Bernardo Bertolucci: In Search of Mystery

7/8/11 to 8/18/11

Trained first as a poet, this great Italian film director has issued a body of expansive works, lyrical in their form, rigorous in their reception, profound in their intent, over the course of his fifty-year career. Our series presents an opportunity to see all new prints of many of his feature films, from The Grim Reaper (1962) to 2003's The Dreamers, and a virtually unknown but astonishingly still-relevant 1967 documentary, The Path of Oil.

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  • Upcoming
    Films
  • Upcoming
    Events
  • Selected
    Objects
  • Past
    Films
  • Past
    Events

Past Films

  • Before the Revolution

    Friday, July 8 7 PM
    Bernardo Bertolucci (Italy, 1964). Bertolucci's paean to unhinged passion references Stendhal, Godard, Rossellini, Chekhov, and others, as it follows a young bourgeois reinventing himself as a progressive Marxist-and embarking on an affair with his aunt. “A richly romantic work” (Pauline Kael). (112 mins)
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  • The Grim Reaper

    Friday, July 8 9:10 PM
    Bernardo Bertolucci (Italy, 1962). Pier Paolo Pasolini wrote the script for Bertolucci's gritty debut film, a Rashomon-like thriller about a prostitute's murder in the hills of Rome. “Works on every level-melodrama, spectacle, reportage” (Andrew Sarris). (92 mins)
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  • The Spider's Stratagem

    Sunday, July 10 7:45 PM
    Bernardo Bertolucci (Italy, 1970). A story by Jorge Luis Borges inspired this atmospheric political thriller involving a young man who returns to the small village where his activist father was murdered. Year later, some wish the past be undisturbed-or repeated. “Possibly Bertolucci's simplest and most glowing work” (Judith Crist). (97 mins)
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  • The Conformist

    Thursday, July 14 7 PM
    Bernardo Bertolucci (Italy, 1970). Jean-Louis Trintignant is a suave intellectual who has risen through the ranks of Mussolini's fascist government, a conformist who now faces his ultimate orders: to assassinate his former mentor, an antifascist professor. “A great film, drunkenly beautiful and deeply disturbing” (David Thomson). (116 mins)
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  • 1900

    Saturday, July 16 6 PM
    Bernardo Bertolucci (Italy/France/West Germany, 1976). Robert De Niro, Gérard Depardieu, and Burt Lancaster lead an international cast in Bertolucci's sweeping epic about two young friends-a peasant and a landowner-as they live through world wars, labor revolts, and the rise and fall of fascism. “The biggest manifesto against capital ever paid for with American studio money” (Village Voice). (311 mins)
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  • Partner

    Wednesday, July 20 7 PM
    Bernardo Bertolucci (Italy, 1968). Bertolucci updates Dostoevsky's classic tale of paranoia to a modern-day Italy. A timid drama teacher dreams of revolution-until his doppelganger appears, and begins to realize all his hopes. “Exuberant movie-making by a young director who talks like an intellectual but makes movies like a poet” (Vincent Canby). (107 mins)
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  • Last Tango in Paris

    Saturday, July 23 8:10 PM
    Bernardo Bertolucci (France/Italy, 1972). Marlon Brando, Maria Schneider, and Jean-Pierre Léaud star in Bertolucci's notoriously steamy film about an amour fou between an older man and a younger woman, banned in Italy upon its debut. "The movie breakthrough has finally come; Bertolucci and Brando have altered the face of an art form” (Pauline Kael). (136 mins)
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  • The Path of Oil

    Wednesday, July 27 7 PM
    Bernardo Bertolucci (Italy, 1967). Bertolucci's formidable documentary explores the path of oil from extraction to dispersal, and uncovers the complex colonial enterprise behind it. (135 mins)
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  • Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man

    Friday, July 29 7 PM
    Bernardo Bertolucci (Italy, 1981). A cheese tycoon discovers that his son has been abducted by radicals, and must decide between his life or that of his company, in Bertolucci's sly, questioning portrait of terrorism, economics, and the divide between generations. An engrossing time capsule of Italy during the Red Brigade era. (118 mins)
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  • The Last Emperor

    Sunday, July 31 7 PM
    Bernardo Bertolucci (Italy/China, 1987). Winner of nine Oscars, Bertolucci's cast-of-thousands epic follows the life of China's last Emperor, Pu Yi (John Lone), from coddled child to leader to-post-Cultural Revolution-gardener. Costarring Joan Chen, Peter O'Toole, and Ryuichi Sakamoto. (163 mins)
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  • Besieged

    Saturday, August 6 8:55 PM
    Bernardo Bertolucci (Italy, 1998). An English composer (David Thewlis) embarks on an affair with a beautiful African student/maid (Thandie Newton) in Bertolucci's understated romance. “A film about the limits of art, about civilization at this moment of flux, and about a gentle connection between a man and a woman” (Time Out). (90 mins)
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  • The Sheltering Sky

    Wednesday, August 10 7 PM
    Bernardo Bertolucci (Italy/U.K., 1990). John Malkovich and Debra Winger star as a couple on the verge of disintegration during a trek through the vast Sahara. Adapted from the acclaimed Paul Bowles novel. “A long, beautifully modulated cry of despair” (Vincent Canby). (137 mins)
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  • The Dreamers

    Thursday, August 18 7 PM
    Bernardo Bertolucci (France/Italy/U.K., 2003). Bertolucci's paean to late-sixties youth culture-and the cinephilia, politics, and sex that were so intertwined with it-follows the sexual and political awakening of a young American student (Michael Pitt) in riot-torn 1968 Paris. “Both a love song to escapism and a warm embrace of the real world” (Washington Post). (116 mins)
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