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work to unrestricted international audiences and taking into consideration their expections; on the other, there is an openness towards different forms and styles generated by cinematic innovation (Casetti, 1978:24-25). This conviction informs the critic's discussion of the complexity of Bertolucci's position in respect to the means of production for his films in the late 1960s and 1970s. Partner was financed by the State company Italnoleggio; The Spider's Stratagem was funded by RAI, the Italian state television network; Tlie Conformist by the private company Paramount-Universal; the documentary La salute e malata by the election campaign of the Italian Communist Party in Rome, while another (unfinished) documentary about the exploitation of workers was commissioned by the CGIL, a Communist trade union. In this economic context, Casetti sees an intention on Bertolucci's part to avoid 'linking his own role to the destiny of a cinema produced by the State 1 , deciding, instead, to explore different options, adapting his film-making according to different financial circumstances (Casetti, 1978: 71). For Casetti, Tlie Conformist is the statement of a 'new work plan', which manages to maintain an auteurial imprint despite the more commercial aims of the project (Casetti, 1978:71). For the critic, it is - in effect - Bertolucci choosing Renoir over Godard (Casetti, 1978:77). In response to this reasoned assessment, I would suggest that the negative response to Bertolucci's first three films, combined with their economic failure and the director's subsequent, forced inactivity, should be given more prominence in critical assessments of Bertolucci's consequent career decisions. On a similar point, it is noteworthy how Casetti emphasizes the 'paradox' of Before the Revolution representing Italy at the Cannes Film Festival in 1964, being awarded the Jeune Critique prize, receiving high praise in an Entretien in 1965 by Cahiers du Cinema, but being either negatively reviewed or ignored by Italian critics. Casetti's comment about Before the Revolution remaining a semi-underground 12
film for 'jealous cinephiles or, more rarely, film reviewers feeling guilty' is also significant (Casetti, 1978:39-40). Casetti warns against the facile temptation to evoke the Oedipus complex and attempt to endow it with real biographical substance, while suggesting that the rapport between death and the paternal presence is connected to Bertolucci's relationship with his cinematic 'parents', identified in realism, Neorealism, and classic American cinema. He says that in Bertolucci's work 'All classic cinema is revisited, rechecked, abused, re-proposed, etc., in an unremitting tension between an insane love and a distancing hatred' (Casetti, 1978: 28-29). To these cinematic 'parents' Godard should certainly be added, and my study also posits that a more objective awareness of the true relationship between Bertolucci and his father Attilio would benefit future scholarship on the director's work. Another idea elaborated in my study is that the troubled rapport between Bertolucci and the Italian Communist Party which can be envisaged as a father figure - plays a role in films such as The Spider's Stratagem and Tfie Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man, and this interpretation correlates with Casetti's indication that the director's modifications to Borges' novel for Tfie Spider's Stratagem made the film definitively Italian, aiming for a 'direct and precise foregrounding of a political theme: the theme of the Resistance and its legacy' (Casetti, 1978: 62). With regard to Tfie Grim Reaper, Casetti dissociates himself from his contemporaries who dismissed the film as a 'Pasolinism without Pasolini", a perspective which he attributes to a superficial and episodic reading of the film (Casetti, 1978: 35). The differences that Casetti recognizes in both the social perspective and the style of the film become the subject of a detailed investigation in my own volume. Enzo Ungari, author of Scene madri di Bernardo Bertolucci (1982), was one of Bertolucci's friends and collaborators (Ranvaud, 1987: 265). The volume's second edition (1987) includes an interview by Donald Ranvaud regarding Tiie Last Emperor (by then 13
- Page 1 and 2: Emotion and Cognition in the Films
- Page 3 and 4: Contents Acknowledgements 1 Abstrac
- Page 5 and 6: Acknowledgements I am very grateful
- Page 7 and 8: INTRODUCTION Over the past five dec
- Page 9 and 10: moods punctuated by emotional pheno
- Page 11 and 12: comprehensible why a nation that de
- Page 13 and 14: foreground a reception process in w
- Page 15: LITERATURE REVIEW While this study
- Page 19 and 20: together' (Ungari, 1982: 51). This
- Page 21 and 22: Canby implicitly agrees with Cineas
- Page 23 and 24: it is Last Tango in Paris, and in t
- Page 25 and 26: e attributed to Paul's abolition of
- Page 27 and 28: Petri, who - in 1972 - talking abou
- Page 29 and 30: twofold aim of offering viewers sop
- Page 31 and 32: Maraini, D. (1973) 'Who were you?',
- Page 33 and 34: In discussing different narrative t
- Page 35 and 36: outcomes. The viewer and character
- Page 37 and 38: information to which the character
- Page 39 and 40: emotional state that the individual
- Page 41 and 42: opera houses in Before the Revoluti
- Page 43 and 44: manipulation, Bordwell analyses the
- Page 45 and 46: narrative schema clarifies how we o
- Page 47 and 48: to the point of drawing the spectat
- Page 49 and 50: for granted, in a 'slightly hazardo
- Page 51 and 52: passive emotionalism' (Sterritt, 19
- Page 53 and 54: Godard's approach from Bertolucci's
- Page 55 and 56: characters being stimulated into ta
- Page 57 and 58: apolitical art' in La Chinoise (p.
- Page 59 and 60: SECTION 1; Pessimism and Melancholi
- Page 61 and 62: La commare secca/The Grim Reaper: A
- Page 63 and 64: the film. Several of the suspects a
- Page 65 and 66: to reduce realism in favour of an a
work to unrestricted international audiences and taking into consideration their expections; on<br />
the other, there is an openness towards different forms and styles generated by cinematic<br />
innovation (Casetti, 1978:24-25).<br />
This conviction informs the critic's discussion <strong>of</strong> the complexity <strong>of</strong> Bertolucci's<br />
position in respect to the means <strong>of</strong> production for his films in the late 1960s and 1970s.<br />
Partner was financed by the State company Italnoleggio; The Spider's Stratagem was funded<br />
by RAI, the Italian state television network; Tlie Conformist by the private company<br />
Paramount-Universal; the documentary La salute e malata by the election campaign <strong>of</strong> the<br />
Italian Communist Party in Rome, while another (unfinished) documentary about the<br />
exploitation <strong>of</strong> workers was commissioned by the CGIL, a Communist trade union. In this<br />
economic context, Casetti sees an intention on Bertolucci's part to avoid 'linking his own role<br />
to the destiny <strong>of</strong> a cinema produced by the State 1 , deciding, instead, to explore different<br />
options, adapting his film-making according to different financial circumstances (Casetti,<br />
1978: 71). For Casetti, Tlie Conformist is the statement <strong>of</strong> a 'new work plan', which manages<br />
to maintain an auteurial imprint despite the more commercial aims <strong>of</strong> the project (Casetti,<br />
1978:71). For the critic, it is - in effect - Bertolucci choosing Renoir over Godard (Casetti,<br />
1978:77). In response to this reasoned assessment, I would suggest that the negative response<br />
to Bertolucci's first three films, combined with their economic failure and the director's<br />
subsequent, forced inactivity, should be given more prominence in critical assessments <strong>of</strong><br />
Bertolucci's consequent career decisions. On a similar point, it is noteworthy how Casetti<br />
emphasizes the 'paradox' <strong>of</strong> Before the Revolution representing Italy at the Cannes Film<br />
Festival in 1964, being awarded the Jeune Critique prize, receiving high praise in an<br />
Entretien in 1965 by Cahiers du Cinema, but being either negatively reviewed or ignored by<br />
Italian critics. Casetti's comment about Before the Revolution remaining a semi-underground<br />
12
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