The Radical Faces of Godard and Bertolucci

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. "The Radical Faces of Godard and Bertolucci", however, provides new insights into their relationship by specifically addressing their influences upon each other. This careful analysis of their films pays special attention to the more recent and often critically neglected films, and locates their work within the cultural critiques of feminism, postmodernism and multiculturalism. Yosefa Lushitzky argues that in Godard's most recent films, he traded Marxism for mysticism.
In probing his shift toward a new religiosity in "Passion", "Carmen" and "Hail Mary", she discovers that sexuality is no longer linked here to the world of prostitution, consumption and pornography, as it had been in his previous films, but to the world of nature, the universe and cosmic contemplation. Like Godard, Bertolucci also evolved in the 1980s; he became skeptical of Western thought and pursued the East as a utopia, as reflected in films like "The Last Emperor", "The Sheltering Sky" and "Little Buddha". "The Radical Faces of Godard and Bertolucci" traces the careers of two brilliant filmmakers from their Marxist beginnings to their quasi-religious quest for spiritual rejuvenation, thus providing a reinterpretation of the directors and their films.