Bernardo Bertolucci has often
returned to the cinematic exploration of love and of its fleeting
florescence before it gives way under the weight of the world
and the weight of violence. His latest film, The Dreamers,
is a clear continuation of these interests. Set in Paris in
1968, The Dreamers tells the story of an incestuous
attraction between twin brother and sister (1), Theo and Isabelle,
and of their deepening relationship with an American student,
Matthew, who is studying in Paris and whom they invite into
their lives. Matthew spends his days in the Cinémathèque
Française dreaming of life as joy and possibility, but
also suffering from a loneliness whose edges are sharpened by
living in a foreign city without having made any real friends.
He first meets Isabelle and Theo at the riots that explode around
Henry Langlois’ dismissal as head of the Cinémathèque,
develops an almost immediate desire for Isabelle, and soon finds
himself moving into her and Theo’s apartment. Bertolucci’s
exploration of love, and the spaces delineated by the Cinémathèque
Française and by Isabelle and Theo’s apartment,
are inextricably linked. These spaces are presented as refuges
from society’s surrounding chaos and violence, and as
areas in which a new kind of order, an order based on intimacy,
is able to be established. In The Dreamers,
Bertolucci’s exploration of love can be seen as an exploration
of the human attempt, rooted in need, desire and obsession,
to create places in which intimacy with others can briefly exist.
Such places become dream-like (2) regions in which the real
and the unreal inseparably fuse. In the case of the Cinémathèque
Française, the audience space meets and blends together
with the screen-space of images to generate a spacialized experience
whose properties are not simply describable in terms of the
everyday or the imaginative. Rather, their fusion produces the
new and unique properties that belong specifically to the cinematic
experience (3). In the case of the apartment, who and what the
three protagonists are, and the wider social and political situation
in which they are embedded, blend freely with their desires
and fantasies to create a temporary respite from the pressure
of the external world. But the Cinémathèque Française,
and Isabelle and Theo’s apartment, are not just dream-like
in an ontological sense. In a much simpler sense they are areas
in which people can temporarily retreat from the world to breathe
freely, to dream, to desire, to hope, and to build their fantasies
like children (4) build castles of sand by the sea. In this
sense, both the space of the Cinémathèque Française,
and the space of Isabelle and Theo’s apartment, are promises
of liberation, even if it’s a liberation that Bertolucci
seems to suggest is always doomed to be fleeting.
The Dreamers begins on the streets of Paris but quickly
shifts to Isabelle and Theo’s apartment. This transition
to the interior of the apartment is achieved in a single long
delirious camera shot (5) that begins with Isabelle and Theo
shoving Matthew into an elevator. The camera holds us inside
the elevator watching as they run up the stairs to greet Matthew
where it stops, and then follows Matthew out of the elevator
and into their apartment. This shot is reminiscent of a similar
‘elevator-shot’ from Touch of Evil
(Orson Welles, 1958), but whereas Welles uses deep-focus and
a spatially-acute eye to articulate and examine power relations
and character-interactions, Bertolucci’s camera creates
the effect of a ‘passage’. As the camera moved out
of the lift, passed through the front door and into the apartment,
I ceased to feel that it was simply moving from one three-dimensional
environment to another but felt, at least for a moment, as if
I was passing into a two-dimensional screen-space (6). In this
moment and movement Bertoulcci first hints that the space of
the apartment and the space of the Cinémathèque
Française can be elided. In fact, once Isabelle, Theo
and Matthew enter the apartment, Bertolucci never again takes
us to the actual Cinémathèque Française.
The reason is simple: there is no longer a need. As the characters,
and the audience with them, pass into the apartment, it is as
if their spatial co-ordinates have become continuous with those
of a film. This is closely allied to the experience an audience
feels everytime the lights of a cinema darken, and their real
three-dimensional place merges with the representational reality
of some film whose images and activities begin to absorb them.
With this movement into the apartment Bertolucci moves his protagonists,
the film, and the audience, into its protected space. In a very
real physical and psychological sense the apartment becomes
Isabelle, Theo and Matthew’s whole world, and within its
intimate boundaries Bertolucci can focus on their emotional,
physical and sexual interactions, obsessions, needs and frustrations
(7). Characteristic of the way in which Bertolucci explores
these interactions is a scene which shows Matthew and Isabelle
having sex: Matthew is lying on his back with Isabelle sitting
upon him -- when Matthew finally gets up to leave, Isabelle
says, "stay inside me". She reveals that she wants
to prolong the felt intimacy that can be experienced in sex.
Bertolucci’s handling of this scene, however, suggests
that intimacy, like orgasm to which it is so closely related
in The Dreamers, reaches a peak of intensity
and fades off into the everyday dullness and opacity that mark
the distance between people in the external world. For Bertolucci,
once sexual climax has been reached and lovers’ separate,
there is nothing left but exhaustion (8). Though Bertolucci
represents intimacy as fleeting, he also represents it as intrinsically
creative. Thus sex between Matthew and Isabelle is not just
an attempt to make contact with another person, it is equally
an activity which fuels their self-understanding and self-formation.
This creative function of intimacy in general, and of sex in
particular, is made explicit in the scene where Matthew and
Isabelle have sex for the very first time. As they fuck on the
floor of the kitchen, Theo initially watches, and then begins
to fry eggs on the stove. Bertolucci cuts to a shot of the soft
eggs hardening slowly. In the context of the film this image
becomes deeply polyvalent. The hardening of the eggs is not
only a highly physical analogue of Isabelle, Theo and Matthew’s
mutual arousal, but is symbolic of creation (9). It is through
sex, and through the consequent experience of intimacy with
another person that it brings, that Matthew and Isabelle come
into being and develop as individuals. In contrast, Bertolucci’s
exploration of masturbation reveals it as an instance of frustrated
intimacy, of unconsummated love, and thus as a suitable signifier
for the unformed individual (10). Thus, he shows us Matthew
masturbating the night that he first meets Isabelle, which is
also the night before he moves in with her. Matthew’s
masturbation expresses his need for intimacy through an activity
which by its very nature can never attain to real intimacy.
It is his dream of intimacy, his frustrated hope for a possibility
that as yet has no place to exist in reality. Similarly, we
watch Theo masturbating over a postcard of Marlene Dietrich
as the showgirl Lola Lola from Der Blaue Engel
(Josef von Sternberg, 1930), and to complexify matters Theo’s
masturbation in this instance is not due to the pent up pressure
of his own desires, but due to his sister’s insistence.
This scene cuts to the heart of the personal dilemma generated
by Isabelle and Theo’s persistent sexual attraction for
each other. Afterwards, Isabelle touches Theo’s semen
where it has smeared on the picture. She looks at it and smells
it. This is perhaps the closest, most intimate connection, at
least in sexual terms, that Theo and Isabelle have. Theo’s
masturbation over a postcard of Marlene Dietrich is not only
an image of obsession (11), but also of the impossibility of
the fulfillment of intimacy. Bertolucci makes the sexual attraction
between Isabelle and Theo a constant that is asserted throughout
the film, and he does so, not only because it allows him to
explore a socially-tabooed form of contact, but also because
it allows him to subtly suggest from the very beginning of The
Dreamers that the space of the apartment into which
the three main characters retreat to pursue their own exploration
of each other can never be completely ‘outside proof’.
The external world exists in the sexually-charged highly-personal
space of the apartment in the form of Theo and Isabelle’s
otherwise inexplicable obedience to deeply-ingrained social
values which set-up the psychological barriers that prevent
them from exploring their deeply felt attraction for each other
in a sexually intimate fashion (12).
Bertolucci’s narrative movement in The Dreamers
increasingly isolates Isabelle, Theo and Matthew from the world
outside. Eventually they no longer leave the apartment, and
even begin to run out of food. The final step in their attempt
to create a place in which genuine intimacy can flourish, is
articulated in a scene in which Isabelle constructs a cubby-house
out of sheets for them to spend the night in, telling Theo,
"like when we were kids". We see them naked and huddled
inside the sheltering sheets. Here the space of the apartment
has shrunken to the constricted space of their cubby-house,
and the entire scene reverberates with suggestions of a Jungian
reversion to a womb-like enclosure (13). More tellingly, their
physical closeness emphasizes the increasing intensity of their
need for intimacy, but also the increasing difficulty, the impossibility
even, of maintaining a space in which such intimacy can exist
or thrive. The Dreamers inexorably moves towards
this point, which is simultaneously a beginning and an ending.
By the time we sit with them in the womb-like area of their
cubby-house we have come to a state which directly precedes
the birth of a movement which returns them to the outside world
and which marks the end of their relationships (14). It is a
rock that crashes through the window-pane of their apartment
at the end of this scene which defines the rupture and suddenness
with which they return from their dream of intimacy to the outside
world where protestors rage down the streets. Isabelle, Theo
and Matthew run outside to join the swelling ranks of protesters
who are preparing for a confrontation with the police. Matthew
pleads with his two friends to ignore the demonstration and
leave together with him. But Theo, already caught up in the
force of events, takes a Molotov cocktail and Isabelle follows
him, as Matthew walks off by himself. Bertolucci leaves us with
a slow-motion image of riot police charging towards the camera
and Édith Piaf’s Non, je ne regrette rien
on the soundtrack. The choice of Piaf is significant. In her
own life on the streets of Paris she was continually forced
to assert herself against the weight of external circumstances
and continually sought love and intimacy through a series of
shattered relationships. In this sense, Piaf’s voice could
be positioned as another character in Bertolucci’s film,
something like a cameo role in which a well-known personality
enters the film’s fictionalized world as themselves. She
enters, just before the screen cuts to black, as someone who
gives evidence through her performance, that the passionate
drive for intimacy and the fleeting existence of love are enough
to give human life meaning even if we are aware that they will
be crushed under the weight of the world.
The suggestion that Piaf’s voice can be seen as a character
in the film may seem fanciful, but Bertolucci does in fact do
something very close to this when he brings characters and events
from classic films into a direct relation with characters and
events in The Dreamers. He achieves this by
adopting a strategy of regularly intercutting his film with
scenes from old classic films (15). These intercut scenes function
in a number of ways ranging from the simple descriptive function
they serve when Isabelle, Theo and Matthew are playing a game
of miming old films and the intercutting references the film
they are miming, to a deeply expressive function where they
serve to imbue scenes with emotional resonance and complexity
of meaning. An example of this more expressive use of intercutting
occurs in one of the final scenes of The Dreamers
where Isabelle attempts to prevent the collapse of the partly-real
partly-fantasy world they have built for themselves inside the
apartment by attempting to finally and fully transcend the world
via death. As Isabelle lies between Matthew and Theo holding
a hose attached to a gas-pipe, Bertolucci cuts in the suicide
of the young French girl Mouchette from Mouchette
(Robert Bresson, 1967). By using this intercut, Bertolucci taps
into and draws on the articulation of pain, suffering and redemption
that Bresson spent an entire career intensifyng. This scene
is, as with all Bertolucci’s intercut scenes, short but
carefully chosen. In Bresson’s film we see Mouchette on
the top of a grassy hill preparing to roll herself into the
river below. In a series of shots Bresson shows her rolling
past the camera and out of frame, until her body hits a bush
on a ledge above the river and stops. In typical Bresson fashion,
she picks herself up, climbs the hill, and rolls down again.
Bresson subjects us to the same emotionally-painful sequence
of shots, with each shot following the one before it with an
inevitability we become conscious of from having watched it
all before. This second sequence, however, ends with the sound
of a splash, a harsh discordant element that Bertolucci reproduces
in the sound of a rock whose crashing through the window-pane
of the apartment marks the emotional endpoint of Isabelle’s
own suicide attempt. In light of the fact that this scene can
be viewed as an attempt to return to the womb in which Isabelle
and Theo were originally united, both the splash and the rock
become mutually-reinforcing symbols. The splash symbolizes birth
and is contextualized here as an echo of Isabelle’s dream
to be born into a universe in which she and Theo can be sexually
united. In the context of Bresson’s film, however, its
symbolical meaning is requalified: it announces the death of
Mouchette. That this also announces the death, or end, of Isabelle
and Theo’s dream-world of intimacy is confirmed by the
rock crashing through the window, which in this context is reminiscent
of a still-born fetus being violently thrust forth.
The Dreamers intertextual complexity extends
well beyond Bertolucci’s technique of intercutting scenes
of his film with scenes from classic films. Its narrative structure
has many salient similarities with other films that he has directed,
specifically with Ultimo Tango a Parigi (Bernardo
Bertolucci, 1972). But although Bertolucci brings both films
to a similar thematic, emotional and intellectual endpoint,
The Dreamers in no way seems a copy of the
earlier film. Instead, there is a sense that we are seeing these
well-worn Bertoluccian themes for the first time, and with renewed
impact and conciseness. It may be precisely because Ultimo
Tango a Parigi is such a famous film, and because Bertolucci
wants to be certain that The Dreamers does
not exist in its shadow, that he goes out of his way to make
it independent, so as to render comparisons irrelevant. The
significance that Bertolucci gives to a director’s ability
to transform the already-old into something new and surprising
is well-articulated in a conversation between Theo and Matthew.
Theo’s argument homes in on the famous closing scene from
City Lights (Charles Chaplin, 1931) where the
blind flower girl, having regained her sight due to an operation
paid for by the Little Tramp, sees her benefactor for the first
time. She discovers that he is not the millionaire she believed
him to be, but merely a tramp to whom, seconds earlier, she
had tried to give money. Now, as she touches his hands, she
knows who he is, and understands him on the most intimate level.
Theo argues that the greatness of Chaplin’s genius lay
in his ability to also make the audience ‘see’ the
Little Tramp as if for the very first time, as if we had never
glimpsed that instantly recognizable face before. In the same
way Bertolucci manipulates scenes in The Dreamers,
so that whether they are recognizable from his previous films,
or whether they are referencing or re-contextualizing classic
cinema, they are never simply reiterations, but always an attempt
to make an audience see. Unlike Chaplin’s ‘seeing’,
however, which involves a simple unveiling, Bertolucci’s
‘seeing’ involves a multiplication
of veils, of intersecting representations that complexify and
defer his meanings. Moreover, Bertolucci’s ‘seeing’
is closely related to his interest in intimacy. On a superficial
level, this relation is evident in the fact that he wants us
to see something intimate, something normally hidden. But on
a deeper level, there is a sense in which Bertolucci’s
The Dreamers forces us, not just to see intimate
things, but to see them intimately . The difficulty
of seeing intimately can be illustrated by the way in which
we see Isabelle and Theo’s desire for each other through
the veil of society’s representation of it as incestuous.
The concept of incest construes their desire as something other
than simple sexual desire. It marks this desire by giving it
a meaning that it never would have had before society existed.
In short, it denies their desire its innocence: Isabelle and
Theo cannot experience sex, only incest. And we, as the audience,
are also caught in society’s viewpoint: we see incestuous
desire, not simply sexual desire. From this viewpoint,
The Dreamers could be considered an attempt
to make us see Isabelle and Theo’s desire as
sexual and not as incestuous, that is, to make us see its innocence
(16).
In The Dreamers, we come to associate and equate
the cinema with intimacy, not just because the Nouvelle
Vague filmmakers who were operating in Paris at the
time made films that were fundamentally concerned with the dual
themes of love and the cinema, and not just because of the way
in which Bertolucci interweaves Isabelle, Theo and Matthew’s
activities with parallel activities from old films, but because
of Bertolucci’s deeper conceptual move which makes the
space of their apartment continuous with the space of the Cinémathèque
Française. This continuity is revealed in a scene where
Isabelle mentions to Theo that she spied on him masturbating
over an image of Marlene Dietrich when he thought he was alone.
Both Isabelle’s secret observation of Theo, and Theo’s
secret masturbation, echo the activity of watching a film. Isabelle’s
act of spying not only positions her as the unseen observer
and Theo as the observed image, but more importantly, in doing
so it makes the audience conscious that her spying mirrors their
own watching of a very private and normally hidden activity.
In an even profounder sense, Theo’s masturbation itself
equally mirrors the audiences’ activity of watching a
film: alone, secretly, in the dark of the cinema, in front of
an image, every frustrated desire, thought and emotion can unashamedly
find release (17). Bertolucci presses home this equation between
cinema and intimacy when he has Isabelle force Theo to repeat
his masturbation, to recreate it, in fact, as a spectacle for
both her and Matthew to watch. The reiterability of Theo’s
activity is an analogue of the reiterability of a film to be
screened, and both Isabelle’s obscene request, and a showing
of Bertolucci’s The Dreamers, function
in the same way: they both constitute an attempt to clear a
space in which the dream of intimacy can develop between people
by removing the barriers that society sets up, by letting others
see what society would normally censor or cause individuals
to hide due to socially-inspired guilt (18).
When Bertolucci approached Jean-Luc Godard with the request
to use a couple seconds from À bout de souffle
(Jean-Luc Godard, 1960) and two seconds from Bande à
part (Jean-Luc Godard, 1964) in The Dreamers,
Godard immediately dispensed with all paperwork and legalities,
telling Bertolucci, "You can do what you want. There are
no rights of the auteur, only duties" (19). Godard’s
comment can be read as suggesting that it is the audience, not
the filmmakers, who own the images. Such a reading would place
Godard’s comment in harmony with Henry Langlois’
belief that the Cinémathèque Française
should screen all films rather than locking them up in vaults,
no matter how old or rare the print. Film images exist to be
watched. They have no life outside of the life the audience
gives them (20). Their raison d’être is public consumption,
to become part of the deepest, truest, most intense desires,
thoughts and feelings we have. That a film exists within
us (21), and not in the external world, is a final
intimacy that belongs to the cinema and is a point Bertolucci
stresses in The Dreamers. And just as Godard
and Langlois can be seen as wanting to return film images to
the public, Bertolucci can be seen as wanting to do the same.
In this sense, a film like The Dreamers isn’t
just meant to be watched or discussed, (as I have just done),
but is meant to become something which enters intimately into
the dream-like fabric of our remembering awareness.
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Footnotes:
(1) Bertolucci’s interest in incestuous attraction cannot
be dismissed merely as an interest in sexual aberrancy. He
uses the relation between ‘brother’ and ‘sister’
as a signifier to express the desire for closest intimacy
which is a central thematic thread in The Dreamers.
Already in the ancient Hebrew Biblical literature, which Western
culture has appropriated as the earliest layers of its own
literary consciousness, we find the brother-sister relation
being used in this fashion. It appears in some of the most
erotic chapters of the Song of Songs:
4:9. You have captured my heart,
My sister, my bride,
You have captured my heart
With one [glance] of your eyes,
With one coil of your necklace.
10. How sweet is your love,
My sister, my bride!
How much more delightful your love than wine,
Your ointments more fragrant
Than any spice!
11. Sweetness drops
From your lips, O bride;
Honey and milk
Are under your tongue;
And the scent of your robes
Is like the scent of Lebanon.
12. A garden locked
Is my sister, my bride,
A fountain locked,
A sealed up spring.
13. Your limbs are an orchard of pomegranates
And of all luscious fruits..."
5:1. I have come to my garden,
My sister, my bride;
I have plucked my myrrh and spice,
Eaten my honey and honeycomb,
Drunk my wine and my milk.
Eat, lovers, and drink:
Drink deep of love!
[Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures
(Philadelphia and Jerusalem: The Jewish Publication Society,
1985)]. The Hebrew word used for ‘love’ in verse
4:10 and verse 5:1 is not the more commonly used word אהבה
(ahavah) but the rarely used word דודים (dodim) which only
occurs in this particular sense in the Song of Songs (about
30 times), in the Book of Ezekiel (twice), in the Book of
Proverbs (once), and in the Book of Isaiah (once). Although
דודיך (dodayich) in 4:10 has been translated as ‘your
love’, and דודים (dodim) in 5:10 as ‘love’,
these words literally mean ‘your loves’ and ‘loves’
respectively. The plural form clearly refers, not to the generalized
emotion, but to actual activities or concrete instances of
love, that is, to the actual sensual ways in which the two
lovers who are the central characters in the Song of Songs
arouse each other. This meaning of the plural usage is even
more obvious in Proverbs 7:18 where the context is the explicitly
sexual one of a prostitute propositioning a young man. "Let
us drink our fill of דודים (dodim) (literally ‘loves’)
until morning." A final quote from the Song of Songs
will serve to illustrate how the brother-sister relation has
been used to express closest intimacy in highly sexual terms:
8:1. If only it could be as with
a brother,
As if you had nursed at my mother’s breast:
Then I could kiss you
When I met you in the street,
And no one would despise me.
2. I would lead you, I would bring you
To the house of my mother,
Of her who taught me --
I would let you drink of the spiced wine,
Of my pomegranate juice.
3. His left hand was under my head,
His right hand caressed me.
The JPS translation
translates the Hebrew word אחותי (achoti), ‘my sister’,
as ‘my own’, in recognition of the fact that the
Hebrew text is using the brother-sister relation in a metaphorical
sense to express intimacy, (they indicate the literal translation
in a footnote – I have substituted it back into the
text). It is important to note that in The Dreamers
the brother-sister relation is not merely a metaphorical relation,
but is also a literal relation. It functions, therefore, not
only as a signifier of Isabelle and Theo’s desire for
closest intimacy but equally as a signifier of society’s
role in frustrating that intimacy through socially-constructed
taboos.
(2) The two ways in which I highlight how aspects of this
film can be considered dream-like in nature, are by no means
intended to be exhaustive. Bertolucci continuously explores
the chains of associative concepts set-off by the signifier
‘dream’ or ‘dreamer’. To list a few,
Isabelle and Theo are dreamers in the sense of (i) being inwardly
and obsessively focused on each other, (ii) trying to build
for themselves a partly-real partly-imaginary world in which
they can fulfill their need to be intimate with each other,
and (iii) diverting their incestuous libido into symbolic
actions. For example, Theo contemplating an egg he is frying
while Matthew screws Isabelle in the same room shows a process
of dream-like substitution in which the frying egg is a displaced
symbol of Isabelle’s ovum and of his own desire to be
in Matthew’s place. Equally, Isabelle’s desire
to be bedded by her brother is revealed in the displaced symbolism
of her touching his semen. Once established, this sense of
symbolical substitution ripples out in all directions. The
central characters inhabit a space between "desire and
fulfillment", (to borrow a phrase from Mallarmé’s
Mimique), and in this sense, the film itself
conceptually occupies the position of a dream whose symbolical
substitutions continually displace desire onto a symbol
of the desired, and therefore continually place the desired
just beyond reach.
(3) The unique properties of cinematic experience were noted
as early as 1896 when Maxim Gorky wrote, "Last night
I was in the Kingdom of Shadows. If you only knew how strange
it is to be there ... I was at Aumont’s and saw Lumière’s
cinematograph ... The extraordinary impression it creates
is so unique and complex that I doubt my ability to describe
it with all it its nuances ... Suddenly something clicks,
everything vanishes and a train appears on the screen. It
speeds straight at you –watch out! It seems as though
it will plunge into the darkness in which you sit, turning
you into a ripped sack full of lacerated flesh and splintered
bones, and crushing into dust and into broken fragments this
hall and this building, so full of women, wine, music and
vice. But this, too, is but a train of shadows ... You are
forgetting where you are. Strange imaginings invade your mind
and your consciousness begins to wane and grow dim..."
[p.342-343, Roger Ebert, Roger Ebert’s Book
of Film, (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company,
1997)] In 1923 Dziga Vertov also noted the uniqueness of the
new spacialized experience provided by cinema: "I free
myself for today and forever from human immobility. I’m
in constant movement. I approach and pull away from objects.
I creep under them. I move alongside a running horse’s
mouth. I fall and rise with the falling and rising bodies."
[p.17, John Berger, Ways of Seeing, (London:
British Broadcasting Corporation, 1977)] Both Gorky’s
and Vertov’s descriptions of the peculiar fusion of
representation and reality that marks the cinematic experience
attempt to describe that experience as an unexpected shift
to one side of the representation/reality binary: Gorky describes
how real cinematic images seem to be, whereas
Vertov describes how his seeing is liberated from reality
and expanded by cinematic seeing. Ultimately, however, the
one-sidedness of such descriptions must always fail to express
the uniqueness of an experience which cannot be adequately
described simply as either real or imaginary and which, therefore,
requires a new conceptual articulation.
(4) I use this metaphor quite consciously as Bertolucci does
in fact weave a sense of Isabelle and Theo’s childlikeness
throughout The Dreamers. It is felt not only
in their own intimacy with each other, which was clearly forged
in their twin birth and childhood together, but also in a
certain naivety apparent in their attempts to retreat from
society’s influence into a sealed-off private space
in which they can act out their fantasies for each other.
(5) My original impression on my first viewing of the film
was that this sequence was a single shot. In fact, after Isabelle
and Theo shove Matthew into the lift there are two cuts to
an external shot of the lift, but the camera does follow Matthew
in a single movement from inside the lift to the apartment.
I have left my original impression and give here the reasons.
The errors of seeing are often more lasting,
and also more widespread, that the supposedly correct
seeing established by a carefully trained eye or critical
dissection. There is a gap between the seeing of most viewers
and the seeing of a group of professional critics. As a film
comes into being largely due to an ineradicable subjective
dimension in seeing we are forced to admit that a film comes
into being differently for these two groups. This gap between
the seeing of most viewers and the seeing of trained viewers,
and the whole question of their relationship, requires a careful
analysis and handling rather than a simple privileging of
one seeing over the other.
(6) While discussing this shot, I am reminded of Bertolucci’s
evocative statement, "I try to dream in my sleep the
shots that I will be shooting the next day on the set".
[p.51, Laurent Tirard, Moviemakers’ Master Class
(New York: Faber and Faber, 2002)] Bertolucci’s dream-space
becomes a real-space on set where it is acted and filmed,
and this real-space then becomes screen-space when the film
is shown in a cinema. On watching The Dreamers,
or any film for that matter, this process is inverted: the
screen-space fuses with the real-space of the cinema as the
audience’s real-space becomes continuous with the representational-space
before them, and ultimately, for the film to become meaningful
it must be infused with the emotional, conceptual and experiential
elements that belong to the private lived experience of each
viewer – a last step which resembles the opening up
of a dream-like space in each viewer. Thus, Bertolucci himself,
the characters in The Dreamers, and the audience
watching the film, can all equally be considered ‘dreamers’.
(7) The artists of the Italian Renaissance could be seen as
having made the spiritualization of the human form central
to their aesthetic and their expression. Sandro Botticelli’s
The Birth of Venus (c.1480) is an early and
clear example: "The lovely figure of Venus, strangely
weightless and ethereal, is the intellectual or spiritual
apparition of beauty, not at all the queen of sensual love
whom the Venetian Renaissance will create." [p.443, Helen
Gardner, Art Through the Ages, Fifth Edition
(New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Atlanta: Harcourt, Brace
and World, Inc., 1970)] In contrast to this spiritualization
of the physical, which has exerted such a strong influence
in Western culture and dominated large areas of its thought
and artistic expression, Bertolucci’s approach in The
Dreamers could be thought of as the carnalization
of the spiritual. That is, central to Bertolucci’s cinematic
aesthetic and expression is a tendency to site spiritual elements,
such as ideas, desires, emotions, etc., in explicitly physical,
erotic and sexual activities. Bertolucci’s use of the
incest prohibition as a thematic focus functions to amplify
this mainstream Western tendency to spiritualize love and
intimacy by directing sexual attraction towards purified disembodied
feeling. An unambiguous cinematic example of this tendency
is the brother-sister love in George Lucas’ original
Star Wars trilogy. Luke’s sexual attraction
to Leia is transformed into a spiritualized emotional love
when he learns she is his twin sister. This is not surprising
as Lucas’ fictional world establishes a clear hierarchy
in which spiritual power, represented by the Force, is the
true foundation of all material manifestation. In contrast
to this, Isabelle and Theo in Bertolucci’s The
Dreamers are constantly trying to materialize their
sexual attraction for each other. This offers one way in which
to see The Dreamers: it is the spectacle
of its central protagonists desiring to embody
what society decrees they must disembody .
(8) Ultimo Tango a Parigi (Bernardo Bertolucci,
1972) took this same approach of prolonged sexual-exploration
being equated with a continual deepening of the characters’
self-exploration until the climax of the film. And when the
protagonists finally reach this point, and spend a last night
on the streets of Paris, there is nothing left but exhaustion
and death.
(9) Conversely, the softness of the eggs can also be seen
as an image of Theo’s inability to consummate his love
for his sister. Here, the soft eggs have the same overtones
of impotence as seen in the work of Salvador Dalí,
e.g. Fried Eggs on a Plate Without the Plate
(1932) and Ordinary French Loaf with Two Fried Eggs
Riding without a Plate, Trying to Sodomize a Heel of a Portuguese
Loaf (1932). Interestingly, Dalí also experienced
an intense attraction for his sister in his younger years.
(10) I am not suggesting that masturbation has a wholly negative
implication for Bertolucci, on the contrary, as I mention
later in this review, it is related to Bertolucci’s
exploration of cinema as a release of repressed desires and
fantasies. This relation with cinema has creative and, therefore,
positive overtones. In The Dreamers, masturbation
is presented by Bertolucci as both the concrete instance of,
and the dream of, Theo and Matthew’s desire for Isabelle.
As an actual manifestation of their desire for intimacy it
is clearly a failure in terms of attaining its goal, but as
their dream of that intimacy it is creative and represents
their continuing attempt to deal with a world that decrees
distance where they desire closeness. Moreover, as a meeting
place in which the real and the imaginary blend inseparably,
masturbation itself becomes a symbol of both the dream state
and the cinematic experience which are also meeting places
in which the real and the imaginary blend. Underlying this
specifically Bertoluccian link between masturbation, dreaming
and cinema, there is a more general symbolism that equates
masturbatory activity with creation and creativity. This positive
creative conceptualization of masturbation is veiled in Western
culture by its condemnatory attitude but is often clear in
non-Western cultures. As an early non-Western example, I offer
a few lines from two ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic texts:
"Tem hath departed to Annu to satisfy his love of pleasure;
he hath thrust his member into his hand, and hath performed
his desire, and hath produced the two children Shu and Tefnut
..." [p.297, E.A.Wallis Budge, The Gods of the
Egyptians, (New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 1969)]
Elsewhere in a creation story the divine being Khepera is
made to say, "I, even I, had union with my clenched hand,
I joined myself in an embrace with my shadow, I poured seed
into my mouth my own, I sent forth issue..." [p.310-311,
ibid.] The hieroglyph for the phrase, "I joined myself
in an embrace" is quite explicit, containing the image
of an erect penis with a line emanating from it to represent
the flow of semen. The translator of this text, E.A. Wallis
Budge, reflects a fairly mainstream Western response when
he comments on this myth, "Now a myth of this character
can only be the product of a people at a low level of civilization,
and it is difficult to understand the character of the mind
of an author who in one sentence helps Khepera out of a difficulty
by ascribing to him the possession and use of magical power,
and in another reduces him to the necessity of committing
an act of masturbation in order to begin the generations of
the gods, and yet assigns to him at the same time many of
the powers which are assigned by Christian nations to God."
[p.297-298, ibid.]
(11) This image of Marlene Dietrich is apt in the context
of desire and obsession. Von Sternberg first saw her in a
cabaret, chose her for the role of Lola Lola in Der
Blaue Engel (Josef von Sternberg, 1930), and later
brought her to America where he made six more films with her,
each a paean to her beauty and sensuality. His relationship
and love for her eventually crossed from the realm of cinema
into real life, and they became lovers for several years.
Dietrich’s introduction into The Dreamers
also serves to augment Isabelle, Theo and Matthew’s
seclusion in their apartment, as we remember that Dietrich
spent the last 12 years of her life secluded in her own Parisian
apartment.
(12) Here Bertolucci insinuates that society is the main,
though not perhaps sole, impediment to human intimacy.
(13) From a mythical perspective, Jung views return to the
womb as symbolical of a return to the maternal waters from
which the existing order of the cosmos emerged. From a psychological
perspective, this implies a return to a state, "...when
there was as yet no ‘thou shalt’ and ‘thou
shalt not’, and everything just happened of itself.
Even now a deep resentment seems to dwell in man’s breast
against the brutal law that once separated him from instinctive
surrender to his desires and from the beautiful harmony of
animal nature. This separation manifested itself in the incest
prohibition ... The development of consciousness inevitably
leads not only to separation from the mother, but to separation
from the parents and the whole family circle ... Yet the longing
for this lost world continues and ... is forever tempting
one ... to regress to the infantile past..." [p.235-236,
C.J. Jung, The Collected Works. Volume Five: Symbols
of Transformation, 2nd Edition, trans. from the German
by R.F.C. Hull, (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970)].
As Isabelle and Theo are twins their attempt to return to
the womb symbolizes their attempt to return to a pre-social
time when they existed in the closest physical embrace and
intimacy. Jung further notes that, "The ark, chest, casket,
barrel, ship, etc. is an analogy of the womb..." [p.211,
ibid.] This suggests that Isabelle and Theo’s apartment
can itself be read as a womb symbol, like the Biblical ark
surrounded by the surging violent waters of the Flood. This
construction of The Dreamers only reinforces
Isabelle, Theo and Matthew’s shared dream for the birth
of a new order of harmony and love that will replace the old
order of conflict and violence that dominate the surrounding
world.
(14) This narrative movement is reinforced by a subtly suggested
series of associations clustered about the meaning given to
the womb in this film. The womb which united Isabelle and
Theo is also that which divided them by giving them birth,
and its double function as both a harmonious originary place
that unites, and a place that violently ejects and separates,
is implicit in this scene. Thus, Isabelle and Theo’s
return to the womb as the place that united them also involves
a return to the place that separated them. This suggests a
certain inescapability to their separation which strikes a
slightly tragic note which Bertolucci lightly touches upon
at several points in the film.
(15) For the record, Bertolucci cuts in scenes from twelve
films, each having a thematic semblance, either direct or
indirect, to the scene it is cut to:
(i) The
Cameraman (Edward Sedgwick, 1928) (An image of peering,
of the gaze of the camera, and indicative of the voyeurism
of cinema)
(ii) City Lights (Charles Chaplin, 1931)
(An image which equates ‘seeing’, and hence the
watching of a film, with ‘understanding’ and hence
with closeness.)
(iii) Freaks (Tod Browning, 1932) (An image
of solidarity amongst those who are marginalized by society
because their existence fails to match society’s blueprint.)
(iv) Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932) (An image
of the death of an individual in a flood of chaotic violence.)
(v) Blonde Venus (Joseph von Sternberg, 1932)
(An image of ‘unmasking’, of things hidden from
the eye; and an image of the peeling back of layers until
the true self is laid bare.)
(vi) Queen Christina (Rouben Mamoulian, 1933)
(A scene which equates memory, and hence the remembering of
film images, with an intensely erotic and sensual experience.)
(vii) Top Hat (Mark Sandrich, 1935) (A scene
that humorously plays on the frustrations of love.)
(viii) The Girl Can’t Help It (Frank
Tashlin, 1956) (Theo and Isabelle watch this film at the movies
in Cinemascope. It provides an image of how cinema is expanding
and engulfing them, and of how they are becoming disassociated
from the world outside.)
(ix) À bout de souffle (Jean-Luc Godard,
1960) (An image of freedom.)
(x) Shock Corridor (Samuel Fuller, 1963)
(An image of the insanity of societies and their governments.
Specifically, it reads as a criticism of the French government
which fired Langlois, and of the police force which brutally
opposed the students and filmmakers who turned out in protest.)
(xi) Bande à part (Jean-Luc Godard,
1964) (By intercutting the ‘run through the Louvre’
scene from this film with Theo, Isabelle and Matthew’s
re-enactment of it, Bertolucci shows their complete immersion
in cinema, and points to the fact that they don’t just
watch films, but live them.)
(xii) Mouchette (Robert Bresson, 1967). (A
particularly poignant image of death, suicide, and the pain
of life, which adds a tragic element to The Dreamers
that makes us believe that Isabelle, Theo and Matthew’s
dreams and desires could end up destroying their lives.)
In addition
to these twelve scenes, Bertolucci’s use of the postcard
of Marlene Dietrich as Lola Lola in Der Blaue Engel,
offers a still of Dietrich that functions in a similar way
to the film clips. Film audiences, accustomed to looking at
film stills and lobby cards, might even remember a still image
more strongly than an entire scene. Martin Scorsese says,
"When I was growing up in the forties and fifties, I
spent a lot of time in movie theatres ... there was nothing
really available that I could find written about film –
except one book ... I hadn’t seen many of the films
described in the book, so all I had at my disposal to experience
them where these black and white stills. I would fantasize
about them, they would play into my dreams..." [p.13-14,
Martin Scorsese and Michael Henry Wilson, A Personal
Journey with Martin Scorsese through American Cinema,
(United Kingdom: Faber and Faber, 1997)] What Scorsese describes
is not just the visual power of the particular images in his
film book, but in general, the ability of a still image from
a film to evoke something beyond itself, and by its very lack
to hint at the rest of the film.
(16) This comment itself can be understood as a displaced
re-statement of the comment which sums-up The Dreamers
at the end of footnote seven.
(17) In the light of the observation in footnote six that,
"Bertolucci himself, the characters in The Dreamers,
and the audience watching the film, can all equally be considered
‘dreamers’", it becomes clear that this release
is not limited to the audience watching or the characters’
activities in the film, but can apply to the filmmakers whose
making of the film can equally allow every frustrated desire,
thought and emotion to unashamedly find its release. An example
that immediately comes to mind is the work of another Italian
filmmaker, Dario Argento. In Trauma (Dario
Argento, 1993) his camera takes the position of voyeur, spying
on a half-naked character who is in fact his own daughter,
and in La Sindrome di Stendhal (Dario Argento,
1996) assumes the POV of this daughter-actress-character’s
rapist.
(18) A comment by Jung is highly instructive in this context:
"The possession of a secret cuts a person off from his
fellow human beings. Since it is of the utmost importance
for the economy of the libido that his rapport with the environment
should be as complete and as unimpeded as possible, the possession
of subjectively important secrets usually has a very disturbing
effect." [p.207, C.J. Jung, The Collected Works.
Volume Five: Symbols of Transformation, 2nd Edition,
trans. from the German by R.F.C. Hull, (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1970)] In the light of this comment many of
Isabelle and Theo’s activities within the apartment,
which could be labeled ‘obscene’, appear as a
kind of disburdening themselves of the “subjectively
important secrets” which function like separative walls
between people.
(19) This exchange was taken from the film’s press kit.
(20) This is also true in the sense that what we call a ‘film’
is not something that physically exists as reels of celluloid,
nor even something that exists in the form of still images
that flash on the screen at a rate of 24fps, each interrupted
by an unperceived black screen, but rather exists as something
in our minds. That is, what we call a film exists as a perceptual,
cognitive, cultural and personal response to the punctuated
stream of still images which we perceive as moving though
they are not, and which we have been trained to read meaningfully,
and which fuse with the memory of our personal experiences
to become imbued with psychological depth.
(21) A statement supported by a quote from Japanese director
Mikio Naruse, who once said, "Perhaps this is what films
should be, things that live on only in the audience’s
memory..." [p.129, Donald Richie, A Hundred Years
of Japanese Film, (Tokyo, New York, London: Kodansha
International, 2001)] For Naruse, the most vital part of a
film is how it’s remembered, because this is one way
that its ephemeral images achieve a kind of ‘permanence’
and life.
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