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SECTION 1; Pessimism and Melancholia
The Grim Reaper (1962), Before the Revolution (1964), Tlw Spider's Stratagem (1970), The
Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (1981).
These four films are linked by their cognitive and affective structures and by a similar socio­
political remit. With their fragmented - and sometimes cryptic - narratives, startling visuals,
and socio-political sensitivity, the films were intentionally addressed to an implied audience
who were arguably well versed in the aesthetics of cinema and in leftist political ideology.
The films' cognitive structures are based on paratelic narrations, including Stratagem, whose
initial telic strand focusing on the quest to identify Athos Senior's murderer, is soon
overtaken by the more paratelic, process-oriented facets of the narration. All the films draw
on detective movie conventions, in particular by featuring suppressive and distributed
narrations which obstruct the viewers' activities of hypothesis making and of creating
expectations, hi this context, the use of noir conventions, such as starting a film from a point
close to its narrative conclusion, or with a past tense narration, serves to establish a
deterministic narrative quality and imply a descriptive mode of representation. The
flashbacks in The Grim Reaper and in Stratagem often have the function of manipulating the
reality status of the sequences by blurring the contours between subjectivity and objectivity,
thus giving the narratives an oneiric quality, hi addition, Tlte Grim Reaper and Before the
Revolution are characterized by elements of the Nouvelle Vague style, which expose elements
of the cinematic process. All the films feature techniques, such as Bertolucci's conspicuous
use of the camera as an extra-diegetic narrator, unnatural lighting, calculatedly stylized
sequences, and non-mimetic editing, which aim to create an ongoing awareness on the
spectator's part of the cinematic medium and of the author's presence, thereby privileging
cognitive and intellectual modes of viewer engagement.
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