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Godard's approach from Bertolucci's career trajectory not just in terms of Bertolucci's shift
in cinematic orientation in the late 1960s which derived from his eagerness for broader
professional and artistic recognition, but also through the director's fascination with the
notion of the cinematic "spectacle', particularly after the international success of Last Tango
in Paris. This approach to cinema ensured that Bertolucci's films explored and exploited
cinema's aesthetic and formal potential while never losing sight of the pressing social,
political and personal issues affecting the Western world in the late 20th century.
Affective Theory
This volume will outline how Bertolucci's films possess a notable affective resonance, but
that the kinds of emotions likely to be experienced by viewers are rarely elicited via
traditional means such as close visual and psychological attachments to sympathetic
protagonists or by the use of music to 'amplify' the emotions of characters. Grodal's
reference to the importance of body posture, body language and the facial expressions of
characters as 'innate and therefore transcultural" means of cueing emotions from viewers,
(Grodal, 1997: 90) is echoed in essays by Berys Gaut and Carl Plantinga. Gaut outlines two
modes of viewer attachment to screen characters:
Imaginative identification (imaginarily putting oneself in another's position), which is in turn
subdivided into perceptual, affective, motivational, epistemic, and perhaps other forms of
identification; and on the other hand, empathic identification, which requires one actually to share the
character's (fictional) emotions because of one's imaginarily projecting oneself into the character's
situation (Gaut, 1999:208).
Gaut's discussion of techniques such as the use of POV shots to facilitate perceptual and
epistemic (an awareness/knowledge of the extent of events in the world of the film)
identification sheds light, for example, on the nature of the viewing experience generated by
the voyeuristic POV sequence towards the beginning of Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty (Gaut,
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