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them seem weightless. This technique is applied whenever the urban landscape is framed in
the background, at a distance from the diegetic action. In these sequences the frame
composition has three horizontal planes: the blurred skyline of the urban landscape in the
background, the river in the middle ground, and, in focus in the foreground, the urban
neighbourhood near the river bank where the socially excluded try to make ends meet.
Therefore, the lighting not only marks a physical distance between the city, with its potential
for individuals to improve their lives, and the peripheries with their hopeless decay and
neglect, but it also endows the images with symbolic meaning, implying that the illuminated
city is an unreachable mirage for the sub-proletariat. With regard to Rome's historical
landscape, intense natural light is featured during the Cosentino episode, during which
buildings, walls, and fields emerge as fragmented impressions that evoke Cosentino's
unfamiliarity with the environment, as well as reinforcing a sense of loneliness. In both
situations the use of light cues a form of intellectual compassion towards the characters
because it emphasizes their fragility in the midst of an indifferent society; however, a more
intimate emotional attachment from viewers to characters is not elicited.
The plight of such individuals, although represented by Bertolucci more subtly than
by his predecessors, links Tlie Grim Reaper to what might be termed the second stream of
neorealist cinema, which - as Shiel explains - saw a 'shift of emphasis from solidarity to
disconnection in the relationship between the protagonist of the neorealist film and his urban
milieu' due to changes in the economic climate which transformed Italian society from one
'in which austerity breeds community' into one in which 'increased affluence breaks it down*
(Shiel, 2006: 78). The symbolism inherent in two other scenes reinforces this impression; an
argument breaks out between the gigolo, Bustelli, and his partner about her financial
difficulties, a sequence that is endowed with visual irony on account of its background - a
wall plastered with magazine covers celebrating the lives of the nouveaux riches. Similarly, a
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