Internationally recognised art and literary critic, writer and cultural producer. Published in ELLE, Glamour, Esquire and Cosmopolitan; member of the Union of Writers.
Tinto Brass has passed away at the age of 93. Born Giovanni Brass, he was an Italian film director whose restless career moved from experimental and genre films to erotic drama, and whose confrontations with censorship and producers became part of his public identity. He leaves 27 films, nearly all of them meeting censors’ objections, and a name associated with provocation, visual invention and an anti-authoritarian streak.
From law to the Cinémathèque
Born in Milan on 26 March 1933, he grew up in Venice and took a law degree in 1957. He then worked at the Cinémathèque française in Paris, where he learned editing and met the French New Wave circle. Back in Italy he served as assistant director and editor to Roberto Rossellini. That route gave him technical discipline and an appetite for experimentation.
A restless start in the 1960s
His first feature, Chi lavora è perduto, appeared in 1963. He followed it with Il disco volante in 1964, a science-fiction comedy; Yankee in 1966, a western; and Col cuore in gola in 1967, a thriller. No two of these early pictures belong to the same genre, and together they show a director unwilling to settle in one mode, moving between forms with speed and curiosity.
Salon Kitty, Caligula and the erotic years
In the mid-1970s he turned to erotic cinema. Salon Kitty (1976) is set in Nazi Germany and concerns a brothel used by the secret services to spy on powerful visitors. Caligula (1979), a historical drama with Malcolm McDowell, Peter O’Toole, Helen Mirren and John Gielgud, and a script by Gore Vidal, was conceived by Brass as political satire on cruelty and abuse of power. Producer Bob Guccione, publisher of Penthouse, took the editing from him and added scenes shot without his consent; Brass disowned the released version. It nevertheless brought him international fame. He later made La chiave (1983), Miranda (1985), Paprika (1991) and Monamour (2005); his last film was Hotel Courbet (2009).
A filmmaker against power
He told Film International: “I am not an anarchist, but I hate power, be it political, religious or something else.” He resisted censorship throughout his career; Italian press reports put the count at 27 films, 26 of them hit by it. A stroke in 2010 left him in a wheelchair in later years. In September 2026 a 4K restoration of Col cuore in gola opened the Venice Film Festival; Brass could not attend, and his wife read a message from him in which he described his work as research with a “grotesque and paradoxical, hard, hyperbolic and surreal” signature.
Farewell
He passed away on the morning of Wednesday 4 November 2026, aged 93, around 10:30 in Rome. The news was given to the ANSA agency by his wife Caterina Varzi and his children Bonifacio and Beatrice. The funeral will be strictly private.
Cover photo: Tinto Brass at the Venice Film Festival, 1990. Gorupdebesanez / Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
