Sexual violence
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The broadcast, during a Marlon Brando retrospective, of the film by Bernardo Bertolucci in which the actor and the filmmaker trapped Maria Schneider to film a rape scene without her consent, outrages feminist activists, who demand a contextualization of the artwork.
“A time for discussion with the public, about the questions raised by the broadcast of the film, will precede the screening of the Last Tango in Paris.» The note appeared during the day of Friday, December 13 on the website of the Cinémathèque française, as if to put out the embers. The event could have gone unnoticed. On social networks, the Cinémathèque française had not particularly advertised its screening, scheduled for Sunday December 15 at 8 p.m., from Last Tango in Paris by Bernardo Bertolucci, as part of his Marlon Brando retrospective, probably anticipating the explosive nature of the thing.
The film is in fact surrounded by what the Cinémathèque presents as a “smell of sulfur” in his short summary of the event. Reference to the terrible story of Maria Schneider, permanently damaged by the filming during which Bertolucci decided, without her consent and with the complicity of Brando, to make her undergo the filming of a rape scene, in which the actor simulated sodomy with a pat of butter. “I didn’t want Maria to act out her humiliation and her rage, I wanted her to feel it,” Ber explained.
