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Download (12MB) - University of Salford Institutional Repository

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film for 'jealous cinephiles or, more rarely, film reviewers feeling guilty' is also significant<br />

(Casetti, 1978:39-40).<br />

Casetti warns against the facile temptation to evoke the Oedipus complex and attempt<br />

to endow it with real biographical substance, while suggesting that the rapport between death<br />

and the paternal presence is connected to Bertolucci's relationship with his cinematic<br />

'parents', identified in realism, Neorealism, and classic American cinema. He says that in<br />

Bertolucci's work 'All classic cinema is revisited, rechecked, abused, re-proposed, etc., in an<br />

unremitting tension between an insane love and a distancing hatred' (Casetti, 1978: 28-29).<br />

To these cinematic 'parents' Godard should certainly be added, and my study also posits that<br />

a more objective awareness <strong>of</strong> the true relationship between Bertolucci and his father Attilio<br />

would benefit future scholarship on the director's work. Another idea elaborated in my study<br />

is that the troubled rapport between Bertolucci and the Italian Communist Party which can<br />

be envisaged as a father figure - plays a role in films such as The Spider's Stratagem and Tfie<br />

Tragedy <strong>of</strong> a Ridiculous Man, and this interpretation correlates with Casetti's indication that<br />

the director's modifications to Borges' novel for Tfie Spider's Stratagem made the film<br />

definitively Italian, aiming for a 'direct and precise foregrounding <strong>of</strong> a political theme: the<br />

theme <strong>of</strong> the Resistance and its legacy' (Casetti, 1978: 62). With regard to Tfie Grim Reaper,<br />

Casetti dissociates himself from his contemporaries who dismissed the film as a 'Pasolinism<br />

without Pasolini", a perspective which he attributes to a superficial and episodic reading <strong>of</strong><br />

the film (Casetti, 1978: 35). The differences that Casetti recognizes in both the social<br />

perspective and the style <strong>of</strong> the film become the subject <strong>of</strong> a detailed investigation in my own<br />

volume.<br />

Enzo Ungari, author <strong>of</strong> Scene madri di Bernardo Bertolucci (1982), was one <strong>of</strong><br />

Bertolucci's friends and collaborators (Ranvaud, 1987: 265). The volume's second edition<br />

(1987) includes an interview by Donald Ranvaud regarding Tiie Last Emperor (by then<br />

13

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