Tinto Brass has died just when nobody is interested in sex any more

“I have a nice little bum”, “Good, I’m the king of the bum”: one would often come across dialogue like this in the reports on auditions for Tinto Brass’s films, which the gossip magazines published with admirable regularity between the late 1980s and the early 1990s. Those were the days when so-called ‘men’s’ magazines scoured every corner in their quest to unearth that risqué little feature with which to spice up their inside pages, consequently overflowing with investigations into infidelity, revelations about amateur porn tapes, analyses of late-night programmes on private channels, and unforgettable reports on events such as ‘Miss Golden Bottom’, there we go again, or ‘Miss Wet T-shirt’.

Anyone who attended secondary school during those glossy years will have compulsively re-read such articles (let’s not even mention the photographic evidence), the unattainable pinnacle of which were the periodic auditions to which Brass subjected the aspiring leading ladies: stories—I know not how true—of a fairy-tale world over which the director reigned like a carnivalesque sovereign, in meticulously staged photos depicting him grinning with a cigar between his teeth whilst, before him, who knows how many aspiring starlets lay on the sofa—albeit on all fours, with their skirts lifted and their knickers askew – they might have been retired porn stars, bored shop assistants, hopeful newcomers, or veteran stage veterans willing to pose nude, but only for artistic purposes… This ‘court of miracles’ must not be forgotten now that newspaper critics are filling their obituaries with the most specious distinctions, lamenting Brass the director, but only the avant-garde director of his early days, not the cynical, low-brow box-office sell-out, not the satyr who had developed a senile obsession with adolescent eroticism.

Brass didn’t care for critics: part resentful, part amused, Tullio Kezich recounted how, after criticising one of his works, he found his name engraved on the gravestones in a cemetery scene in Brass’s next film. Just as he laughed at the critics back then, so Brass would laugh at the timidity of those who today forget that his films were social phenomena – the brazen articulation of what was teetering on the edge of a somewhat hypocritical sleaziness, much like the racy covers of the aforementioned weekly magazines, for which Cuore published a detailed ranking by erogenous zone (Panorama and L’Espresso were jostling for the top spot, whilst Epoca and L’Europeo were lagging behind), whilst the more demure Italia Settimanale nevertheless allowed itself to slip into its review of L’uomo che guarda a wistful remark: ‘It’s nice to earn money by filming what you imagine whilst masturbating’.

Back when the Lega claimed to be ‘tough’, Brass was called upon to condemn a form of machismo he deemed ‘orrotic’ – a portmanteau of ‘eroticism’ and ‘horror’ – yet he would then bless journalists with the wish ‘Erectio perennis’. Admittedly, the scripts for his films might have been slapdash, the acting questionable, the nudity decidedly excessive – but that was the trend elsewhere too: one need only recall Il macellaio and Le età di Lulù, the provocative Francesca Dellera in La carne, Anna Falchi stripped bare and furious in Dellamorte Dellamore, Valeria Marini astride the mortadella in Bigas Luna’s Bambola, and the scene with the eel, the eel! Tinto Brass was the supreme chronicler of that collective adolescence, free from shame as he was wholly focused on the irresolvable tension that always animates sex and resolves it into disappointment: as in the short film in which a man waiting for the underground at night spots a woman on the opposite platform undressing and winking at him; he races up the stairs to reach her without crossing the tracks, and when he arrives, she’s gone, vanished like a wet dream. Or that scene in which a couple take refuge to make love on a bell tower because they want to enjoy themselves closer to the sky: well, Tinto Brass is dead now that the sky has receded, the tension has eased, and we no longer need sex.