Download (12MB) - University of Salford Institutional Repository

The affective and cognitive implications of the voyeuristic prologue
Bertolucci's inclination to summarize his films" themes during their opening credits occurs
again in Stealing Beauty. On this occasion, viewers are made aware of the film's voyeuristic
perspective as the opening credits roll beneath images of Lucy, who is travelling from the
USA to Italy. Stylistically, this sequence resembles an amateur home video; there are
moments of camera shake which emphasize a presence behind the camera as well as its
subject, plus several crude close-ups and pans that are symptomatic of inexperienced camera
users who follow their instincts rather than aiming for an aesthetic smoothness in their films.
This is a stylistic approach, which, given its attractive female subject, escalates into
voyeurism. Confirming this interpretation, Bertolucci himself declared that these early
sequences were inspired by Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, a voyeuristic cult movie that
portrayed a serial killer's penchant for filming his female victims' agony (Mirabella-Pitiot,
1991:73). But, unlike Peeping Tom, there is no mediation between the viewers and these
images, since the character filming Lucy never comes into frame (it is only later in the film
that he is identified). During the final Italian stage of her journey, the camera moves close to
Lucy, taking advantage of her as she sleeps in a train compartment; her obliviousness to
being observed is underlined by the camera filming a drop of saliva that falls from her
slightly open mouth. This makes the filming appear as a form of intrusion on the part of the
invisible cameraman, whose perspectives start fragmenting the girl's body into many details,
focusing on the childlike within Lucy while also charging the images of her with a clear
erotic connotation. A cut to a close-up of her plump red lips depicts them as almost asking to
be kissed; a series of extreme close-ups of her hand, until just the fingers are visible, picture
her fingertips resting near her inner thigh, a pose with obvious autoerotic implications. A full-
length low-angle shot focused on her open legs, her bended knees, and her feet that rest on
the seats opposite, is followed by a cut to high-angle shot that frames the top of her thighs as
296