SOURCE: Loshitzky, Yosefa. “The Spider's Sexual Stratagem: Bertolucci's Poetics and Politics of Sexual Indeterminacy.” In The Radical Faces of Godard and Bertolucci, pp. 174–99. Detroit: Wayne State University, 1995.

Bertolucci's fascination with bisexuality and androgyny is a recurrent motif in his work. On this matter he observes, “I would say that I like men who have something feminine about them and vice versa. Absolute virility is horrible. Absolute femininity, also.”¹ Yet, as Will Aitken observes, “gay sexuality has never been the central concern of any of Bertolucci's films.”² Bertolucci seems to be more interested in sexual ambivalence, than in pure and determinate sexual identity. Bertolucci uses one memorable image of sexual ambiguity again and again. In The Spider's Stratagem it is an image of a servant boy who provokes Athos's curiosity. The boy is always wearing a straw hat while smiling mysteriously. When eventually, Athos finds himself alone in the room with the boy, the boy smiles and then removes his hat and a shock wave of dark hair tumbles down revealing the image of a girl. In The Conformist this image is echoed in the seduction scene of the child Marcello by Lino, the chauffeur. Lino first shows Marcello his pistol and then takes off his uniform cap allowing his raven-black hair to tumble down to his shoulders. “Kill Madame Butterfly” Lino orders Marcello. The juxtaposition of the hard/phallic/Fascist symbol of the pistol with the soft/feminine/exotic Otherness of the luxurious kimono and the long silky hair, creates a disturbing poetic image of sexual ambiguity that anticipates the seductive Orientalism of Ar Mo in The Last Emperor (“She is not my wet-nurse! She is my butterfly!” Pu Yi cries after Ar Mo is expelled from the Forbidden City after the incestuous suckling scene). The Conformist's poetics of sexual indeterminacy is expressed through the doubling process and the symmetrical configuration of the characters, as well as through the bisexual inclinations of the protagonists of both sexes (see chapter 2).

In Tango, both Maria Schneider and Brando were selected, partially, due to what Bertolucci saw as their ambivalent sexual identity. One reason Bertolucci chose Schneider (although his first choice was Dominique Sanda, who could not accept because she was pregnant) was his perception of her androgynous quality (and perhaps her alleged bisexuality in real life). Bertolucci was impressed by her feminine upper part and her more masculine lower parts. This choice underscored his longstanding obsession with bisexuality and also matched the androgynous quality that some perceive as peculiar to Brando's grand machismo beauty. The sexy Jeanne exhibits masculine traits as well. She is wearing a mannish suit when she and Paul first meet in the real world on the Paris streets. When she kills Paul with the phallic pistol of her dead father, the colonel, she is wearing her masculine-fashion jacket. It is worth mentioning here that Ingmar Bergman said Tango would have been a much more truthful film had the Jeanne/Maria Schneider role been played by a boy.

In 1900 the homosexual motif is manifested through the twinning/doubling motif of Olmo and Alfredo. There, however, it is immersed with Bertolucci's disturbing view of the working class as the embodiment of virility. This view is inspired by Pasolini and reveals an affinity with Fassbinder to whom Bertolucci feels very close.³ In one of the scenes in 1900 Olmo (Gerard Depardieu), the share-cropper's son, and Alfredo (Robert De Niro), son of the landowner, compare the size of their penises, and Olmo jokingly notes that his is longer because he's a socialist. In The Sheltering Sky, super-virility is attributed to Belqassim, the Other from the Third World. This attribution assumes a visual representation in the set, which was erected as to show a Western fantasized image of Belqassim's harem. In the center of the set a towerlike construction looks like an erect penis, recalling Pasolini's mythic sets for the movies Oedipus Rex and Medea which were shot in North Africa and used Third World natives as extras.

In Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man there are several vivid images of sexual indeterminacy.⁴ One of them occurs when the camera, through an extremely tight close-up of Laura's feminine lips, reveals a small moustache. The extreme close-up has no apparent motivation other than to reveal to the spectator the “blemish” in Laura's otherwise pretty face. There is also a scene in which two maids in Primo's household are dancing together to the sounds of rock music. One is a full, older woman and the other is a young and slim tomboy type. The spectator discovers that the young girl is a woman only after the camera approaches her bosom. The image of the two dancing women recalls the seductive tango performed by Anna and Guilia in The Conformist. But here, sexual liberation is the domain of the working class (associated with the low form of rock music), and not the dubious privilege of the decadent bourgeoisie (associated with the tango) as in The Conformist. In The Last Emperor although Pu Yi's homosexuality is never explicitly expressed in the movie, Bertolucci hints at it by presenting Lone's face in ways which emphasize its androgynous qualities. The eunuchs, representing the artificial third sex (see chapter 4) in Emperor, push sexual ambiguity into its grotesque limits. They are portrayed by Bertolucci as repulsive creatures and their sexual ambiguity is neither seductive nor sexually attractive.

In The Sheltering Sky, the image of bisexuality resonates in the image of a young, always laughing girl/boy in the Tuareg caravan to whom Kit gives her Panama (colonial) hat, and who resembles the boy/girl in Stratagem. Here sexual ambiguity is associated, as in Stratagem and The Conformist, with the symbol of the hat and its masking connotation. The hat veiling and unveiling the hair alludes to pubic hair, which veils the sexual marks of difference. Kit herself is veiled as a boy so that, paradoxically, both she and Belqassim can enjoy heterosexual relationship. There are also well disguised suggestions in the movie regarding Port's homosexual inclinations. The film, particularly in the beginning, creates an expectation that Port will have an affair with Tunner or with a local Arab boy. Port's soft voice and sometimes his body language seem to invite homosexual relationships. Some of the shots in which he is seen from behind, and others in which he is seen with the repulsive Erick—as well as shots showing him approaching Arabs—provoke homosexual associations. Another image of sexual ambiguity is associated with the veiled Belqassim. When we first see his eyes under the veil we, presumably like Kit, are not sure of his sexual identity. The scene that deconstructs all The Sheltering Sky's sexual ambiguity occurs when the Arab whore pushes a breast into Port's open fly. This image fuses the sexual markers of the opposite sexes.

SEXUAL INDETERMINACY AND THE PROMISE OF SEXUAL LIBERATION

Bertolucci's openness to the bisexual aspect of human sexuality seems to suggest, if not feminist convictions, then at least sensitivity to the concept, suggested by bisexuality, of a truly liberated human sexuality. Yet, as Barbara Creed observes, the increasing emphasis on the androgynous figure in popular culture and the woman/man in the cinema is neither new nor necessarily progressive. On the contrary, “this postmodern fascination with the androgyne and the ‘neuter’ subject may indicate desire not to address problems associated with the specificities of the oppressive gender roles of patriarchal society, particularly those constructed for women.”⁵

Bertolucci is perhaps a good reinforcement of Creed's suggestion. He has often been accused by feminists of conveying anti-women sentiments in his work.⁶ This judgment is particularly evident in many feminist critiques of Tango. Bertolucci said in one of the interviews he gave after the phenomenal succès de scandale of Tango: “I like feminist women watching Tango. They have a primary reaction to this film—that because of the fact that Maria undergoes acts of violence it is therefore an anti-feminist film. That's much too primary a reaction for me.” In the same interview he also said that: “It is not a male chauvinist film. That's too simplistic. It is a film about.” And he added: “The movie is an accelerated course in Wilhelm Reich. … To make moral judgements is not interesting.” Perhaps his most revealing remark in this interview is that “for men this movie is a more traumatic experience than for women” because “the men feel their virility challenged. Marlon takes great risks, and they identify with this.”⁷ Yet, despite Bertolucci's apologetic discourse, one cannot ignore the disturbing acts of sexual and verbal abuse committed against the character of Jeanne, as well as the representation of the Paul character as the sole bearer of suffering and social anger. The larger than life figure of the Paul character, and the tragic proportions of his agony, overshadow the petit-bourgeois concerns of the Jeanne character. The speech delivered by Paul sitting near the coffin of his dead wife, more than anything else fixes the notion of femininity as enigma, if not treachery, against the world of men. The authenticity attributed to Paul's search for pure sexuality denies Jeanne's subjectivity by embodying male fantasy, which ignores the humanity of the fantasized other.

Tango, Bertolucci's most controversial and disturbing film primarily because of its treatment of sexuality, violence, and death, is perhaps the director's most problematic film from a feminist point of view. In the second chapter I suggest that Tango be read as both a regressive and a progressive text that follows Marcuse's radical reading of Freud's analysis of perversions as the foundation of a better civilization based upon the pleasure principle. Aitken, to cite another example of a critic offering a favorable feminist reading of Tango, claims that the first intercourse between Paul and Jeanne inacts “the prototypical heterosexual male fantasy—pure lusty fucks, no encumbering attachments.” But he adds that the fact that this relationship ultimately fails, “in fact proves fatal for Paul, seemed to indicate that Bertolucci was saying this sort of macho fantasy was over, impossible.”⁸

Another disturbing aspect of Tango from a feminist point of view is the complete absence from view of Brando's penis, or even partial nakedness. Only in the last tango scene does he mockingly expose his buttocks to the shocked bourgeois audience in a gesture that ridicules the tango as a metaphor for heterosexual relationship and bourgeois respectability by suggesting anality and latent homosexuality. The historic absence of the penis in cinema is a well-known phenomenon and it has allowed, as Chris Straayer suggests, “the male body an independence from sexual anatomical verification.”⁹ When male sexuality is symbolized as the phallus, “power displaces sexuality rather than delivers it.”¹⁰ The displacement of the penis by phallic tyranny is most evident in Tango where Jeanne is asked to worship the phallus and the spectator is asked to admire Paul's transgression of social norms through his incestuous, Oedipal relations with Jeanne. In many interviews Bertolucci has admitted that he identified with Brando to such an extent that he could not show him naked in the final version. “It is also possible that I had so identified myself with Brando, that I cut it out of shame for myself. To show him naked would have been like showing myself naked.”¹¹

In The Sheltering Sky, however, we see Port's penis. Until his penis is revealed, it is difficult to determine if the visible lower parts belong to a man or a woman. The interesting thing about this shot is that the penis is not erect, a rare phenomenon in cinema. Whereas the absence of the penis in Tango only glorifies Paul's machismo, its presence in The Sheltering Sky exposes the problematic status of the phallus. It also alludes to the intratextual relationship between Tango and The Sheltering Sky discovered by Bertolucci, as he confessed to me, during an analysis only after he finished filming the latter.¹² In one of the shots of the dying Port in the room (which recalls the empty apartment of Tango) Port is seen wearing a T-shirt alluding to the famous Kowalski's T-shirt worn by Brando in Tango. Even some of the angles from which Port's face is shot during this agonizing scene (his face is seen from a high angle and from behind as if reversed) recall close-ups of Brando's face in Tango. The emphasis on male suffering locates the fictional situation of both films within an existentialist framework that assigns grandeur to male agony.

The representation of the Jeanne character in Tango is particularly difficult. The tragic greatness of Paul vis-à-vis Jeanne's petit-bourgeois worldview is, in a way, a reproduction of the imbalance in the two actors' star status levels. The utilization of Schneider, at that time an unknown actress (although the illegitimate daughter of a relatively famous French actor, Daniel Gelin), only emphasizes Brando's stardom. The collision of international star and anonymous actress created an intriguing yet problematic interaction. The curious thing about the characterization of Jeanne is that Bertolucci inverted Schneider's off-screen image as a young rebel. In Tango she plays the role of the French petite bourgeoise who submits herself to the American rebel. Bertolucci also selected Schneider, apparently, because he was impressed with her free attitude toward nakedness. Yet in Tango he preferred to invest her character with sexual submission and that of Brando with rebelliousness.

The investment of the Brando's character with the grandeur of the rebel is linked to his utilization as an icon of Hollywood cinema. “Why this fascination with the forties?” Tom asks Jeanne. She answers, “Because it's easier to love something that doesn't affect us too directly … something which keeps a certain distance … like you with your camera.”¹³ The cinematic allusions are clear. Jeanne's answer seems to express Bertolucci's own nostalgic fascination with the movies of the 1940s. Her explanation seems to be his. Jeanne appears at the beginning in a 1940s coat, flowered hat, and modern mini skirt. She appears as the combination of old and new. She is young and identified with pop art, but at the same time she has a special inclination for the old. Jeanne likes to collect antiques that once were revolutionary, because that makes her feel revolutionary. The allusion to Brando is obvious. Jeanne loves Paul/Brando although he is old (significantly, Paul is forty-five in the movie), because he once was a true revolutionary (Brando's movies from the 1950s are a rebellion against the 1940s) and because even in the present he remains an anachronistic but romantic “revolutionary” type. Brando's romantic image is what attracts Jeanne as well as Bertolucci to him. Tom, on the other hand, is the contemporary Godardian revolutionary who is disgusted by old things despite their revolutionary past:

I don't have to think twice to choose between an antique house and a clean, clear room. You'll see … few pieces of furniture … glass and chrome … light even in the objects, everything new … new things. You are like a film with a technical error. The sound doesn't synchronize with the visuals. We listen to you talking of old dusty things while we see your clean, healthy, modern appearance.¹⁴

As a representative of the New Wave and its radical conversion in Godard's cinema, Tom expresses a childish zeal for everything that is new, thus reminding us of Jacques's (Godard's alter-ego in Tout va bien) quest for new forms for his revolutionary cinema.

Freudian psychoanalysis provides additional layers of signification for Jeanne's obsession with old things. Her Oedipal fixation on her father, the colonel with the green eyes and the shining boots (which still give her mother “strange shivers”),¹⁵ motivates the narrative progression in Tango. Jeanne, who is defined by Paul as an old-fashioned girl, kills him, finally, with an old-fashioned phallic pistol that belonged to her father, while Paul mockingly wears the colonel's hat. By killing Paul, Jeanne “has also killed the cinematic fantasies which provide identity for all Bertolucci's generation.”¹⁶ When Paul offers to marry her it means that the past becomes entirely real and that means “it can no longer provide a vital myth for the present.”¹⁷ When the romantic rebel image of Paul/Brando is broken, he cannot be accepted any more. His existence is justified only by his being the epitome of the Hollywood star as rebel hero.

In the beginning scene, Brando, like Schneider, is dressed in a half modern, half old-fashioned manner. Under his elegant 1940s coat, he wears the Kowalski's T-shirt, his on- and off-screen rebel symbol. The semi-rape scene in Tango is an echo of the rape scene in Streetcar Named Desire (1951), the movie adaptation of Tennessee Williams's steamy play which established Brando as Stanley Kowalski as rebel anti-hero associated with class consciousness. We continue to see Kowalski's T-shirt in the following scenes. This shirt, we should remember, was a powerful erotic image in the 1950s. Like the blue jeans and the leather jacket (which Brando as Johnny, a leader of the Blind Rebels Motorcycle Club, wears in The Wild One), to young audiences the T-shirt meant freedom, danger, defiance of authority, and refusal to conform to all established rules including the rigid sexual taboos of the time. Brando, whose roles in the 1950s established him as the rebel against the sexual repression intrinsic to the ideology of romance as elaborated by the movies of the 1940s, was therefore a natural choice for Bertolucci who, in Tango, launches an attack on the self-consuming discourse of romance.

Brando's Method acting during the 1950s also signified a rebellion—in this case against the dead expression typical of the acting style of the 1940s. Brando's relaxed postures, as opposed to the rigidity of the 1940s, represent his anti-Hollywood rebellion. In Tango the opposition of rigidity and free-spirited behavior is symbolically alluded to during the tango sequence. In this scene, Brando, dressed in the style of the great lovers of classical Hollywood cinema, is making fun of the very code he is supposed to obey. Not only does he disrupt and mock the ritualized movements of the dance, he also commits the ultimate gesture of assault on bourgeois/Hollywood respectability, baring his backside to the shocked dancers/spectators. Another facet of Brando's sexual rebelliousness during the 1950s was his tendency to play roles involving sado-masochism, a tendency fully realized by Bertolucci who moves him in Tango through a process of percorso (see chapter 2). Brando's play on the tension between sensitivity and brutality (a typical Hollywood strategy) is also exploited by Bertolucci's use of the American actor as the living rebel icon of the 1950s.

Significantly, in the last three scenes he is wearing an elegant suit. This is also “the first time they are together outside their island. It is their first contact with reality.”¹⁸ This is also the first time that Paul confesses his love and proposes marriage to Jeanne. Talking in bourgeois terms, he seems to break up his rebel image. But by the act of exposing his buttocks on the dance floor, Brando reminds us again that he is the eternal rebel, the last romantic cinema idol, “the essentially naive outsider, the romantic who is not a match for a French bourgeois girl.”¹⁹ Thus Brando's on-screen image as a rebel is preserved. He is metaphorically destroyed, but his screen image is revived. To reiterate this notion, he dies, curled in a fetal position.²⁰ The image is a quotation from Brando's death in Viva Zapata, where his role as the “essential revolutionary” established him as a hero for Bertolucci.

Whereas the main triangle in Tango retains Hollywood conventions of rivalry (weak male versus strong one), the secondary triangle is a sheer parody of the cinematic norm. We see Paul and Rosa's lover Marcel, sitting in identical red plaid bathrobes given them by Rosa, drinking the bourbon she gave her lover in emulation of her relationship with Marcel, Paul says to himself, in English, after leaving Marcel's room, “I can't understand what she saw in you.” The irony is that in her lover she saw Paul. She tried to make her lover a double of Paul.

This is a reversal of the Hollywood convention of rivalry according to which rivals are supposed to be opposites, and certainly not doubles. The parody is intensified by the atmosphere of the scene. Instead of an outburst of envy and hatred between the husband and the lover, we see a very friendly conversation between two ridiculous middle-aged men. Their discussion also centers around problems typical of middle-aged men, such as being overweight and losing hair. Perhaps it is the first scene in which Brando is shown not as a romantic idol, but as a real person, a human being who is even a little bit ridiculous. He is no more the legendary sexual animal, but an aging man concerned about losing his hair and getting fat, which reminds the spectator of the real problems of the aging Brando and re-emphasizes the question of where Paul ends, where Brando starts, and vice versa.

Paul becomes, despite his efforts to create a new symbolic order, the double of his own padre, a supermasculine figure who epitomizes the oppression of a phallic-centered culture. He also becomes symbolic of Jeanne's father, the ultimate symbol of Fascist oppression (he was a racist colonel who died in the Algerian war). Thus Paul becomes the double of two fathers who are themselves two ghost doubles united by the oppression/repression they inflict on their children (Jeanne and Paul). Despite Bertolucci's identification with the macho figure of Paul, his poetics of sexual indeterminacy complicates an explicit feminist critique of the movie. As much as Paul's character is a culmination of machoism it is also vivid evidence of the failure of macho fantasies.

WOMEN AND THE CRITIQUE OF THE BOURGEOISIE

Luna is the only Bertolucci film introducing a woman as a protagonist. It is about a widowed opera singer who goes to Rome for a summer engagement accompanied by her fifteen-year-old son. She discovers that her son is a drug addict and has a physical interest in her. Her response is animalistic, and she provokes her son to have intercourse with her. Bertolucci said that his inspiration for Luna was developed from the first memory he had of his mother. “I was 15 months or 2 years old. I was in the basket of a bicycle. I was looking up at my mother riding the bicycle, the moon behind her, and in my eyes confused the young face of my mother and the old face of the moon. I started from that memory and it became a story of a relationship between a mother and a son.”²¹

The association of the mother and the feminine with the moon will be reinvoked in The Sheltering Sky when Kit's destiny after Port's death is controlled by the moon, the mythic symbol of the feminine. It is quite significant that in Bertolucci's only two films in which the protagonist is a woman (Kit is the sole protagonist of the second part of The Sheltering Sky, beginning with Port's death) women are explicitly associated with the moon. When Kit leaves the room after Port's death there is a spectacular shot of a moon in a dark blue sky (one might even find here a resonance to the corny images of the moon in Godard's Hail Mary) and from that moment on Kit is under the sign of the moon. This point was made clear by Storaro himself.

The Sheltering Sky is a recounting of a journey in the lives of two characters, Port and Kit. The first part of the tale belongs to Port, the dominant one, the sun. The second part of the story belongs to Kit, the more submissive of the two, the moon. The fact that the story is set in Africa makes those two natural symbols of light, the sun and the moon, all the more important and the more difficult to ignore. At the beginning of the film it is day and Port is at the height of his powers. Kit is almost invisible, much the way the moon is when in the sky at the same time as the sun. But as Port sickens, the sun is going down. When he dies, it is nightfall. As Kit is left alone in an alien land, her moon begins to rise. It becomes her story. The journey of their lives parallels the journey of the sun and the moon. The sun, of course, represents the hot colours, the masculine colours, the reds and the oranges. The moon reflects the cooler colours, the indigos and the blues. Perhaps it is significant that as a couple, they only come to terms with their relationship as they sit and watch the sun go down, over a vast plain, at the time when the two lights pass each other. It is only then that they find their truth.²²

Indeed the red/blue color scheme that dominates The Last Emperor's dialectic of enlightenment is repeated in The Sheltering Sky, which bathes its interiors (the hotels' rooms and the room where Port dies) in yellow/red colors and its exterior scenes in the desert when Kit is wandering with the Tuaregs caravan in blue. Kit is not only under the sign of the moon and the dark blue of the desert night, but the color of her blue eyes (unlike the dark brown color of Jane Bowles's eyes) is made even more salient by her blue clothes (the blue robe in the scene in the first hotel, the blue indigo turban, and finally the light blue dress and the blue sweater she is wearing after being saved and brought back to civilization). Thus, Kit's madness is portrayed as her inevitable destiny as a woman. The moon (itself the mythic symbol of the feminine element as well as the symbol of femininity in Bertolucci's private family mythology) is presented within the film's economy as being responsible for Kit's madness, i.e., for her dubious sexual liberation by the Other and her eventual hospitalization by the representatives of civilization. The moon, femininity, and madness, thus, are interwoven in accordance with an essentialist view regarding the true nature of woman.

The Sheltering Sky opens with an image of the strong and dynamic woman embodied through the famous energy of Debra Winger. In the beginning of the movie, when Kit, Port, and Tunner sit in the station, Kit reads aloud from a newspaper (with an ironic intonation) that the Italians gave the right of vote to women. Yet, in the second part of the film beginning with Port's death, Kit, being under the influence of the moon, becomes a submissive woman whose existence centers solely around her emanicipatory sex with Belqassim. Her self breaks and dissolves after the sexual adventure is over and her story ends in madness. The dissolution of Kit's image of a strong woman begins in fact with the scene of Port's dying in the room. There, Kit is assigned the traditional maternal function of providing a nurturing environment for her man. She feeds Port with hot milk in a simulation of the idealized suckling mother of the oral stage.

It is rather interesting to note here that both Tango and The Sheltering Sky attempt to liberate their protagonists through sex and the rejection of language as a form of human communication. In Tango the negation of language (the “law of the father”) fails and results in Paul's death. In The Sheltering Sky, the communication between Kit and Belqassim is purely carnal and devoid of any verbal or linguistic articulation. Eventually, as in Tango, this effort at achieving an articulate body language also fails.

In Tango, as in The Conformist, women are presented as mediocre, and their petit-bourgeois concerns are ridiculed relative to male existential angst. Marcello contemptuously describes Guilia to the priest during his confession as “petita borghesa” who is “all bed and kitchen.” Yet as Mellen suggests, this view of women can be read differently.

Perhaps taking cues from the actual history of fascism, with its suppression of the rights of women (a correlative to the latent or overt homosexuality of its men) Bertolucci, Visconti, and Petri reveal women under fascism to be either mainly promiscuous whores (Anna in Il conformista, Agusta in Investigation, Draifa in Spider's Stratagem) or “all bed and kitchen,” like Guilia, the mindless girl Clerici marries in his campaign not to be different. “To be normal is to turn to look at the ass of a pretty girl, see that others have done the same, and be pleased,” says Clerici's best friend, the blind Italo—speaking Clerici's thoughts.²³

Mellen's view suggests indeed a reading of what seems to be Bertolucci's view of women's inferiority as a critique of the Fascist view of women as sexual servants and procreation organisms. This recalls of course Bertolucci's insistence on reading Tango as about male chauvinism rather than as an expression of it. Yet one cannot ignore the impression that against the rebellious male protagonists in Bertolucci's films women are dwarfed by, if not indirectly blamed for, restricting their men's freedom. Women in Bertolucci's movies (with the exception of 1900) do not have any intellectual interests, they live by animalistic instincts and for sensual pleasure. It is for the Bertoluccian male to suffer at length, and to prolong his suffering through conscious intellectualization of his problems.

The critique of the bourgeoisie in Bertolucci's cinema is immersed with anti-women sentiments correlating to the same strains in Fascist thought. Bertolucci's view of women as the locus of repressive bourgeois ideology is nowhere more evident than in the sodomizing scene in Tango in which the punished female body, as Lynda K. Bundtzen observes, becomes “a pathetic vessel of patriarchal and bourgeois values, a hiding place for ‘family jewels.’”²⁴ The difficulty in criticizing Bertolucci on this issue derives from the fact that this very strategy of sexual indeterminacy is projected to the sphere of sexual politics. Is Bertolucci's depiction of women part of his critique of the Fascist and patriarchal orders? As such is it reflective of dominant patterns of thought in these orders? Or is it an unproblematized mediation of women as seen by him?

SPIDER WOMEN

There are two types of women in Bertolucci's movies: the domestic type, the petit-bourgeois, such as Guilia, or Celia in Before the Revolution, and Jeanne in Last Tango; and the destructive, neurotic, decadent type such as Marcello's mother, Anna in The Conformist,²⁵ the incestuous aunt Gina, in Before the Revolution, and Caterina, the seductive incestuous mother in Luna. Bertolucci's preoccupation with the surrealist theme of amour fou is joined with the myth of the spider woman, who resembles a destructive femme fatale borrowed from the misogynist tradition of film noir.

Kolker says on Draifa that she “may be the black widow of The Spider's Stratagem.”²⁶ Tara, in Stratagem, as Kline observes, is composed of “the first two syllables of the most dreaded of spiders.”²⁷ When Athos junior insults Draifa's sexual prowess, she winds him “into a medical sarape, spinning him around and around, in a gesture that recalls both the action of a reel of film being embobine and a spider mummifying and embalming its prey.”²⁸ In The Conformist the private tango between Anna and Guilia becomes a seductive spider's web that encircles the stiff Marcello. In Luna, Joe as a baby is trapped by a ribbon while his mother and father are dancing. Furthermore, Alida Valli (who plays Draifa in The Spider's Stratagem) plays in Luna the role of Giuseppe's (Joe's father) mother who gets trapped in her own knitting, recalling her spinning of Athos with a medical sarape in Stratagem. Bertolucci, in one of his most famous and quoted interviews said:

In nature it is usually the female that devours. Genetically, over the centuries, some males have understood her mechanisms, have understood the danger. Some spiders just approach the female, but stay within safe distance. Exciting themselves with her smell, they masturbate, collect their sperm in their mouth and wait to regain strength after orgasm. Because that is how they get devoured, when they are weak after ejaculation. Later, they inseminate the female with a minimal approach and thus she cannot attack them in the moment of their weakness. … What can develop (between a man and a woman) is only possessiveness … the destruction of the loved object.²⁹

One cannot avoid comparing Bertolucci's reflection on this biological phenomenon with Simone de Beauvoir's. For de Beauvoir, this phenomenon “has crystallized the myth of the devouring femininity” and foreshadows “a feminine dream of castration.” These biological facts, she emphasizes, create “a proclamation of the ‘battle of the sexes’ which sets individuals, as such, one against another.”³⁰ Freud himself in his famous article “Femininity” gives the spiders as an example “that in some classes of animals the females are the stronger and more aggressive and the male is active only in the single act of sexual union.”³¹

METAPHORS OF SEXUAL REPRESSION/POLITICAL OPPRESSION

Bertolucci's consistent preoccupation with the motifs of sexual repression/political oppression, dance, incest, the Oedipal complex, sexual ambiguity, and anal metaphors contain the promise of liberated as well as liberating discourse. Hence, for example, dance sequences in his films have been interpreted as privileged moments of sexual and political liberation³² and the incest motif as a metaphor for social transgression. Bertolucci himself acknowledged that his depiction of the incest in Luna “was supposed to serve as a kind of commentary on the decadence of modern society and the failure of the family as an institution to provide either solace or support.” The reason Caterina and Joe “go so far in the movie,” he said, “is a response to that destruction of values by society. They try to recreate a value even if it is painful. Their act is transgressive—subversive in a way. But through this traumatic experience they go toward a better life. I think there is a political gesture of hope at the end.”³³

Anality and sodomy are used by Bertolucci as metaphors for the exploitative, consumerist capitalist society. Yet, the repeated acts of violent sodomy and anal sex forced upon the female figures in his films (and also in Godard's) make it questionable whether these acts can be taken as legitimate symbols of reification of social conditions under Capitalism. The anal motif so pervasive in Bertolucci's cinema is frequently used as a metaphor for the social relations under capitalism (see chapter 2). Perversions, on the other hand, are used ambivalently both as a promise of liberation and as a sign of decadence and degradation (as in 1900). Yet the emancipating potential of the incest metaphor, to cite one example, is never fully realized. In Before the Revolution, as Aitken observes: “The replacement of Agostino by his aunt, Gina, the substitution of one taboo for another—a sort of homosexuality by a sort of incest—ultimately leads Fabrizio, in his quest for an unremarkable life, to ditch Gina and marry a respectable bourgeoisie.”³⁴

There is, then, some ambivalence in Bertolucci's treatment of incest and homosexuality. On the one hand they are presented (as in Tango) as manifesting a rebellion, and challenging bourgeois notions of propriety. In particular they attack the family as the nexus of civilized repression and political oppression imposed on the individual by the capitalist system. On the other hand, as in The Conformist, homosexuality and incest are presented as symptoms of bourgeois decadence regardless of actual political inclinations. Therefore both the Fascist Marcello and the anti-Fascist Anna are found guilty of decadence by Bertolucci.

In many of Bertolucci's movies, his heroes have been involved with women much older than themselves. In Tango this pattern is reversed. In Partner, however, Giacobbe is narcissistically in love with his double. The persistent search for the father in Bertolucci's cinema with its Oedipal overtones is in fact a search for the ultimate tutor. All the tutors (except for Anita, the teacher in 1900) are males. Usually these tutor figures are unmarried or not presented in a family context. In Before the Revolution, at their final meeting, Fabrizio offers to take Agostino to visit his mentor, an older unmarried man, Professor Cesare (who on the film's self-reflexive level alludes to Cesare Zavattini). It is finally Gina and not Agostino whom Fabrizio takes to meet Professor Cesare. And it is here that Fabrizio and Gina read to each other from Oscar Wilde. “This Socratic relationship—older man teaching impressionable youth—runs in an ambiguous refrain from Before the Revolution to The Conformist and gets intermingled with another strain—murder of the father by the son.”³⁵The Conformist like all of Bertolucci's movies is about the quest for the father, the absent patriarch. In The Conformist the Fascist state functions as a father-substitute. Quadri, as a potential spiritual father, is not good enough for Marcello. He is married to a lesbian and presumably derives pleasure from watching her engaged in homosexual acts with other women. The relationship between the Oedipal complex and the tutor motif reaches its climax in The Last Emperor (see chapter 4).

ETHNO-PORNO: FROM “MAMA-CHINA” TO “MAMA-AFRICA”

Bertolucci's quest in The Last Emperor and The Sheltering Sky for the non-Western Other involves as well a quest for another sexuality. Indeed, the two quests are one and the same in the sense that the allure of the Other is, presumably, grounded in his/her promise of different sexuality. In The Last Emperor (see chapter 4) racial otherness is homologous with sexual otherness. Yet, the film represents a fantasy of sexual otherness located within the boundaries of one race (the Chinese) and one class (the Imperial court). The most memorable erotic scene in the film is the suckling scene which foregrounds other sexuality by exploiting and exoticizing racial difference and geographical otherness. The location of Ar Mo in the center of the frame and the fondling and suckling of her breast by Pu Yi entrap the spectator not only because of the visual seductiveness and the voluptuous esthetics of the shot but, also because its composition frames a boundary of pleasure between spectacle and excess.

In the center of the frame are Ar Mo and the twelve-year-old Pu Yi. In the background the concubines are on boats sailing among exotic floating flowers and watching the scene with binoculars. On the right side of Pu Yi the camera reveals his younger brother Pu Chi eating his meal, a regular, normal nourishment. The spectator who looks at Ar Mo as an incestuous object of desire becomes complicit in Pu Yi's and Ar Mo's perversion, hence becoming as well a participant in the perverse pleasure of cinema itself. Moreover, the camera demands that the spectator participate in the concubines' voyeurism and in the mute but seeing presence of Pu Chi, who establishes the normative rules of child behavior by eating a regular meal.

The fetishization of Ar Mo as well as Pu Yi's regression to infantile orality become, to use Julia Kristeva's words, “metaphors of non-speech, of a ‘semiotics’ that linguistic communication does not account for.”³⁶ This type of fetishization also occurs both in the ménage à trois scene between Pu Yi and his two wives, and in the scene between the woman pilot, Eastern Jewel, and Pu Yi's first wife. There fetishization is carried even further, culminating in the punishment of the deviant wife and her expulsion from history and the narrative alike.

In The Sheltering Sky, on the other hand, sexual and racial boundaries are transgressed in the form of inter-racial erotica. Whereas in The Last Emperor's regime of desire the only imagized/eroticized bodies are the fantasized bodies of the Chinese Other, in The Sheltering Sky the protagonists' sexual encounters break racial and ethnic taboos. Nevertheless, Bertolucci's sexual politics do not transgress Western ethnocentrism. The American married couple Kit and Port Moresby are trying to resolve marital problems through a travel expedition through North Africa. Both of them have sexual encounters with natives. Port has an encounter with an Arab prostitute and Kit lives out a voluptuous affair with Belquassim, a Tuareg tribal chief. The film's narrative focalization is the white couple; the natives (Arabs, Africans, and Tuaregs) are used as an ethnic backdrop aimed at magnifying and sanctifying white angst.

A deconstruction of the design of the major sexual encounters in The Sheltering Sky reveals that Bertolucci's sexual politics in this movie are heavily laced with traces of colonial discourse.³⁷ Port has a one-night stand with a Moroccan prostitute. Thus, her character is colonized twice: once as a subject of a colonized country under the French Protectorate and second as a prostitute whose body has been colonized by her pimp and clients. By contrast, Kit becomes the lover of a free subject. Tuareg nomadic culture resisted the Arab influence of the Islamic crusades and the attempts of the French colonization of the Magrheb. Furthermore, Belquassim is the chief of a Tuareg tribe; his status as a young Sahara desert prince counterbalances, to some extent, the inferiority implied by his racial difference.

Whereas the prime region of erotic interest for Port in the Moroccan prostitute's body is her full-breasted torso, Belquassim's sexual interest seems to concentrate on Kit's lower parts with an inclination towards foot fetishism (which is evident also in scenes in The Conformist and The Last Emperor, representing lesbianism). Port and the prostitute engage in phallic-mammal contact leading to Port's orgasm. The prostitute is the active partner in this encounter taking the responsibility for the seduction. She recites Arab love songs to Port with a soothing, musical voice. Like an infant who is reassured by a mother's voice, Port is shown with his head comfortably rested in the woman's full bosom. This pre-Oedipal, pre-genitally organized sexuality does not put any demands on Port's active virility, but expresses, rather, a regressive childish longing to refuse with the mother's body and thereby achieve an orgasm which means death.³⁸ In The Sheltering Sky, Port's desire to escape the fate of the American “lost generation” through fusion with Mother-Nature (“Mama-Africa”) epitomized by the African continent (the origin of humanity according to current scientific thinking) indeed ends with his actual death.

It is worth noting in this context that the whole situation of prostitution is disguised in the film as a display of Oriental hospitality in which—according to the dictates of Arab tradition—tea is served to the guests. This disavowal of prostitution is perpetuated by the fact that no monetary payment is overtly transacted. The stealing of Port's wallet by the prostitute appears almost as a continuation of the disavowal of the act of selling which is taking place in this scene. However, as the prostitute cuddles Port to her bosom, Port takes back his wallet, thereby stealing in his turn, the sexual services he has been provided with. The spectator is put in an uneasy position in which identification oscillates between the exploited Western tourist and the exploited prostitute. When Port shows the wallet to the angry prostitute as he leaves the tent, his face expresses a greater satisfaction than it did during the sexual act itself, thus underlying the social vulnerability and exploitability of the humiliated Arab prostitute.

For a French audience familiar with the history of French colonialism in North Africa, the whole scene can be read as an allegory on French colonialism. Bertolucci, however, utilizes the pornographic potential of the cinema to comment on the exploitative nature of all colonial relations. Hence, Port's return home from a prostitute to the waiting Kit is not perceived as adultery. Rather, it points to the recourse of Port, as the traveler who explores the sexuality of the exotic other, to another sexual regime.

Bertolucci's poetics of sexual indeterminacy in The Sheltering Sky subliminally suggests an ethno-porno iconography. Kit's mimicry (her disguise as a Tuareg boy) allows her to enter Tuareg society. In the private chamber where she is kept confined, both sexual partners unwrap the traditional male Indigo turban. Kit by now has been transvested, her skin blackened. All this camouflage occurs so that Belquassin can enjoy her being sexually other (female) and racially different (white). The ritualistic, worshipping manner in which the African sexual partner tenderly undresses and reverently wipes the desert dust off Kit's body conjures forth an image of the American partner as a sex goddess rather than a sexual slave. Kit's cage/castle provides the couple, temporarily, with an intimate isolation free of the colonial outside world with its racial segregation. However, like in Bertolucci's Tango, the moment the door of this artificially constructed private space opens to the public space marked by racial separation, the couple's private Eden collapses. This recalls Albert Memmi's comment about the illusions of exogamy: there is no space free of socio-cultural contingencies.³⁹ It should also be stressed that, to put it provocatively, the fact that Belquassim does not look like the “Orangoutan husband of the Hottentot female”⁴⁰ but is stunningly beautiful and delicate, fetishistically assuages the transgression that traverses the text. Indeed, fetishism structures the whole scene that gives back to Kit her white skin and racial supremacy.

The potentially anxiety-inducing idea regarding contact between black manhood and white womanhood is soothed in the film by giving the Western partner an ego-reinforcing focus. Only the white male enjoys orgasm (as in the encounter between Port and the Moroccan woman) and the spectator is kept ignorant about the black male's subjectivity. Is he ravished by the delights of sexual difference, or by the discovery of Kit's white skin? Furthermore, Bertolucci's mise en scène reproduces cultural codes of mastery and submission taken from popular erotica, thereby establishing white racial supremacy. This is most notable in the scene in the private chamber in which Kit is standing on the bed while Belquassim, sitting and kneeling, performs oral intercourse with her.

Both Kit's and Port's respective encounters with the exotic Other lead to sexual practices quite rare in mainstream cinema. Those practices allow the Western man to be nurtured without a display of virility, and permit the Western white woman to enjoy sexuality without phallic penetration. A feminist reading would gladly welcome this less phallocentric representation of human sexuality. However, the fact that, unwittingly or not, this reduction in phallocracy requires the recourse to an exotic Other as a flight from Western alienation is disturbing.

Bertolucci, just like Bowles four decades earlier, is a kind of “colonial traveler” in Said's sense of “displaced percipient.”⁴¹ Said describes colonial texts as “encapsulations” of the encounters between Europe and “primitivity” where a “vascillation” between the foreign and the familiar occurs. In The Sheltering Sky Port experiences precisely this kind of vascillation. He enjoys the delights of cultural differences as a freshly arrived American in Tangier but simultaneously disavows these differences by affixing universalist rules governing prostitution to his first North African experience (the encounter with the Moroccan woman). Homi Bhabha's analysis of colonial discourse may suggest a better insight into Bertolucci's fetishization of the Other along lines of race and sex. Bhabha reminds us that skin “unlike the sexual fetish, is not a secret, it is the most visible of fetishes which plays a public part in the racial drama which is enacted everyday in colonial societies.”⁴² In The Sheltering Sky the blackening of Kit's skin (her newly acquired sun-tan) metamorphoses the white skin of the Western female from a “visible fetish playing a public part in racial drama” into a secret fetish playing a part in private sexual drama. Not only does the scopic economy of the mise en scéne of the sexual drama enacted in the hidden room between Kit and Belquassim establish the idolization of white skin, but also the fetishistic textual regime of this scene leads to the sexualization of what Frantz Fanon refers to as the “epidermal schema.”⁴³

In the same thrust, Bhabha underlines the parallelism between sexual fetish and the fetish of colonial discourse (or of racial stereotypes). The first facilitates sexual relations (“It is the prop which makes the whole object desirable and lovable”).⁴⁴ The second facilitates colonial or inter-racial relations. In The Sheltering Sky the scene between Port and the North African young woman demonstrates how the sexual fetish (signified by the Arab woman's dazzling erotic paraphernalia) facilitates colonial relations simulating a harem-like erotica. Similarly, the erotic scenes between Kit and Belquassim illustrate how the skin, the “key signifier of cultural and racial difference,”⁴⁵ facilitates and intensifies sexual relations. Bertolucci's exploitation of racial difference through the revitalization of tired libido (Port) or the investment of libidinal excess (Kit) seems to follow a prevalent tendency of our age of postmodern post-colonialism regarding the representation of sexual/racial relations.⁴⁶ It can be argued that this trend is triggered by the epidermal fetish which (due to its visibility) offers a tremendous voyeuristic potential to the scopophilic cinematic apparatus by injecting into the sexual fetish a new vitality.

Bhabha argues that colonial discourse is characterized by the holding of multiple contradictory beliefs. Bertolucci in The Sheltering Sky cultivates countless contradictory endemic beliefs about Africa and Africans/Arabs. Africa is both convivial and hostile, hospitable and rejecting, unpolluted and fly-infested. Africans are both ravishingly winsome and grotesquely repulsive. They have healthy, sculpted bodies or degenerate, demonized ones. They are capable of gratuitous, altruistic behavior or can reveal themselves as money-hungry and easily corruptible. In short, Arab/African culture within the economy of Bertolucci's quest for the Other is both utopia and dystopia.

Films, as products of the societies that consume them, give an expression to public consciousness and ideological orientations. As a product of the early 1990s, The Sheltering Sky's latent phobia of inter-racial relations expresses Eurocentrist xenophobic fears of the Other. Questions of socio-cultural and national identity prevail in all their urgency in most countries at the outset of the 1990s. The Sheltering Sky, thus, relate to fears of First World metropolitan masses on both sides of the Atlantic, of being linguistically and culturally engulfed by unassimilable Others viewed as demographically, economically, and culturally threatening. The growing role of exile, expatriation, diaspora, and multiculturalism in the European and American urban landscape is libidinally invested in the textual and scopic organization of The Sheltering Sky in which postcolonialism is revealed both by its reproduction of racial hierarchies of the colonial order and by its nostalgic look at the “good old days of the Empire.”

CONCLUSION

Despite Bertolucci's complex and sensitive engagement with the themes of male homosexuality and bisexuality, his female characters are represented and perceived exclusively within the boundaries of the sexual domain and are never depicted as able to transcend it (unlike, for example, Susan in Tout va bien). Women are excluded from the utopian vision portrayed in most of Bertolucci's films, and the Last Emperor even goes one step further and exiles them from the narrative.

The influence of Godard on the early Bertolucci is apparent, to a certain extent, in his representation of women as well. In fact, the seeds of all of Bertolucci's films are already planted in his first feature film Before the Revolution, which is a clearly post-Godardian film. The film contains many quotations that pay homage to Godard's New Wave films. Such for example is the beginning scene of the running Fabrizio which recalls Belmondo in the final scene of Breathless—a movie that affected the young, impressionable Bertolucci enormously.⁴⁷ There are also several allusions to Godard's A Woman Is a Woman. The pick-up scene of Gina by a stranger in the street (the whole scene is voyeuristically observed by Fabrizio) is on the background of a billboard of Una donna est una donna, the Italian title of Godard's film. Later Fabrizio discusses the film with Cesare his spiritual father, the Communist tutor whose first name is the same as Cesare Zavattini's (who was also Bertolucci's father's friend). The billboard with the title of Godard's film is a sort of misogynist statement affirming that women are by definition treacherous creatures.

Bertolucci said in 1981, “When I made my first film in 1964, I considered myself more of a French director than an Italian director. I was influenced by the Nouvelle Vague and their experiments with cinema at the time.”⁴⁸Before the Revolution is an intertextual film and its plurality of shooting styles is based on a Godardian model. The film contains references not only to the New Wave Godard but also to a whole series of films from two decades of Italian neorealism.⁴⁹ The subject matter of Before the Revolution is an analysis of a segment of Italian society at a particular historical moment (Fabrizio accuses his apolitical aunt of living outside of history). Cesare, the Communist tutor, tells Fabrizio that “my education started at 45.” Before the Revolution, thus, should be understood as referring to the way this chapter in Italian history has been embedded in the Italian cinema of the twenty years preceeding its making.

As much as Godard created Anna Karina, his first wife, as a new kind of woman to represent an era, so Bertolucci created Gina (played by the actress Adriana Asti, who was his first wife) to function as Fabrizio's other/mirror. Gina is the projection of Fabrizio/Bertolucci's neuroses (the nostalgia for the present, the fear of revolution, and the repudiation of politics) as well as a mirror of a whole generation of Italian intellectuals. The character of the aunt, Gina, an alienated modern woman (associated with Michelangelo Antonioni's woman but also with Roberto Rossellini's), recalls also the Godardian woman of the New Wave period. Her haircut is very French (the Care style), recalling Godard's Luis Brooks type of woman. Gina is a cinematic composition of constructions of female types in French and Italian cinema. Her meaning is created by allusions to cinematic female types and their relationship to trends in film and society (Italian neorealism, French New Wave, Antonioni's modernism) and not by psychological depth. Gina represents the idea of the new Italian woman. She is independent of her family in Milan, the most modern and industrial city of Italy.

Fabrizio epitomizes the contradiction between the power of the bourgeois past and the felt need for the revolution to be carried out by the Communist party. Fabrizio's conflicts with the other characters, each representing another segment of Italian society, turn the film into an analytic metamovie. The major conflict between Cesare (representing the political aspect) and Gina (representing the sexual apolitical aspect) is resolved only in Bertolucci's following films which synthesize Freud with Marx. Before the Revolution is a film “before the analysis” (the beginning of Bertolucci's analysis was in 1969) in which both the political and the sexual are betrayed by the young, immature protagonist. And, indeed, the film not only identifies with Fabrizio but also criticizes him on every level. Fabrizio is criticized by both Gina and Cesare. Gina criticizes Fabrizio for capitulating to bourgeois morality while Cesare criticizes him for being incapable of acting correctly on either the personal or political level. Gina in Before the Revolution (giving voice to the reactionary position from a leftist point of view) argues with Cesare that people cannot change. To support her argument she quotes Oscar Wilde's dictum, “You can't change even one person.” In The Last Emperor, however, (which coincides with the end of Bertolucci's first analysis)⁵⁰ Bertolucci based his thesis on the belief that man can change. If we take Bertolucci as representing the authorial position of Before the Revolution, then we can take Fabrizio's capitulation as a signifier of Bertolucci's forthcoming career, his capitulation to bourgeois filmmaking. Although the film, through its shifting narrative and character focalization, privileges Gina's and Cesare's positions, Bertolucci's career has followed Fabrizio's path.

In Partner, to give another example of Godard's influence on the young Bertolucci, the scene of the soapgirl invokes the linking in Two or Three Things of female prostitution to consumer society. A more substantial theme in Bertolucci's cinema, which is not far from Godard's representation of women, is the association of the masculine as exterior and transcendental (evident also in Godard's Masculin/Feminin, Numero Deux, and others) in contrast to the association of the feminine with the interior and the immanent. Not even one woman in Bertolucci's cinema escapes this immanence or manages to exist beyond the realms of the senses. The two aspects of the Other as discussed by Erik Cohen are according to him “strikingly united in R. M. Rilke's Third Duino Elegy, in which the lover declares his love for the primeval monster, his mother, in which he himself was ‘dissolved’ in a pre-natal state.”⁵¹ This view of the M/Other is not alien to Bertolucci's films and in particular Tango where the apartment assumes the role of the prenatal state similar to that of the Forbidden City in The Last Emperor.

The traditional association of femininity with the forces of nature and sensuality devoid of the grandeur of male existential angst or intellect (evident in particular in the fictional figures of Paul and Port) subverts Bertolucci's utopian attempts to foreground different sexuality. It is particularly disturbing that his two most recent films to date do not show any progress in this respect despite Bertolucci's more recent public pronouncements.⁵²The Last Emperor symbolically annihilates women, while The Sheltering Sky punishes the white woman who was swept away into irrational sexual adventure. Sexual fantasies and political utopias in Bertolucci's cinema seem to be the exclusive privilege of men. What is left for women in his films, as in most of mainstream cinema, is to be gazed upon, to be erotically contemplated, and finally to be possessed and devoured as symbolic objects of desire.

Notes

1. Joelle de Gravelaine, Jean-Pierre Lavoignat, and Christophe d'Yvoire, “Bernardo Bertolucci: La Confusion Magnifique,” Studio Magazine 9 (Decembre, 1987): 60. This recalls Susan Sontag's observation: “What is more beautiful in virile men is something feminine; what is more beautiful in feminine women is something masculine.” Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” in Against Interpretation (New York: Dell, Laurel Edition, 1969), 279. The celebration of androgyny is one of the principles of the credo of camp. As a matter of fact many of the features of camp (the aestheticist attitude, the preference of artifice to nature, the love of exaggeration, and the cult of the androgyny) show an amazing resemblance to nineteenth century decadence. Freud discusses the androgynous structure in mythology in his study of Leonardo Da Vinci. See Sigmund Freud, “Leonardo Da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910),” in Art and Literature. The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 14 (London: Penguin Books, 1979), 185–186.

   See also Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, “Cross-Dressing: Transvestism as Metaphor,” in No Man's Land: The Place of The Woman Within the Twentieth Century, Vol. 2: Sexexchanges (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1989), 324–376 and Chris Straayer, “Redressing the ‘Natural’: The Contemporary Transvestite Film,” Wide Angle 14, No. 1 (January, 1992): 36–55.

   Angela Dalle Vacche's emphasizes in her discussion of Bertolucci's Spider's Stratagem what she calls “gender confusion and role contamination.” Angela Dalle Vacche, The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1992), 241.

2. Will Aitken, “Bertolucci's Gay Images: Leaving the Dance,” Jump Cut 16 (November 1977): 24.

3. Bertolucci confessed to me in an interview in London, July 27, 1991 that Fassbinder is one of the filmmakers he loves and to whom he feels close.

4. Bertolucci said: “In Last Tango in Paris, Brando, the father, is confronted by a bisexual and bifocal character represented by Maria Schneider and Jean-Pierre Leaud. In Tragedy … we have the same thing, but in addition, there is a mother who is very active from the beginning while in Last Tango she's dead from the start. Leaud, instead of making love to Maria, films her, just as Adelfo, who before being a worker is a priest, has a platonic, intellectual relationship with Laura.” Donald Ranvaud and Enzo Ungari, Bertolucci by Bertolucci (London: Plexus, 1987), 222.

5. Barbara Creed, “From Here to Modernity: Feminism and Postmodernism,” Screen 28, no. 2 (Spring, 1987): 66.

   Chris Straayer distinguishes a new sexual type, the she-man, within the context of postmodern performance. The she-man, according to her, “is glaringly bi-sexed rather than obscurely androgynous or merely bisexual. Rather than undergoing a downward gender mobility, he has enlarged himself with feminine gender and female sexuality.” Chris Straayer, “The She-Man: Postmodern Bi-Sexed Performance in Film and Video,” Screen 31, no. 3 (Autumn, 1990): 263.

6. For a feminist critique of Bertolucci's sexual politics see Robert Kolker, Bernardo Bertolucci (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 225–240. For a critique of Tango, see Joan Mellen, “Sexual Politics and Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris,” in Women and Their Sexuality in the New Film (New York: Horizon Press, 1973), 128–146.

7. Jerry Tallmer, “The Feminists ‘Will Kiss Me,’” “The Week in Entertainment,” New York Post (Saturday, February 3, 1973): 15.

8. Aitken, “Bertolucci's Gay Images,” 26. Aitken adds that the last scene in which Jeanne is dressing Paul in her father's military cap and gunning him down is “curiously, touchingly reminiscent of the final scene of Godard's Breathless,” Ibid.

9. Straayer, “The She-Man,” 262.

10. Straayer, 263.

11. Newsweek, February 12, 1973, 56.

12. In our interview Bertolucci said: “after I finished working [on The Sheltering Sky] I thought that there were strong links between The Sheltering Sky and Last Tango. I thought that the two movies were closer than it seems … both films are about the difficulty of the couple … they both are the most, I think, existentialist of my movies. Both Marlon and John … have an aura of danger, they are both dangerous men. Also I thought that they carry with them a strong sense of death. … Both films are full of death and in both films the man dies and the woman survives.”

13. Bertolucci, Last Tango in Paris (New York: Delacorte Press, 1973), 136.

14. Bertolucci, Last Tango, 135.

15. The portrayal of the Colonel as an archetypal Fascist links Tango to The Conformist, which attempts (like the original text of Moravia's novel) to explain the formation of a Fascist personality.

16. Julian C. Rice, “Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris,” The Journal of Popular Film, 3 (1974): 171. For an interesting and nostalgic discussion of the “generational effect” of Brando on the adolescents of the 1950s (Bertolucci's generation) see Richard Schickel,” Accomplices: Brando and the Fifties, and Why Both Still Matter,” Film Comment 27, no. 4 (July-August, 1991): 30–36.

17. Rice, “Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris,” 169.

18. Bertolucci, Last Tango, 180.

19. Pauline Kael, “Introduction,” Last Tango in Paris, 18.

20. The shot of Paul's death is an allusion not only to Viva Zapata. The background (the roofs of Paris) recall visually and thematically the shot of Kelly sitting on the roof in An American in Paris. It also echoes the imagery of the roofs of New York in On the Waterfront.

21. Ann Guarino, “It's Impact He Wants,” New York News (October 6, 1979).

22. Vittorio Storaro, “Writing with Light,” in The Sheltering Sky: A Film by Bernardo Bertolucci Based on the Novel by Paul Bowles, edited and produced by Livio Negri, and Fabien S. Gerard (London: Scribners, 1990), 88. The mythological association of femininity with the moon is joined with the association of masculinity with the sun. In his discussion of the case history of Schreber, Freud mentions that he was able “to explain the sun as a sublimated ‘father symbol’” by recognizing the connection between the patient's peculiar relation to the sun and the “wealth of its bearing upon mythology.” Sigmund Freud, “Postscript” (1912 [1911]) to “Psychoanalytic Notes on an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia (Dementia Paranoides) (Schreber) (1911 [1910]),” in Case Histories II: ‘Rat Man,’ Schreber, ‘Wolf Man,’ Female Homosexuality, ed. and trans. James Strachey, The Pelican Library, vol. 9 (London: Penguin Books, 1979), 221.

23. Mellen, “Fascism in Contemporary Film,” 4.

24. Lynda K. Bundtzen, “Bertolucci's Erotic Politics and the Auteur Theory: From Last Tango in Paris to The Last Emperor.” Western Humanities Review 44, no. 2 (Summer, 1990): 202.

25. An opposite view on the character of Anna is conveyed by Aitken. According to him: “Anna, at first a butch-lesbian caricature [actually she imitates the pose of Marlene Dietrich] striding about, hands thrust firmly in trouser pockets—quickly becomes the epicenter of repressed erotic desires in the film. Anna alone, of all the characters in the perhaps over-simplified Reichean schema of the film, is a free sexual agent, radiating a determined sensuality that at once frightens and fascinates Marcello.” p. 25.

26. Kolker, Bernardo Bertolucci, 233.

27. Kline, Bertolucci's Dream Loom: A Psychoanalytic Study of Cinèma (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1987), 66.

28. Kline, 74.

29. Cited in Gideon Bachmann, “Every Sexual Relationship Is Condemned: An Interview with Bernardo Bertolucci,” Film Quarterly 26 (Spring, 1973): 3–4.

30. Simon de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. and ed. H. M. Parshley (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1974 [1949]), 50.

31. Sigmund Freud, “Femininity,” in New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, ed. and trans. James Strachey. The Pelican Freud Library, vol. 2 (London: Penguin Books, 1979), 148.

32. See Marsha Kinder and Beverle Houston, “Bertolucci and the Dance of Danger,” Sight and Sound 42 (1973): 186–191.

33. Michiko Kakutani, “Bertolucci: He's Not Afraid to Be Shocking,” The New York Times (Thursday, October 4, 1979): C17.

34. Aitken, “Bertolucci's Gay Images,” 24.

35. Aitken, 25.

36. Julia Kristeva, “Stabat Mater,” The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 175.

37. My analysis of inter-racial relations in The Sheltering Sky is indebted to Jocylin Tinestit.

38. In many interviews that Bertolucci has given on Tango he has emphasized the fact that in French the expression “le pétit mort” means orgasm. He also added that the feeling of death is characteristic of sexual relations in our alienated age. The intertextual relationships between Tango and The Sheltering Sky only reinforce this Eros/Thanatos-invested association.

39. See Albert Memi, L'Homme Domine (Paris: Gallimard, 1968).

40. Sander Gilman, Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), 85.

41. Edward Said, “Orientalism Reconsidered,” in Literature, Politics and Theory: Papers from the Essex Conference 1976–84, eds. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, Margaret Iversun, and Diana Loxley (London: Methuen, 1986), 224.

42. Homi Bhabha, “The Other Question: Difference, Discrimination and the Discourse of Colonialism,” in Literature, Politics and Theory, 166–167.

43. See Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 1986).

44. Bhabha, “The Other Question,” 166.

45. Bhabha, 165.

46. From the mid 1980s up to the present date one can detect the emergence of films (among others Heat and Dust, The Gods Must Be Crazy, A Passage to India, Out of Africa) that portray imperialism with nostalgia. See Renato Rosaldo, “Imperialist Nostalgia,” in Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), 68–87. The 1990s, however, witness a new wave of French films (L'Amant, Indochine, and La Guerre Sans Nom) on the French colonial experience in Indochina and Algiers. Much like The Sheltering Sky, these films look on the French colonial era with nostalgia. The plots involve doomed love affairs used to allegorize, nostalgically, the colonial experience.

47. On the impression of Breathless on the young Bertolucci, see Ranvaud and Ungari, Bertolucci by Bertolucci, 30. In Franco Citti, as Ranvaud and Ungari note (p. 32), Bertolucci recognized “not only the sacred double of Jean-Paul Belmondo A Bout de Souffle but also his profane counter-part.”

48. Ric Gentry, “Bertolucci Directs Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man, Millimeter (December, 1981): 58.

49. Some of my ideas on Before the Revolution are influenced by William Simon's discussion of the film in his class on “Italian Cinema,” offered by the Department of Cinema Studies at New York University, in Fall, 1989.

50. In an interview that I conducted with Bertolucci on August 7, 1991, in London he told me that he began his analysis in 1969. This analysis, he said, “ended one or two times officially, but then started again.” He added, laughingly, that he remembers “there is an essay of Freud called ‘Analysis or Interminable Analysis.’” He said, “I think that “I'm the first case of interminable analysis.”

51. Quoted in Erik Cohen, “Pilgrimage and Tourism,” regarding Rainer Maria Rilke's The Duino Elegies (New York: Harper and Row, 1972): 45.

52. At the Mill Valley Film Festival in April 9 and 10, 1988, on the subject of “Cinematic, Psychoanalytic, and Historical Viewpoints,” Bertolucci said: “I think that feminism is the most important thing happening in the last 15 years.” I would like to thank Bruce Sklarew for giving me access to the video recording of the discussion with Bertolucci.