The Conformist

01/08/2026

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If all films are useful in illuminating film theory, some are more useful than others. A viewer might believe that, by analysing a work of popular entertainment, the theorist is reading too much into it. Seeing Jaws as an allegory of Watergate, or masculinity-in-crisis, is all very well, but hardly adding much to the viewing experience. This is a film that doesn’t need theoretical bolstering. Most viewers have got on fine without it. However, what about a film like Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1930s-set The Conformist? There is a well-known scene where the central character, Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant), reminds his former professor of the moment when he discussed Plato’s Cave. There, prisoners were chained since they were young, all facing a wall at the back of the dwelling. Behind them is a low wall where soldiers are walking, and behind them a fire burns. The prisoners can’t turn around, and thus can only see the soldiers as flickering, large shadows against the wall in the cave. They see an image of reality, but not reality itself. In the film, the professor says that with central character Clerici’s generation, the same is happening to them; they are confusing shadows and reality, allowing them to be manipulated in Mussolini’s Fascist Italy. As they speak in the professor’s lowlit room, we see Clerici’s shadow against the wall as the director proposes there are shadows everywhere.
In the same year that Bertolucci’s film was made, Jean-Louis Baudry wrote an influential essay using the very same image. In ‘The Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematic Apparatus’, Baudry reckoned “…the optical construct appears to be truly the projection-reflection of a ‘virtual image’ whose hallucinatory reality it creates.”  “It is”, he says, “an apparatus destined to obtain a precise ideological effect, necessary to the dominant ideology…it collaborates with a marked efficacity in the maintenance of realism.” (Cahiers du Cinema) Thus, for Baudry, cinema made us see a reality shaped by ideology and determined to keep us within its limited purview. The viewer is like Plato’s prisoner; confusing what they see on screen with what they perceive as life. Plenty of commentators have questioned Baudry’s claims, and Baudry’s argument is more nuanced than what we offer here. Yet what we can say with some confidence is that many works in the 1960s and 1970s were concerned with how a film was made and the sort of reality it seemed to be projecting onto the screen, and thus onto the world.
Bertolucci, who would go on to make Last Tango in Paris and win an Oscar for The Last Emperor, had an ambivalent relationship with this question. He was a director increasingly interested in making films that would have a large audience, while also determined to use the form in complex and alienating ways. Yet this was not quite the alienation of more demanding filmmakers of the time, including Jean-Luc Godard, Straub/Huillet and Miklos Jancso. Bertolucci wanted to draw the viewer into the work but not quite draw the viewer into the story he was telling. He wished for the pleasure principle but wanted to defy a reality principle that would have masked the form. “I think film in general expresses ‘film.' I know that’s a tautology but when critics ask me what did I want to say in the film, I say nothing with the film. I just want to say…just the film. Because the audiences, the public in general, the critics as well, judge the film on the story, the content, not the style.” (Cineaste)
Bertolucci might agree that the viewer shouldn’t confuse the shadows on the walls with the soldiers behind the prisoners, but perhaps he would wish less to free the prisoners than make them aware they are watching an image. There was a lot more to Baudry and other writers, like Daniel Dayan and Jean-Louis Comolli, who fell under what was called apparatus theory at the beginning of the seventies, but most agreed that viewers should be woken up from their narcoleptic stupor.
Bertolucci, however, was more likely to insist on the most tangled of dreams. While in 1964 he made Before the Revolution, by the early seventies his Marxism was weak next to his Freudian preoccupations. He reckoned that revolutionary films didn’t change society; they merely became part of a festival programme. “So you do a revolutionary film for the cinephiles, the people who like movies.” (Cineaste) This needn’t make Bertolucci apolitical, but political in a different way — just as he wished to make the audience confront the form, without the radical distancing of a Godard. It was as though he wanted the viewer to be seduced and abandoned, drawn into the style but left puzzled by the nature of the film’s content. It was as if he wished his work to possess an aspect of the dream, and it thus made sense that immediately prior to The Conformist he adapted a short story from that most convoluted of oneirists, Jorge Luis Borges, into The Spider’s Stratagem.
In The Conformist, the most obvious formal convolution rests on time. The story may focus on the day that Clerici will kill the professor, but it is a fragmentary account that keeps dipping into time past. That often isn’t a problem: numerous noirs have accessed flashbacks to fill out a story’s context. But usually these flashbacks are motivated by the narrative the film tells and the characters relating the information. Long before Tarantino and Christopher Nolan were turning their stories into assertively controlled narrations, Bertolucci was taking to heart Godard’s dictum that films could have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.  Tarantino and Nolan may have wished to escape both chronology and conventional flashback. However, they still wanted to tell the story, insisting the viewer work harder than usual to comprehend the time frames, but that the story was still the thing. A little bit of narrative theory can be useful in understanding their work, though many will insist that just a second viewing of Memento and Pulp Fiction will suffice. We don’t especially need psychoanalytic, ideological, semiotic and formalist tools to muse over any confusion the films elicit. The films stay within their diegetic limits; they don’t ask us to see the work as a product of aesthetic understanding. The directors are finally pragmatists of the image, creating problems in the story all the better for us to feel satisfied in its resolution.
Bertolucci’s film is more irresolute than that. He asks us to follow the film rather than the story, well aware that a film is made up of many elements that are then absorbed into the narrative, so that they needn’t trouble us or draw attention to their presence. Like many films of the period by Godard, Bunuel, Bergman and Resnais, cinema wanted to prove it was more than a storytelling medium; that it was made up of numerous components brought together that could allow the filmmaker to show film rather than tell a story. While filmmaking has usually been concerned with how to build a narrative, film theory has been much more concerned with proposing what film is.  There may have been the avant-gardes of the twenties, and Russian formalism of the same decade, but film had generally settled into its narrative demands. However, while many of the directors of the sixties and seventies didn’t want to reject narrative, they wanted to absorb it into questions over the medium. It thus became a theoretical endeavour, as though the films themselves were arguing over the theories that had been developed during cinema’s brief history. This would include Rudolf Arnheim proposing that film ought to escape from its roots in reality if it is to announce itself as an art form, with Dudley Andrew saying: “it should be clear why Arnheim chides technological developments such as color, 3-D photography, sound and wide-screen. Each reduces the impact of film by bringing it more into accord with natural experience.” (The Major Film Theories) Andre Bazin’s approach would be more the opposite: the addition of sound and colour allows film to be a medium of the real and thus distinguishes itself as a specific art form.  Sergei Eisenstein and other Russian formalists saw film’s originality resting on montage, seeing cinema as a series of blocks, cells or particles that could be extravagantly combined. Alexandre Astruc reckoned film was a medium of potentially great authorial freedom; the camera becoming like a pen the writer holds. These and other ideas became central to how a director could make a film, one made not by ignoring theory (as classic Hollywood insisted, relying on conventions over ideas), but by absorbing it into the texture of the film experience. As Paul Coates proposed: “one reason why Godard enjoys such critical favour is because his films are machines for transforming viewers into critics.” (The Story of the Lost Reflection)
Watching The Conformist, we may wonder if Bertolucci is telling his story well, or whether he has instead chosen to adapt Alberto Moravia’s novel as an opportunity to explore film’s formal possibilities. He rejects Moravia’s causal chronology and finds his own form, making us constantly aware of the montage as the film moves back and forth in time without quite doing so from Clerici’s perspective, nor quite from the story’s sense of progression. The film generally covers the hours before Clerici helps murder a former professor, an anti-fascist exiled in France, and moves back and then forward as it moves towards that day. But it doesn’t settle into this pattern so the viewer can forget about the editing. It wants us constantly to be aware of the montage; not the convention, the conventions that propose a flashback is a character’s clear point of view and/or that it will push the story forward even if it is told backwards.
Yet if Bertolucci is beholden to Eisensteinian editing, he is also fascinated by Bazin’s interest in film as a recording device, picking up locations that very much exist in the world. The station Clerici waits outside at the beginning of the film is Gare d’Orsay, disused by this stage and awaiting potential destruction — a beautiful building that was saved and turned into an art museum. Bertolucci also uses the Palazzo dei Congressi for the asylum where Clerici’s father is staying. It was adapted to become the hospital near the beginning of Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, and is a well-known piece of Italian architecture built in 1939. Our purpose isn’t to get lost in architectural history, but propose that if Bertolucci wishes to make us aware of the editing, he is no less interested in making the viewer see that the real world matters and wishes to film it.
Equally, he believes, like Arnheim, that film has to earn its keep by removing itself from the demands of realism that may come naturally to it, and generate a level of expressive originality that makes us aware in the framing, in the colour design, in the camera movements, that we are watching an art object. It may be the moment when the camera prowls lowly as the wind whips up at Clerici’s mother’s house; the changing colours when Clerici and his new wife are on the train to France, or the split-framing often adopted — when he asks his radio announcer friend what a normal man is; when he sits on the hotel bed in Paris; when he speaks to the priest. The film never settles into its story as it insists on unsettling us with the form. It must not become a transparent work, falling into realism or narration. Such an approach was possible because, in Astruc’s words: “…cinema is now moving towards a form which is making it such a precise language that it will soon be possible to write ideas directly on film without even having to resort to those heavy associations of images that were the delight of the silent cinema.” (‘Le Camera Stylo’) It finds individuated expression rather than homogenous convention.
Numerous filmmakers during this period insisted that films couldn’t just be watched; they needed to be read, to be understood as works within the history and theory of film. This obviously doesn’t mean wonderful movies like Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, Now Voyager and Double Indemnity can’t be read; it is to insist, though, they can more easily be watched than The Conformist. While most of the questions Casablanca and Now Voyager are concerned with and contained by the story, Bertolucci’s can more usefully serve as an introduction to theoretical questions, partly because it is constantly asking them of itself. It is thus a difficult film and yet an easy text to illustrate some of the ideas vital to film theory.

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

The Conformist

If all films are useful in illuminating film theory, some are more useful than others. A viewer might believe that, by analysing a work of popular entertainment, the theorist is reading too much into it. Seeing Jaws as an allegory of Watergate, or masculinity-in-crisis, is all very well, but hardly adding much to the viewing experience. This is a film that doesn’t need theoretical bolstering. Most viewers have got on fine without it. However, what about a film like Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1930s-set The Conformist? There is a well-known scene where the central character, Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant), reminds his former professor of the moment when he discussed Plato’s Cave. There, prisoners were chained since they were young, all facing a wall at the back of the dwelling. Behind them is a low wall where soldiers are walking, and behind them a fire burns. The prisoners can’t turn around, and thus can only see the soldiers as flickering, large shadows against the wall in the cave. They see an image of reality, but not reality itself. In the film, the professor says that with central character Clerici’s generation, the same is happening to them; they are confusing shadows and reality, allowing them to be manipulated in Mussolini’s Fascist Italy. As they speak in the professor’s lowlit room, we see Clerici’s shadow against the wall as the director proposes there are shadows everywhere.
In the same year that Bertolucci’s film was made, Jean-Louis Baudry wrote an influential essay using the very same image. In ‘The Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematic Apparatus’, Baudry reckoned “…the optical construct appears to be truly the projection-reflection of a ‘virtual image’ whose hallucinatory reality it creates.”  “It is”, he says, “an apparatus destined to obtain a precise ideological effect, necessary to the dominant ideology…it collaborates with a marked efficacity in the maintenance of realism.” (Cahiers du Cinema) Thus, for Baudry, cinema made us see a reality shaped by ideology and determined to keep us within its limited purview. The viewer is like Plato’s prisoner; confusing what they see on screen with what they perceive as life. Plenty of commentators have questioned Baudry’s claims, and Baudry’s argument is more nuanced than what we offer here. Yet what we can say with some confidence is that many works in the 1960s and 1970s were concerned with how a film was made and the sort of reality it seemed to be projecting onto the screen, and thus onto the world.
Bertolucci, who would go on to make Last Tango in Paris and win an Oscar for The Last Emperor, had an ambivalent relationship with this question. He was a director increasingly interested in making films that would have a large audience, while also determined to use the form in complex and alienating ways. Yet this was not quite the alienation of more demanding filmmakers of the time, including Jean-Luc Godard, Straub/Huillet and Miklos Jancso. Bertolucci wanted to draw the viewer into the work but not quite draw the viewer into the story he was telling. He wished for the pleasure principle but wanted to defy a reality principle that would have masked the form. “I think film in general expresses ‘film.' I know that’s a tautology but when critics ask me what did I want to say in the film, I say nothing with the film. I just want to say…just the film. Because the audiences, the public in general, the critics as well, judge the film on the story, the content, not the style.” (Cineaste)
Bertolucci might agree that the viewer shouldn’t confuse the shadows on the walls with the soldiers behind the prisoners, but perhaps he would wish less to free the prisoners than make them aware they are watching an image. There was a lot more to Baudry and other writers, like Daniel Dayan and Jean-Louis Comolli, who fell under what was called apparatus theory at the beginning of the seventies, but most agreed that viewers should be woken up from their narcoleptic stupor.
Bertolucci, however, was more likely to insist on the most tangled of dreams. While in 1964 he made Before the Revolution, by the early seventies his Marxism was weak next to his Freudian preoccupations. He reckoned that revolutionary films didn’t change society; they merely became part of a festival programme. “So you do a revolutionary film for the cinephiles, the people who like movies.” (Cineaste) This needn’t make Bertolucci apolitical, but political in a different way — just as he wished to make the audience confront the form, without the radical distancing of a Godard. It was as though he wanted the viewer to be seduced and abandoned, drawn into the style but left puzzled by the nature of the film’s content. It was as if he wished his work to possess an aspect of the dream, and it thus made sense that immediately prior to The Conformist he adapted a short story from that most convoluted of oneirists, Jorge Luis Borges, into The Spider’s Stratagem.
In The Conformist, the most obvious formal convolution rests on time. The story may focus on the day that Clerici will kill the professor, but it is a fragmentary account that keeps dipping into time past. That often isn’t a problem: numerous noirs have accessed flashbacks to fill out a story’s context. But usually these flashbacks are motivated by the narrative the film tells and the characters relating the information. Long before Tarantino and Christopher Nolan were turning their stories into assertively controlled narrations, Bertolucci was taking to heart Godard’s dictum that films could have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.  Tarantino and Nolan may have wished to escape both chronology and conventional flashback. However, they still wanted to tell the story, insisting the viewer work harder than usual to comprehend the time frames, but that the story was still the thing. A little bit of narrative theory can be useful in understanding their work, though many will insist that just a second viewing of Memento and Pulp Fiction will suffice. We don’t especially need psychoanalytic, ideological, semiotic and formalist tools to muse over any confusion the films elicit. The films stay within their diegetic limits; they don’t ask us to see the work as a product of aesthetic understanding. The directors are finally pragmatists of the image, creating problems in the story all the better for us to feel satisfied in its resolution.
Bertolucci’s film is more irresolute than that. He asks us to follow the film rather than the story, well aware that a film is made up of many elements that are then absorbed into the narrative, so that they needn’t trouble us or draw attention to their presence. Like many films of the period by Godard, Bunuel, Bergman and Resnais, cinema wanted to prove it was more than a storytelling medium; that it was made up of numerous components brought together that could allow the filmmaker to show film rather than tell a story. While filmmaking has usually been concerned with how to build a narrative, film theory has been much more concerned with proposing what film is.  There may have been the avant-gardes of the twenties, and Russian formalism of the same decade, but film had generally settled into its narrative demands. However, while many of the directors of the sixties and seventies didn’t want to reject narrative, they wanted to absorb it into questions over the medium. It thus became a theoretical endeavour, as though the films themselves were arguing over the theories that had been developed during cinema’s brief history. This would include Rudolf Arnheim proposing that film ought to escape from its roots in reality if it is to announce itself as an art form, with Dudley Andrew saying: “it should be clear why Arnheim chides technological developments such as color, 3-D photography, sound and wide-screen. Each reduces the impact of film by bringing it more into accord with natural experience.” (The Major Film Theories) Andre Bazin’s approach would be more the opposite: the addition of sound and colour allows film to be a medium of the real and thus distinguishes itself as a specific art form.  Sergei Eisenstein and other Russian formalists saw film’s originality resting on montage, seeing cinema as a series of blocks, cells or particles that could be extravagantly combined. Alexandre Astruc reckoned film was a medium of potentially great authorial freedom; the camera becoming like a pen the writer holds. These and other ideas became central to how a director could make a film, one made not by ignoring theory (as classic Hollywood insisted, relying on conventions over ideas), but by absorbing it into the texture of the film experience. As Paul Coates proposed: “one reason why Godard enjoys such critical favour is because his films are machines for transforming viewers into critics.” (The Story of the Lost Reflection)
Watching The Conformist, we may wonder if Bertolucci is telling his story well, or whether he has instead chosen to adapt Alberto Moravia’s novel as an opportunity to explore film’s formal possibilities. He rejects Moravia’s causal chronology and finds his own form, making us constantly aware of the montage as the film moves back and forth in time without quite doing so from Clerici’s perspective, nor quite from the story’s sense of progression. The film generally covers the hours before Clerici helps murder a former professor, an anti-fascist exiled in France, and moves back and then forward as it moves towards that day. But it doesn’t settle into this pattern so the viewer can forget about the editing. It wants us constantly to be aware of the montage; not the convention, the conventions that propose a flashback is a character’s clear point of view and/or that it will push the story forward even if it is told backwards.
Yet if Bertolucci is beholden to Eisensteinian editing, he is also fascinated by Bazin’s interest in film as a recording device, picking up locations that very much exist in the world. The station Clerici waits outside at the beginning of the film is Gare d’Orsay, disused by this stage and awaiting potential destruction — a beautiful building that was saved and turned into an art museum. Bertolucci also uses the Palazzo dei Congressi for the asylum where Clerici’s father is staying. It was adapted to become the hospital near the beginning of Federico Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, and is a well-known piece of Italian architecture built in 1939. Our purpose isn’t to get lost in architectural history, but propose that if Bertolucci wishes to make us aware of the editing, he is no less interested in making the viewer see that the real world matters and wishes to film it.
Equally, he believes, like Arnheim, that film has to earn its keep by removing itself from the demands of realism that may come naturally to it, and generate a level of expressive originality that makes us aware in the framing, in the colour design, in the camera movements, that we are watching an art object. It may be the moment when the camera prowls lowly as the wind whips up at Clerici’s mother’s house; the changing colours when Clerici and his new wife are on the train to France, or the split-framing often adopted — when he asks his radio announcer friend what a normal man is; when he sits on the hotel bed in Paris; when he speaks to the priest. The film never settles into its story as it insists on unsettling us with the form. It must not become a transparent work, falling into realism or narration. Such an approach was possible because, in Astruc’s words: “…cinema is now moving towards a form which is making it such a precise language that it will soon be possible to write ideas directly on film without even having to resort to those heavy associations of images that were the delight of the silent cinema.” (‘Le Camera Stylo’) It finds individuated expression rather than homogenous convention.
Numerous filmmakers during this period insisted that films couldn’t just be watched; they needed to be read, to be understood as works within the history and theory of film. This obviously doesn’t mean wonderful movies like Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, Now Voyager and Double Indemnity can’t be read; it is to insist, though, they can more easily be watched than The Conformist. While most of the questions Casablanca and Now Voyager are concerned with and contained by the story, Bertolucci’s can more usefully serve as an introduction to theoretical questions, partly because it is constantly asking them of itself. It is thus a difficult film and yet an easy text to illustrate some of the ideas vital to film theory.

© Tony McKibbin