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BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI'S THE DREAMERS (2003): POLITICS OF YOUTH REMEMBERED Bertolucci's films have always been politically engaged. Undergoing psychoanalysis in the 1960s left him fascinated by dreams and their resemblance to cinematic sequences. However, he declared that he could not bring together his interests in politics and aesthetics. For me it's very difficult to succeed in mixing together the idea of beauty that I have as a moral fact and a reduction of reality in political terms, exactly because I think they are two irreconcilable things. (Cited by Purdon, 1971: 7) The Dreamers finally realised his long-standing ambition to make a film dealing with the events of Paris in 1968. Much more than a mere reconstruction of those events, this was to become the Bertolucci film that wove together sex, psychoanalysis, memory, dreaming, revolution and filmic style in a rich tapestry. Bertolucci always wanted to make cinema new and strange.

This article reexamines television sporting heroes in the light of the myths that accompany their stereotypical images. It considers briefly the pressures that encourage broadcasters to build the most successful athletes into stars and addresses some of the main constituents propagated in such figures. The elaborate ceremonies mounted in the stadium for the Barcelona Olympics are reviewed so as to focus on a central myth on which those presentations touched. And an account is given of the manner in which the television channels received in Britain mediated these performances. The article concludes by arguing that, despite the evidence provided by the Barcelona ceremonies, the vestiges of certain ancient myths still have an animating function in television's routine sports coverage.