The Grim ReaperDan Bradbury
The Grim Reaper was filmed on location in Rome in 1961 by Bernardo Bertolucci, who was only twenty-one years old at the time. The screenplay for the black and white picture was based on a story written by Bertolucci's mentor, Pier Paolo Pasolini. Like Pasolini, Bertolucci adopts the Italian neo-realist style as a base for his exploration of cinematic form. In The Grim Reaper Bertolucci uses the boys of the Roman subproletariat, whom he called "the children of life," to paint a picture of Rome. This characterization is also akin to Pasolini's early films, Accatone and Mama Roma, both of which dealt with the struggles of the underclass in Rome. The Grim Reaper is Bertolucci's first feature length film and it opens with a long tracking shot which comes to rest on the image of a dead woman laying in the grass next to a bridge. The rest of the film is spent piecing together the events that lead up to the murder. Like Kurosawa's Rashomon, the story is founded on the investigation of a murder and is broken into successive narrative blocks which establish a non-linear plot similar to Bertolucci's later film The Conformist. Through police interrogations, the audience is introduced to five characters who crossed paths with the woman on the evening of the murder. As they tell their respective stories to the police, most of which are lies, we see what actually occurred through a series of flashbacks. There is a rain storm during the afternoon of the murder which is seen in each of the characters stories. During each rain sequence Bertolucci cuts away from the suspects stories to show the woman, a prostitute, in her home preparing for her night's work. It is the eerie, premonitory rain sequences which fix the element of time in this non-linear narrative. In The Grim Reaper, Bertolucci makes an artistic switch to a more modernistic form of cinema. Using techniques such as montage, deep focus, shadowing, long shots and camera movement, Bertolucci attempts to make his films beautiful, not solely a vehicle for deeper interpretation as was Pasolini's style. Much like Godard, Bertolucci preferred rapid cutting, which was seen as an attack upon classical cinematic form. As Bertolucci's first feature film, The Grim Reaper shows little originality, having taken elements from Kurosawa, Godard, Pasolini and the Italian neorealists. Despite its failure at the box office, the film did bring Bertolucci recognition as a promising young director.
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