Tinto Brass and the question of what endures

Tinto Brass died this week at ninety-three, and the world's press has settled on a familiar frame: the maestro of Euro erotica, the director who moved from Rossellini's shadow into sex films, the man who believed eroticism a fundamental key to human expression. The Guardian's obituary carries the arc we know—from neorealism's heir to the auteur of Caligula, from the serious to the transgressive, as though these were stations on a line of decline. Yet the framing itself deserves scrutiny.

What strikes us is not Brass's subject matter but the constancy of international puzzlement at it. For fifty years, foreign critics have treated his work as a paradox: a serious artist who chose to make serious films about desire. The world's coverage has always struggled with this combination, as though eroticism and artistic ambition were mutually exclusive, as though a director could not be both rigorous and unafraid of the body. Brass never seemed to believe this contradiction existed.

Italy's own relationship with his legacy remains opaque to us from abroad. We know only what the foreign press tells us—that he was once hailed as the Antonioni of the seventies, that he moved into erotic cinema, that he died at ninety-three. What we do not know is how Italian audiences, Italian critics, Italian institutions have held his work over the decades. The silence itself is telling. A figure who shaped European cinema for half a century remains, to the world's eye, a footnote to a genre rather than a master of his medium.

His death closes a chapter in a cinema that believed the camera could look at anything without shame. Whether that belief survives him is a question the world will answer, not Italy.