Tinto Brass died at 93, farewell to the master of Italian erotic cinema (but not only)

Tinto Brass died this morning in Rome, around 10.30. The director was 93 years old. His wife Caterina Varzi and his children Bonifacio and Beatrice Brass gave the news; for now the family plans a strictly private funeral ceremony. The master of Italian erotic cinema is passing away, the author who, more than any other, linked his name to desire on the big screen, transforming it into a recognizable, provocative, often irreverent (and almost always, like it or not, scandalous) language. Irony, sensuality and freedom of the body: these are the cornerstones of an unmistakable aesthetic, which challenged taboos and moral conventions, making him one of the best-known Italian directors also abroad.

We should perhaps start with Tintoretto, however. Since that art name, even before becoming a trademark, was a family term of endearment: his grandfather, the painter Italico Brass, had given it to him, seeing his grandson spend his days drawing. And if you look closely, all of Brass's cinema was, right up to the end, a Venetian painter's affair: flesh, light, colour, the surface of bodies treated like a canvas, the gaze that lingers (and takes pleasure in lingering) precisely where morality would like to divert it.

Giovanni Brass was born in Milan on 26 March 1933, but grew up in Venice, in a family where art and law have coexisted for generations. His grandfather Italico, born in Gorizia, had settled in the lagoon by purchasing the Abbazia della Misericordia, transformed into a sort of private gallery for his own and others' works. The father, Alessandro, is one of the most successful criminal lawyers in the city. So the young Tinto enrolled in law school, first in Padua and then in Ferrara, where he graduated in 1957. The thesis, however, already betrays his vocation: working relationships with film production companies.

At the end of the 1950s Brass was in Paris, archivist at Henri Langlois's Cinémathèque française. He works in exchange for room and board, learns editing by handling the films of the masters, breathes the air of the Nouvelle Vague that is about to explode. Back in Italy he became assistant director to Alberto Cavalcanti and Roberto Rossellini, for whom he edited the documentary L'India vista da Rossellini and worked on the set of Il Generale Della Rovere; with Joris Ivens he collaborated on Italy is not a poor country. A pure cinephile education, in short, which those who dismissed him as a simple artisan of eros have always preferred to forget.

His debut came in 1963 with In Capo al Mondo, an anarchic and mocking apologist on the hardships of a young man who is unable to integrate into society, presented at the Venice Film Festival. The censors force him to turn it over from scratch; Brass, in response, only changes the title to He who works is lost, making the message even more explicit. Years of experimentation followed: the collective film La mia donna (with episodes also directed by Luigi Comencini and Mauro Bolognini), the science fiction fairy tale The Flying Saucer with Alberto Sordi, the spaghetti western Yankee. Then the pop and visionary season of With Heart in Gorge (1967), L'Urlo (1968) and Nerosubianco (1969), on whose poster the director highlights the central letters composing a play on words that is already a program: nEROSubianco. In 1971 The Holiday, with Vanessa Redgrave, won the Pasinetti Award for best Italian film in Venice. It is one of the last titles of its first season, the experimental one.

Among the anecdotes that Brass himself loved to tell, one deserves to be remembered: after the American success of Nerosubianco, he was asked to direct A Clockwork Orange. However, he preferred to dedicate himself to The Scream. Stanley Kubrick would later direct the film based on the novel by Anthony Burgess in 1971.

In the Seventies, sex, intertwined with power and money, becomes the center of his reflection. Salon Kitty (1976), set in the Berlin brothel transformed by the SS into an espionage center, dialogues with the atmospheres of Luchino Visconti and Liliana Cavani; that same year, on the other side of the world, Nagisa Ōshima signed Behold the Empire of the Senses, a reminder that eros, in the cinema, had now become a political terrain. Then comes Caligula (1979), a blockbuster produced by Bob Guccione, the editor of Penthouse, with Malcolm McDowell, Peter O'Toole and Helen Mirren: a very troubled process, marked by such bitter contrasts with the production that it led to Brass's ouster from editing. The director distanced himself from it and the film became a case. Action (1980) follows, a grotesque and autobiographical reflection on the very thin border between art and pornography.

In 1983 he made the decision: to abandon "serious" cinema, as he called it, to dedicate himself entirely to eroticism. The Key, with Stefania Sandrelli, was born from the novel of the same name by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, transferred from Japan to Venice. The same book had already become a film by Kon Ichikawa, Kagi, in 1959, awarded at Cannes; but where the Japanese master chose dim light and the unspoken, Brass opened the shutters to full light. And it is a delightful paradox, so much so that it is worth underlining: Tanizaki is also the author of Book of Shadows, the famous praise of veiled beauty and the light that does not reveal; Brass, many years later, would sign a booklet entitled, without too many mincing words, In Praise of the Ass.

The film was a great success with the public, consecrated him in the Olympus of the genre and at the same time made him a controversial figure, the target of a part of the feminist movement (which reproaches him for a vision of women as an object) and of right-thinking people of all stripes.

From that moment on, every film becomes an event, punctually accompanied by an aura of scandal, and every protagonist a diva. Miranda (1985), a revisitation of Goldoni's La locandiera, launches Serena Grandi; Capriccio (1987) is the film by Francesca Dellera. After the noir parenthesis of Snack Bar Budapest (1988), based on the novel by Marco Lodoli and Silvia Bre, Brass returns to more explicit eroticism with Paprika (1991), which reveals Debora Caprioglio, and with Cosi fan tutte (1992), which brings debutant Claudia Koll to success and borrows the title from Mozart and Da Ponte. The hot controversies, the television debates, the scissors of censorship: everything contributes to making his actresses very popular faces and his name almost an adjective. He, meanwhile, cut out cameos in his films, cigar between his lips and the eye of a smug voyeur, like a Hitchcock of the flesh.

In the 1990s and 2000s, the repetitiveness of patterns and situations weakened the public's interest, but not the author's obstinacy. The Man Who Watches (1994) is freely based on Alberto Moravia; Fermo post Tinto Brass (1995) is an autobiographical comedy in which the director plays himself; then Monella (1998), Tra(sgre)dire (2000) and Senso '45 (2002), with Anna Galiena, an erotic rereading of the story by Camillo Boito already brought to the screen by Visconti in 1954. At seventy he made Fallo! (2003), an episodic film inspired by Boccaccio; the latest feature film, Monamour, is from 2005 and arrives directly on DVD. In 2009 he staged a Don Giovanni set in 1930 Venice in Rome and presented the short film Hotel Courbet at the Festival, a tribute to the painter Gustave Courbet, played by Caterina Varzi.

The last hug with his audience came just two months ago. In September 2026, the 83rd Venice Film Festival dedicated its pre-opening to him, screening Col Cuore in Gorge in a new version restored in 4K: not a new film, therefore, but the recovery of one of the most representative works of its first season. On the same occasion, the Italian Film Journalists awarded him the Pietro Bianchi Award. A circle that closed where it all began, at the Lido, sixty-three years after the debut with Who works is lost.

Brass was married to the screenwriter and collaborator Carla Cipriani, who passed away in 2006, mother of his children Beatrice and Bonifacio. On 3 August 2017, at the age of 84, he married the psychoanalyst, former lawyer and actress Caterina Varzi in a civil ceremony in his Roman villa. Always close to the radical positions of Marco Pannella, in 2010 he ran for the regional elections with the Bonino Pannella List. He defined himself as "quietly atheist". And his name, as proof of a popularity that has gone beyond cinema, has even ended up in music: Porcupine Tree named a song after him on the album Stupid Dream (1999), while in Italy he was mentioned by, among others, Samuel and Francesca Michielin, Noyz Narcos and Rancore.

It started from Tintoretto and arrived at Courbet, the painter who more than any other had dared to look at the body without veils or mythological pretexts. In between, sixty years of cinema spent doing what he did with a pencil as a boy, under the amused gaze of his grandfather Italico: drawing what he saw, without asking anyone's permission.