Italian film director Tinto Brass, once dubbed the “Antonioni of the ’70s,” but who later became known primarily for popularizing Italian erotic cinema among a broad audience — notably with films such as “Caligula” and “Salon Kitty” — has died at the age of 93, UNN reports, citing The Guardian.
The director’s death was reported to the Italian news agency Ansa by his wife, Caterina Varzi, and his children, Bonifacio and Beatrice Brass.
Brass was born in Milan and grew up in Venice. He began his film career after moving to Paris, where he worked as an editor and archivist at the Cinémathèque Française. After returning to Italy, he worked as an editor and also as an assistant to director Roberto Rossellini.
Thanks to his experimental and anarchic approach to filmmaking, he quickly acquired a certain reputation. In 1964, Umberto Eco commissioned him to make two short films for the Milan Triennale — works in which Brass experimented with visual language. It was reported that Warner Bros. offered him the chance to direct the film “A Clockwork Orange,” but because of scheduling conflicts, the job ultimately went to Stanley Kubrick.
In the 1970s, Brass turned to erotic cinema. Although his early works in the genre were fairly crude and rife with scenes of nudity, they also served as politically charged examinations of the relationships between sex, power and money.
“I made so many erotic films because I considered eroticism a fundamental key to human self-expression and, above all, a key to portraying women,” he told La Repubblica in an interview. “That was what interested me most.”
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His 1976 film “Salon Kitty” — an example of the “Nazisploitation” genre (exploitation cinema dealing with Nazism) — was based on the true story of a Berlin brothel that the Nazis used to spy on foreign allies and officers. The film attracted the attention of Penthouse publisher and founder Bob Guccione. In 1979, he invited Brass to direct “Caligula,” a large-scale pornographic project with a star-studded cast, whose plot was based on the history of one of the most terrifying rulers of ancient Rome. The film, starring Malcolm McDowell, also featured Helen Mirren, Peter O’Toole and John Gielgud. The screenplay was written by Gore Vidal, but Tinto Brass reworked it, adding orgies, decorative phalluses and a large number of nude female bodies.
Vidal disowned the film; Brass did the same after producer Bob Guccione filmed additional scenes of real (non-simulated) hardcore sex and edited them into the film without the director’s permission. The picture was released in the United Kingdom and the United States in 1980, with Brass credited only as the director of the “principal photography.” In 2023, a new edit was released — this time without Guccione’s inserts — but Brass had no involvement in it and did not approve that version.
In recent years, Brass lived in Isola Farnese, on the outskirts of Rome. He is survived by his wife, Varzi, whom he married in 2017 and who was responsible for organizing his archive. In an interview marking his 90th birthday, he expressed the wish for his ashes to be scattered over the Venetian Lagoon.