Credit where credit is due.
At different times in my life, I've encountered work (as probably many of us have, whatever field of life we stumble through) that has radically altered how I think about film and what I believe is possible both as a viewer and as someone who aspires to make the damn things. Sometimes it's just a single film that cracks the lid, and sometimes it's an entire body of work. Sometimes it comes from the usual suspects, whose works have blown minds over and over again, and sometimes it comes from unexpected quarters and surprising sources.
Exhibit A in the list of usual suspects. I offer up Bernardo Bertolucci.
I was recently reminded of my early obsession with him while talking to a friend who is curating a retrospective
of his films in Melbourne and was able to meet and spend time with BB
in Venice recently. After a bout of insane star-fucking jealousy on my part, I
thought back to two key films of his early work - both made in 1970, in a
period of incredible productivity - that I watched back to back when I was 20 and which completely unravelled what I thought was possible for filmmakers to achieve in terms of the complexity of their ideas.
These were films that contained an intricate density of narrative,
with an oneiric layering of ideas, sensation and impossibly beautiful
images; films that loosened the boundaries between idea and expression,
and which embodied an inherently playful approach to the world outside
of the film (especially as expressed in other texts - literature,
cinema, psychoanalysis, political theory) and which were brimming with a
visceral, sexualised expression of human desire and repression. The
Conformist and Spider's Stratagem were the films. Buttressed between the
unruly brilliance of Before the Revolution and Partner, and the grand
mastery of Last Tango in Paris and Novecento, these two films became a
turning point for me in realising that cinema is, if nothing else, an art of endless possibility.
Filmmakers talk of limits but Bertolucci found ways to circumvent all
limits. In these two films he allows a sequence to be visually staggering and a narrative lynchpin,
while also serving as a moment of psychoanalytic severance, an unraveling of Plato, a reflection
on his relationship with Godard, with Freud, with his poet father, or with the moral
orthodoxies of the neo-realists; or he offers a scene as a demand that we view it's inversions
and subversions in the context of the most challenging contemporary
histories. The layers of interpretation throughout these films, within a coherent narrative, were, to my mind, staggering. And these films
contain dozens of these endlessly re-interpretable sequences.
On
top of this, what I also encountered, and what I loved equally, was that these films are sexy, wild, playful, beautiful, demanding,
startling. They are not perfect films but, when I first encountered them, in all their flawed brilliance, they made cinema seem to me to be the perfect form.
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Post script:
After writing this little love letter to the past, I started thinking out my plans for the retrospective and mulling over the schedule and noticed that there was an accompanying essay to the retrospective written by bloody Christos Tsiolkas who sits in the next bloody desk over from me and who had not once mentioned that he'd written this beautiful and far more articulate essay of adoration. Read it... It's a beautiful thing.
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"We need to come to it, as we need to come to all of Bertolucci's work, acknowledging that we are thinking, active, ethical beings, that we come to cinema with ideas and dreams we seek to explore and to think through and to challenge."
Christos Tsiolkas
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