chastened by the killing he sees and realising that someone must save Moss from this incarnation of bottomless malevolence.
Is Tommy Lee Jones as scary as he looks, by the way? "Oh, he's a big pussycat!" laughs Ethan. But he sounds a little nervous. "He wants to pretend that he's scary," offers Joel, to which Ethan adds: "Let's just say he doesn't suffer fools gladly, but he's fine." But he's essential to the film's integrity, isn't he? "He grew up there. He's from San Saba, Texas, not far from where the movie takes place. He's the real thing regarding that region. There's a short list of people who could play that part at the basic level of the qualities you need: age, screen presence and the need to really inhabit that region and that landscape."
I have to ask about Bardem's hair, which manages to be simultaneously terrifying and ridiculous. "That bowl is fantastic," says Joel. "We saw that hair in a photograph of a guy in a bar in a Texas border town in 1979, and we just copied it." "Yeah," giggles Ethan, "Javier really embraced it enthusiastically!" Bardem himself spoke of the haircut to the LA Times: "You don't have to act the haircut; the haircut is acting by itself ... so you don't have to act weird if you have that weird haircut."
Rounding out the film's trio of protagonists is the relative newcomer Josh Brolin, who here steps into a new dimension, and one step closer to stardom. Ethan: "He came in late in the day, after Tommy and Javier. Since it's about three guys circling each other, what we were afraid of was two very compelling performers and then you cut to the dull guy. We were setting that bar kind of high."
"We were very unsatisfied with everyone we saw before he showed up," adds Joel. "We needed the same combination we had with Tommy: someone with equal weight who could authentically be part of that landscape. Those two things together ... we were surprised how difficult it was, and we weren't happy until he walked in. Without him the whole thing would have been out of whack."
This is not the first time the Coens have returned from an artistic impasse. There was speculation that they were tapped out when the exhaustingly zany The Hudsucker Proxy was poorly received a decade ago. Yet they soon sprang back with Fargo, their most famous movie, followed by Lebowski, their masterpiece.
But things in the early 2000s seemed a little more serious. For a start, the brothers were no longer directing scripts that had fermented and matured in the hothouse of their shared brain; they were adapting novels and rewriting other people's scripts. This seemed like a very bad sign. This more recent impasse started when a long-cherished project, an adaptation of To the White Sea by James "Deliverance" Dickey, fell apart. In retrospect, it seems like a signpost to No Country for Old Men. The White Sea project was about a American airman shot down in second world war Japan who witnesses the Tokyo firebombing and then, insanely, tries to make his way home to Alaska. It shares many things with No Country, particularly a fascination with processes, the mechanics of things, machismo, and lengthy sequences without dialogue or music.
"Yes," says Joel, "that's definitely true, something that we had both thought about to a certain extent. In fact we mentioned Dickey's book to Cormac a few times when we talked to him about anything relating to the book." "This one sort of displaced that project in a lot of ways," adds Ethan.
"Jeremy Thomas was producing it," Joel continues, "and Jeremy is the patron saint of lost causes in the cinema - he seems to make all these interesting movies that everyone thinks are impossible to get made. He got very close to getting the financing for it, which on the face of it is just an insane proposition - a movie with the firebombing of Tokyo in it that's very expensive and somewhat marginal. But he came close."
It sounds like Slaughterhouse-Five, minus the sci-fi, married to John Boorman's Hell in the Pacific. "That's exactly right," says Joel. "Hell in the Pacific is a good example of the same sorts of things we have here in No Country: almost no dialogue, a bizarre score, and guys fighting and doing lots of stuff with their hands." That was your first adaptation? "We have written things for other people that haven't got made," says Joel. "Actually, the Dickey book was the first adapted thing that almost rose to the level of getting produced."
Much of the dialogue in No Country is taken from the book almost word for word. Joel: "Ethan once described the way we worked together as: one of us types into the computer while the other holds the spine of the book open flat. That's why there needs to be two of us - otherwise he's gotta type one-handed. That's how you 'collaborate' with someone else." Ethan: "Paperback novels just won't lie open properly! They flip shut."
One wonders what a sci-fi movie by the Coens - who have done noir, screwball, a kind of western, even a musical of sorts - would look like. "Neither of us is drawn to that kind of fiction," says Ethan of sci-fi. "There are movies that we both like. I don't know that that would ever happen, and I don't quite know why." Joel knows: "I don't think we could get our minds around the whole spacesuit thing."
Instead, they have a script of their own that they'd like to film. "We've written a western," says Joel, "with a lot of violence in it. There's scalping and hanging ... it's good. Indians torturing people with ants, cutting their eyelids off." Ethan: "It's a proper western, a real western, set in the 1870s. It's got a scene that no one will ever forget because of one particular chicken." And so, yet another innocent creature prepares to die for the Coen brothers' art.
· No Country for Old Men is released on January 18. Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
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david
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Dec 28, 2007 19:57:25 GMT -5
Post by david on Dec 28, 2007 19:57:25 GMT -5
I thought No Country for Old Men was terrific. I'm a Coen brothers fan anyway, but this is one one of their better ones.
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Jan 3, 2008 10:31:35 GMT -5
Post by Cat Stevens on Jan 3, 2008 10:31:35 GMT -5
I almost forgot how good was Clint's directing debut.
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Jan 3, 2008 11:30:07 GMT -5
Post by dino on Jan 3, 2008 11:30:07 GMT -5
how do you do that
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Jan 3, 2008 16:25:44 GMT -5
Post by owen on Jan 3, 2008 16:25:44 GMT -5
nice one fingy.
i think ill go watch it again.
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Jan 3, 2008 16:42:52 GMT -5
Post by Cat Stevens on Jan 3, 2008 16:42:52 GMT -5
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Jan 8, 2008 21:32:38 GMT -5
Post by Cat Stevens on Jan 8, 2008 21:32:38 GMT -5
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Jan 12, 2008 13:04:43 GMT -5
Post by Cat Stevens on Jan 12, 2008 13:04:43 GMT -5
The greatest scene from the Michael Cacoyannis' ("Zorba the Greek") documentary, "Attila '74": www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZbActfnrQ_IThe late great archbishop Makarios. Lot of similarities there with the present situation in Kosovo & Metohija.
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Jan 22, 2008 9:56:27 GMT -5
Post by Cat Stevens on Jan 22, 2008 9:56:27 GMT -5
Hollywood Support for Serbiatinyurl.com/2v9r95tinyurl.com/2pddl9hey thanks guys, but I wonder if you even know where Serbia is (except De Niro), let alone its province Kosovo & Metohija...
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manho
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Film
Feb 22, 2008 6:03:57 GMT -5
Post by manho on Feb 22, 2008 6:03:57 GMT -5
'Films are a way to kill my father'
After decades of analysis, Bernardo Bertolucci has a new take on his 1970 classic The Conformist. He tells all to Stuart Jeffries Stuart Jeffries Friday February 22, 2008 Guardian
One rainy night in Paris in 1970, Bernardo Bertolucci was standing outside the Drugstore Saint Germain. It was a quarter to midnight. He was waiting for his mentor, the great New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, to arrive from the French premiere of the Italian's new film, The Conformist. "I haven't talked about this for dozens of years," says Bertolucci, "but Godard was my real guru, you understand? I used to think there was cinema before Godard and cinema after, like before and after Christ. So what he thought about the film meant a great deal to me."
The Conformist was an adaption of Alberto Moravia's novel, about a 30-year-old Italian Marcello Clerici (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant), a repressed upper-class intellectual who, during Mussolini's rule, is hired by fascists to go to Paris and murder a dissident who was his former philosophy teacher. It's not just a politically engaged film, but also a stylish thriller complete with car chases, murders and sex that Bertolucci thought the Frenchman would like. At midnight, Godard arrived for the rendezvous.
Bertolucci, 37 years after the event, recalls exactly what happened next: "He doesn't say anything to me. He just gives me a note and then he leaves. I take the note and there was a Chairman Mao portrait on it and with Jean-Luc's writing that we know from the handwriting on his films. The note says: 'You have to fight against individualism and capitalism.' That was his reaction to my movie. I was so enraged that I crumpled it up and threw it under my feet. I'm so sorry I did that because I would love to have it now, to keep it as a relic."
The Conformist, despite Godard's contempt, has proved to be one of the most influential postwar films. With it, Bertolucci looked back at Italy's fascist past, finding psychosexual dysfunction at its heart. It is a film, with its bleak vision of human motivation, that was evidently made in the aftermath of 1968's failed utopian dreams, and yet one so visually daring and structurally sophisticated that without it such subsequent masterpieces as The Godfather and Apocalypse Now would have been unimaginable.
Why do you think Godard didn't like The Conformist, I ask Bertolucci. It was, after all, partly a trenchant diagnosis of a fascistic mentality. "I had finished the period in which to be able to communicate would be considered a mortal sin. He had not."
But there might be another reason Godard didn't like the film. In it, Clerici asks for his doomed teacher's phone number and address. "The number was Jean-Luc's and the address was his on Rue Saint Jacques. So you can see that I was the conformist wanting to kill the radical."
Indeed, Bertolucci takes evident delight in the fact that, for all Godard's Maoist contempt for The Conformist, a rising generation of film-makers saw his picture as a revelation. "What always made me proud - almost blushing with pride - is that Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg all told me that The Conformist is their first modern influence." What did they find inspiring in the film? Its complex flashback structure, the symbolic colour-coded photography of Bertolucci's director of photography Vittorio Storaro (whom Coppola would later lure to Philippines to bring his talents to bear on the Apocalypse Now shoot) and several of its virtuosic showpiece scenes find echoes in many later films.
But The Conformist deserves to be appreciated not for prefiguring future cinematic masterpieces, but for itself. The chaotic hand-held camera as fascist hitmen chase the central figure's lover through the woods. The chilly framing of iconic fascist buildings such as EUR in Rome and the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. The expressionist angles when the conformist visits his dotty mother. And, perhaps best of all, the ingenious sequence in a Parisian cafe in which Clerici's reluctance to participate in a forandarole dance leads him to being surrounded by an ever-tightening spiral of dancers, the whole thing shot ingeniously from above. Rarely has cinema been so poetic, so daring or freighted. Its sexual politics (of which more later) don't bear much scrutiny, but otherwise, this film will be a revelation for cinemagoers who only know Bertolucci for his later, relatively stodgy films such as The Last Emperor, Stealing Beauty or The Sheltering Sky.
So what is at the heart of The Conformist? Marcello is a weak-willed man seeking to blend into the crowd. He chooses to become a fascist killer and to marry a materialistic petit bourgeois wife (whom he describes as "good in bed, good in the kitchen") not out of political commitment, nor out of lust, but because he has an (ostensibly) shameful secret. His desire to conform, he discovers in the film's last shot, is because of an adolescent incident in which his gay chauffeur tried to seduce him and whom (he thinks) he shot dead.
Bertolucci elaborates on the theme: "The conformist understands that the reason of his desperate look for conformism is that he realises he is different and that he never accepted his difference. In that last scene, he understands why he became a fascist - even the worst fascist of all - because he wanted to hide and forget what he feels are his differences in his deep, deep consciousness. It's like realising that even fascists have a sub-consciousness."
Significantly, it was during the making of The Conformist that Bertolucci went deeply into Freudian analysis. Up to that point, his earlier films such as Before the Revolution, The Spider's Stratagem and even The Grim Reaper, had been made under Godard's influence. Do you feel you grew up in making The Conformist? "Completely. At a certain moment I had to be careful not to be imitating, not to be a forger, to do Godard fakes. I think it's not only my experience but the experience of a lot of people of my generation."
One early result of going into analysis was that Bertolucci was impelled to symbolically destroy his leading mentors. Not just Godard, but his father, the great Italian poet Attilio Bertolucci. "With Freudian analysis I realised that making movies is my way to kill my father. In a way I make movies for - how can I say - the pleasure of guilt. I have accept it at a certain moment, my father too had to accept that he was killed every movie. The funny line he gave me once was: 'You're very smart. You have killed me many times without going to jail.'"
What did your father think of The Conformist? "He loved all my movies for a simple reason: he felt as if he had done them. He loved his puppet, which is me, because I was very good at doing his movies. He thought he had taught me everything, which is true." What a monstrous egotist, I say. So in a sense, whatever you did, you couldn't kill your father, or eradicate his influence from your work completely? "That's true. My movies are always in the same field as my father. They occupy a certain kind of cultural area: the same as from Parma." It is from this little Italian city that the Bertolucci family hailed, and significantly, Bernardo's 1967 film Before the Revolution is a loose adaptation of Stendhal's novel The Charterhouse of Parma.
Attilio was not just a poet, but also a film critic who was friends with Pier Paolo Pasolini. (Indeed, Bernardo's first job in the movies was as an assistant on the great director's film Accatone). The father was obsessed by the cinematic medium and so keen that his sons Bernardo and Giuseppe should share his love that he took them along to screenings and gave them a camera. They both became film directors, Bernardo going on to become one of Italy's most famous and the winner of two Oscars.
One of Attilo's poems is called The Cableway, with the dedication "To B. with an eight millimetre cine camera". It includes this fond memory of his already cinema-addled adolescent son filming the Bertolucci family as they walk in the Apennines:
"But your adolescence sweetens, matures/ in the subtle craftsman's patience/ with which you shoot from below/ and from behind the ragged hedge, so weaving/ its real time of berries, thorns and leaves/ into the story pulsating in the furtive steps of the children."
It's hard not to read into this Attilio's delight in his 14-year-old son's directorial apprenticeship.
Fifteen years later, Bernardo was still obsessed with his shots. The Conformist's assassination scene was virtuosically shot in the snowy Piedmontese hills. ("We had never done action movies before. So when we shot the scene in which we stabbed the man, we said 'My God! What have we done?") Bertolucci rewrote the novel so that Clerici is a spectator of the murder. In the novel, Clerici doesn't even witness the murder - he is in Rome at the time. "I told Moravia before starting: 'In order to be faithful to your book, I must betray it.' He said: 'I completely agree with you.' After he saw the film, Moravia paid me the great compliment, saying that there were only two adaptations of his books he liked. One was The Conformist." (For the record, the other was Godard's brilliant 1962 film Contempt, with Jack Palance and Brigitte Bardot.)
Bertolucci made another, even more bravura, even more treacherous change to Moravia's story. It comes at the end. "In the novel," says Bertolucci, "after the fall of Mussolini, the Conformist is fleeing Rome with his family. An aeroplane comes down and machine-guns the Conformist and his family, and that's the end. I thought it was too moralistic, like the hand of God punishing the guilty one." Bertolucci's ending is more disturbing. One night Clerici wanders into the Colosseum and there finds the aged chauffeur who he wrongly thought he had killed when he was an adolescent. The chauffeur is trying to seduce a beautiful young boy. Clerici loudly denounces the chauffeur, yelling that he is a fascist. But that isn't the end: the last shot has Clerici alone with the boy. The camera tracks over the boy's naked buttocks to Clerici who looks at the camera. What are we supposed to make of that, I ask Bertolucci, that they had just had sex? "It's very possible. The boy is naked and has the slow movement of after love in a way, so you're right." But that is a troubling idea, suggesting that fascism can be linked with repressed homosexual desire, particularly when Bertolucci adds that it is only at this moment that Clerici truly understands who he is and why he was a fascist.
If that is the case, though, Bertolucci refuses to take the rap for this homophobic denouement. "With all my old movies I feel I am no more responsible - read: guilty - for them. The person who made these films is so distant from me." You don't feel responsible even for the film you made immediately after The Conformist, namely Last Tango in Paris, with its notorious sex scenes? "Least of all that film." However, Bertolucci feels sufficiently connected to Last Tango to defend one of its stars, Marlon Brando. "When I wanted Brando for that film, the head of Paramount said to me 'Not that old fart!' And yet Brando was the greatest thing in that film."
His most recent film was The Dreamers, an adaptation of Gilbert Adair's novel set amid the student riots of Paris 1968. That was made five years ago. Why nothing since - after all you're only 66? "My back. I had an operation three years ago which went badly and so for three years I've been really punished badly with pain and I can't walk well and I couldn't be working." He has had to set aside two plans: a long-cherished project to direct a film on the life of Gesualdo da Venosa, the 16th-century Neapolitan composer who brutally murdered his wife, Maria d'Avalos, after catching her in flagrante delicto; and an adaptation of Bel Canto, Ann Patchett's novel about a group of terrorists and their hostages living in a house together. "I have to find a solution for my back," says the 66-year-old director. "And then I will direct again."
Is it really true that you won't see your old movies or is it just a misleading story for journalists? "I can't see them, I feel embarrassed." Oh, Bernardo, surely not! "It's true! To see what today I think is wrong, mistakes, pathetic things that maybe nobody sees but I do." So it wouldn't give you straightforward pleasure to see The Conformist after all this time. No! But maybe when a movie is so far away I can forgive it." Here, Bertolucci sounds like a priest forgiving the sins of his earlier self.
As a result of this irresponsibility, it's strange to talk to Bertolucci about his early work. The man who felt so outraged by Godard's gnomic note no longer exists. "I feel something for this old film and that old me, but I don't feel the weight, the responsibility. For the artist, that is a relief."
· The Conformist is released next Friday guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
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