I f Bernardo Bertolucci had not made Last Tango in Paris (1972), which gained notoriety for its explicit sex scenes, and The Last Emperor (1987), which amassed nine Academy awards, then most of the world would not have known anything about him. His body of work would have been of significance only to cinephiles and students of cinema. In a career spanning 50 years from 1962 to 2012, Bertolucci made 24 films. How do we approach or assess this oeuvre without being taken in by the aura that surrounds him or by claims that are dismissive of his work?
A film is not necessarily what a film-maker claims it is or what a spectator says it is about. Without an assumption like that to start with, no genuine appreciation of a body of work or an adequate critique of it is possible. Let us take Last Tango in Paris , for instance. While working in the film, Marlon Brando is supposed to have said that he was acting in a “f..k movie”. This film came after The Godfather (1972) for which he was honoured with the Academy award for Best Actor and which he refused on the basis of his admirable political convictions. Yet, he was again nominated for the academy award for his acting in the Last Tango in Paris . How is that possible if it is nothing but a “f..k movie”?
The film scholar Professor Thomas Jefferson Kline was so intrigued by this film that he was inspired to take a careful look at Bertolucci’s other films and write a book, Bertolucci’s Dream Loom: A Psychoanalytic Study of Cinema (1987). He discusses seven of his films in the book: Before the Revolution (1964), Partner (1968), The Spider’s Stratagem (1970), The Conformist (1970), Last Tango in Paris (1972), 1900 ( Novecento / The New Millennium , 1976) and Luna (1979).
If cinema is some kind of a dream, then, as Freud pointed out, what is important in the dream is not the latent content that is hidden below the manifest content but the dream-work or the form taken by the dream to hide that. The detours, condensations, doublings and displacements of the dream which hide a specific wish, the latent content, are however right there on the surface of the dream.
Therefore, any approach to cinema that restricts itself to a typical content analysis or the manifest content of a film would certainly miss the forest for the trees. So, what is on the surface of Bertolucci’s films or the cinematic dreams woven by him? That question cannot be answered adequately without recognising first and foremost the fact that he was a product of the 1960s, the age of Eros and Civilisation that culminated in the revolt of May 1968. Being an Italian and, like his mentor Pasolini, a poet by the time he was 15, Bertolucci had to struggle against both the legacy of sentimentalism in Italian neorealism and his towering mentor to find his own voice.
On the contrary, within his own being, he had to face the challenge to go beyond his father without decimating his energy in some murderous rage against such authority or fall for the narcissistic trap of rising in his mother’s gaze in order to accomplish that. While he eventually succeeded in finding his voice in cinema thanks to the breath of fresh air brought in by the French New Wave in which he found all the needed inspiration, it is not clear if he succeeded in his other challenge.
Once he took to film-making, he stopped writing poetry to affirm “cinema as a way of life”. In this significant shift, the choice to move away from an ideal like his father, Attilio Bertolucci, who was a well-known poet himself, is certainly evident.
At a later point, while referring to his films, Bertolucci said that through all his films he was making only one film and that we would recognise that if we removed all the titles of these films and the caption “The End” at the end and join them all together into one massive singular film. Kline points out that as the struggle to free himself or cut his umbilical cord is indexed in the body of Bertolucci’s cinematic oeuvre, it would be proper to title that long film either as “Scena Madri” (Scene of the Mother) or “Scena Anti-padre” (Scene against the Father), “for to see and to be seen by the mother are opposite sides of the single issue: the quest for identity”, which is linked to “his competitive need to find a cinematic identity”, and not having to establish it on the basis of the endorsement of a paternal figure.
Does it imply that Bertolucci completely eschewed all literary consciousness for a cinematic consciousness? Far from it. We see that evident literary models are visible in his films; like Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma in Before the Revolution , Dostoevsky’s The Double in Partner and The Conformist is based on Alberto Moravio’s novel of the same name. While clarifying these aspects, Kline points out that Last Tango in Paris is the first Bertolucci film to fully break away from a literary model and erect something totally cinematic. Why? It is not the case that the need to break out of the classical cinematic form that is akin to the 19th century novel is not seen in the earlier films of Bertolucci. Even in his first film, La Commare Secca ( The Grim Reaper , 1962), there are references to a different kind of cinema or different mode of representation, specifically the French New Wave, which is no doubt more evident in Before the Revolution ; and The Conformist has nothing literary in it despite the fact that it is based on a novel.
Beyond the story, Bertolucci was often concerned about interrogating the conventions of cinema, a meta-cinematic enterprise, a rejection of which in any analysis would result in the rejection of an important dimension of his oeuvre. As a film-maker, then, he was acutely conscious of both film form and film style. Like Jean Luc Godard, whom he evidently admired in his youth, Bertolucci was not as much concerned with cinema’s representation of reality as he was with the “reality of its mode of representation”.
Mediated by cinema
In Partner , over a lengthy pan shot across the ruins of a massive Roman structure in the middle of the bustling city, the radical double of Giocobbe announces: “Our subject is primarily life, but if you feel that life is missing something, steal a movie camera and try to give life a style. Do long panning shots of life in Techniscope and colour if you have broad ideas. Do static shots of death, in black and white, if you like early Godard. Or make double exposure films. Cinema is a part of our show and our show is a part of cinema.” In other words, for Bertolucci, life in all its struggles, hesitations, ugliness, violence and beauty matters, provided it is mediated through the cinematic engagements of his mentors and fellow travellers; be it the allusion to Red River (Howard Hawks, 1948) or A Woman is a Woman (Jean Luc Godard, 1961) in his Before the Revolution or, for that matter, the famous Odessa Steps sequence of Battleship Potemkin (Sergei Eisenstein, 1925) in his Partner.
Last Tango in Paris itself makes liberal allusions to Jean Cocteau’s Orpheus (1950) and a series of other contemporary representations of that myth. If these allusions in the film are what intrigued Kline to obsessively pursue the films of Bertolucci to write his important book, then our own critics saw nothing much in it other than the existential angst of a man who attempts to overcome his loneliness through aggressive sex and meets a deadly end as a consequence. Although the film borrows heavily from the original myth of Orpheus and its modern versions, both cinematic and literary, as Kline points out, Bertolucci puts his own spin on it without imitating his models. After Paul and Jeanne meet for the first time by chance in that old apartment across the bridge and make abrupt and sudden love, we learn subsequently that Paul’s wife Rosa, who owns a flophouse, has committed suicide; that her body has been taken for autopsy; and that her funeral is not over yet. In a way, Jeanne is the double of Rosa, and Paul’s repeated engagements with her are expressive of his aggressive narcissism that obsessively tries to seek in her eyes w hat he failed to see about himself in the eyes of Rosa and which he can never see as she is dead and gone.
As Freud reminds us, the unrelenting pursuit of the lost love object, whatever form it may take, always entails the constant pulsing of the death drive, which wishes to achieve an impossible equilibrium that can only imply death, either for the self or the other. Once Eurydice dies of snakebite, Orpheus pursues her to Hades. There, he impresses those who are in control of that dark place by his music and poetry and wins her back.
Striking parallels
Yet, on his way back, he loses her again by breaking the interdiction laid by the lord of the underworld that he should not turn back and look at her. He looks back not because he wished to clear his doubt about her presence as she follows him out of Hades, as explained by the standard interpreters of the myth. On the contrary, he wishes only to retain her image with the look of appreciation in her of his daring rescue, and not of herself, so that he could continue to persist in some kind of an eternal masturbatory existence by recapitulating that look time and time again. Sustaining oneself in the rescual fantasy, thereby, matters more to Orpheus than fully living through it. In this, much as Kline for some reason does not mention it, it is not difficult to see a striking similarity between Last Tango in Paris and the Hitchcock classic Vertigo (1958).
In Vertigo , the detective Scottie obsessively tracks down Judy to brutally impose his vision of the deceased Madeline on her; Judy only pretended to be Madeline for a brief period for a fee. Scottie’s unrelenting pursuit of Judy to recover his Madeline ends in Judy’s disastrous death. Scottie thus loses his Madeline once again but, nevertheless, in the process, he overcomes his fear of vertigo, which makes him stand erect over the roof of the church as the perceptive Hitchcock’s camera tracks back to enhance his apparent virility while he is still ambiguously searching for some kind of an endorsement of his status in the eyes of the dead woman below.
Bertolucci, in contrast, goes further than the original myth and Hitchcock by refusing to offer any escape route to his Orpheus, Paul. When his relationship is forged with Jeanne, the double of Rosa, as in the myth, they agree to some kind of an interdiction that they will not ask each other their names or anything about their past. In the penultimate scene in the dance hall, she declares her decision to break away from him and marry Tom, her film-maker boyfriend.
By some quirk of fate, Paul chooses precisely this moment to declare his love and seek her hand forever. In order to accomplish that desire, he breaks the interdiction and reveals his name and identity and the details of the flophouse he now owns after Rosa’s death. Instantly, he falls from grace in Jeanne’s eyes, appearing in all his pathetic condition to her. She nevertheless jerks him off as a gesture towards a final goodbye. Perhaps, she wished to suggest that henceforth he could only exist in some kind of masturbatory relationship with her instead of having her permanently by his side.
Refusing to accept her decision, he chases her down the streets and forces himself into her father’s apartment when she flees into it. Unwittingly, though, he then adorns her father’s army cap and asks her for her name. She reveals it but instantly shoots him in the crotch. As Kline points out, by adorning that cap, Paul literally became the double of Jeanne’s father. Her unconscious thus finds an immediate outlet in Paul to avenge her racist and sexist father. In other words, she has her own journey and refuses to accept Paul beyond a point as she has to travel farther in her life, and also by that gesture of shooting him she ultimately refuses to be a mere object of the gaze.
As elaborated by Kline, there is another double in the figure of Tom, the film-maker boyfriend. On the one hand, as this role is adorned by Jean Pierre Leaud, he symbolically functions as the double, or surrogate, of Bertolucci and his fascination with the French New Wave. On the other, by obsessively seeking to represent Jeanne’s past, he also functions as the double of Paul. He cannot see her as a person but only as an image that needs to be constantly framed and reframed again in his relentless pursuit to ma ke a film on her past. Even when he does not have a camera, he only likes to look at her by framing her with his fingers as a film-maker is prone to do.
Irritated by this obsession on his part, Jeanne at one point rebukes him by saying, “Do you want me to marry you or the camera?” Thereby, if Tom’s orphic drive similarly fails to find what it wishes, Bertolucci’s camera, by refusing to engage in the typical shot-reverse shot suturing of the sex scenarios of its primary couple, at the same time rejects the orphic drive of the spectator to recuperate the voyeuristic pleasures of a long-lost primal scene.
When the film ends, therefore, instead of arriving at an orgasmic finale we see the defeated Paul stumble on to the balcony mumbling, “Our children… our children… will remember,” and then gazes at the camera before collapsing on the balcony into a foetal position, indicating his ultimate point of regression. Who are the children being referred to here anyway if not the spectators who often regress voyeuristically to that stage when witnessing a film in a dark room, as Christian Metz may put it?
The unconscious for Bertolucci, then, as he himself has said, is another word for fate. If psychoanalysis in this manner leaves a decisive mark on his world view and his body of work, then Marxism and its encounter with fascism is not far behind, given his association with a mentor like Pasolini, who was in and out of the PCI (the Italian Communist Party) and who never compromised his ideological commitment and its Gramscian understanding whether he was inside or outside. Bertolucci succeeds in brutally unmasking the vacillating bourgeois intellectual, whether such a figure engages with the idea of revolution as in Before the Revolution or with fascism as in The Conformist .
When it comes to the final crunch, despite all their elaborate intellectual discourse, these figures, like Fabrizio in the former film, either recoil into the cocoon of middle-class comfort, or, like Marcello Clerici in the latter, are reduced to being mere witnesses of the brutal murder of Professor Quadri by the fascists, which, he, however, meticulously planned right from the beginning, even to the surprise of the fascist powers that be who are intrigued by his desire to volunteer himself to accomplish such a quest. Like revolution, which is too large for Fabrizio, fascism is too large for Marcello. Bertolucci in a way tells us that they are figures that could only orbit around such large left- or right-wing political scenarios as they can never be at the centre of either.
Cinematically, if Before the Revolution indexes the coming of age of a young film-maker, it is with The Conformist that we witness the emergence of a consummate master. In close collaboration with another master craftsman, the cinematographer Vittorio Storaro, some of the most astounding imagery in cinema could be seen in The Conformist and in films such as The Spider’s Stratagem , Last Tango in Paris , 1900 , Luna , The Last Emperor and The Sheltering Sky (1990). Take, for instance, his five-hour-fifteen-minutes-long magnum opus, the epic historical film 1900 , that has a large international cast in the figures of Burt Lancaster, Robert De Niro, Gerard Depardieu, Dominique Sanda, Francesca Bertini, Laura Betti and Donald Sutherland.
This film covers the story of a village in southern Italy from 1901 with the births of Olmo (Gerard Depardieu), a peasant, and Alfredo (De Niro), a landlord; their strong bond formed as friends despite belonging to opposite ends of the spectrum of society; the end of fascism with the overthrow of Mussolini in 1945; and until these alleged twins who could have been fathered by the grand old patriarch Alfredo (Burt Lancaster) reach ripe old age.
In making visible the inherent class contradiction in that landscape, the film does not resort to any trickery of montage to contrast the peasants with the landowners or the rich with the poor by alternating the images of one after the other. Instead, in many parts of the film, we see this in one grand and elegant sweep of the camera.
As many a critic has pointed out, no other film celebrates communism in such exuberant colours as this one. Yet, as other critics have pointed out, in elaborating the struggle between communism and fascism, Bertolucci does not cut deep enough. That is, while the film clearly shows the decadence of the landed aristocracy and the marriage of convenience it makes with fascism, we do not get any idea anywhere in the film of how fascism was able to mobilise the peasant or the proletarian on its side and without whose support it could not have succeeded. To the credit of Bertolucci, however, it should be mentioned that given the contradictory nature of the forces consisting of Christian democrats, liberals and communists that united in the name of national liberation after the war, he does point out that Italy only succeeded in orbiting around revolution and did not fully realise it.
This becomes evident in the scene that begins the denouement where, after the peasants surrender their arms to a committee of partisans who are made of such a motley crowd, the red flags begin to disappear from the peasant quarters and the largest of them is carried away by a group as they recede along with it into the horizon and the camera deals with the two friends who are left alone to begin their squabble again.
Epic drama
When it comes to his Asian trilogy, The Last Emperor , The Sheltering Sky and Little Buddha , only the first of them, again an epic historical drama, impresses with its grand and massive sweep of history. Unlike the other two films, perhaps this worked because it was centred on China, where Bertolucci was in somewhat familiar ground given the backdrop of communism. Particularly in coming to grips with the horrors of the Cultural Revolution, both Bertolucci and Storaro could not afford to allow the colour red to explode as exuberantly as it does in 1900 . The first time we see red in The Last Emperor is when the protagonist attempts to commit suicide at the beginning of the film on his way to the prison. Briefly, when he is allowed to go the restroom, he slits his wrists and thrusts his tightened fists into a sink full of water. Instantly, blood red fills the screen in stark contrast to the bluish grey that began the sequence.
Similarly, when his communist mentor is led away like a dog by the screaming mobs at the peak of the Cultural Revolution, we see the violent unfolding of hundreds of red flags. As red is at the same time a sacred colour to the Chinese, we can see the red interiors of the forbidden palace in which the protagonist is interned from birth until he becomes an anglicised youth. Unlike 1900 , therefore, the colour red stands for all things regressive in this film.
Recently, Bertolucci was again in the news just a few weeks before his death on November 26. Once again, it was for Last Tango in Paris . As the #MeToo movement picked up steam, Maria Schneider, who played the role of Jeanne, went on record to say that she was not informed about the scene where Paul (Marlon Brando) sodomises her. As more news trickled in, it emerged that both Brando and Bertolucci knew it as they had discussed it before and did not tell her as they wished to register her shock and surprise on the camera when it happened. To the credit of Marlon Brando, however, it should be mentioned that during the shoot of the film, when Bertolucci demanded that they have real sex before the camera, he bluntly refused.
So, whatever the intensity of this controversy, what we see on the screen in this film is simulated sex unlike so many other contemporary films and television series where they are literally doing it for the camera. Directors are often tyrants on the sets when it comes to realising their vision on the screen, and Bertolucci was no better.
Venkatesh Chakravarthy is Dean, Academics, Ramanaidu Film School.
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