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Bertolucci Images
Edited by Marcello Garofalo.
Bernardo Bertolucci (born 1940) is Italy's most famous living film director, an heir to the country's tradition of cinema auteurs. His films, which include such modern classics as The Conformist (1970), Last Tango in Paris (1972), The Last Emperor (1987), The Sheltering Sky (1990), Stealing Beauty (1996) and The Dreamers (2003), offer a wild blend of leftist politics, history, literature, psychoanalysis and sexuality. Beginning with Bertolucci's debut film The Grim Reaper (1962), Bertolucci Images traces the evolution of the director's sensual and philosophical brand of cinema, including stills from all of the films for which he has become justly famed. The book includes on-set photographs of some of modern cinema's finest actors, such as Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, Gérard Depardieu, Donald Sutherland, Peter O'Toole, Debra Winger, John Malkovich and others. The first thorough photographic overview of his career, Bertolucci Images is packed with images from the director's 40 years of making some of today's most critically acclaimed films.
Featured image is from Bertolucci's steamy 2003 film The Dreamers.
"By half-closing our eyes to imagine passing from one scene to another, we create a moment of darkness between one photographic image and another to stimulate our emotional memory as viewers, but also to confirm that the director-filmmaker is an ideal figure solely created by the viewer, who recognizes his individual style, signs and obsessions. When the stills do not merely fulfill their promotional purpose, and go beyond becoming something in their own right, a kind of 'alias' of the film itself is created, consisting of individual images that are often as mysterious and powerful as the film that generated them. In the 'sequence' of images in an exhibition that seeks to illustrate a director's career through photographs, the first instinct is to concentrate on the still-frame, the moment that might not have been but was: a disruption in the surroundings, a gesture, a chance expression, the tilt of a head, can represent the punctum, the focus that unites all the elements of meaning. But if the darkness that links the various frames of a film is the space that permits us to invent our 'justification' or response to photographic sequence, we will be free 'to advance,' to fit the last piece of the puzzle, maybe helped by a caption, which sometimes facilitates and sometimes complicates this process."
Marcello Garofalo, excerpted from Relying on an Unconscious of Cinema in Bertolucci Images.
FORMAT: Pbk, 9 x 9 in. / 168 pgs / 60 color / 90 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $45.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $55 ISBN: 9788836618965 PUBLISHER: Silvana Editoriale AVAILABLE: 10/31/2011 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of print AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: NA LA ASIA AU/NZ AFR ME
Published by Silvana Editoriale. Edited by Marcello Garofalo.
Bernardo Bertolucci (born 1940) is Italy's most famous living film director, an heir to the country's tradition of cinema auteurs. His films, which include such modern classics as The Conformist (1970), Last Tango in Paris (1972), The Last Emperor (1987), The Sheltering Sky (1990), Stealing Beauty (1996) and The Dreamers (2003), offer a wild blend of leftist politics, history, literature, psychoanalysis and sexuality. Beginning with Bertolucci's debut film The Grim Reaper (1962), Bertolucci Images traces the evolution of the director's sensual and philosophical brand of cinema, including stills from all of the films for which he has become justly famed. The book includes on-set photographs of some of modern cinema's finest actors, such as Marlon Brando, Robert De Niro, Gérard Depardieu, Donald Sutherland, Peter O'Toole, Debra Winger, John Malkovich and others. The first thorough photographic overview of his career, Bertolucci Images is packed with images from the director's 40 years of making some of today's most critically acclaimed films.
