Tinto Brass: beyond the bum

Tinto Brass – my generation discovered him the wrong way round. For years, he was synonymous with hormonal surges and first stirrings of passion, especially for those who, as children in the 1980s, were deeply unsettled by Stefania Sandrelli’s garter in La chiave – a coveted VHS tape to swap secretly, to keep in the most hidden drawer, in an era without YouPorn (only to later discover that, when watched in full, it was actually a sort of Bertolucci’s The Conformist, not all that risqué after all). This was Tinto Brass, the ‘king of eros’ – that is, the great celebrator of bottoms, back when people didn’t yet say ‘backside’ or ‘C-factor’. Buttocks, preferably large ones, which always recurred like a signature in his films – out in the open, spied on through the keyhole, lined up like toy soldiers. Taking the idea of ‘the arse as the mirror of the soul’ – an aphorism of which he is very proud – quite literally, Brass had seen it coming: In recent years, oversized, swaying buttocks have dethroned breasts, becoming a pop phenomenon; Kim Kardashian has turned them into the great fetish of the 21st century, a totem of the gender-fluid era: techniques and exercises to lift them up are all the rage, they have their own ritual dance – twerking – and a pantheon of icons – Kardashian, Jennifer Lopez, Beyoncé or Lizzo, if you really want to go over the top; whilst Tinto Brass’s were Claudia Koll, Debora Caprioglio, Francesca Dellera (it may not seem like it, but this is an article on film restoration and the influence of Pop Art in Tinto Brass’s films – bear with us, we’re getting there). A film starring Tinto Brass was an event. For some actresses, it was a leap from obscurity to stardom, followed by a more respectable career, shaking off their fling with Brass, disowning it all, perhaps washing their dirty linen in public at Sanremo with Pippo Baudo – right up to the heights of Claudia Koll, who went from Così fan tutte to devotion to the Virgin of Loreto (in America, it’s usually the other way round: first Disney princesses, then twerking). It was then, with a certain bewilderment, that – having passed puberty – we discovered there had been another Brass: heretical, experimental, Buñuelian. A Brass who had honed his craft at Langlois’s Cinémathèque, editing Rossellini’s documentary on India and discussing cinema with Sartre and Jean Renoir at the Café de Flore. A Brass who had transplanted Flaiano’s Martian to the Veneto with Sordi and Silvana Mangano, and had shot Godardian thrillers in Swinging London; Brass was also the first choice to direct A Clockwork Orange, with Mick Jagger in the lead (he would later make the legendary Caligula with Malcolm McDowell, based on Artaud’s Heliogabalus, and would spectacularly fall out with everyone: Gore Vidal, who had written the screenplay, and producer Bob Guccione, the guru of Penthouse). Brass was formidable in the editing room, knowing Eisenstein even better than Aristarco, the prince of Marxist criticism and a sworn enemy of detachment. In short, it was a sudden revelation: like those who, two weeks ago, discovered that ‘I Will Always Love You’ wasn’t by Whitney Houston but by Dolly Parton. There was more: the nickname ‘Tinto’ – whose full name was Giovanni – was a brainwave of his grandfather, Italico Brass – a native of Gorizia who’d settled in Venice, a painter and a great art collector – who, noticing how much his little grandson loved to draw, had declared: “We have a Tintoretto in the house” – thus not only finding the right name, but also foreshadowing his figurative taste and aesthetic sensibility.

It is Tinto Brass whom the Venice Film Festival celebrated – or ‘rediscovered’ for the umpteenth time – this week, with the premiere of the restored version of Col cuore in gola (1967), one of the great films from the brief but intense ‘pop art’ phase of Italian cinema. Few remember him today, but back then our films were full of references and tributes to Rauschenberg, Lichtenstein and Mimmo Rotella’s décollages. Not a movement, but a mood, a shameless exercise in cultural appropriation – which was once a national speciality (plundering international influences, reinventing them in an Italian style as if they’d always been our own): pop art blended with comedy, crime thrillers, science fiction and comics, finding a wholly local expression each time. As in Bava’s Diabolik. Or in the platinum-blonde Mastroianni, in a space-age outfit, dashing about between the terraces of the EUR district and a phantom ‘Lungotevere Federico Fellini’ in Elio Petri’s film The Tenth Victim, an Italian-style Bond film featuring Ursula Andress, which few people understood at the time (Petri was a very serious man, a communist, who’d come up through investigative cinema, and he would pay dearly for this brief foray into pop cinema for a long time to come).

The culmination of Brass’s London-based ‘optical’ trilogy – which continues with Nerosubianco (1969) and Dropout (1970) – Col cuore in gola is a thriller that has little to offer in terms of plot, particularly when viewed today, in an era of multi-plot narratives and intricate crime series. Yet it remains a formidable piece of cinema in terms of directorial inventiveness, daring editing, use of colour, and a soundtrack by Armando Trovajoli that immediately captures the London beat. It features Jean-Louis Trintignant, as well as numerous close-ups of Ewa Aulin – a Swedish actress, very blonde, with big blue eyes and looking rather young (she was seventeen at the time). She went on to become the forbidden dream of Italian cinema, starring in many ‘Decamerotic’ films, although today, in Venice, she is celebrated above all as ‘Giuseppe Conte’s mother-in-law’ (she is the mother of Olivia Paladino, the partner of the ‘People’s Lawyer’). Viewed today, it’s a film brimming with pop culture references: globe lamps and lava lamps, egg-shaped armchairs, shiny plastic chairs, Plexiglas, foam rubber and Formica, acid-coloured carpets, comics strewn everywhere, neon lights and Ewa Aulin’s mini plastic raincoats. There is a sequence at Clapton Stadium that appears lifted from an old Mack Sennett slapstick comedy, and exchanges such as “she’s gone out”, “where’s she gone?”, “she’s gone to a happening”. In fact, the true star is London in ’67, with its clubs, miniskirts, criminal underworld and fashion photographers. The finale also features the 14-Hour Technicolour Dream, the legendary happening at Alexandra Palace which, shortly before, had seen Syd Barrett’s Pink Floyd and the Soft Machine take to the stage – the very place where the whole of British psychedelia converged. In London, Brass captured the counterculture first-hand; he didn’t merely reference it.

But in those years, the city was the setting for so much Italian cinema: Antonioni’s Blow-Up – to which Brass pays homage whilst also borrowing heavily from its photographic shoot scenes – Modesty Blaise, starring Monica Vitti as the comic-book heroine, directed by Losey; but also Fumo di Londra, Sordi’s directorial debut, which picked up on the trends of the moment whilst poking a bit of fun at them – the antique dealer from Perugia, in love with old England and sporting a bowler hat, who finds himself lost amongst beatniks and hippies. Art-house cinema, genre films, Italian-style comedies: everything came together in London, the metropolis of the moment. It is as if, today, we were to send all the Edoardo Leos, Checco Zalones, Rohrwachers and Guadagninos to Dubai to tell us about the world.

Taken from a Mondadori novel by Sergio Donati (screenwriter of Leone’s great Westerns), "Col cuore in gola" draws its inspiration and is largely sustained by forty-two colour illustrations by Guido Crepax, who was already a sensation at the time. The son of La Scala’s principal cellist, a graduate in architecture, a cartoonist for adult comics and the creator of Valentina – which had been running in Linus since 1965 – Crepax is the film’s visual catalyst. Yet Valentina already contained everything that intrigued Brass: sadomasochistic dreams, bourgeois Milanese interiors, and a superhero who works as an art critic. Tinto Brass was particularly fascinated by Crepax’s layout: changes in framing, sharp cuts, details, and the decomposition and recombination of images. In that ‘disjointed montage’, he saw the techniques typical of the French Nouvelle Vague at work. Crepax thus drew the film’s storyboards and set out the shots. With every fistfight or gunshot, Brass then inserted captions reading ‘bang’ or ‘sbem’.

The result is a film that defies classification for Italian critics of that era, who, right from his debut – Chi lavora è perduto (1963) – were unsure quite where to place this Milanese-Venetian director: a supporter? A fellow traveller? An unyielding anarchist-individualist? Wearing the structuralist mantle, Moravia defended the film in L’Espresso, explaining that “the signifier was more important than the meaning” – in other words: it is not a film of social criticism, but it is beautiful. Debates that are incomprehensible today, but which at the time shaped the careers of film directors.

“Col cuore in gola is a film that hadn’t been available for some time; it wasn’t even to be found online,” Steve Della Casa, critic, long-standing presenter of Hollywood Party on Radio 3 and curator at the National Film Archive, tells me, having overseen the 4K restoration – “until a few months ago, only a Russian version was circulating on YouTube – one of those dreadful ones with dubbing over the original dialogue. The restoration involved a huge team effort, including collaboration with the rights holders, not least because the negative we started with had various issues; we then also acquired Crepax’s storyboards and the entire Brass archive – documents, papers, scripts and letters.”

Netflix’s contribution has been crucial, as it sponsored the project (restoring films costs a great deal of money). “It’s been a real pleasure working with them,” says Steve, “they’ve collaborated whilst leaving the restoration in our hands – no interference whatsoever, quite the opposite.” Netflix sponsoring arthouse cinema is nothing new, even if it’s rarely discussed here. There is also a larger project underway: the reopening of the Cinema Europa, a glorious cinema in the centre of Rome that had been closed for some time, refurbished by Netflix and managed by the Cineteca Nazionale in partnership with the streaming platform – a first in Europe (something like this only exists in Hollywood: the famous Egyptian Theatre, now part of the American Film Archive, which was restored by Netflix a few years ago).

There were also many young people at the Venice preview. Young people who may never have seen Paprika’s erotic Brass or La chiave, and who might be discovering him today through his ‘optical’ and experimental films, following the proper chronological order. Who knows.

On Letterboxd, the social media platform where Gen Z reviews every film they watch, Brass isn’t doing too badly: Caligula tops the list, followed by the ‘trash canon’: Salon Kitty, Paprika, Monella, Così fan tutte. Brass’s ‘optical’ films, on the other hand, are a deep cut for connoisseurs. Deadly Sweet – that is, Col cuore in gola – is “an almost avant-garde thriller, with more Godard than Argento”. But few people have unearthed it. The surprise, however, is that this generation—which, in theory, should have sent him to the #MeToo guillotine—seems instead to be playing along. Brass is largely acquitted because the eroticism is seen from a female perspective; because there are plenty of naked men; because it’s period stuff. What ends up under fire, however, is Ewa Aulin’s age. That’s where even the fans get pissed off.

In Venice this week, the focus was on ‘the rediscovery of Tinto Brass’, complete with the ‘Pietro Bianchi’ critics’ award, which immediately offers posthumous redress: it honours the avant-garde, respectable, artistic Brass. But as he always insists, there is only one body of work: there are no two distinct phases. There is no experimental Brass and no erotomaniac Brass. The “elegy to the bum” that became the hallmark and essence of his films after La chiave is simply the continuation of his artistic experiments through other means. Recently, returning to the subject of the restoration, he put it more or less like this: for decades I was pigeonholed as the “master of eros”; now I am becoming a “classic”. The real question is whether it is I who have changed, or the critics.

Certainly, her films were often butchered by the censors, re-edited by producers and disowned by the director. Nevertheless, those films failed to make money at the box office. The turning point came when the film placed just behind Flashdance at the box office. Stefania Sandrelli, reinvented as a sex symbol at nearly forty, was the film’s real stroke of genius – one of those second chances that cinema occasionally bestows, like John Travolta being brought back into the limelight by Tarantino with Pulp Fiction after years of obscurity. Brass became a pop icon. Television appearances, magazine covers, and gossip: a sort of ‘Fellini of the bums’. The difference was that Fellini had managed to cast a spell, transforming bums into symbols, dreams, shapes, and metaphors for something else. Brass’s were just bums, and nothing more.

Brass really got into character: the D’Annunzio-esque erotomaniac with a cigar in his mouth and mirrored sunglasses, the now legendary auditions in which he asked actresses to pick up a coin from the ground, with their backs turned on the maestro, naturally. Nobody remembers, however, the auditions he held for cinematographers, asking them what technique they would use to bring out the lapis lazuli hues of the embers. While playing the part of the voyeur, Brass remained a maniac for form. By constantly playing with the character, he ended up making the films almost an afterthought. Yet even the most tired, the most repetitive ones were still an antidote to the grim tedium of ‘content-driven cinema’ – that formula which keeps coming back, finding us increasingly unwilling each time. Already exhausted before we’ve even begun.