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Section Three: Between History and Nostalgia
// Conformista/The Conformist (1970), Novecento/1900 (1976).
These films represent two key points in Bertolucci's career. The Conformist marked a shift of
orientation in Bertolucci's work, the director seeking to amalgamate authorial elements
within film-making as a visual spectacle; 1900 marked his desire to break into the American
market after the acclaim of Last Tango in Paris. Both films therefore involved a change in
the nature and in the scale of the audience to be addressed, but they retain Bertolucci's
propensity for complex narrative construction, sophisticated mise-en-scene, and intellectual
cross-references. These characteristics, and the sheer length of 1900, make it difficult to
categorize these films as 'commercial'; instead their nature lends weight to Bertolucci's
declaration that he had wanted to infiltrate the cinematic 'system' in order to combine the
best traditions of Hollywood film-making with auteur cinema (Mirabella-Pitiot 1991: 42).
Critics have already described the distribution saga of 1900 (Kolker 1985: 73-75); in the
following chapter, I will only highlight how the conduct of the producer, Alberto Grimaldi,
appeared to be incongruous with his role of acting on behalf of the American Majors, which
seemed to be unaware of fundamental information about the film, such as its length, until the
film's screening at Cannes.
Most critical analyses of the two films have traced several points of contact, starting
from their narratives which portray Italy's Fascist period. This historical frame - which is
added to in The Conformist by the presence of film noir conventions that alert viewers to their
conscious use by Bertolucci - is instrumental in distancing viewers from the ongoing action
by eliciting continuous intellectual and memory associations that shape the viewing
experience by creating the saturated modal qualities referred to by Grodal (Grodal, 1997:
179