A whole section of Italian cinema has disappeared.
Italian director Paolo Taviani, who with his brother Vittorio, who died in 2018, directed landmark films including the masterpiece “Padre padrone”, Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1977, died Thursday at the age of 92, announced the mayor of Rome.
“With Paolo Taviani, a great master of Italian cinema is leaving us.
With his brother Vittorio (died in 2018 at the age of 88, Editor's note), he created unforgettable, profound and committed films,” praised Roberto Gualtieri on X.
With Paolo Taviani he is a great Maestro of Italian cinema.
Inside Vittorio's brother, the film has an indimentable, deep, impregnated film, so that it can enter the collected images and the cinema story.
Un abbraccio affettuoso alla famiglia.
— Roberto Gualtieri (@gualtierieurope) February 29, 2024
The secular funeral of Paolo Taviani, who died in Rome 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 the 7th art, have co-signed a total of around fifteen feature films marked by a very literary style, mixing history, psychoanalysis and poetry.
Shock film, “Padre padrone”, which can be literally translated as “Father-boss”, is an adaptation of the autobiographical novel by Gavino Ledda, on the story of a young shepherd escaping the despotic control of his father who, out of financial necessity, had forced him to abandon school, leaving him illiterate until the age of 20.
After the death of his two-year-old elder, Paolo Taviani found the strength to shoot one last film alone, “Leonora Addio”, presented at the Berlinale in 2022. Strongly inspired by the master of neorealism Roberto Rosselini, the two brothers, sons of an anti-fascist lawyer, have been interested in social themes since their beginnings in the 1960s.
Inspired by Brecht, Pasolini and Godard
Passionate about cinema since their youth, the two brothers born in Tuscany moved to Rome in the 1950s. One of their first films, “Les Subversifs” (1967), prefigures the events of 1968 in the form of an investigation into the Party Italian communist at the time of the funeral of one of its founders, Palmiro Togliatti.
Inspired by Brecht, Pasolini and Godard, they then made “Under the Sign of the Scorpion” (1969), their first color film with Gian Maria Volontè in the lead role, which would also be their first big success.
After the coronation in Cannes of “Padre padrone”, they 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 for 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.