In collaboration with Cinecittà Luce, Rome, MoMA presents a complete retrospective of the films of Bernardo Bertolucci, featuring new prints produced by Cinecittà Luce, with sound and color corrections overseen by cinematographers who have worked with Bertolucci in the past, including Vittorio Storaro, Darius Khondji, and Fabio Cianchetti. Bertolucci himself will be present to introduce the exhibition’s opening screening, The Conformist (1970), a film that has deeply influenced American filmmakers as different as Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. The retrospective also includes the U.S. premiere of a rare documentary by the director, Oil (1967), which returned to public view at the 2007 Venice Film Festival.
At the age of twenty-one Bernardo Bertolucci debuted his first film, The Grim Reaper (1962), at the Venice Film Festival; he has since gone on to earn every award and accolade to which a filmmaker can aspire. Tirelessly experimenting with form and content, Bertolucci has garnered both critical and popular acclaim; he consistently pushes the boundaries of the medium, yet still creates Oscar-winning epics with mass appeal. What unites his body of work—and imbues his individual films with texture and depth—is the director’s enormous passion and uncanny ability to fuse the lyrical and the dramatic. Watching the films in this series together, one witnesses his development as an artist, from grappling with the influence of cinematic trends and filmmaking icons to developing and refining his own voice, and ultimately becoming an enormously influential auteur who creates films of beauty and consequence.
The exhibition is co-produced by the Department of Film of The Museum of Modern Art and Cinecittà Luce, Rome. It is organized by Jytte Jensen, Curator, Department of Film; Camilla Cormanni and Paola Ruggiero, Cinecittà Luce; and Alessandra Bracaglia.