A Matter of Life and Death? Bernardo Bertolucci and Filmmaking

Bertolucci and notoriety seem to go hand in hand. He's now known as the 'elder statesman of world cinema' according to one critic, but it's not always been so civilised. The Italian auteur whose landmark 1973 film Last Tango in Paris divided audiences and prompted the acerbic American critic Pauline Kael's most famous review, also managed to get himself convicted in his home country for blasphemy. Then, when the establishment embraced him for the relatively uncontroversial The Last Emperor, he still managed to go down in history by referring to Hollywood as 'the big nipple' in his acceptance speech.

As The Last Emperor is released in a truly majestic director's cut, and his latest film The Dreamers shows around the country, the question we can now feasibly ask is: has he been tamed? Now 63, the former poet has returned to the stage that inspired Last Tango, namely Paris, for his new film. Featuring a young American student bunking down with French twins and fellow cineastes Theo and Isabelle during les événements of Paris 1968, the film has been hailed as Bertolucci's best in years and all the elements that mark his style: politics, cinema and, of course, sex (with a nod to Paris too). The difference is that this offering just isn't that shocking to a contemporary audience used to sex and scandal. In fact, he's had to specifically court controversy this time round, denouncing Fox to a Venice press conference for ordering one minute's worth of cuts from the film for its American release. Had he kept the homosexual elements of Gilbert Adair's novel, on which The Dreamers is based, the film would probably have been far more controversial.

Born in Parma in 1940, the son of a poet-anthologist-art history professor-film critic father who began his passion for cinema, Bertolucci began his own career with poetry, winning the prestigious Premio Viareggio literary prize for 'In Search of Mystery' while at Rome University. Dropping out when he got a job as assistant director on Accatone, working with Pier Paolo Pasolini - a friend of his father's - he made his first feature in 1962. The Grim Reaper was, by all accounts, rather morbid but it sparked a career that's now into its fifth decade.

Over the next 11 years he made three features together with, according to Leonard Maltin's biography, a number of documentaries for Shell Oil (an interesting choice considering his burgeoning leftwing political beliefs). Prima della rivoluzione (Before the Revolution, 1964) and Partner (1968) preceded the acclaimed Il Confirmista (The Conformist) in 1970. The film tells the story of Marcello, a man working for Mussolini and garnered him a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay at the 1972 Oscars. It also brought him firmly to the attention of the film world, Last Tango In Paris and that review.

Never one to sit on the fence, Pauline Kael described Last Tango in Paris as a film that "altered the face of an art form". It is indeed a seminal moment in cinema. Situated on the cusp as the French nouvelle vague peaked, Italian realism waned, and as the great era of American Independent cinema was unleashing the likes of Scorsese and Ford Coppola, this sex story really did break the rules. It's hard to view its impact with the eyes of a movie-goer in 1973, but even now it remains disorientating and shockingly powerful. Banned in Italy, Bertolucci lost the right to vote for five years, and its ingénue Maria Schneider blamed her director for the downward spiral of her career. Still, it got him into cinema's history books and he bagged another Oscar nomination to boot - this one for Best Director.

Last Tango's preoccupation with sex, as a violent, destructive, irresistible force, was not a new preoccupation for Bertolucci. It's interesting though, that he is open about the fact that he's been in psychoanalysis since 1964. Happily married to fellow filmmaker Clare Peploe, and leading a life that allows him to fulfil his every passion through his work, it's pertinent to ask where aspects such as the depravity in Last Tango come from, and what in his oh-so-personal films is really personal. For instance, the mother in La Luna (1979) has been linked to his own mother, and Bertolucci himself told Jeremy Isaacs in an interview for the BBC: "My mother is the most mysterious person in my life. If you know my movies, there is an obsession in my movies which is my father. In all my movies there is some kind of Oedipal conflict; the mother is always a kind of remote, hidden figure." He mentions her as being something of a muse to his poet father - something that is echoed perhaps by the twins' parents in The Dreamers.

The film 1900 followed the storm of Last Tango. Six years later and now working with the likes of Robert De Niro and Gerard Depardieu, the film deals with the rise of fascism in Italy over 45 years and the varying effects on a peasant and a landowner's son. A true epic, showing at just over four hours (five hours for the director's cut), it returns to the politics of his films that began with his first feature 14 years earlier. By this point, Bertolucci had gained a worldwide reputation as a respected auteur, and was able to work on a larger scale, which explains how he had the clout to make his next epic possible.

The Last Emperor in 1987 was his first collaboration with British producer Jeremy Thomas (they have gone on to make another four films together). Winning nine Oscars, the film has been hailed as Bertolucci's masterpiece; it's also his most accessible; a linear narrative, tasteful sex scenes within an historical context and the sweeping scale that Big Picture lovers love, the only objectionable thing is the length. (He attempted to revisit similar territory with 1993's Little Buddha, starring Keanu Reeves, but with much less success.) Working with an established team, such as long-time collaborator cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, every shot of the film is imbued with his deep adoration of cinema. It's another venture into the politics that have inspired him since the 1960s; as he told Jeremy Isaacs, "every movie is political". The team were the first Western filmmakers to be allowed to film in Communist China, and they approach the subject with great sympathy - not bad for a man who had been exasperated by the Maoist politics of his French friends such as Jean-Luc Godard.

That sort of contradiction seems to be par for the course for Bertolucci though: Last Tango is a groundbreaking film in its depiction of sexuality, which he follows twenty years later with Stealing Beauty, the rather chauvinistic story of a ripe young virgin in the form of Liv Tyler hankered after by old and young men alike, hidden beneath the conventions of an art house film.

Bertolucci sees his films as a kind of progression towards maturity. He admits to not liking his old films, seeing them as a reflection of his own state at the time he made them - harking back to the psychoanalysis factor here. "They are like sea urchins," he told The Telegraph's Sabine Durrant; "very closed, very difficult to handle." Yet at the same time - another contradiction here - he also views each film that he makes in the present tense, telling an audience at the 30th Anniversary screening of Last Tango in Paris; "When I begin a film I always think cinema always takes place in the present. The people on the screen are our contemporaries."

Really, it is these contradictions that allow him to produce classics such as The Last Emperor and follow them up with empty, disappointing offerings like Stealing Beauty; always beautifully shot, always the work of a man who loves art, and cinema especially, but not consistently good.

It's also interesting that he comments, following his father's death in 2000, that he's moved from being an adolescent to an old man in one move. He is indeed an older man these days, slowed down by an operation three years ago for a herniated disc but his latest film, The Dreamers, shows no loss of vigour or passion on his part (especially if his performance at Venice last year is anything to go by). In a way, it's a neat summing up of everything that the auteur stands for: there's sex, politics - even the neat little touch of Mao memorabilia in Theo's room that refers back to The Last Emperor - and France of course. He calls French "the language of cinema" and revisiting 1968 Paris is obviously something he's been dying to do for ages. This ties in with Bertolucci's other great preoccupation: cinema itself.

Critics can say what they like about the final product, but it can't be denied that every shot, every frame of a Bertolucci film, is imbued with a love for its medium, culminating in this homage to the explosion of film theory and production in France in the 1960s. Even his signature theme - sex - becomes subservient to the passion of cinema, the three young lovers acting out film fantasies and recreating moments from classic movies as they do.

Ultimately, however, it seems that Bertolucci's preoccupations are just that - preoccupations; and in the end they seem to engulf The Dreamers with their own needs. Like an obsessive thought that circles round and round the mind until it loses meaning, so his later films have been accused of a certain vagary. It's almost as if the passion fuels itself, becoming a necessity for Bertolucci, as he says in a BBC4 documentary about his latest film, "I know that I am in that phase of my life when I am sure that shooting keeps me alive - very alive. Makes my life much more full and passionate. So I think that the only way is to start today a new film. The only way to survive."