EPFF: Observer Article on EPFF

How to kill your father...
...and get away with it
Gaby Wood, The Observer, Sunday 22 October, 2001

Through the medium of cinema, Bernardo Bertolucci has done it several times. Here the veteran director talks about his parallel journeys in film and psychoanalysis

Sunday October 21, 2001
The Observer Gaby Wood

The story begins during the Second World War: a boy is born in Italy. He is brought up on a farm outside Parma by his beautiful mother and a father with whom he identifies very closely. His father is a poet and film critic; he has copies of Cahiers du Cinéma lying around the house. He takes the boy to Parma to watch movies, and the boy becomes a great cinephile, travelling to Paris as a teenager to witness the birth of the New Wave.
On his return to Italy the young man publishes a precocious, prizewinning book of poems, and a couple of years later makes a film set in Parma, about a young man who wants to change the world, sleeps with a female relative, and cannot escape from his past.

If it were to be turned into a film, Bernardo Bertolucci's early life would not be called an updated version of Sophocles's Oedipus - there are no changelings or Sphinxes, and the real father, Attilio Bertolucci, died of natural causes last year - but it might well be seen as a version of Freud's.

This suspicion is far from alien to Bertolucci himself, who has been in psychoanalysis, on and off, since 1969. Bertolucci is the chair of the First European Psychoanalytic Film Festival, which takes place in London at the beginning of next month; he is not averse to psychoanalytic readings of his films, and - unlike Woody Allen, for example - is quite prepared to talk about them in relation to his actual life. Indeed, he tells me, for a long time he could not separate the two at all.

'I started to think that going to the shrink was not only analysing me but analysing my movies,' he says when I meet him at his production office in London. 'My movies are such a big part of me that I couldn't see any difference.'

I ask him what propelled him to go into psychoanalysis in the first place. 'That's very intimate,' he says quietly, and after a brief pause he explains a part of it. 'I started very, very young to make movies - I was 21. And at the age of 27, 28, I'd done already three movies. So I was feeling a bit... uncomfortable in my life. I felt that I was shouting in the desert and nobody could hear me.'

Bertolucci says that his early films were 'like sea urchins - very closed, very difficult to handle for an audience. And probably I was also like that. Then I started in '69 to have psychoanalysis, and I realised very soon that I was changing, and that's I think why my movies were changing. They became much more open to dialogue.'

I say it's interesting that it should have gone in that direction rather than the other way around - why did his films not become more introspective when he was in analysis?

'I think that it was part of the ideology of the group I was a part of, in a way, the Nouvelle Vague. We were very interested in what cinema is, so our movies were kind of thinking about cinema itself. You know, there were many mutations, if you look back at cinema history: first it was silent, then it started to speak, then it started to think, in the Sixties - about the nature of itself.

'So in a way, our movies were a bit punishing, I think, for the audience. They were almost not looking for feedback, not looking for a dialogue. That was the moment, at the end of the Sixties, when I felt suffocated. I wanted to have a reaction from the audience. I wanted to be able to talk to somebody, and not be talking just to myself. That's when I did The Conformist, Last Tango in Paris, etc. And I found it was incredibly rewarding, something new.'

From his very first session, psychoanalysis became a new filmmaking tool for Bertolucci. It was, he says, 'like an additional lens in my camera, which wasn't Zeiss, it was Freud'. His analysis was, as he puts it, 'always part of the pre-production'.

The first filmic product of Bertolucci's psychoanalysis, made four months after his analysis began, was The Spider's Stratagem, a brilliant film based on a short story by Jorge Luis Borges. In the Borges story a young man embarks on an investigation of his great-grandfather's allegedly heroic death in an eighteenth century Irish battle. Bertolucci changed the setting to Mussolini's Italy, and a town near Parma.

When he began psychoanalysis, he 'understood that the great-grandfather had to become the father'. And so the film became very clearly a movie about the Oedipus complex, by way of the myth of Narcissus. It tells the story of a fictional anti-fascist hero named Athos Magnani, who was assassinated, and whose home town has since been turned into a shrine. Years later, his son, also called Athos Magnani and played by the same actor, returns to this town to investigate his father's death. His father is everywhere: there is a statue of him, streets and theatres are named after him - in fact, the town seems to be otherwise empty, inhabited only by his ghost. The young Athos struggles with the memory of his father, whom he never knew, and with his own identity. After many tormented, dreamlike sequences he finds that his father was not as heroic as his legend suggests.

Bertolucci has spoken of this film as 'a kind of voyage through the pre-conscious', and said that 'it would never have happened if I hadn't been in analysis'. He laid emphasis on psychoanalytic ideas that were not obvious in the original story - for example, in the book the older relative receives oracular warnings of his death: it is predicted by a gypsy, as in Macbeth , and in a letter, as in Julius Caesar . But 'in fact', says Bertolucci, it is not fate, but 'the Oedipus knot that the character is trying to undo'.

That same year, in 1970, Bertolucci made what has perhaps become his most famous (if not his most notorious) film: The Conformist. Here, too, he made a 'little change': in the novel on which the film is based, Marcello, the hero and traitor, is killed in an accident. Bertolucci explains that he substituted 'Marcello's unconscious for the presence of Destiny in the book'. His actions are explained by flashbacks into his past, and, instead of being a classically tragic hero who dies as a result of his actions, his comeuppance is provided by his own tortured mind.

Bertolucci has said that whereas in The Spider's Stratagem he was 'more influenced by life', in The Conformist he was 'more influenced by movies'. In that respect there is an Oedipal knot of his own in The Conformist too. If the first of those films could be said to have emerged from his relationship with his father, the second might be seen as a product of, and a rebellion against, his cinematic mentors.

Bertolucci had fallen out with Jean-Luc Godard at the end of the Sixties. At one point in The Conformist Marcello (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant), who has been sent to Paris to assassinate his former teacher, has to ask the operator to put him through to the professor's number. 'When Trintignant asked me what number he should ask for,' Bertolucci tells me, 'I said Godard's number. So that was very much an in-joke, about the Italian going to kill his French teacher.'

It was in Last Tango in Paris, made two years later, that Bertolucci thought he ought to put his analyst's name on the credits. Why on that particular film, I wonder. 'Because,' he reflects, 'he pushed me to go farther... I don't know if that's the right way of putting it because that makes the analyst seem like a black soul, but let's say that I found a way of being very comfortable talking about my obsessions without blushing. And also I realised that there was a strong romantic side to that story, hiding behind the apparently obscene moments of the film. The romantic thing was that a man and a woman are trying to communicate, giving up their identities, giving up their names, giving up their address, and just communicating through their bodies - it's a very romantic act.'

Bertolucci now thinks that all of these movies - his best - 'were like a celebration of the analysis... maybe the movies were a kind of offering that I was giving to the analyst - an offer which was a result, like the immaculate conception, between me and the analyst.'

I ask if his first analyst, whom he was with for 15 years, saw his films, and he says yes. Bertolucci even thinks that, 'a bit like my father, he was seeing the movie and thinking that he made it'.

And his father, like his analyst, had some understanding of Bertolucci's unconscious. 'There is all this killing of fathers in my movies,' Bertolucci accepts. 'That's why my father told me a few years ago: "You were smart - you've killed me many times without having to go to jail"!'

It's a strange business talking to Bernardo Bertolucci, however tangentially, about his Oedipus complex. On the one hand he is very open about his analysis, and on the other, as an interviewer you feel oddly free to make associations and inferences about a total stranger that are downright rude. In a very candid interview Bertolucci gave in 1973 about his childhood, he said that the most important thing he remembered about his father was butter. He went on to describe the smell - 'an intense odour of bitter almonds that surrounded him like a halo'. I mention this, and say that I can't help thinking of his most infamous movie scene - in which Marlon Brando uses butter as sexual accessory. I don't know what this association says, if anything, but Bertolucci is understandably shocked. 'Oh my God. I didn't say... No, no, I think you have the wrong information.'

Then he softens a little, perhaps amused by the tricks of the unconscious - his or mine. 'I don't know,' he smiles, 'maybe it was peanut butter'.

Gaby Wood Oct 2001