Akademik

(1933-)

(Born Giovanni Brass.) Actor, screenwriter, director. Despite what would become his characteristic association with soft-porn films, Brass began his career as a passionate cinephile, working for a number of years as an archivist at the Cinematheque Francaise in Paris. Returning to Italy in the late 1950s, he served as assistant director to Roberto Rossellini on India: Matra Bhumi (India, 1959) and Il Generale della Rovere (General della Rovere, 1959) before making his directorial debut with the anarchistic social satire Chi lavora eperduto (Who Works Is Lost, 1963), a film well received at the Venice Festival but immediately attacked by the censors. A similar strong sense of social commitment was evident in Ca ira—Il fiume della rivolta (Tell It Like It Is, 1963), a powerful documentation of revolutions throughout the world, edited from stock footage. He returned to truculent social satire in the two episodes he contributed to the compilation film La mia signora (My Wife, 1964), starring Silvana Mangano and Alberto Sordi, and with the science fiction spoof Il disco volante (The Flying Saucer, 1965). He then experimented with the spaghetti Western in Yankee (1966) before moving to London to make Col cuore in gola (I Am What I Am, 1967), an erotic thriller adapted from a novel by Sergio Donati that exploited split-screen and animation techniques.

   The provocative eroticism already present in Brass's earlier works became more pronounced in his subsequent films Nerosubianco (Black on White, 1967), L'urlo (The Howl, 1968), and Dropout (1970), all made in England and all held up for long periods by the censors. The sexual dimension per se appeared to move ever more to center stage in Salon Kitty (1975), Caligola (Caligula, 1977), and the films that followed: La chiave (The Key, 1983), adapted from the novel by Junikiro Tanizaki and scored by Ennio Morricone, Miranda (1985), Snack Bar Budapest (1988), Paprika (Paprika, Life in a Brothel, 1991), L'uomo che guarda (The Voyeur, 1994), and, more recently, Trasgredire (Transgressions, 2000), Fallo! (Do It! 2003), and Monamour (2005), all of which have served to locate him very firmly in the area of soft-core pornography.