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informed by canonical codifications of fiction.
Disrupting cognitive activity
Bertolucci's re-examination of cinematic language in the light of the methodologies of
Godard and, in a theatrical context, of Brecht, included a reconsideration of editing, an
interest which emerges in Bertolucci's analysis of Deux on trois choses que je sais d'elle
(1966) in the article Versus Godard. There he declares his fascination for Godard's
unconventional editing ideas, which posit that the order of images will evolve spontaneously
at the moment of placing one shot next to another, because if they possess a poetic charge, a
relationship between them will emerge regardless of anything else (Bertolucci, 1967: 140).
This interest matured over four years of inactivity during which he 'did almost nothing but
think about film, about cinematic style"; Bertolucci distinguishes between editing as a tool
used by auteurs and as a process used by studios during which 'every film loses its stylistic
violence' and is homogenized (Apra-Ponzi-Spila, 1968: 39-40). Hence, in making Partner,
Bertolucci admits to using editing as a form of authorial affirmation and self-contradiction,
deliberately interrupting shots to produce discontinuity either using by cuts or inserts (Apra-
Ponzi-Spila, 1968: 41). The combination of idiosyncratic editing, theatrical components, and
the distanciation schemata, generates a narration and style that enable Partner to be classified
as metafiction, particularly with regard to Grodal's definition of the term as 'fiction that lays
bare its devices and makes the relation between addressee and fiction visible in a critique of
cliches of representation 5 (Grodal 1997: 209).
In particular, Partner's, structure includes contextual frames where Bertolucci's
artistic and political perspectives form the meta-frame through which viewers follow the
film's events with an awareness of extradiegetic and metafictional intentions, which, in this
case, is an awareness of Bertolucci's articulation of three discourses: the obsolescence of
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