During their student days, Paolo and Vittorio started shooting documentary films. Their first completed short, SAN MINIATO, JULY 1944 (1954), a collaboration with Cesare Zavattini, concerned a Nazi massacre in their hometown. Working as a team from the start, their early films were influenced by and often made with Valentino Orsini, a resistance fighter. A turning point in their work, as well as Italian political cinema in general, was SUBVERSIVES (1967), which combined documentary footage of a prominent Communist leader's funeral and the story of four people for whom this death raises numerous questions about their political future.

The Tavianis (Paolo and Vittorio) work together on the writing, design, and direction of all their feature films. Their primary inspiration was Roberto Rossellini's PAISAN (1946), a film which treated contemporaneous life honestly and suggested means for its improvement. Although their first films used non-professional actors, natural lighting, location shooting, ambient sound and working-class situations, the Tavianis have altered this approach in search of a style adequate to their own times. Using ambiguity of character and motivation to suggest the impossibility of portraying historical truth, they present subjective views of history based on objective fact. They have rejected the neorealist aesthetic in favour of a more metaphoric film language. 

Perhaps because their childhoods were dominated by plays and concerts rather than movies, the Tavianis are strongly influenced by the theater. Their tendency to emphasize invention and staging calls narrative perspective into question and proclaims their work as interpretations of history rather than documentaries. THE NIGHT OF THE SHOOTING STARS (1982)/LA NOTTE DI SAN LORENZO/THE NIGHT OF SAN LORENZO, a feature-length remake of SAN MINIATO, JULY 1944, exemplifies this quality and its effect. A flat, painted mural of a window opening out to a starry night is accompanied by a poetic voice over describing the film as a wish-fulfilment fantasy. A child narrator, whose memories are corrected by adults, suggests the collective nature of memory and the capriciousness of individual recollection. Similarly, KAOS (1984)/CHAOS, an adaptation of four Pirandello stories, each intended to be shown separately on television, describes how an uncomprehended childhood memory blossoms forth in its full significance only as it is told and envisioned on film.

Music, and sound in general, are very important to the Tavianis' work. Both men are musicians who use their knowledge and appreciation of folk music and instruments, oratorio and classical presentation and the modern symphony of voices, radios and record players to reinforce their themes. In UNDER THE SIGN OF SCORPIO (1969), the camera's rhythm is determined by the music's pace to enforce the balletic, anti-naturalistic structure of the film.

PADRE PADRONE (1977), the only film to win both the Grand Prix and the Critics International Prize at Cannes, is the Tavianis' best known work. Using a highly mobile camera, with elaborate aerial and pull-back shots, they scrutinize the relationship of a father and son who both suffer under a system of cruel domination. The film alternates extreme long shots of field, roads, or church interiors with close-ups in order to isolate characters in their determinant time and place as a means of explaining motivation. Within this dialectic of peasant and modern laws, silence and communication, father and child, the son learns to save himself through the telling of his story.

The theme of resistance and communal action in an ongoing, revolutionary effort is evident in all of the Tavianis' films. They often use an allegorical structure to discuss current events and relate them to the past, referring to anarchists of the 1870s in SAINT MICHAEL HAD A ROOSTER (1971) and to revolutionaries of 1816 in ALLONSANFAN (1975). They question the possibility of a "good" revolution, since upheaval is inevitably marked by bloodshed, injustice and innocent victims. In the Tavianis' view of history, one revolution replaces another in an everlasting struggle between the collective and the individual.

THE NIGHT OF THE SHOOTING STARS/LA NOTTE DI SAN LORENZO/THE NIGHT OF SAN LORENZO best exemplifies the Tavianis' belief in history as a continual utopian rebirth based on military liberation and domestic reform. A deft combining of emotional involvement with characters who reflect the Tavianis' own lives and an ironic distancing through the use of slapstick, the film narrates the past through a variety of perspectives to illuminate the present. This film and KAOS/CHAOS stress how Italian folk myth and popular religion define people's lives and their place in history. The Tavianis believe that retelling history in a style appropriate to current needs, whether within a community or in a film, acts as an incantation to prevent the repetition of history's worst aspects.