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By T. Jefferson Kline. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. 206 pp.
Bernardo Bertolucci's cinema visualizes the forbidden. It portrays sadomasochism, seduction, homosexuality, and oedipal struggles in a style that is dreamlike and provocative without exploitation of his audience. Bertolucci roots these manifest themes to their unconscious derivatives and pervasively uses aesthetics, literature, and political ideas like day residues. In homage to psychoanalysis, this image-maker speaks of it as another lens on his camera, of his films having been constructed in the framework of analysis and dreams. He says, "Cinema is made from raw material woven on a dreamloom" (p. 10). He speaks of the unconscious as the modern word for the Greek concept of fate and of his own unconscious as the fate of his movies. (Because his work so richly evokes psychoanalytic discussion, the Forum for the Psychoanalytic Study of Film twice conducted weekend retrospectives of his work, with Bertolucci's participation.)
Despite the popularity of Last Tango in Paris and The Last Emperor,