PAOLO TAVIANI

(8 November 1931 – 29 February 2024)

Although we may be aware of a few brothers who always work together on films, there are indeed many who have kept their film making in the family. Perhaps the earliest were the Lumière brothers, August and Louis, famous pioneers of early cinematography from 1895. To them we can add John and Roy Boulting, the documentarians Albert and David Maysles, the animators Stephen and Timothy Quay, the Coens Joel and Ethan, Peter and Bobby Farrell and the two transgender filmmakers Lena and Larry Wachowski.

Famous in Italy were the Taviani brothers who spent most of their careers working in tandem. The senior of the two, Vittorio, was born in 1929 and died in 2018. His younger brother Paolo was born two years later and has now died aged 93. Both brothers were born in San Miniato in Tuscany and both died in Rome.

Together they wrote, produced, edited and directed all their films, some twenty titles from 1954. They were always revolutionary and political and their films often dealt with historical and documentary subjects. They began their careers as journalists and then joined the filmmaker Joris Ivens as scriptwriters, and also worked with Valentino Orsini.

They made many films that were not globally recognised at first. Their initial film together was The Subversives in 1967 which predicted the revolutionary events of 1968. They worked with Gian Maria Volonte on Under the Sign of Scorpio and with Marcello Mastroianni on Allonsanfan, both revolutionary films.

In 1977 they made Padre Padrone, the drama that made their names. It concerned a poor boy taken out of school to work on the land, and it won the brothers the Palme d’Or at Cannes. They also won the Golden Bear award at Berlin for Caesar Must Die (2012).

They used Brecht, Pasolini, Visconti and Bertolucci as influences and adapted the works of Pirandello, Tolstoy, Goethe, Dumas and Shakespeare. Good Morning, Babylon was a tribute to the early Hollywood pioneers. From 2000 they moved into television with adaptations of the works of classic writers mentioned above.

MICHAEL DARVELL