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Ultimo tanso a Parisi/Last Tango in Paris: Bertolucci's Cinematic Manifesto
After the successful reception of The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris (1972) is arguably the
film with which Bertolucci heralded the new ideas about film-making that he had
investigated two years earlier. Hence the elements that contributed to the success of The
Conformist were transposed in the making of Tango: the editing was assigned to Franco
Arcalli, the man responsible for Bertolucci's u-turn regarding montage (see the 'Conclusion'
in the chapter on The Conformist}; the photography was again assigned to Vittorio Storaro;
Ferdinando Scarfiotti moved from costume design to production design; a famous actor -
Marion Brando - was cast as a protagonist; finance for the project came from a European
production company that had links with an American counterpart, in this case Italy's P.E.A.
(Produzione Europee Associate Rome), and France's Artistes Associes (Paris) linked with
the American United Artists. Because these companies exemplified the idea of private
production companies being open to politically committed films - for instance P.E.A.'s
production list included Pasolini's Said (1975) and Rosi's Illustrious Corpses (1976) - the
organizational ingredients of Tango convey Bertolucci's intention to construct another film
amalgamating auteurist elements with a Classical Hollywood legacy, a film appealing both to
the senses and the intellect. This was an artistic path virtually described by Bertolucci
himself:
Partner was entirely based on the contradiction between the 'spectacle' and "distanciation" [...] The
Conformist was my first film-spectacle, an exploration into the desire to create a spectacle. But it was
only with Last Tango in Paris that I stopped feeling that notions of experimentation and spectacle were
contradictory (Ungari, 1982: 89).
In Tango, Bertolucci explored contemporary social malaise, articulating the theme within a
Hollywood mode of film-making enriched by sophisticated camera movement and frame
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