Robert De Niro is jetting into Rome to be on hand Monday to introduce the restored version of Bernardo Bertolucci‘s “Novecento,” marking the 50th anniversary of the historical epic shot in 1976.
Besides De Niro, the film’s stellar cast also comprised Gérard Depardieu, Burt Lancaster, Dominique Sanda and Donald Sutherland.
The special two-part screening, being held in Piazza San Cosimato in Rome’s Trastevere neighborhood, is the grand finale of the Eternal City’s Il Cinema in Piazza summer screenings series. The event is run by Fondazione Piccolo America, the feisty group of young film buffs headed by Valerio Carocci that have been shaking things up for years after occupying the nearby shuttered Cinema America movie theater.
The event is being billed as a tribute to Rome and to Bertolucci, who organizers said in a statement was among the first “to support the fight to defend the Italian capital’s cultural spaces” along with fellow directors Ettore Scola, Ugo Gregoretti and Francesco Rosi. Bertolucci, who was a Piccolo America supporter, died at 77 in 2018.
De Niro, 82, is scheduled to take part in an onstage conversation with Carocci and New York-based journalist and academic Antonio Monda, who is also a former Rome Film Festival chief.
“Novecento” depicts half a century of Italian history through the parallel lives of two childhood friends born on the same day in 1900 in the central Italian Emilia Romagna region countryside: Alfredo, heir to a wealthy landowning family (played by De Niro), and Olmo, a Communist farm laborer’s son (Depardieu). Thousands of extras were also employed by the production, some of whom were real farm laborers.
Bertolucci, in a 2011 interview with Variety, recalled that “putting together peasants from Emilia with Hollywood actors was the height of transgression at that time.”
Paramount, however, seemed to care less about Bertolucci’s breaking taboos than about the length of the film — five hours and 20 minutes — which soon became part of an acrimonious battle. In solidarity, he has jokingly recounted, Francis Ford Coppola promised to make “Apocalypse Now” one-minute longer than “Novecento,” which, of course, he did not manage to do; not even in the redux version.
The restoration of “Novecento” was carried out by 20th Century Fox, Paramount Pictures, Istituto Luce-Cinecittà and Bologna’s Cineteca di Bologna archives, in collaboration with producer Alberto Grimaldi and with the support of Massimo Sordella at Bologna’s L’Immagine Ritrovata laboratory, under the supervision of Bertolucci and ace cinematographer Vittorio Storaro.
The first part of “Novecento” will screen in Piazza San Cosimato on July 13. The second part will screen on July 14, concluding the festival.
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