Paolo Taviani, half of a famous Italian film duo, dies at the age of 92

Paolo Taviani, who with his brother Vittorio made some of Italy’s most acclaimed films of the past half century — including “Padre Padrone,” which won the top prize at the 1977 Cannes Film Festival — died Feb. 29 in Rome. He was 92.

His son, Ermanno Taviani, said the cause of death in a hospital was pulmonary edema.

The Taviani brothers emerged in the late 1950s as part of a generation of Italian filmmakers – including Bernardo Bertolucci, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Gillo Pontecorvo – who were inspired by the country’s neorealist movement but determined to go beyond it. (Vittorio Taviani died in 2018.)

Although the brothers came from an urban, intellectual family – their father was a lawyer, their mother a teacher – their work was a tribute to traditional life in the Italian countryside where they had grown up. “Padre Padrone,” for example, tells the story of a boy’s struggle between the demands of his overbearing father, who wants him to become a farmer, and his own dreams of becoming a linguist.

They injected their films with a sense of spectacle that distinguished them from the austerity of neorealist predecessors such as their idol Roberto Rossellini, who in turn championed their work and, as president of the Cannes jury in 1977, helped insure that “Padre Padrone” won the festival’s coveted Palme D’or award. It was a surprise victory in a field that also included another Italian film, ‘A Special Day’.

“Rossellini allowed us to understand our own experiences, to really understand what we had been through,” Paolo Taviani told The International Herald Tribune in 1993. “To understand it in a way that would have been impossible if we hadn’t seen his films. And we felt that if film had this kind of power, we wanted to master it.”

The brothers were born two years apart and were inseparable for most of their lives. They both studied for a while at the University of Pisa, started making films together and even lived together in Rome. Every morning they walked their dogs together and discussed ideas for new films or the progress of current projects.

The brothers wrote most of their screenplays together, but on set they took a different approach. They took turns directing, scene by scene, with one brother directing and the other watching from a video monitor.

“The crew that knows us asks, ‘Who’s the first today?’” Paolo Taviani told The New York Times in 2013. “And as long as that person is at the helm, the crew only has to answer to the director who is on is in charge at that moment. They can’t ask Paolo what they want to do. When it’s done, I’ll come and watch the video.”

Their work was often based on historical and literary sources; one of their favorite writers was Luigi Pirandello, whose lyrical absurdism matched their own sense of storytelling. Their film “Kaos” (1984) is an adaptation of four of his short stories.

One of their best-known late-career films was ‘Cesare Deve Morire’ or ‘Caesar Must Die’ (2012), about the staging of Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’ in a prison near Rome.

The film’s premise isn’t as strange as it seems (Italy has about a hundred prison theater troupes), but the brothers’ approach was still unique. Most of the actors were prisoners and the film was shot in a real prison. The Tavianis, working on a shoestring budget, even had to negotiate access with the unofficial leaders of the prisoners, who were said to be dangerous members of the mafia.

“We shot the film in 21 days, with very little money, just like when we were very young,” says Paolo Taviani. “There was no time or need to think about anything, this or that, on the part of the producer. We were free. This really helped the film.”

Paolo Taviani was born on November 8, 1931 in San Miniato, a village in Tuscany. His parents, Ermanno and Jolanda (Brogi) Taviani, were anti-fascists in the 1930s and 1940s under the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini.

As children they rarely saw films; instead, as a treat, their father took them to nearby Pisa to see the opera. But after a German attack near their village forced the family to move to Pisa during World War II, the boys had better access to cinemas.

They both remembered walking past a theater one day, shortly after the war, as a crowd of people came out. The movie was terrible, the audience told them. Their curiosity piqued, they went inside, where they saw Mr. Rossellini’s “Paisan” (1946) still playing on the screen. They were hooked.

“When we saw it, we realized that through art we can gain an understanding of our experiences that is greater than what we derive from living them directly,” Paolo Taviani told the Los Angeles Times in 1994. “By the time we left the theater, we decided to dedicate our lives to making films.”

The brothers briefly attended the University of Pisa, but left before graduating. After a few years as journalists, they began working as film assistants, including for Mr. Rossellini, before striking out on their own.

Paolo Taviani married Lina Nerli in 1957. She and their son survive him, as does their daughter, Valentina Taviani; his brother, Franco; his sisters, Maria Grazia and Giovanna; and four grandchildren.

The Taviani brothers made a series of well-received documentaries, mainly on subjects from Tuscany, before shooting their first feature film, “Un Uomo da Bruciare” (“A Man for Burning”), in 1962. It tells the story of a union organizer who takes on the mafia and is ultimately murdered.

Many of their films are made for television and supported by RAI, Italy’s public broadcaster, a relationship that insulated them from the pressures of commercial filmmaking while at the same time giving them the freedom to explore.

After “Padre Padrone” won top honors at Cannes in 1977, the brothers returned in 1982 to win the festival’s grand jury prize with their film “La Notte di San Lorenzo,” known in the United States as “The Night of the falling stars’. .” It was also Italy’s official submission as Best Foreign Language Film for the Academy Awards, although it did not receive a nomination.

Paolo Taviani made only one film after his brother’s death in 2018: ‘Leonora Addio’, aka ‘Leonora, Goodbye’, released in 2022.

“Making films has taken us to strange places we would otherwise never have seen and met so many new people – including ourselves – who are constantly changing,” Paolo Taviani told The Times in 1986. “It is a wonderful calling, and after all these years it has still not failed us.”