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The Godardian scheme
Partner's debt to Godard's film-making resides in the constant distancing of viewers from
the ongoing action through different devices. One frequent effect is a stylized camera
perspective that cannot be attributed to a diegetic character's viewpoint; this is created by the
camera being positioned frontally and close to the diegesis, a perspective that erases spatial
depth and stresses the stylization of the performance. Additionally, throughout Partner,
viewers focus on deciphering the meaning of the viewed, but also on identifying the cross-
references and intellectual associations that are featured in the narration. Godard's location
shooting techniques, and his idiosyncratic dissections and insertions of Hollywood genres in
his work, (3) albeit in a more theatrical configuration, also occur in Partner. However, unlike
Godard's films, in which the subversion of traditional cinematic codes can militate against
emotional viewer engagement, Partner foregrounds the tendency of Bertolucci's work to
generate emotion during the viewing experience; indeed, even the way in which he exposes
the nature of cinematic devices cues emotional responses. Bertolucci himself recognized that
even in Partner there is a degree of abandonment to the magic of cinema, (Ungari 1982: 52)
and that it would have been impossible to create that 'distancing from emotion of the type
Godard does' given the film's emphasis on dementi's acting style which was classical and
'entirely against Brecht'(Apra-Ponzi-Spila,1968: 46).
Moreover, Bertolucci's manipulations of cinematic techniques feature a self-
consciousness that sometimes borders on the comic, and they invariably feature a fusion of
the emotional and the intellectual. One re-elaboration is of a scene from Murnau's Nosferatu
(1922), a film to which Bertolucci alludes in the prologue. A night sequence shows Giacobbe
wandering around the city; his shadow, thanks to the lighting and to the camera position -
which, from a straight-on angle moves to a high angle - gradually outgrows him in such a
way that it menacingly assumes a life of its own. The scene subsequently shifts towards the
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