The Taviani brothers, Vittorio and Paolo, wrote and directed 21 feature films and two television movies together, in a career that spanned six decades. The elder, Vittorio, died in 2018; Paolo, two years younger, has died aged 92 after a short illness.
Influenced by the Italian neo-realism of Roberto Rossellini, the brothers started their feature film-making in the heady days of the Italian cinematic boom of the 1960s, alongside contemporaries such as Sergio Leone and Bernardo Bertolucci, producing politically themed dramas. In the 70s, they soon carved a distinctive niche for themselves, often adapting literary source material – Leo Tolstoy and Luigi Pirandello were especial favourites – with an underlying leftward leaning liberal political sensibility and fashioning a style that mixed almost documentary authenticity with playful comic fantasy.
This was first fully realised in 1977 with Padre Padrone, their first major international success and winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Based on a contemporary autobiography by Gavino Ledda, the film dramatised the painful but eventually successful flight of a Sardinian shepherd from servitude to his brutal father.
The Tavianis, now firmly established with a close creative team around them, including Paolo’s wife, Lina Nerli Taviani, the costume designer on every one of their movies, then scaled further heights through dramatising part of their own early lives in the classic second world war drama The Night of The Shooting Stars (1982), a jury prize winner at Cannes. It encapsulated every facet of their mature film-making with its basis in historical truth – they first explored the subject in their short debut documentary, San Miniato (1954) – and its gritty authenticity, interspersed with moments of extraordinary fantasy and black humour.
All this made The Night of Shooting Stars a moving and cathartic experience. It also features the rural landscape of Italy, and especially of their native Tuscany, as an extra dimension of their work that they returned to again and again.
They went on to direct a film more or less every two years for the next two decades, with varying degrees of success, including a brief excursion into television, during the early 00s, that encompassed their adaptation of Tolstoy’s novel Resurrection in 2001. Their adaptation of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar in a Roman maximum security prison, Caesar Must Die (2012), brought them a Golden Bear award at Berlin.
San Miniato, south-west of Florence, was Paolo’s birthplace. He was one of three sons (the third was Franco) of Jolandi (nee Brogi), a teacher, and Ermanno Taviani, a liberal lawyer. Their mother encouraged Vittorio and Paolo’s early interests in the arts. But it was a screening of Rossellini’s account of the allied liberation of Italy, Paisan (1946), that changed their lives. They saw it in a cinema in Pisa, where they had been evacuated during the second world war. The then Lina Nerli, who went to the same school in Pisa as her future husband, recalled in the documentary Passion and Utopia (2015) that she sat at a wooden desk in a classroom that was scored with the names of directors such as Luchino Visconti, John Ford and Roberto Rossellini, only to discover it had been Paolo’s previously.
Paolo studied liberal arts at Pisa University, while Vittorio took law, but they used the institution as a stepping stone to make their first short documentaries, while consuming everything the Pisa Film Society screened. This was their own kind of improvised film school, learning by watching and deconstructing other people’s movies, while experimenting with their own.
After discarding their initial idea of making their living as journalists, they moved to Rome in the early 1950s and made a number of documentaries. They then wrote and directed their first feature film, A Man for Burning (1962), with their friend Valentino Orsini, and won three awards at the Venice film festival.
Paolo and Lina married during this period, and had two children, Ermanno and Valentina. The brothers also then began developing a lifelong extended creative family that included their producer, Giuliani G De Negri (from A Man for Burning until his death in 1991); editor, Roberto Perpignani, whose wife, Grazia Volpi, was also their producer from 1993 to 2015; cinematographer, Giuseppe Lanci; and composer, Nicola Piovani.
As film-makers, the brothers were often described as being two halves of the same character, and they had an extraordinarily close relationship, making all their creative decisions together, even to the extent of directing alternate shots on set. However, actors working with them noticed differences. While working on The Lark Farm (2007), the actor Moritz Bleibtreu said that Paolo on set was “good cop, to Vittorio’s more emotive bad cop”. Fellow cast member Paz Vega found Paolo “more intellectual, while Vittorio is more emotional, which makes them a perfect pair for us actors”. The result was a unique complementary dynamic.
They applied it with renewed vigour to their final great work, Caesar Must Die, with its cast of real convicted mafia criminals. Paolo, who turned 80 during its making, said that it returned to “the audacity and sheer recklessness” of their early films.
By the time of Rainbow: A Private Affair (2017), Vittorio was already ill, and Paolo had to complete the shooting without him. After Vittorio’s death, Paolo returned to a subject they had been considering for years, a last adaptation of the work of Luigi Pirandello, for Leonora Addio (2022), in what proved to be a final solo fling; an elegant and elegiac homage to his brother and Italian postwar cinema. At the time of Paolo’s final illness, he was working on a new film and had hoped to visit London in February to attend the first ever comprehensive retrospective of his work being presented at BFI South Bank.
He is survived by Lina, their children, and his brother Franco.
• Paolo Taviani, film-maker, born 8 November 1931; died 29 February 2024
