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Italian filmmaker Tinto Brasi, once known as the “Antonioni of the ’70s” but better known to the wider Italian erotic cinema audience for films such as Caligula and Salon Kitty, has died aged 93.
His wife Caterina Varzi and children Bonifacio and Beatrice Bras announced the death of the director to the Italian press service Ansa on Wednesday.
Born in Milan and raised in Venice, Brass first began working in film 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 for Roberto Rossellini.
His experimental and anarchic approach to cinema quickly gained a reputation, and in 1964 Umberto Eco commissioned two short films experimenting with visual language for the Milan Triennale. He was reportedly approached by Warner Bros to direct A Clockwork Orange, however a scheduling conflict meant that the film was offered to Stanley Kubrick instead.
In the 1970s, Brass moved to erotic cinema. Although raw and full of nudity, his first forays into the genre were also politically minded explorations of the relationship between sex, power and money.
“I made many erotic films because I believed that eroticism was the fundamental key to human expression and, above all, the key to the image of women,” he told La Repubblica newspaper. “That was what I was most interested in.”
His 1976 Nazi exploit Salon Kitty was based on the true story of a Berlin brothel that was recruited by the Nazis to spy on foreign allies and fellow officers. He attracted the attention of the producer and Penthouse Founder Bob Guccione, who hired Brass to direct Caligula in 1979, which was An attempt to make a star-studded, mainstream pornographic film based on the story of ancient Rome’s most feared ruler.
Starring Malcolm McDowell alongside Helen Mirren, Peter O’Toole and John Gielgud, the film, based on Gore Vidal’s script, rewritten by Brass, features orgies, decorative phalluses and plenty of female nudity.
Vidal rejected the film, as did Brass after Guccione shot additional non-simulated hardcore sex scenes and spliced them into the film without the director’s permission. It was released in the UK and US in 1980, with the brass awarded only for “principal photography”. A re-release, without Guccione’s inclusions, was released in 2023, although Brass was not involved and did not approve of it.
In recent years, Brass lived in Isola Farnese, a suburb of Rome. He is survived by his wife, Varzi, whom he married in 2017, and who curated his archive. In an interview given on the occasion of his 90th birthday, he expressed his wish to have his ashes scattered in the lagoon of Venice.
