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negative evaluation of the representations of women in his films (Loshitzky, 1995: 186) by
arguing that although female characters rarely share the pivotal importance of their male
counterparts in the development of both the filmic story and the making of History in general,
they are depicted as intellectually equal, if not superior, and often endowed with a stronger
existential determination than male characters, as in the case of The Conformist and The Last
Emperor.
InBernardo Bertolucci (1996), Stefano Socci provides information about Bertolucci's
documentaries, and analyses his fiction films from The Grim Reaper to Stealing Beauty,
while the book's second edition of 2003 also includes Besieged. Socci skims through all the
director's films, his examination dense with references to, and subjective evocations of,
Italian and international literature, paintings, and films. This profusion of cross-references is
sometimes accompanied by dismissive comments about individual films, which, in the case
of The Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man and The Sheltering Sky will be discussed in the chapters
relevant to the films. Socci's analysis also follows the dual optic of Marxist and Freudian
perspectives, with a stern leftist evaluation of the political perspective of Bertolucci's films,
which in the case of 1900 leads him to criticize a supposedly unconfrontational political
attitude on Bertolucci's part. My analysis of the film, drawing partly on Bertolucci's
declarations about wanting to diffuse the idea of Communism amongst American audiences
in a different climate from that of the usual anti-communist hysteria, suggests that this was
never intended (Socci, 1995: 61). Socci often praises the aesthetic aspects of the director's
films, as well as his tendency to weave the viewer into webs of intertextual references. In
this respect, Socci's closing reflection that Bertolucci's films are able 'to charm us with all
the fascination of the seventh art [...] but remain 'slightly indecipherable' (Socci, 1995: 100)
corroborates this volume's view that Bertolucci's entire output is characterized by the
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