Tinto Brass Dies: Italian ‘Caligula’ Director Was 93 — SkimNews
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- Caterina Varzi and children Bonifacio and Beatrice Brass confirmed on Wednesday to Italian press agency Ansa that their husband and father, filmmaker Tinto Brass, died in Rome at age 93.
- Tinto Brass was born in Milan in 1933 to a Venetian family, graduated in law in Padua and moved to Paris in 1957, where he connected with the Cinémathèque française under Henri Langlois, assisted Joris Ivens and Roberto Rossellini, and joined the milieu of the emerging Nouvelle Vague.
- In Capo Al Mondo (later retitled Chi Lavora è Perduto) debuted in Venice in 1963, following a young unemployed man with anti-social tendencies; censors attacked the film, launching a series of battles over Brass's personal nonconformist libertarian vision.
- Umberto Eco commissioned two experimental shorts from Brass, Tempo Libero and Tempo Lavorativo, during the 1960s and early 1970s, when avant-garde filmmaking was the director's main focus.
- Deadly Sweet (1967), starring Jean-Louis Trintignant and Ewa Aulin, was one of three films Brass shot in London alongside Attraction (1969) and Dropout (1970); a restored digital 4K version screened in the Venice Film Festival's Venice Classics program this year.
- Caligula (1979) and Salon Kitty (1976) brought Brass fresh notoriety with cult historical-erotic films, followed by The Key (1983), a free adaptation of a novel by Tanizaki Jun'ichirō.
Why it matters: Brass's death comes in the same year a restored 4K Deadly Sweet screened in Venice Classics, spotlighting the pop-thriller and avant-garde side of a 93-year-old director rather than the Caligula-era erotica. His 1963 debut drew censor fire, Umberto Eco commissioned two shorts, and censors repeatedly challenged his nonconformist vision.
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