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engagement with the director's work. What Bordwell describes as 'the marked self-
consciousness of art cinema narration', featuring moments 'in which the narrational act
interrupts the transmission of fabula information and highlights its own role', in other words,
moments 'that announce the power of the author to control what we know" mirrors
Bertolucci's mode of film-making and the way it creates shifts between affective forms of
viewer engagement and a more distanced, intellectual form of reception during the director's
more stylized moments (Bordwell, 1995: 209). Bertolucci's familiarity with canonical
cinematic conventions and his ability to manipulate and subvert them is typified in films such
as Tlie Spider's Stratagem, and this is a quality which emerges in much of his work; the
application of suppressive narratives, the retardation of the disclosure of narrative
information, and a recurring self-consciousness recur from his earliest work up to Jlie
Dreamers.
This study also draws on Edward Branigan's theories of narrative comprehension and
reception, work which is based on cognitive psychology, narratology and linguistics
(Branigan, 1992: xiii). Branigan describes the way our mental processes register sensory
information from the world around us, recognizing and classifying this information for future
use by organizing it into patterns, or schema, based on what we already know. (Branigan,
1992: 13) He notes that 'a schema assigns probabilities to events and to parts of events. It
may be thought of as a graded set of expectations about experience in a given domain',
(Branigan, 1992: 13) and he asserts that a schema is used in our mental processes in order to
recognize narrative patterns, such as in films. Again, a fusion of the affective and the
cognitive emerges in the format that Branigan envisages for a standard narrative schema, with
features such as an 'explanation of a state of affairs' early on, followed by an 'emotional
response or statement of a goal by the protagonist', and finally an outcome plus 'reactions to
the outcome' (Branigan, 1992: 14). However, Branigan admits that while the notion of a
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