Forty years of collected interviews with the influential filmmaker of The Last Emperor, Last Tango in Paris, and Little Buddha

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From the acclaimed writer Susan Minot, author of Monkeys, Lust & Other Stories and Folly, and the legendary filmmaker Bernardo Bertolucci, director of Last Tango in Paris, The Last Emperor (winner of nine Academy Awards, including Best Director and Best Picture), The Sheltering Sky, and Little Buddha, comes a hauntingly beautiful film about innocence, seduction, and the pain and pleasures of youth. Following the death of her mother, nineteen-year-old Lucy Harmon is sent by her father to Italy to stay with old family friends and to have her portrait done. She is eager to renew her acquaintance with Niccolò Donati, the handsome young boy from a neighboring family with whom she shared her first kiss on a visit four years earlier, and anxious to solve a riddle left in her mother's diary, the answer to which may change Lucy's life forever.

In this anthology, filmmakers, psychoanalysts, film scholars, and cultural historians use a psychoanalytic approach to examine Bernardo Bertolucci's epic film The Last Emperor (I988). Evolving out of a conference on Bertolucci's work, the essays interweave psychological, political, and cinematic themes in The Last Emperor as well as in much of Bertolucci's other works. This volume includes a foreword by Bernardo Bertolucci and is organized into four parts or "takes," including "Filmcraft," "Psychoanalysis," "Film Scholarship," and "Cultural History." Although we can never fully know the real Aisingioro Pu Yi, Bertolucci used his vision of the intricate relationship between art, ideology, and the psychic experience to tell the story of one ordinary man's extraordinary life. Bertolucci's The Last Emperor hopes to illuminate this complex and often enigmatic creation as well as renew an excitement about the possibilities of interdisciplinary criticism in film studies.

From the radical 1960s through the neo-conservative 1980s and into the early 1990s, the provocative cinematic careers of French director Jean-Luc Godard and Italian director Bernardo Bertolucci have captured the imagination of filmgoers and critics alike. Although their films differ greatly - Godard produces highly cerebral and theoretical works while Bertolucci creates films with more spectacle and emotionalism - their careers have sparked lively discussion and debate, mostly centred around the notion of an Oedipal struggle between them.

Film-making is a collaborative business and, when it comes to the way a filmooks, the critical relationship is that between the director and theinematographer - now often called the director of photography - whose rolen the enterprise is too often undervalued, if not wholly overlooked. Yet, ashis book shows, the cinematographer's contribution to many great movies haseen both vital and distinctive, and director-cinematographer partnerships,uch as those between David Lean and Freddie Young or Ingmar Bergman and Svenykvist, have played a significant role in the history of the cinema.;Thisook systematically examines and documents the technical and creative role ofhe cinematographer in European cinema over the past 100 years. It has beenompiled under the aegis of the Association of European CinematographersImago) and the contributors include many distinguished figures in Europeaninema history such as the director Bernardo Bertolucci, the actor Marcelloastroianni, cinematographers Sven Nykvist, Jack Cardiff and Giuseppe Rotunnond a number of leading film historians. Individual contributions cover a