SOURCE: Loshitzky, Yosefa. “More than Style: Bertolucci's Postmodernism versus Godard's Modernism.” Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts 34, no. 1 (winter 1992): 119–42.

In the following essay, Loshitzky explores how Bertolucci's work has come to define postmodern cinema and the ways in which his films are an answer to the modernism of filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard.

Any attempt to discuss Godard's and Bertolucci's styles¹ invites an engagement with one of the most absorbing issues in contemporary discourse, the quarrel between modernism and postmodernism. The modern/postmodern debate is broached in various areas of contemporary thought ranging from hermeneutics, neo-Marxism and poststructuralism to cultural studies, psychoanalysis and feminism. In each of these currents the concept of postmodernism has been either valorized or devalorized, depending on the relation to its counterpart modernism. I do not intend to resolve the debate,² but rather to use some of the issues it raises regarding the two...