Summary:
Set in 1930s Fascist Italy, Il Conformista tells the story of Marcello Clerici’s desire for conformity. Sexually repressed Marcello is tormented by the memory of a homosexual encounter during his childhood with his family’s chauffeur Lino, whom he believes he killed after Lino attempted to seduce him. Having suppressed his homosexual leanings, believing them to threaten his façade of ‘normality’, Marcello proves his own conventionality by joining the Fascist Party and marrying a petit bourgeois woman, Giulia, whom he does not love. To show his loyalty to the regime, Marcello then volunteers his services to Benito Mussolini’s secret police: during his honeymoon in Paris, Marcello will contact his former university professor of philosophy, Luca Quadri, now an antiFascist refugee, and will spy on him. On his way to France, Marcello learns that the counter-order from Rome is to kill Quadri.
Analysis:
In Il Conformista, the anti-Fascist professor Quadri, who lives in exile in Paris and is murdered with the complicity of his former student Marcello Clerici, is given an address and a phone number by director and scriptwriter Bernardo Bertolucci – 17, Rue St. Jacques; MED-15-37 – that belonged to French director Jean-Luc Godard, Bertolucci’s cinematic mentor at the time the film was made. Moreover, Quadri’s first name in the film is changed from Edmondo (Quadri’s name in Alberto Moravia’s novel Il conformista, of which Bertolucci’s screenplay is an adaptation) to Luca, the Italian for Luc, as in Jean-Luc Godard. Peter Bondanella has observed that ‘Marcello’s assignment to murder Professor Quadri reflects not only the protagonist’s Oedipal conflict but those of Bertolucci as well’ (1994: 303). Meanwhile, Claretta Micheletti Tonetti has observed that by giving Godard’s address, phone number and first name to Professor Quadri, Bertolucci projected ‘in Marcello’s killing of his intellectual father (Quadri) his own desire to suppress Godard’s influence on his artistic creation’ (1995: 106), in order to establish his artistic identity. As Bertolucci admitted:
“The Conformist is a story about me and Godard. When I gave the professor Godard’s phone number and address I did it for a joke, but afterwards I said to myself, ‘Well, maybe all that has some significance. I’m Marcello and I make fascist films and I want to kill Godard, who’s a revolutionary, who makes revolutionary movies and who was my teacher.” (Goldin 1971: 66)
The influence of paternal authority and the conflict between father and son are key themes in Il Conformista, and can be understood within the Freudian theory of the totemic father, whom the son must renounce to establish his male identity and symbolically enter society. In this respect, the film beautifully lends itself to a psychoanalytical reading focused on the Oedipal struggle against the father. As Christopher Wagstaff has pointed out, Bertolucci regards the Oedipal scenario as the metaphor for human existence, at the individual, sexual, social and political levels, and develops it in his films in relation to patriarchy, selfhood and repression (1996: 206). Il conformista was in fact shaped by Bertolucci’s concomitant discovery of psychoanalysis. In an interview given to Le Cinéma Italien in 1978, after saying he had been under analysis since the making of La Strategia del Ragno in 1970, Bertolucci significantly added: ‘During the time I am shooting, the film replaces analysis’ (Gili 1998: 136).
Bertolucci’s adaptation of Moravia’s novel revolves around Marcello’s quest for father figures that he feels the need to, first, please and then, in line with a classical Oedipal trajectory, rebel against and eliminate. In Il Conformista it is possible to identify numerous father figures: the Fascist state, which Marcello tends to perceive as ‘the ultimate patriarch’ (Loshitzky 1995: 65); Marcello’s friend and Fascist theorist Italo Montanari; the Fascist minister, obviously presented as an authoritative father figure through the ‘primal scene’ Marcello witnesses in the ministry office, in which the minister embraces an uncanny double of Quadri’s wife Anna; Marcello’s insane father, whom Marcello sadistically torments by reminding him of his former crimes of torture and assassination as a Fascist picchiatore (thug); Lino the chauffeur; Alberi, Marcello’s mother’s chauffeur and lover, who replaces Marcello’s father in the life of Marcello’s mother and embodies Marcello’s incestuous desire for her; the veteran agent Manganiello, who is responsible for Marcello’s ‘training’ as a special agent of Mussolini’s secret police; and then the ultimate father/teacher, Professor Quadri, whom Marcello feels he must betray and kill to establish his own identity and conform to normative masculinity. As Bondanella has observed, ‘Marcello’s entire existence revolves around a desire to please successive surrogate fathers, and a feeling of inadequacy brought on by a chance homosexual encounter in the distant past, which motivates his search for “normality” in the present’ (1994: 303). He represses his latent homosexuality by constructing a representation of normalcy and supporting the regime, but his adult self remains obsessed by the homosexual initiation experienced in his childhood, which exists as an inerasable sin and a permanent ‘fathering principle of his male identity’ (Dalle Vacche 1992: 57).
With Il Conformista, inspired by a Freudian psychoanalytical framework, Bertolucci confronted his personal father figures: his father Attilio, an acclaimed poet, film critic and academic; famous novelist Moravia; and his cinematic mentor, Godard. Attilio Bertolucci’s strong personality made a dramatic impact on his son, and Attilio was for the director the first father to ‘kill’. In various interviews Bertolucci has significantly linked his love for writing poetry to a desire to emulate his father (Gili 1998: 129), while also admitting that his choice of cinema over poetry had to be attributed to a need to find a different ground on which to compete with his father (Rigoletto 2012: 124). And he certainly managed to establish his own artistic identity at a very young age. After serving as an assistant director on Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Accattone in 1961, Bertolucci won a prestigious prize in poetry and received critical acclaim for his first film, La commare secca, the following year, aged just 21. Then, in 1970, came two films which secured Bertolucci international recognition and critical acclaim: La strategia del Ragno and Il Conformista.
With Il Conformista, Bertolucci also challenged one of the most eminent Italian novelists of the twentieth century, Moravia. According to Jefferson Kline, Bertolucci’s adaptation of Moravia’s novel helps us understand how the director addressed the issue of the relationship between authority and creativity, and between written text and image, for, in the film, Bertolucci ‘explicitly imitated and implicitly contested’ the textual authority represented by Moravia. While Kline identifies Bertolucci’s refusal ‘to imitate the novel’s insistently systematic chronology and causality’ as a most significant deviation from Moravia’s novel (1987: 88), Millicent Marcus also points to the replacement of Moravia’s dramatic determinism – according to which Il conformista is to be read as a story of inescapable fate which marks the protagonist from his childhood – with psychological determinism, with an emphasis on the force of the subconscious. Although faithful to the anecdotal level of the book, Bertolucci makes the present of his narrative Marcello’s car journey from Paris to the place of the assassination. During the journey, Marcello recalls various episodes of his life leading up to his current circumstances. These memories are represented in a disorienting set of flashbacks within flashbacks that defy any linear time frame. After the murder, the film ends with a coda set on 25 July 1943, the night Mussolini was voted out of power (Marcus 1986: 287–94).
Kline has also observed that since the film is built around a series of reminiscences presented in flashbacks within flashbacks, for viewers to make sense of the plot they must read the images each scene presents associatively, rather than analytically. Therefore, association is the key to interpretation, which is possible by putting together, as an analyst does when he or she listens to a patient, the various clues that are presented (1987: 91–2). These elements and chronologies give Il Conformista an oneiric quality, for they operate in line with the processes of the Freudian latent dream work, which are condensation, displacement, projection, and doubling (Bondanella 1994: 301). They also imply, as Marcus argues, that Marcello’s subjectivity is the source of the camera’s perspective and that Bertolucci’s visual style, with its surrealistic mise en scène, is to be regarded as the visual representation of Marcello’s disturbed psyche (1986: 295–6).
With Il Conformista Bertolucci also contested Godard’s anti-commercial cinema and announced the end of Godard’s influence on his cinematic style. He rejected the approach to political filmmaking the French director had developed at the time of his most intransigent Maoism, immediately after the events of May 1968, and that was characterised by a search for more radical forms to express political ideas (Loshitzky 1995). Robin Wood has argued that, at a stylistic level, Il Conformista, with its elaborate tracking shots, opulent colour photography, surrealistic visual incongruities and play of light and shadow, is testament to the full blossoming of an artistic flamboyance influenced by Orson Welles, Max Ophüls and Josef von Sternberg (2000: 265). Arguably, then, the scene of the murder may be seen as the final act of Bertolucci’s Oedipal journey to Paris to ‘kill off’ his cinematic father figure.
While Quadri is stabbed, Marcello sits and passively watches the assassination through the window of Manganiello’s car. His immobile form, frozen in a dreamlike dimension, reminds us of the immobility of the cinematic spectator, of the dreamer and of the enchained people in Plato’s allegory. If, as Christopher Wagstaff has pointed out, ‘looking is central to the cinema, and doubly so to Il Conformista, where Marcello does not so much do things as watch things, and where the viewer watches Marcello watch’ (1983: 68), then with this powerful scene Bertolucci urges viewers to consider the dynamics of spectatorship and our engagement with such images. When Quadri, after he and Marcello have retold the myth of Plato’s cave, urges his former student not to mistake the shadows of reality for reality, the skilful lighting of the scene makes the professor look like a shadow on a wall of light, which reinforces Bertolucci’s message about the illusionary nature of his art (Kline 1987: 86–7).
When viewing Il Conformista through an Oedipal lens, it is difficult to disagree with Kline’s view that ‘if it is his “destiny” to kill the father, Bertolucci succeeds where Marcello has not: he manages his murders (of Moravia and Godard) on a purely symbolic and creative level’ (1987: 105). By adopting an experimental cinematic technique, Bertolucci transformed traditional narrative elements into an oneiric journey through memory and the past, making viewers aware of the very nature of the cinematic experience while urging them to reflect upon the ambiguous relationship between authority and creativity, looking and action, reality and illusion.
Antonella Palmieri
Cast and Crew:
[Country: Italy, France, West Germany. Production Company: Mars Film/Marianne Productions/ Maran Film. Producers: Giovanni Bertolucci, Maurizio Lodi-Fè. Director and Screenwriter: Bernardo Bertolucci. Cinematographer: Vittorio Storaro. Editor: Franco Arcalli. Cast: Jean-Louis Trintignant (Marcello Clerici), Stefania Sandrelli (Giulia Clerici), Enzo Tarascio (Professor Quadri), Dominique Sanda (Anna Quadri).]
Further Reading:
Peter Bondanella, Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present, New York, Continuum, 1994.
Angela Dalle Vacche, The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1992.
Jean A. Gili, Italian Filmmakers. Self Portraits: A Selection of Interviews, Roma, Gremese Editore, 1998.
Marylin Goldin, ‘Bertolucci on The Conformist’, Sight and Sound, Vol. 40, No. 2, 1971, pp. 64–6.
Jefferson Kline, Bertolucci’s Dream Loom: A Psychoanalytic Study of Cinema, Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1987.
Josepha Loshitzky, The Radical Faces of Godard and Bertolucci, Detroit, Wayne State University Press, 1995.
Millicent Marcus, Italian Film in the Light of Neorealism, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1986.
Claretta Micheletti Tonetti, Bernardo Bertolucci: The Cinema of Ambiguity, New York, Twayne Publishers, 1995.
Sergio Rigoletto, ‘Contesting National Memory: Masculine Dilemmas and Oedipal Scenarios in Bernardo Bertolucci’s Strategia del ragno and Il Conformista’, in Italian Studies, Vol. 67, No. 1, February 2012, pp. 124–46.
Christopher Wagstaff, ‘The Construction of Point of View in Bertolucci’s Il Conformista’, in The Italianist, No. 3, 1983, pp. 64–71.
Christopher Wagstaff, ‘Bertolucci: An Italian Intellectual of the 1970s Looks at Italy’s Fascist Past’, in Graham Bartram, Maurice Slawinsky and David Steel (eds), Reconstructing the Past: Representation of the Fascist Era in Post-War European Culture, Keele, Keele University Press, 1996, pp. 202–13.
Robin Wood, ‘Il Conformista’, in Tony Pendergast and Sara Pendergast (eds), International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers: 1 FILMS, Farmington Hills MI, St. James Press, 2000.
Source Credits:
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Films, Edited by Sarah Barrow, Sabine Haenni and John White, first published in 2015.