Italian director Tinto Brass has died at the age of 93. He became known for bringing Italian erotic cinema to a wider audience with films such as “Caligula” and “Salon Kitty.”
His wife Caterina Varzi and children Bonifacio and Beatrice Brass announced the news of the director's death to the Italian news agency Ansa.
Born in Milan and raised in Venice, Brass began working in cinema after moving to Paris, where he was an editor and archivist at the Cinémathèque. After returning to Italy, he worked as an editor and assistant director to Roberto Rossellini.
His experimental and anarchic approach to film quickly earned him a reputation, and in 1964 he was commissioned by Umberto Eco to create two short films experimenting with visual language for the Milan Triennale. Warner Bros. reportedly asked him to direct A Clockwork Orange, although scheduling conflicts led to the film being offered to Stanley Kubrick instead.
In the 1970s, Brass moved into erotic cinema. Although gritty and full of nudity, his first forays into the genre were also politically minded explorations of the relationships between sex, power, and money.
"I made so many erotic films because I believed that eroticism was a fundamental key to human expression and, above all, the key to the portrayal of women," he told the newspaper La Repubblica. "That was what interested me the most."
His 1976 Nazisploitation film Salon Kitty was based on the true story of a brothel in Berlin that the Nazis used to spy on foreign allies and other officers. The film caught the attention of producer and Penthouse founder Bob Guccione, who hired Brass in 1979 to direct Caligula, an attempt at a star-studded pornographic film based on the story of ancient Rome's most feared ruler.
Starring Malcolm McDowell in the title role, alongside Helen Mirren, Peter O'Toole and John Gielgud, the film was based on a screenplay by Gore Vidal, which Brass rewrote to include orgies, decorative phalluses and lots of female nudity.
Vidal disowned the film, as did Brass after Guccione filmed other unsimulated hardcore sex scenes and incorporated them into the film without the director's permission. The film was released in the UK and US in 1980, where Brass was only credited for "principal photography". A remastered version, without Guccione's inserts, was released in 2023, although Brass was not involved and did not approve of it.
In recent years, Brass lived on Isola Farnese, on the outskirts of Rome. He is survived by his wife, Varzi, whom he married in 2017 and who looked after his archive. In an interview on the occasion of his 90th birthday, he expressed the wish that his ashes be scattered in the Venetian lagoon. ©LAPSI.al
