Research in Progress (March 1, 2021)
Cinema is a matter of style, and style is a moral fact–Bertolucci
Motifs:
Cinema is the synthesis of all the other arts
Cinema is a kind of reservoir of the collective memory of this century.
The visual design of Bertolucci’s films is one of cinema’s most singular and sumptuous
The past holds the present captive; it subsumes and even becomes the present.
The recurrence of doubles and doppelgangers. Duality is manifest in several ways: split personality, identical figures, parallel lives, the same actor playing different roles in the same film, multiple P.O.V.s
The dances that often prefigure death
The sinister homosexual as a character
The Totemic Father
The pathology and inescapability of the family
The simultaneity between conformity and liberation
Ambivalent sexual identity
Youthful search for identity
Exploration of political ideology (Before the Revolution)
Discovery of the unconscious (Spider Strat
Loneliness and despair (The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris)
Oedipal contemporary dramas (Luna, Tragedy)
The linkage of the libidinal and the political: Depiction of isolated sexuality (Last Tango, The Dreamers) which is dangerous, because outside reality inevitably impinges on it; sexuality should never occur and be dealt with in isolation from other social factors.
