Two of the giants of the film world fell out yesterday as the Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar hit back at Quentin Tarantino for deriding the current state of Italian cinema as “tragic”. Almodóvar, who was in Rome to be given an Italian state honour with the title of “Commendatore” (commander), said that Tarantino suffered from “verbal incontinence”. “Quentin is a good director, a passionate cinema enthusiast — and a great expert on all the world’s trash,” he observed waspishly.

The Spanish director of All about My Mother, Talk to Her and, more recently, Volver, said that Italians should not take the American director seriously. “I don’t think he was comparing the best auteur cinema of yesterday and today. I doubt he had the cinema of Luchino Visconti, Pietro Germi and Pier Paolo Pasolini in mind — and as for Italian film-makers of today, I don’t think he even knows who they are.”

At the Cannes Film Festival last month, Tarantino said that he was appalled at the current state of Italian cinema compared with the great days of Federico Fellini, Vittorio De Sica and Visconti. An agonised debate has been raging among Italian film directors and critics ever since over whether he might have a point. Not a single Italian film was entered at the recent Cannes festival.

Tarantino acknowledged that Italian cinema had once been one of his main sources of inspiration. “I really loved the Italian movies of the 1960s and 1970s. But what happened? It’s a real tragedy. The Italian films I’ve seen over the past few years all seem the same. All they talk about is boys growing up, girls growing up, couples in crisis and holidays for the mentally disabled.”

Almodóvar, however, said Tarantino had failed to understand the “passion” that underlay Italian cinema past and present. “There are only two countries where I don’t have to explain what putting passion into cinema means — Spain and Italy,” he said. “These are cultures where emotion, instinct, the art of getting by and suffering to express talent are part of the national DNA.”

Tarantino was also rebuked by Sophia Loren. “How dare he talk about Italian cinema when he doesn’t even know anything about American cinema?” she said. The director Marco Belloc-chio said that Tarantino was “a good director, but in no position to give us lessons. In saying these things he has shown himself up as a jerk who doesn’t understand anything.”

However, Pupi Avati, another Italian director, said that Tarantino was “partly right. Italian cinema is far from dead, but it is weak.” At Italy’s own cinema prize-giving ceremony this week, the David di Donatello awards, Bernardo Bertolucci issued an appeal on behalf of 100 directors and screenwriters and actors to President Napolitano to persuade the Government to give greater backing to the film world.

He said that although directors such as Ermanno Olmi, Daniele Luchetti and Belloc-chio were producing world-class films, Italian governments of both Left and Right had cut funding for culture and the arts. Cinema now received a tenth of the subsidy enjoyed by French cinema. “The more films we produce, the better the chance that some of them will be brilliant,” said Bertolucci.

A spokesman for the Venice Film Festival said that despite Tarantino’s remarks he would still be the star guest at next September’s event, when he would present his favourite spaghetti westerns.

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