It is the other half of an emblematic brotherhood of Italian cinema who has left. Italian filmmaker Paolo Taviani died Thursday February 29 in Rome at the age of 92, the city’s mayor announced. He directed with his brother Vittorio, who died in 2018 at the age of 88, significant films including the masterpiece Padre padronePalme d’Or at Cannes in 1977.
“With Paolo Taviani, a great master of Italian cinema is leaving us. With his brother Vittorio, he has created unforgettable, profound and committed films”greeted the mayor of Rome, Roberto Gualtieri, on.
The secular funeral of Paolo Taviani, who died following a “brief illness”, will be held on Monday in Rome, according to Italian media. The Taviani brothers, who formed a rare duo in the history of 7e art, have co-signed a total of around fifteen feature films marked by a very literary style, mixing history, psychoanalysis and poetry. After the death of his two-year-old senior, Paolo Taviani found the strength to shoot one last film alone, Leonora Addiopresented at the Berlinale in 2022.
The Palme d’Or for “Padre padrone”
Shock movie, Padre padronewhich can be literally translated as “Father-boss”, is an adaptation of the autobiographical novel by Gavino Ledda, the story of a young shepherd escaping the despotic control of his father who, out of financial necessity, had forced him to drop out of school, leaving him illiterate until the age of 20.
Strongly inspired by the master of neorealism Roberto Rosselini, the two brothers, sons of an anti-fascist lawyer, were interested in social themes from their beginnings in the 1960s. Passionate about cinema since their youth, the two brothers born in Tuscany moved to Rome in the 1950s. One of their first films, The Subversives (1967), prefigures the events of 1968 in the form of an investigation into the Italian Communist Party at the time of the funeral of one of its founders, Palmiro Togliatti.
Inspired by Brecht, Pasolini and Godard, they then toured Under the sign of the Scorpio (1969), their first color film, with Gian Maria Volonte in the lead role, which will also be their first big success. After the coronation in Cannes of Padre padronethey returned to the Croisette in 1982 with The Night of San Lorenzo, a film with a magical atmosphere which received the Grand Jury Prize. In 2012, with Caesar must die, where they performed Shakespeare’s tragedy to the inmates of the Roman prison of Rebibbia, the Taviani brothers won the Golden Bear at the Berlin Festival. In 1986, they also received an honorary Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, paying tribute to their entire career.