The board of Paris’ French Cinematheque has apologised for failing to contextualise a screening of Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1972 film Last Tango In Paris in December, which was ultimately cancelled.
Filmmaker Costa-Gavras, who is the Cinematheque’s president, joined other members of the directorial board to face a French National Assembly commission on sexual violence yesterday (January 16).
The Cinematheque had programmed a screening of the film, which includes a rape scene shot without the consent of actress Maria Schneider, as part of a retrospective of Marlon Brando’s career on December 15.
The programming decision was harshly criticised by film figures and feminist organisations, with the organisers opting to cancel the screening altogether the day before “to calm tensions and in light of potential security risks”.
However, this decision generated further outrage among the protesting groups who argued that the state-funded film archive and cinema should have screened the film as planned, but provided context and organised a debate around it.
Costa-Gavras told the National Assemly: “Our desire was far from provocation, it was to present an important work with a legendary actor,” referring to Brando.
He added: “The film should have been the subject of a very detailed and in-depth screening, because it had serious consequences, indisputably, on Maria Schneider’s life.”
“I take responsibility for this refusal,” the Greek-French director, who will receive an honorary Cesar award for his career in February, declared before the board. “I deeply regret that we did not plan to accompany the presentation of the film with a specialist. This is a lesson for the future.”
The Cinematheque’s director Frédéric Bonnaud said that the board plans “to take greater account, when presenting certain films, of the retrospective light cast on these works by the passage of time, the evolution of society and the respect due to victims.”
The shooting of Last Tango In Paris is notably the subject of Jessica Palud’s Being Maria starring Anamaria Vartolomei as Schneider (who died in 2011) and Matt Dillon as Brando, which played in the Cannes Premiere selection and was released in France last June.
The original film explores the relationship between a widowed American in Paris (Brando) and a much younger Parisian woman (Schneider) and depicts a violent rape scene. Schneider, who was 19 at the time of shooting, said in a 2007 interview that the scene was a violation claiming it had not been in the original script, but her allegations were largely ignored at the time.
In a 2016 statement in Italian, Bertolucci called the incident a “misunderstanding” and said: “Maria knew everything because she had read the script, in which it was all described. The only new thing was the idea of the butter. It was this, I learned many years later, that upset Maria, and not the violence that was in the scene that was written in the script of the film.”
The Cinematheque apology comes as France’s #MeToo movement continues to shake up the film industry and raises questions about handling past classics from acclaimed filmmakers within a modern context.
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