| This critical study singles out surrealism in its various pictorial, thematic and conceptual manifestations as the principle aesthetic informing Bernado Bertolucci's mid-career films. Despite a proliferation of literature on Bertolucci, no one has isolated the formal aspects of surrealism to explain the psychological conflict at the core of his narratives. Yet surrealism is conspicuous in his films. He has admitted to borrowing from painters who are theoretically associated with the 1920s movement such as Rene Magritte and Giorgio de Chirico, and has derived surreal principles from the figurative painter Francis Bacon (a self-proclaimed painter of irrational reality). Moreover, Andre Breton's notion of amour fou and other Freudian inspired motifs (doppleganger, the female demon/diva, object-fetishes, the uncanny, sadomasochism, scatology, scopophilia) repeatedly show up in Bertolucci's narratives and thematically correspond with the language of surrealism.An appraisal of Bertolucci's early films explains how he applied the lessions of Jean-Luc Godard and Pier Paolo Pasolini's cinema to develop a poetic film form that calls attention to the signifying power of the film image. Stylistic digressions in The Grim Reaper and Before the Revolution, where visual details in the mise en scene and editing surpass the expository focus of his story lines, unmistakably derive from the creative model of poetry and encourage the free-association of imagery in his films. In Partner, the influence of Godard's counter-cinema combined with Antonin Artaud's dramatic methods arm Bertolucci with a subversive approach to filmmaking.The final film chapters examine surrealism in The Spider's Stratagem, The Conformist and Last Tango in Paris as it developed out of a series of formal models that derive from surrealist painting, photography and film. Subliminally registered images that show the union of irreconcilable elements as they are reconstituted in a dream or fantasy, contradict the storyline and develop the irrational side of his characters. Bertolucci has labeled the irrational substrata of images that make up his movies as scene madri (mother scenes) with reference to the ideal unity between mother and infant and the film viewer's regressive response to movie watching. In his search for equivalents, Bertolucci has used surrealism as a means of entering this experience and transporting it to the screen. |
