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working class people depicted in these images evoke the mass emigration from Italy to the
USA that occurred during periods of economic hardship. The brown colour is a device which
immediately shapes viewers 5 cognitive and affective engagement, by positioning them at a
temporal distance from the fictive world.
The narrative, based on Bowles's novel, is set at the beginning of 1900 and concerns a
tour of Africa - a place historically and mythically linked to man's birthplace - made by
three Americans. There is a married couple, Port (John Malkovich) and Kit Moresby (Debra
Winger), (a composer and writer respectively), and their entrepreneur friend George Tunner.
They are intermittently joined by a British woman, Mrs Lyle, and her adult son Eric who has
no apparent job. Port and Kit's marriage has lost much of its enthusiasm, and their present
rapport, essentially a friendship, is clearly unsatisfactory for both. Port's contact with a
different culture and immersion in a fascinating yet wild environment brings him to realize
that he loves his wife deeply, although this realization arrives belatedly and he dies of
malaria. Kit feigns intellectual detachment and enjoys Tunner's amiable company, the latter
clearly in love with her. But her impression of having everything under control is mistaken;
after drinking too much, she allows herself to be seduced by Tunner. Later, she also belatedly
declares her love to her dying husband. In shock, Kit runs away from the situation and,
having joined a group of Tuareg, she passively becomes the sultan Belquassim's lover, until
his wives banish her. Kit is rescued and returned to Western society but her rescue is
incomplete, as she ultimately rejects being reunited with Tunner because she feels
psychologically lost.
The representation of time through subjective narration
The two poles around which Bertolucci represents time are an intense subjectivity and a
detachment from what Deleuze terms 'sensory-motor situations', (Deleuze 1989: 126)
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