» World Cinema Selects

“It’s a triumph of feeling and style…so operatic that you come away with sequences in your head like arias.”

- Pauline Kael

Presented in this new 4K restoration by Minerva Pictures-Rarovideo USA and L’Immagine Ritrovata, Bernardo Bertolucci’s THE CONFORMIST (1970) is both a searing study of sexuality and politics set in 1930’s Italy and a triumph of opulent visual storytelling. Bertolucci combines a flawless aesthetic with a deep emphasis on composition, design, and camerawork to slowly build a devastating portrait of the kind of personality that allows fascism to flourish. Marcello spends much of the film being followed by fascist henchmen who are shadowing him to ensure he carries out his orders. And to capture Marcello’s slowly building sense of being trapped in an inescapable situation — as well as the invasive, subtly Orwellian atmosphere of fascist life — Bertolucci’s venerated cinematographer Vittorio Storaro uses a wealth of different camera techniques.

In Mussolini's Italy, repressed Jean-Louis Trintignant, trying to purge memories of a youthful, homosexual episode--and murder—joins the Fascists in a desperate attempt to fit in. As the reluctant Judas motors to his personal Gethsemane (the assassination of his leftist mentor), he flashes back to a dance party for the blind, an insane asylum in a stadium, and wife Stefania Sandrelli and lover Dominique Sanda performing the tango in a working-class dance hall. But those are only a few of this political thriller's anthology pieces; others include Trintignant's honeymoon coupling with Sandrelli in a train compartment as the sun sets outside their window, a bimbo lolling on the desk of a fascist functionary, glimpsed in the recesses of his cavernous office, and a murder victim's hands leaving bloody streaks on a limousine parked in a wintry forest. Bernardo Bertolucci's masterpiece, adapted from the Alberto Moravia novel, boasts an authentic Art Deco look created by production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti, a score by the great Georges Delerue and breathtaking color cinematography by Vittorio Storaro.

Repeatedly, the camerawork calls attention to itself in the French New Wave tradition (ALPHAVILLE): low camera angles rising to confront or trail after characters, as if the camera has been lying in wait; tracking shots that seem to follow the action from a surreptitious distance; and a few oblique angles that indicate both the main character’s completely askew moral compass and the increasingly distorted society in which he finds himself.

Bertolucci also drew heavily on German Expressionism (THE LAST LAUGH), with its exaggerated, distorted shapes, and the deep, heavy shadows as well as the stark contrasts of film noir (TRAPPED). Storaro and the film’s art designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti (both longtime collaborators with Bertolucci) also drew upon the 16th century artist Caravaggio, and his famous use of contrasting light and darkness. 

The production design uses a wealth of actual Italian Fascist architecture and deep color contrasts — the color scheme frequently shifts from fully washed-out neutrals to vibrant, almost garish primary colors. Nearly every scene features an extremely regimented composition. In many shots, characters are framed in the center of a vast, looming environment that threatens to engulf them. The mise en scène deploys heavy contrasts of shadow and light throughout to indicate Marcello’s internal war with himself, and the depth of his conscious and unconscious desires.

THE CONFORMIST unfolds as a series of flashbacks and flashbacks-within-flashbacks in service of a twisty plot with a distinctly noir flavor. The sheer extravagance of the film’s visual design — expressive lighting, lavish decor, sumptuous costumes, elaborate tracking shots — evokes the classic Hollywood studio cinema of Sternberg, Ophüls and Welles.

Using shadows, bars, and the camera as a surveillance device, Bertolucci and Storaro turn the cinematic canvas into a prison. One of the things that makes THE CONFORMIST so tense and taut is that the film’s aesthetic and composition visually surrounds the viewer, trapping us, alongside Marcello, within the increasingly distorted horror that his reality has become. The film consistently frames characters within bars to deepen the sense of imprisonment. These frequently take the form of horizontal and vertical shadows, as well as barred windows, trees and architecture, and occasionally literal bars. Furthering the sense of entrapment, the film is full of furtive camera angles. At various points, the camera seems to be stuffed into an odd corner of a room, or else dangling high overhead from a birds-eye view, or viewing the action from far across a vast room or landscape. All these shadows and visual references to imprisonment finally grow so intense that they infiltrate the action of the film.

All of this visual thematic filmmaking comes to a brilliant head in one scene — in which the professor, Quadri, suspecting that Marcello’s visit has a darker purpose, jovially confronts him with an allegory of Marcello’s own moral emptiness — the famous allegory of Plato’s cave. Quadri invites Marcello to recount the story, recalling that to the prisoners who have known only the shadows on the wall, the shadows are the true version of reality. 

The film’s style, both in movement and design, is symbolic of Fascism’s rise and fall. Just as Marcello’s attempts to order his life according to society’s harsh rules lead to his eventual psychic disintegration, so too do Fascism’s attempts at regimentation and authoritarianism lead to anarchy and chaos. The earlier parts of the film, full of the clean, imposing spaces of Mussolini’s Italy, are directed with a highly orderly aesthetic – symmetrical compositions, lateral, precise tracking shots, and very tight, controlled movements by the actors, particularly Trintignant. 

Bertolucci also filmed in a building with ties to the Fascist regime. The scene in the film that takes place at the Palazzo dei Congressi is where the protagonist Marcello visits his ill father. The building’s sharp architectural outlines, its clean shapes and the attention to detail make this building a significant example of rationalist architecture. Bertolucci’s use of this space in this film draws parallels to the political beliefs at the time – a focus on brutalist, architectural monumentality – showing off the vastness of this space with wide shots. The film’s cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro, photographs this scene by closing his aperture and achieving deep focus, providing his images with a larger depth of field.

The Palazzo dei Congressi is located in the EUR district, a residential and business district in Rome. Benito Mussolini created the district in the late 1930s for the Esposizione Universale Roma, a World’s Fair that would be held in 1942, celebrating twenty years of fascism. This was also a way of directing the expansion of the city towards the southwest and the sea with the intentions of forming a new city center in Rome. The start of World War II and Italy’s involvement in the war, however, canceled the original plans for the exposition. The EUR district, as a result, was never finished, and the Palazzo dei Congressi, was completed nearly two decades later. The desolate area is now seen as a complete failure on a massive scale, paralleling Marcello’s solitude at the end of the film.

The later parts of THE CONFORMIST are draped in shadows, or shot through with unflatteringly harsh lights, working to create a unique sense of violent social turmoil. The scene where the Professor and his wife are murdered is full of rough, handheld camerawork and jump cuts. The finale of the film, set in a dark, dank prostitute-riddled corner of the Colosseum on the night of Il Duce’s fall, with distracting searchlights and other odd lighting effects, is a far cry from the cleanly lit, orderly spaces of the earlier scenes. The mixture of homosexual and heterosexual hustlers (among them the gay chauffeur Marcello thought he had killed as a child), the disorderly political protesters, the collapsing symbols of fascism’s fall, all create the sense that the protagonist has wound up in a world where everything he sought to suppress has come out of hiding and into full view.

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