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INTRODUCTION
Over the past five decades, assessments of Bernardo Bertolucci's work have tended to centre
on two purported career phases: an early period influenced by the French Nouvelle Vague and
particularly by the work of Jean-Luc Godard, and a later phase characterized by a shift of
orientation towards more mainstream film-making. Inevitably, the critical reception of
Bertolucci's films at given stages of his career has been determined by the prevailing
theoretical frameworks espoused by scholars who have published in those particular periods.
These have ranged from the politicized evaluations of the style and content of Bertolucci's
films which characterize much Italian scholarship, to the psychoanalytical interpretations of
his work that have emerged from American academia since the 1970s. The present study
differs from its predecessors in its approach to Bertolucci's films, partly in terms of its scope
- analysing each of the director's full-length fiction releases up to / sognatorilTlie Dreamers
(2003) and partly in terms of its theoretical approach, which is based on affective and
cognitive theory, a transnational branch of film studies that has acquired momentum since the
mid-1990s. This study is a departure from existing scholarship on Bertolucci, as it identifies
how, through aesthetics, film technique and narrative construction, the director's films are
primed to elicit intense emotional and cognitive viewing experiences from spectators. The
project focuses on identifiable uses of the camera, music, mise-en-scene and narrative
structure in his films, tracing common denominators and evolutions in his work since the
early 1960s, and contextualizing these filmic mechanisms within affective and cognitive
theory, a branch of scholarship based on scientifically verified research into human responses
to emotional and intellectual stimuli.
Bertolucci's individual films and their aesthetic and narratological features therefore
constitute the focus of this study, differentiating it from existing politicized and
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