Italian erotic filmmaker Tinto Brass dies at 93

Italian film director and master of erotic cinema Tinto Brass has died at the age of 93, according to Il Giornale. Born Giovanni Brass in 1933 in Venice, he spent his childhood in the lagoon city and earned the nickname Tinto from his grandfather, who compared his childhood drawings to the work of Tintoretto.

Brass studied law at the University of Ferrara, graduating in 1957 with a thesis on employment relations with film production companies. He then moved to Paris, where he worked as an archivist at the Cinematheque Française and became close to the French New Wave movement.

“Li chiamano film di serie B, ma per me non lo sono mai stati. Io ho sempre fatto cinema di ricerca formale.”

His first marriage was to Carla Cipriani, sister of Arrigo Cipriani, owner of Venice's Harry's Bar, whom he always called Tinta. Cipriani died twenty years ago. In 2007 Caterina Varzi became his companion, and they married in 2017 at their home in Isola Farnese, near Rome.

Brass often defended his work against being labeled as B-movies, saying he had always made formal research cinema. He acknowledged that critics had created a rupture in his filmography by viewing him only as an erotic director, though he considered form and the signifier to be what mattered in all his films.

The Venice Film Festival will honor him during its pre-opening evening with a restored screening of Col cuore in gola, restored by Rome's Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia with support from Netflix. The restored film will serve as the pre-opening film of the 83rd Venice Film Festival on September 1.

Il Giornale reported that Brass saw his father only on his deathbed and refused to attend his mother's funeral, reflecting a difficult relationship with his parents. Vanity Fair Italia published its final interview with Brass, conducted in September, in which he discussed cinema, love, freedom, sex, and a life lived without giving up his obsessions.