Download (12MB) - University of Salford Institutional Repository

inging to contemporary Italian society.
Given the film's dense theoretical basis - which includes Godard, Artaud, Brecht,
and the Expressionist Theatre - Partner can be viewed as an essay on all the issues that
interested Bertolucci in that period, questions such as the language of cinema and the role of
cinema in contemporary society. The film, inspired by Dostoevsky's novel Tiie Double, deals
with the dualities of realism and anti-realism in cinematic representation, and with the
dualism between submission and rebellion within human nature. The two discourses are
merged mainly through style, creating a result that no other Bertolucci film emulates in terms
of self-conscious artificiality. Within this study's parameters, one could suggest that Partner
mainly focuses on cognitive and intellectual forms of viewer engagement; while this is true,
this chapter also shows how the film's intellectual orientation informs its emotional structure
in generating a viewing experience typified by what Grodal terms intense and saturated
modal qualities (Grodal, 1999: 136). The construction of disconcerting emotional
associations by means of decor, colour, lighting, sound and music, like the dissonant violin
score that dominates the soundtrack when violence is initiated, create a mood of angst
punctuated by moments of empathy or of disorientation and estrangement.
Plot summary
In the style of cinema verite a cafe is shown where a man (later recognizable as Giacobbe's
double) is reading a book about the film Nosferatu (1922) and he replicates the vampire's
idiosyncratic movements by mimicking his hunched back and claw-like hands. Outside, men
put up posters extolling freedom for Vietnam. In the next sequence, shot in theatrical style,
the man shoots a youth playing a piano, while caressing his head; the youth seems to submit
voluntarily to death. The soundtrack is filled with melancholy noise, produced by a spinning
chandelier of which only a shadow is visible. The screen fades to black to end of what is a
129