Born in Parma in 1940, Bertolucci began his career as an assistant director to Pier Paolo Pasolini on his 1961 film Accattone and directed his first feature at the age of 21.

BBC: Bertolucci to be honoured at European Film Awards

Powerful as it was in places, that manuscript, published pretty much as he had left it, was pitifully incomplete and nobody could really be sure how Pasolini would have brought it to completion.

ECONOMIST: Italian novels

With such disruptive devices as intercutting color and black-and-white footage, parodying silent-film antics, and inserting scenes of youths dancing the twist, Pasolini both affirms the classical grandeur of cinematic modernism and conveys his sense of a time out of joint.

NEWYORKER: La Ricotta

In 1962, the Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose first films were latter-day variants on neo-realism, took a flying leap into hectic modernity with this short, apocalyptic screed against the habits of professional filmmaking and the un-Christian coldness of contemporary Christendom.

NEWYORKER: La Ricotta

Le Portier quickly became a specialist of big-cat scenes and after Pasolini came other famous screen directors such as Jean-Jacques Annaud with "Two Brothers, " Ridley Scott with "Gladiator, " and more recently Ang Lee with "Life of Pi, " which stars a digital tiger.

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