Born in Milan and raised in Venice, Brass began working in cinema after moving to Paris, where he was an editor and archivist at the Cinémathèque. Returning to Italy, he worked as an editor and assistant director to Roberto Rossellini. His experimental and anarchic approach quickly earned him a reputation, and in 1964 Umberto Eco commissioned him to create two short films experimenting with visual language for the Triennale di Milano. Warner Bros reportedly approached him to direct A Clockwork Orange, though scheduling conflicts meant the film was offered to Stanley Kubrick instead.
Brass moved to erotic cinema in the 1970s. Though crass and filled with nudity, his first steps in the genre were also politically minded explorations of the relationships between sex, power and money. “I made so many erotic films because I believed eroticism to be a fundamental key to human expression and, above all, the key to portraying women,” he told La Repubblica newspaper. “That was what interested me most.”
His 1976 “Nazisploitation” film Salon Kitty was based on the true story of a Berlin brothel co-opted by Nazis to spy on foreign allies and fellow officers. It caught the attention of producer and Penthouse founder Bob Guccione, who hired Brass in 1979 to direct Caligula, an attempt to make a star-studded, mainstream pornographic film with a plot based on the story of ancient Rome’s most feared ruler.
Starring Malcolm McDowell in the title role, alongside Helen Mirren, Peter O’Toole and John Gielgud, the film was based on a screenplay by Gore Vidal, which Brass rewrote to include orgies, decorative phalluses and plenty of female nudity. Vidal disavowed the film, as did Brass after Guccione shot additional unsimulated hardcore sex scenes and spliced them into the film without the director’s permission. It was released in the UK and US in 1980, with Brass only credited for “principal photography”. A recut version without Guccione’s inserts was released in 2023, although Brass was not involved and did not approve of it.
In recent years Brass lived in Isola Farnese, on the outskirts of Rome. He is survived by Varzi, whom he married in 2017 and who curated his archive. In an interview on the occasion of his 90th birthday, he expressed a wish for his ashes to be scattered in the Venice lagoon.