Oil (La via del petrolio)Restored to coincide with the presentation of a career Golden Lion to Bertolucci at the 2007 Venice Film Festival, Oil (La via del petrolio) is the director's only foray into feature length documentaries.
Commissioned by Italian state broadcaster RAI, the film is structured in three parts: the first, Origins (Origini), filmed in Iran, establishes a poetic register; the second, The Journey (Il viaggio), interweaves literary and cinematic references including the fabulist films of Georges Melies; and the third, Across Europe (Attraverso l'Europa), employs the fictional figure of a journalist (Argentinian poet, Mario Trejo) as a protagonist/guide.
New 35mm print.
"Taking a page from Roberto Rossellini and Alain Resnais.Bertolucci produced a poetic rumination that links the black gold's continent-spanning odyssey to the evolution of the cinema itself.one of the true undiscovered treasures in Bertolucci's otherwise well-known oeuvre" - TIFF Bell Lightbox
Screens with Bertolucci's Canal (Il canale) (12 min, Italy, 1967), filmed at Suez during production of the second episode of Oil.
