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with the disturbing fates of impotent screen protagonists, the critic indicating how their
identification with the screen figure becomes purely perceptual. This is a defensive act during
which 'the mind dissociates perceptions and emotions in strongly negatively charged
situations, as when people involved in catastrophes experience them as happening to
somebody else' (Grodal, 1997: 158). Therefore the film's disconcerting emotional mood -
diffused by its visuals and mise-en-scene - is intensified by the traumatic development of its
strongest moment of viewer/character empathy.
Between history and nostalgia
The narrative sequence where Anna Quadri advises Giulia regarding fashion, jewellery and
Parisian entertainment supplements Anna's femmefatale attributes by giving the character an
alluring, worldly knowledge, but it also endows sections of the film with a glamorous
elegance and sensual pleasure, as displayed in the dancing sequence. The Paris sequence,
together with other elements of the film's mise-en-scene, was instrumental in it being
categorized as a nostalgia film in the sense used by Fredric Jameson in his analysis of the
dialectic between political films and mass culture. Jameson argues that the element that
makes historical films inauthentic and therefore turns them into nostalgia films is 'the cult of
the glossy image, as a whole new technology [...] has allowed its lavish indulgence in
contemporary film' (Jameson, 1992: 85). He identifies in the precise (re)construction of
period style - above all of art deco - the formal element on which many nostalgia films
depend, so much so that he actually redefines the term as 'nostalgia-deco film" (Jameson
1992: 225). Jameson mentions The Conformist several times, but succinctly, so his ultimate
evaluation of the film remains unclear. On the one hand he considers it as part of the 'range
of contemporary nostalgia culture' deriving from the French categorization of such films as
pastiche reinventing 'the style, not of an art language, but of a whole period' (Jameson 1992:
84).
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