Tinto Brass made desire a signature, and nobody has replaced him

Can you name a single director of today's explicit content? Not a platform, not a performer: a director, with a recognizable eye, a body of work and enemies in high places. That the question sounds absurd is, in our view, the best obituary Tinto Brass could get.

Brass died in Rome on the morning of November 4, at 93. His wife, Caterina Varzi, and his children, Bonifacio and Beatrice, told ANSA, and the family has asked for a strictly private funeral. He was born Giovanni Brass in Milan in 1933, studied law, worked at the Cinémathèque française in Paris and assisted Roberto Rossellini before debuting as a director in 1963.

His erotic period is the one the world remembers, from "La chiave" in 1983 to "Miranda," "Paprika" and "Così fan tutte." International headlines, naturally, lead with "Caligula," which The Guardian describes as an attempt to make a star-studded, mainstream pornographic film, hired by producer Bob Guccione. That is the least interesting thing about him.

Brass was an author before he was a provocateur

Here is what the nostalgia crowd forgets: Brass did not start with sex. His debut ran into the censors, and his answer was to rename the film "Chi lavora è perduto" ("Whoever works is lost"), which sharpened the political jab. Before eroticism he made comedies, westerns and avant-garde-flavored films, and worked with Alberto Sordi and Monica Vitti.

That matters because it explains why his erotic films are recognizable at a glance. Eroticism wasn't his business model; it was the language he arrived at after trying others. Italian obituaries keep using the word "autore," and for once the cliché looks earned. You could pick a Brass film out of a lineup the way you pick out a Wes Anderson frame.

Free and infinite is not the same as free

The comfortable thesis says we won something: explicit images are now a click away, no censor, no seized prints. "Caligula" was, per the Italian press, seized for obscenity and tangled in legal trouble. Nobody misses that.

But we think the trade was lopsided. Censorship gave erotic cinema stakes: a director had to argue for a vision, defend it in court, and make something worth the fight. Abundance removed the fight and, with it, the need for a point of view. When everything is available, nothing needs to be signed. Explicit content today is optimized to be found, not to be remembered, and that is why we can't name its directors.

Don't canonize him blindly, though

A fair column has to add the caveat. As Movieplayer notes, his films won a large audience but also fueled debate over how they portray the female body. That argument was real in his lifetime and shouldn't evaporate in the eulogies. His later work, at least by one Italian obituary's account, also did less well than the run that began with "La chiave."

Still, being arguable is the point. The same outlet closes by saying he never had much interest in getting everyone to agree. Few things today are made by someone willing to divide the room on purpose.

What to do with his death

The nicest coincidence is that, as Quotidiano del Sud reports, Venice chose a restored 4K version of his 1967 thriller "Col cuore in gola" for the pre-opening night of its 83rd festival on September 1. Italian film journalists also gave him the Pietro Bianchi Prize, which Varzi accepted for him because he couldn't attend for health reasons. So the rediscovery is already under way.

Our recommendation: skip the "Caligula" scandal reruns and start with the restored thriller, then "La chiave." Judge him as a filmmaker, flaws included. If the erotic auteur is truly extinct, the least we owe him is to look at the work seriously.