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The film's cognitive structure and the question of nostalgia
The film's structure resembles French realist novels such as the works that form Honore de
Balzac's La Comedie Humaine, (1799/1850) where detailed descriptions of the characters'
milieu link with the narration of their individual struggles during a particular epoch, hi the
case of 1900, the narrative depicts the contrast between different social classes but, unlike the
pattern of literary narratives in which different classes rarely interact, the essence of the
narrative ambiguity of 1900 evolves as the key figures embodying class difference, Alfredo
and Olmo, establish a friendship which is perceived as ever more incomprehensible as
Alfredo's ambiguity evolves into an opportunistic, tacit backing of Fascist violence. This
element creates disorientation in the viewers' attempt to reconstruct the story, as the linear
chain of cause and effect underlying the narration is disturbed by this unconventional position
given to characters who, by representing conflicting social forces, would be unlikely maintain
their friendship.
The film depicts the lives of different classes through a narrative whose focus shifts
from one grouping to the other with a perspective that constitutes an evocative and outwardly
objective description of the socioeconomic milieu of the time. However, the film's visual
arrangement of these elements is marked by an aestheticized beauty in the representation of
both social classes, an effect consolidated by the way in which the opulent mise-en-scene is
symmetrically distributed, though in different forms. The refinement of the landowners'
costumes and the decor of their living environments are counterbalanced by framings which
give an almost sculptural representation of the physicality of the labourers, and which
accentuate the natural beauty of their rural houses, a landscape where the master's manor
house also stands. This representation points to an aesthetic problem arising from the mise-
en-scene of 1900, as it implies an uneasy interplay between an aestheticized, personal
evocation on Bertolucci's part, and an attempt to develop a more distanced historical
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