BOLOGNA, JUN 26 – Research conducted by the Bernardo Bertolucci Foundation and the Cineteca di Bologna have led to an exceptional discovery: the film ‘The Death of the Pig’, shot in 1956 by a 15-year-old Bertolucci and which has remained unpublished and unknown until today. The discovery will be told at the ‘Il Cinema Ritrovato’ festival, underway in Bologna, on Friday 28 June, at 4.45 pm at the Cinema Modernissimo, by Valentina Ricciardelli and Fabien Gerard of the Bertolucci Foundation and Gian Luca Farinelli and Cecilia Cenciarelli of the Cineteca di Bologna. A film, ‘The Death of the Pig’, of which there was no further trace, except in a memoir by the critic Adriano Aprà: “I met Bernardo when he was 16 years old, in 1957, in the house of Cesare Zavattini (friend of my father ) where, in the company of his friend Romano Costa, he screened two 16mm short films: ‘La teleferica’, a fictional film, and ‘The Death of the Pig’, a documentary. Even though I was only four months older than him, I was a critic: too many low angle shots, in the first, good in the second. I think I’m one of the very few to have seen them but I still remember them.” The theme of the pig’s death will return to the surface both in the never-realised project ‘I pigs’ (1965), and in ‘Novecento’ and in ‘Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man’. Furthermore, the memory of the blood-soaked animal’s escape in the snow inspired in his own way the scene of the murder of Professor Quadri’s wife at the end of ‘The Conformist’. This is the memory of Bernardo Bertolucci himself: “I tried, with the sequence of the killing of the pig (in ‘Novecento’), to remake that old film in sixteen millimetres”. But this is not the only discovery: right on the set of ‘Novecento’, Bertolucci’s wife, Clare Peploe, shot several images, some of which can be seen for the first time at ‘Cinema Ritrovato’, together with a film of family, filmed on holiday, probably in Forte dei Marmi, in the early 1960s. (HANDLE).
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