“He was such a master”: the iconic director Lars Von Trier admired
There’s nobody out there who makes movies remotely like the ones Lars Von Trier has been churning out since the early 1980s, but some of his signature motifs can nonetheless be traced back to a director he greatly admires.
Wherever the Danish provocateur tends to go, controversy follows closely behind. Von Trier has never met a taboo he wasn’t willing to shatter or subject matter he deemed too unpalatable to be committed to film, an approach that’s yielded some incredible work to go along with the odd helping of self-indulgent slop.
Always ambitious, the maverick auteur has combined technical innovation and creative artistry with existentialism, surrealism, absurdism, and heavy lashings of the psychosexual, which has, in turn, seen him confront socio-political, societal, and spiritual issues head-on in several of his films.
Even the most unique filmmakers need to draw inspiration from somewhere, though, and for Von Trier, it was a talent who touched base with many of the same themes. In fairness, he didn’t earn quite as many negative headlines, but the shadow of Bernardo Bertolucci is nonetheless clear for all to see.
Sitting under the learning tree of neorealist figurehead Pier Paolo Passolini, Bertolucci made his directorial debut in his early 20s, with his second feature Before the Revolution adding a classic to his filmography very early on. He did it again when The Conformist released in 1970, before Last Tango in Paris shook things up significantly.
Drawing the ire of censors everywhere and cultivating an unsavoury legacy in the aftermath due to its explicit nature and depictions of sexual assault, it was nonetheless a major box office success that landed Bertolucci and leading man Marlon Brando on the Academy Awards shortlist for ‘Best Director’ and ‘Best Actor’ respectively.
Last Tango in Paris pulled no punches, shocked critics and audiences with its graphic nature, and saw a filmmaker see just how far they could stretch the limits of cinematic acceptability. With that in mind, it’s not a shock that Von Trier was a huge fan of not only Bertolucci but the film as a whole.
“I’m watching the old ones. I just saw 1900 again. It was on my screen back home, but it’s a fantastic film,” he told Film Comment. “It’s really strange what happens with Bertolucci, because he was such a master. Last Tango in Paris, fantastic film.”
The butt-numbing 317-minute historical epic 1900 couldn’t be any more different from Last Tango in Paris in almost every respect, but for Von Trier they stood out as Bertolucci’s strongest work. What’s interesting is that he suggests the maestro went downhill in the latter stages of his career, which is strange when his greatest tangible success was still to come.
His 1987 biopic The Last Emperor would complete a clean sweep at the Oscars by winning all nine of the prizes it was nominated for, including ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Director’, making Bertolucci the first Italian filmmaker to ever be awarded the latter statue.
1990’s The Sheltering Sky notched a Golden Globe nod for ‘Best Director’ and 1996’s Stealing Beauty was shortlisted for the Palme d’Or, so hints of the old magic still remained, even if Von Trier seems convinced that the longer Bertolucci hung around the directing game, the more his powers began to wane.
Still, with much of his back catalogue dealing with politics, classism, sexuality, and taboos, there’s a direct connection between Bertolucci and Von Trier’s individualistic and inimitable ways of creating cinema.
