Tinto Brass Dies at 93: The Grand Master of Italian Eros Was Also a Reader
Tinto Brass died in Rome yesterday morning, around half past ten. He was 93. His wife, Caterina Varzi, and his children, Bonifacio and Beatrice, gave the news to ANSA, and the family wants a private funeral.
Italy will remember him as the maestro of cinema erotico, the man with the cigar and the camera pointed, cheerfully and without apology, at women’s backsides. He wrote a little book in praise of the subject, Elogio del culo, and he meant every word of it. Fair enough. But a site about books and their films owes him something else. Look down his filmography and you find Tanizaki, Moravia, Goldoni, Camillo Boito, Gore Vidal, a Sergio Donati paperback and John Cleland. Brass read. Then he undressed what he read.
Venice, Paris, and a law degree he never used
He was born Giovanni Brass in Milan on 26 March 1933 and grew up in Venice, the city he never really left. His grandfather, the painter Italico Brass, called the boy Tintoretto. The family shortened it to Tinto and it stuck.
He took a law degree, then went to Paris in 1957 and worked as an archivist at the Cinémathèque française under Henri Langlois, which is about the best film school there ever was. Back in Italy he assisted Roberto Rossellini, Joris Ivens and Alberto Cavalcanti, and in 1963 he made his first feature, Chi lavora è perduto. For the next ten years he was an experimental director, political and restless, and nobody would have guessed where he’d end up.
The film that shows the bridge is Col cuore in gola, from 1967. It’s loosely based on Il sepolcro di carta, a 1955 crime paperback by Sergio Donati, with Jean-Louis Trintignant and Ewa Aulin running through swinging London and pop-art frames. It was his only giallo. Readers of our piece on the yellow-covered Mondadori crime books and the films named after them will know the territory. Venice restored it in 4K and picked it to open the pre-festival this September, and Brass got the Pietro Bianchi award from the Italian film journalists. A good last bow, and he knew it.
The novels he took to bed
Salon Kitty (1976) came from Peter Norden’s book about the real Berlin brothel the SS wired for sound. Helmut Berger and Ingrid Thulin. Then Caligula, the 1979 disaster everyone has heard of: Gore Vidal’s script, Malcolm McDowell, Penthouse money from Bob Guccione. Brass and Vidal fought over the screenplay, Guccione took the film off Brass and cut in hardcore scenes he never shot, and both writer and director disowned what came out. It’s the most famous film with his name on it, and it isn’t really his.
What came next is. La chiave, in 1983, is his version of Junichiro Tanizaki’s The Key, the short novel about a professor and his wife who keep diaries they know the other is reading. Brass took the story out of Kyoto, moved it to Venice at the end of the 1930s with Fascism all around, and gave it to Stefania Sandrelli. It’s the best thing he made. The book’s cold game of who reads whose secrets becomes a warm, funny, slightly sad film about a marriage that wakes up too late. Tanizaki fans complain it loses the chill. They’re right, and the film is still better than anyone expected.
He kept going back to the shelf. Miranda (1985) borrowed Goldoni’s La locandiera, the innkeeper who plays her suitors off against each other. Paprika (1991) took a loose hold of Cleland’s Fanny Hill. L’uomo che guarda (1994) was Alberto Moravia’s late novel of a man watching other people’s desire instead of living his own, a book that might have been written for Brass. And in 2002 came Senso ‘45, from Camillo Boito’s 1883 novella, the same story Luchino Visconti had filmed in 1954. Brass said Visconti had been too free with it. Then he moved it from the Austrian occupation of 1866 to the last days of Mussolini’s Salò republic and made it franker than Visconti ever could have. Read Boito’s few dozen pages and watch both films. That’s a good evening.
What he leaves
The critics never decided whether he was an auteur or a dirty old man, and Brass enjoyed the argument too much to settle it. The honest answer is both, often in the same shot. He knew where to put a camera in a Venetian room, and he knew which books had sex buried in them waiting for someone to dig it out.
He had a stroke in 2010 and a long illness after it. He kept turning up anyway, in Venice in September with his red scarf and his opinions. On his 90th birthday he asked that his ashes go into the lagoon.
Pull La chiave off the shelf tonight, and Tanizaki’s novel with it. He’d have liked that order.
Ciao, Tinto.