Tribute to the Taviani brothers

For nearly 60 years, across 20 feature films and two TV movies, the filmmaking brothers Paolo Taviani and Vittorio Taviani helped define and enrich contemporary Italian Cinema.

Drawing on Italian politics, real life history, their passion for literature, their love of film, their own Tuscan origins and their absolute belief in the magic of storytelling, the Tavianis fashioned a unique canon of remarkably diverse, yet distinctly recognisable movies. Demonstrating considerable ambition in the subject matter they tackled and the cinematic invention they deployed (including masterful interweaving of multiple narratives), they give us ultra-contemporary satire, powerful allegorical period drama, haunting war stories and playful, wickedly humorous, literary adaptations of (amongst others) Pirandello, Tolstoy, Goethe and Shakespeare

From the beginning of their film careers, the Tavianis have been politically engaged, wanting to use their work to question the establishment (the church, the state, organised crime) and also the contradictions in ideological rhetoric, often translating real life events (influenced of course by their love of Rossellini) and their very specific, often rural, locales (Tuscany, Sicily) into drama.

conflicts and wars (both real-life and f ictional), in Italy and elsewhere, have littered their work, providing an authentic and urgent background to anchor their stories, both political and otherwise.

This extract is taken from the essay written by Adrian Wootton the curator for the Taviani’s brothers’ retrospective at the BFI