The Conformist

08/12/2025

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    If all films are useful to illuminate film theory, some are more useful than others. A viewer might believe, while analysing a work of popular entertainment, that the theorist is reading too much into it. Seeing Jaws as an allegory of Watergate, or an example of masculinity in crisis, is all very well, but might not add much to comprehending the viewing experience. 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 in class. 

        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 a fire burns. The prisoners can’t turn around and thus can only see the soldiers as flickering, large shadows against the wall. They see an image of reality but not reality itself. The professor says of 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 low-lit room, we see Clerici’s shadow against the wall as the director proposes that shadows are everywhere.  

     In the same year that Bertolucci’s film was made, Jean-Louis Baudry wrote an influential essay using the very same image as he invoked Playto as well. 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) For Baudry, cinema made us see a reality shaped by ideology and was determined to keep us within its limited purview. The viewer was 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, but what we can say with some confidence is that many films 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 would go on to make Last Tango in Paris, and he would win an Oscar for The Last Emperor. He had an ambivalent relationship with this question: a director increasingly interested in making films that would gain 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 films by Jean-Luc Godard, Straub/Huillet and Miklos Jancso. Bertolucci wanted to draw the viewer into the work, but not quite 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, including Daniel Dayan and Jean-Louis Comolli, who fell under what was called apparatus theory at the beginning of the seventies. But they agreed viewers should be woken from their narcoleptic gaze. 

      Bertolucci, though, was more likely to insist on the most tangled of dreams. While in 1964 he made Before the Revolution, by the early 1970s, his Marxism had weakened 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, only 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 thus it made sense that, the previous year, he adapted a short story from that most convoluted of oneirists, Jorge Luis Borges, and made 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 who relate 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. But 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, but many will insist that 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 work elicits. 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 and not the story, well aware that a film is made up of many elements. These are elements which 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 wished to prove it was more than a storytelling medium; that it was made up of numerous components brought together, allowing the filmmaker to show film rather than tell a story. While filmmaking has chiefly focused on 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 1960s and 1979s didn’t want to reject narrative, they were keen 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 was 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 cinema’s originality resting on montage, seeingfilm 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, as if being made not by ignoring theory (as classic Hollywood insisted, relying on conventions over ideas) but 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 makes us constantly aware of the montage as the film moves back and forth in time, but without quite doing so from Clerici’s perspective, nor quite from the story’s sense of progression. The film generally moves through the hours before Clerici helps murder his former professor, now 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 that the viewer can forget about the editing: it wants us constantly to be aware of the montage; not absorbed by 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. 

        While Bertolucci is beholden to Eisensteinian editing, he is also fascinated by Bazin’s interest in film as a recording device, as he uses 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, awaiting potential destruction — a beautiful building that was saved and turned into a 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 note 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 wants 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, so we become 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 speak to the priest. The film never settles into its story as it insists on unsettling us with form. It must not become a transparent work, falling into realism or narration. Such an approach was possible because, as Astruc proposed, “…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 shouldn’t just be watched; they needed to be read, to be understood as works within the history and theory of cinema. 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, that they can more easily be watched than The Conformist. Most of the questions Casablanca and Now Voyager are concerned with are contained by the story. Bertolucci’s film more usefully serves as an introduction to theoretical questions because it constantly asks them of itself. It may be a difficult film, yet it is an easy text to illustrate some of the ideas vital to film theory. 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

The Conformist

    If all films are useful to illuminate film theory, some are more useful than others. A viewer might believe, while analysing a work of popular entertainment, that the theorist is reading too much into it. Seeing Jaws as an allegory of Watergate, or an example of masculinity in crisis, is all very well, but might not add much to comprehending the viewing experience. 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 in class. 

        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 a fire burns. The prisoners can’t turn around and thus can only see the soldiers as flickering, large shadows against the wall. They see an image of reality but not reality itself. The professor says of 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 low-lit room, we see Clerici’s shadow against the wall as the director proposes that shadows are everywhere.  

     In the same year that Bertolucci’s film was made, Jean-Louis Baudry wrote an influential essay using the very same image as he invoked Playto as well. 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) For Baudry, cinema made us see a reality shaped by ideology and was determined to keep us within its limited purview. The viewer was 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, but what we can say with some confidence is that many films 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 would go on to make Last Tango in Paris, and he would win an Oscar for The Last Emperor. He had an ambivalent relationship with this question: a director increasingly interested in making films that would gain 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 films by Jean-Luc Godard, Straub/Huillet and Miklos Jancso. Bertolucci wanted to draw the viewer into the work, but not quite 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, including Daniel Dayan and Jean-Louis Comolli, who fell under what was called apparatus theory at the beginning of the seventies. But they agreed viewers should be woken from their narcoleptic gaze. 

      Bertolucci, though, was more likely to insist on the most tangled of dreams. While in 1964 he made Before the Revolution, by the early 1970s, his Marxism had weakened 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, only 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 thus it made sense that, the previous year, he adapted a short story from that most convoluted of oneirists, Jorge Luis Borges, and made 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 who relate 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. But 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, but many will insist that 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 work elicits. 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 and not the story, well aware that a film is made up of many elements. These are elements which 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 wished to prove it was more than a storytelling medium; that it was made up of numerous components brought together, allowing the filmmaker to show film rather than tell a story. While filmmaking has chiefly focused on 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 1960s and 1979s didn’t want to reject narrative, they were keen 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 was 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 cinema’s originality resting on montage, seeingfilm 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, as if being made not by ignoring theory (as classic Hollywood insisted, relying on conventions over ideas) but 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 makes us constantly aware of the montage as the film moves back and forth in time, but without quite doing so from Clerici’s perspective, nor quite from the story’s sense of progression. The film generally moves through the hours before Clerici helps murder his former professor, now 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 that the viewer can forget about the editing: it wants us constantly to be aware of the montage; not absorbed by 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. 

        While Bertolucci is beholden to Eisensteinian editing, he is also fascinated by Bazin’s interest in film as a recording device, as he uses 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, awaiting potential destruction — a beautiful building that was saved and turned into a 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 note 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 wants 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, so we become 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 speak to the priest. The film never settles into its story as it insists on unsettling us with form. It must not become a transparent work, falling into realism or narration. Such an approach was possible because, as Astruc proposed, “…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 shouldn’t just be watched; they needed to be read, to be understood as works within the history and theory of cinema. 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, that they can more easily be watched than The Conformist. Most of the questions Casablanca and Now Voyager are concerned with are contained by the story. Bertolucci’s film more usefully serves as an introduction to theoretical questions because it constantly asks them of itself. It may be a difficult film, yet it is an easy text to illustrate some of the ideas vital to film theory. 


© Tony McKibbin