Download (12MB) - University of Salford Institutional Repository

psychoanalytical scholarship. The Literature Review will outline the perspectives of the
existing literature on Bertolucci and will engage briefly with the findings of scholars such as
Robert Kolker and Yosefa Loshitzky, but the thesis will then use different critical tools to
analyse the viewing experiences that Bertolucci's films elicit. While paying due attention to
the scholarship that has preceded this project, the present study is not concerned with the
application of psychoanalytical theories to Bertolucci's films. Similarly, the thesis
contexrualizes Bertolucci's work and certain socio-political themes that emerge from it
within Italy's political cinema of the 1960s and early 1970s (the difference in terminology is
important here), but it does so to clarify the nature of the cognitive and intellectual experience
of viewing his full-length fiction films, both at the time and from modern day perspectives.
The political aspects of certain of Bertolucci's films are herein discussed only as a tangential
element, useful to cast light on some directorial choices both in terms of themes and style.
Bertolucci has followed an individual, creative path which is not characterized by
mainstays of the cinematic mainstream such as close viewer/protagonist identification; yet, at
the same time, his re-elaborations of phenomena such as film noir like // confomustalTlie
Conformist (1970), indicate an affinity with the aesthetics and storytelling of classic cinema.
What emerges from films as diverse as La commare seccalThe Grim Reaper (1962) and /
sognatori/The Dreamers is their rich emotional textures and refined narrative structures
through which viewers are engaged cognitively and affectively. As regards the viewer's
affective engagement with Bertolucci's films, the study will describe the way in which the
emotional resonance of his work progressively increases, often deriving from depictions of
natural and artistic beauty. By contrast, processes of viewer identification with Bertolucci's
screen protagonists are less instrumental in conditioning the emotional texture of his work
and such processes undergo negligible change throughout his career; close viewer
identification with characters is frequently inhibited and replaced by the creation of shifting