Quod mentem moneat: Monuments and memory in Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970)

Abstract

Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970), an adaptation of the 1951 novel by Alberto Moravia, has long been recognized for its sophisticated use of both mise-en-scène and editing to explore the historical and psychological effects of Fascism. Bertolucci made significant use of locations in Rome to characterize the Fascist aesthetic, and to visualize the subjective memory of the protagonist Marcello. Concurrent with his evocative use of Fascist imagery is Bertolucci’s complex layering of ancient references, primarily in the form of monuments, to complicate and elaborate the viewer’s understanding of both Marcello’s memory and the historical context, yet this palimpsest of reference has never been comprehensively excavated. This article analyses the classical and classicizing references within The Conformist in their role as memory complexes functioning both narratively and in the cognitive experience of the audience. This exploration seeks both to contextualize Bertolucci’s specific modes of reception within contemporary Italian culture and to deepen the analysis of ancient monuments as cinematic locations more generally.

At the centre of Roberto Rossellini’s neo-realist masterpiece Rome, Open City (1945) is a key scene often analysed by film historians. Following Pina’s dramatic murder by German soldiers, the convoy transporting her fiancé Francesco is ambushed and liberated by partisans. While the action is dramatic and gripping, the mise-en-scène and location of this episode provide even greater significance. The action takes place on an unpaved road surrounded by the dry hills characteristic of the periphery of Rome, looking down on the German trucks from a high angle. As the viewer participates in the action from the partisan perspective, the specific location is understood through the presence of an iconic structure: the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana of the recently planned EUR neighbourhood (Figure 1) This quarter, designed for a 1942 World Exposition that never happened, was intended to showcase Fascism’s social principles and imperial accomplishments via architecture and city planning, using a style and organization that also would demonstrate the regime’s connection to and improvement upon ancient Rome. The Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, as one of the first buildings completed, was thus the aesthetic symbol of the glorious past, but also of Mussolini’s intentions for the future. ‘Clearly we are meant to regard it as hostile and false, something that belongs to the hostile world of Fascism and Nazism that these Partisans have struggled and sacrificed themselves to destroy’.¹ Though glimpsed only briefly in Rome, Open City, the presence of the iconic Palazzo within the scene signifies the ideological focus of the resistance without any narrative explanation.

Much scholarly attention has been devoted to the use and interpretation of modern architecture in cinema, particularly as shorthand for political and/or social extremism. Fascist-era structures in this regard have been recognized as aesthetically and historically evocative,² and the locations are given additional layers of meaning via their presence in film, especially for viewers who have physical and/or cultural experience of the locations. Yet equally significant and perhaps even more ripe for complex interpretation are the uses of ancient monuments as settings in Italian films dealing with more modern eras, as their cinematic presence forces a reckoning not just with the recent past, but also with the longevity of ancient history and its position in European society. For just as new Fascist architecture co-opted aspects of classical aesthetics, so too ancient monuments themselves, particularly in the city of Rome, were excavated, reconstructed, and appropriated to serve as exemplars within the Fascist cult of romanità.³ The city of Rome was extensively remade during the Fascist ventennio, including both new buildings and realigned vistas of the ancient city within a modern (Fascist) framework.⁴ During Fascist period, ancient monuments, texts, and even the Latin language became imbued with a complex network of associations, thus necessitating a difficult cultural repositioning of the ancient past in post-war eras as Italy reconsidered its own history in different ways.

Significantly, the post-war period also saw the development of the Italian film industry and the rise of filmmakers who were interested in exploring this sort of cultural repositioning through commercial cinema, particularly from 1960 onwards. While neo-realist filmmakers like Rossellini are most frequently cited for their extensive use of location shooting, often mentioned in contrast with the heavy use of studio sets in both the Fascist and ‘Hollywood on the Tiber’ eras, Italian directors of the 1960s and 1970s also shot their films within identifiable locales in the city of Rome to create resonance and meaning on multiple levels, not just situating the action in a place but also allowing place to create meaning beyond the action. While cinematic space analysis is becoming an important field of inquiry in relation to works of modern architecture such as the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana described above,⁵ the multivalent potential of ancient architecture within films of this period has largely been overlooked.

Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970) is an ideal film for initiating such an exploration, as it is replete with classical references, both direct and indirect. Shot primarily on location in the city of Rome, The Conformist sets its narrative in relation to both ancient Roman monuments and Fascist-era complexes to illuminate the impact of Italy’s complex history on individual experiences within the film, behind the camera, and in the audience. In addition, Bertolucci interweaves these direct material symbols of antiquity and Fascism with allusions to historical texts and ideas within the dialogue and in the action, thereby creating a complex stratigraphy of reference. Via analysis of this archaeological layering of ancient references within Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970), this article seeks to deepen the interpretation of both classical and classicizing structures in film by considering them as inter-referential complexes of memory, both the spatial and cultural memory brought by the audience to the viewing and the memory that the film medium can itself create via both visual symbolism and editing. For unlike text or narration, which must name and describe specific locations to facilitate recognition, location shooting relies on the viewer’s visual knowledge and experiential memory to create meaning. As a cinematic adaptation of a literary model, namely Alberto Moravia’s homonymous novel, The Conformist underscores this potential in its sophisticated insertion of classical spaces to empower the medium shift, not just to provide grist for dialogue or setting for action, but also to complicate and even undermine the reality of the narrative as the references are recognized and unpacked by the viewer over the course of the film. Thus Bertolucci offers several possible readings of the film, from a superficially decadent and/or generally nostalgic narrative of Fascist conformism, to a highly ambiguous critique of Italian culture and politics from antiquity to the present.

Alberto Moravia, The Conformist (1951)

Alberto Moravia (1907–1990) wrote his 1951 novel The Conformist partly as a literary processing of the 1937 assassination of his cousins Carlo and Nello Rosselli in France, anti-Fascists whose deaths were later revealed to have been authorized by the Italian government.⁶ Moravia was interested in understanding the political, ethical, and personal positions of both anti-fascists who left Italy in reaction to Fascism and of the Italians who collaborated with the Fascist government either actively or passively. The novel is highly subjective and descriptive, dealing profoundly with the impact of memory on thought and action; many scholars have analysed Moravia’s many Proustian allusions and concepts.⁷The Conformist follows the perspective of Marcello Clerici (a demonstrably Proustian name), an ambitious recent recruit to the OVRA (the Italian secret police of the Fascist era) as he seeks to make himself a good Fascist in every sense of the word. The first third of the novel describes Marcello as a child neglected by his wealthy narcissistic parents, who takes his mildly traumatic childhood out on the plants and animals in the grounds of the family estate. The most defining moment of Marcello’s adolescence is a homosexual encounter with an off-duty chauffeur named Lino, whom Marcello purportedly kills with the revolver he used to lure the boy to his quarters.

As an adult, Marcello attempts to demonstrate to himself and others that he is just like everyone else — politically, aesthetically, and sexually — by participating in contemporary legitimizing activities, namely marriage and active participation in the Fascist regime. He distances himself from his dissolute parents, his mother now a drug-addicted recluse and his father in an insane asylum. The second and longest part of the novel describes the events following Marcello’s marriage to Giulia, a young woman Marcello views as representative of average bourgeois Roman life. Using their honeymoon to Paris as a cover, Marcello participates in a scheme to assassinate his former professor Luca Quadri, an anti-Fascist intellectual in self-imposed exile. The encounter produces an unexpected love entanglement: as Marcello draws closer to Quadri, he also becomes infatuated with Quadri’s wife Lina, who professes mutual attraction for Marcello to protect herself and her husband but in turn attempts to seduce Giulia. Following an evening on the town, the couples part with their relationships uncertain, but the episode allows Marcello to point Quadri out to the assassins and thereby seal Marcello’s complicity in their actions. Weeks later, Marcello reads an account of the Quadris’ death in a Roman newspaper, with a sense of relief that he has finally committed an act to counter the aberrant encounter with Lino in his youth.

The novel closes with the fall of the Fascist regime. As Marcello and Giulia wander through Rome stunned by the reversal of their fortunes, they encounter Lino, still alive and working as a park guard in the Villa Borghese, and Marcello suffers a crisis of conscience — the death of the Quadris was pointless, and he is guilty. The following day, as Marcello, Giulia, and their daughter attempt to flee Rome for the safety of the countryside, they are strafed and killed by an Allied plane.

Just then he heard the roar of the airplane banking and turning again. He thought once more, ‘God, let them not be hit … they’re innocent.’

And then, resigned, his mouth in the grass, he waited for the plane to return. The car with its open door was silent, and he had time to understand with a sharp sorrow that no one would get out. Finally the plane was on top of him, trailing after it, as it distanced itself in the burning sky, silence and the night.⁸

Marcello dies believing that their deaths are due to his involvement in the deaths of the Quadris, his wife and child brought down with him because of his tragic fate.

The Conformist (Bernardo Bertolucci, 1970)

While Moravia was inspired by his personal and family experiences of Fascism, Bernardo Bertolucci (1941–2014) created his film version of Moravia’s novel as part of the post-war generation of artists and political activists who were seeking to process the legacy of history beyond their lived experience. For Bertolucci, this project was very much encouraged by his upbringing. Bertolucci’s parents both attended and taught at licei classici and cultivated an environment of artistic enrichment within Bertolucci’s childhood home near Parma. His father Attilio became a prominent poet and writer in the 1950s in Rome, which brought him into the circles of both Moravia and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Bernardo originally intended to follow in his father’s footsteps in poetry and enrolled at Università di Roma La Sapienza in 1958 to study Modern Languages, before dropping out to work with Pasolini on Accattone (1961). His directorial debut La commare secca (1962) was also produced and based on a story by Pasolini. This film investigates the murder of a Roman prostitute via the interviewed memories of the suspects, who all have reason to remember and recount their actions differently. This film displays the considerable influence of Bertolucci’s mentor in the consistent use of location shooting in highly recognizable Roman locales, from the august pile of the Colosseum to the working class quarters along the Tiber. This preference for resonant and meaningful locales, along with a focus on subjective memory and psychology, would distinguish Bertolucci’s films throughout the decade, including Before the Revolution (1963), Partner (1968), and The Spider’s Stratagem (1970), the last released only months before The Conformist.⁹

In adapting Moravia’s novel, Bertolucci ‘took the essence from the book and created his own story’.¹⁰ Film scholars and cultural historians have largely interpreted the film in the light of Bertolucci’s personal biography and contemporary cultural trends: psychoanalysis, particularly Oedipal themes (very common in Italian films of the early 1970s, including those of Pasolini and Fellini); cinematic allusions especially to French Nouvelle Vague filmmakers (particularly Godard), Fascist-era film, and Hollywood auteurs such as Welles; the complex political and historical considerations involved with the aesthetics of Fascism, as termed by Susan Sontag as ‘fascinating Fascism’.¹¹ To these modes of inquiry can now be added Bertolucci’s significant citation of classical sources, both textual and architectural, a theme barely present in Moravia’s novel.¹²

It seems to be my easiest film, but actually it is the most difficult because it is the simplest one. One enters it on a first level of “reading” that was missing from Before the Revolution: that film had many other levels but there did not exist a first level of reading as soon as you saw it. In The Conformist, there is such a first level, so everybody enters it and poses no further problems to himself. Instead, the film is full of other levels.¹³

Bertolucci overlaid numerous references to the past, to the cultural artefacts that inspired him, particularly by using fragmentary cultural artefacts — partial quotations, incomplete views — to catalyse these connections. The film is thus intended to be excavated archaeologically, by analysing the layers within specific physical contexts.

As the film progresses, the cinematic, literary, and historical references are enhanced by the sophisticated use of palimpsestic editing, which Bertolucci implemented for the first time in his career, as suggested by his new editor Franco Arcalli.¹⁴ For while Moravia’s novel is laid out chronologically by third-person omniscient narration, the plot of the film version of The Conformist is presented via Marcello’s own disjointed memories of the past as he journeys by car to the site of the Quadris’ planned assassination, which often contain secondary flashbacks within them. ‘It is as though the director’s memory of the novel is as elliptic and incomplete as Marcello’s own within the film. His imagination, like that of his protagonist, is touched off by a detail which he then transposes and transforms’.¹⁵ The layered visual, aural, and symbolic details are often repeated or echoed, skilfully designed to catalyse cognitive linkages within the viewer, and often the specific references are meant to be recognized and interpreted retroactively, thereby replicating the process of both archaeology and memory. For Bertolucci, The Conformist was not a direct representation of Rome under Fascism, but a ‘memory of my memory’, a present processing of a past history never actually experienced, but that nonetheless had a formative impact on his psyche and political outlook.¹⁶ ‘Every present act is a re-performance of countless past, forgotten acts, which are differentiated from themselves in being presently re-performed (as the present act is divided from self-sameness in recalling the past). Thus, the present is a space and time of difference and forgetting, as the acts performed in it are all, in fact, re-performances’.¹⁷The Conformist (re-)performs history dialectically, placing monuments, ideas, and references in juxtaposition so as to (re-)create its memory.

Unlike Moravia, Bertolucci chose specific and identifiable locations for the action of The Conformist, ones with layered historical and political meaning both inherently and in reference to each other. ‘To the intrinsic advantages of his medium, the capacity for rendering location visually, he adds that of variety so that all the film’s settings disclose something about the people or activities within them’.¹⁸ Locations in The Conformist simultaneously reveal something about the people and activities behind the camera, and this complex interconnection starts with the very first frame of the film. As the lilting flute melody of The Conformist theme plays on the soundtrack, a red neon sign is blinking outside Marcello’s Paris hotel room. It is advertising La vie è a nous (Jean Renoir, 1936) an overtly pro-Communist film, the type of committed yet commercial political film that Bertolucci was seeking to create.¹⁹ The reference is both to the specific location of the action, for the film could conceivably have been showing in Paris in 1937, but also to the time and place of film’s making, to the socio-historical context of Italy of 1969 in which Communism was viewed as viable political option, particularly among Italians of Bertolucci’s generation.²⁰ Furthermore, this initial reference is made more nuanced by the many allusions to other films and filmmakers throughout The Conformist, particularly to other French filmmakers such as Godard and Truffaut;²¹ the viewer is constantly made to recall references and places from earlier in the film, and from their own experience, to strive at a full understanding of the action.²² This elaborate system of reference, combined with palimpsestic editing, means that every setting has the potential for signification, as in dreams or memory.

One of the first instances of this complex use of setting includes significant reference to classical sources, both visual and textual. As Marcello and his Fascist minder Manganiello converse in a car speeding through Paris, the focus pulls from Marcello’s face through the windshield, indicating the onset of a memory moment. Through a series of three intercut shots, Marcello strides past the Res Gestae Divi Augusti inscription in the Piazza Augusto Imperatore, carrying a bouquet on his way to visit his fiancé. Marcello is dwarfed by the structure above him, and the oblique angle of the first shot foregrounds the Latin text and smooth travertine lower façade of Ballio Morpurgo’s original Museo della Ara Pacis in the Piazza Augusto Imperatore, constructed in 1937–38 as part of the highly publicized bimillennial celebration of Augustus’ birth that also coincided with the 15^th year of the Fascist era (Figure 2).²³ The rapidity of the cuts is notable within a film that generally makes use of long takes, creating a sensation of momentous fragmentation between the past and the present.

The corresponding soundtrack is also chronologically complex. As the main musical theme for The Conformist plays to accompany Marcello’s footsteps in Rome, an aural reference back to the opening sequence in the hotel room, Marcello in the car is simultaneously mumbling a Latin poem to himself (Table 1).

Marcello’s quotes a poem purportedly written by the emperor Hadrian on his deathbed (HA, Hadrian 9). Significantly neither the Italian nor English language versions of the film provides subtitles for this section, and Marcello himself remarks that his murmurs are ‘nothing. It’s just Latin’. On the most superficial level, this sequence works to distance the viewer, as the simultaneous aural and visual Latin texts ‘resist adequate deciphering’.²⁴ Analysed further, the poem can be understood as Marcello’s rather bland comment on his own psyche. ‘Marcello’s classical reminiscence is also a reflection on his own soul, at times vagula et blandula (wandering and tempting) and prone to sudden unexplainable motions’.²⁵ But as the knowledgeable film audience understands the reference to La vie è a nous described above, viewers with a literary background, which included a large percentage of the contemporary Italian audience, are equally able to recognize the classical framing, especially as the editing draws attention to the specific location. Augustus’ Res Gestae itself is a work of selective memory, designed to present the past in an edited fashion, and the Fascist remaking of the text and the legacy of Augustus in the construction of the Piazza Augusto Imperatore furthered this process of selection.²⁶ The creation of this celebratory piazza, focused on the Mausoleum of Augustus and surrounded by Fascist-era buildings, was intended to highlight the revival of Augustan ideals under Fascism, and the intimate connection between Mussolini and Rome’s first emperor.²⁷ In addition, the inscription and monument of the original Res Gestae no longer exist; the text has been appropriated and reconstituted outside of its original context, much like Marcello’s own memory. Marcello is triggered by his memory of place to recite a Latin poem, but it is written by another emperor.

Furthermore, Hadrian’s poem itself is perhaps even more problematic. The lines are embedded within the Historia Augusta, a text known for its deceptive authorship and probable embroidery of the lives of Roman emperors. Many of the primary sources cited within the work are viewed as false, created by the unknown author to lend his work the air of authenticity. As a classical reference, it is unreliable, yet as the sole surviving source for the period it has retained its authority. Significantly, Hadrian’s poem was also well known to audiences of 1970, likely through the highly popular Memoirs of Hadrian by Maguerite Yourcenar, which takes the opening line of the poem in Latin as the title of its first chapter. The 1963 Italian translation by Lidia Storoni Mazzolani, a prize-winning late antique scholar and journalist in Rome, was highly regarded and still remains in print.²⁸ Thus this brief quotation would have been initially recognizable in its association with Hadrian, even without subtitles, but the recognition is not designed to simplify. Time, space, and reference are all presented in fragments, as unreliable artefacts without full context. The sequence is designed to alert the viewer, both visually and aurally, to the importance of such palimpsestic references, and to question from the outset the reliability of Marcello’s recall.

This introductory sequence further resonates as Marcello progresses within other recognizable architectural settings in Rome. In other flashbacks framing the above episode, Marcello is seen moving within the interior of an unidentified Fascist ministry building, seeking to finalize his assignment and concretize his adherence to the regime. The spaces are dominated by diagonal lines, repeating patterns of columns and windows, and a sterile classicism that dwarfs and isolates the human figure.²⁹ A second sequence details Marcello’s visit to his father in an insane asylum, where the same aesthetic qualities characterize the location. The setting is an outdoor amphitheatre characterized by rows of horizontal white marble benches, arrayed like lines on page, and loomed over by a uniform white wall in the background. Here Marcello, in an episode invented by Bertolucci, questions his father about his activities as an early Fascist interrogator, an action which facilitates his final separation from his parents.

Significantly Bertolucci shot these sequences without establishing shots; the building is shown only in fragments, partially revealing its identity. Yet the insane asylum scene and the majority of the ministry sequences were filmed in the same building³⁰: Adalberto Libera’s Palazzo dei Congressi, also built as part of the Fascist EUR neighbourhood. This edifice was intended as a visual pendant to the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana, designed by Libera as a rectilinear allusion to the Pantheon and other historical buildings, such as Roman and Christian basilicas.³¹ While the aesthetic qualities of the spaces would be enough to link them, Bertolucci’s double usage of the structure creates another layer of interpretation as more of its contours become decipherable: the housing of both the ministry activities and the mental institution within the same edifice implies a disordered function within the façade of order. Marcello remembers himself within these spaces to both adhere himself to Fascism and sever himself from his past. This structure was also featured in La Dolce Vita (Federico Fellini, 1960) and The Tenth Victim (Elio Petri, 1965), films which also probed significant connections between modern issues and ancient Roman locales.³²

Even as the action moves from Rome to Paris, the classical references continue within the dialogue, notably continuing the importance of location via a well-known text. Marcello and his former mentor Quadri discuss Plato’s Myth of the Cave from The Republic during their first meeting in Quadri’s Parisian study. Marcello summarizes the famous allegory to jog Quadri’s memory — this text was Marcello’s proposed graduate thesis topic before Quadri’s self-exile.

Quadri: Yes, I remember.

Marcello: Now try and imagine some other men passing behind that little wall, bearing statues made of wood and stone. The statues are higher than that wall.

Quadri: You couldn’t have brought me a better gift from Rome than these memories. The enchained prisoners of Plato.

Marcello: And how they resemble us.

Quadri (offscreen): What do they see?

Marcello: What do they see?

Quadri: You who come from Italy should know from experience.

Marcello: They see only the shadows the fire makes on the back of the cavern that faces them.

Quadri: Shadows. The reflections of things. Like what’s happening to you people now in Italy.

Marcello: If those prisoners were at liberty to speak might they not call the visions they see reality?

Quadri: Yes. Good. They would mistake the shadows of reality for reality. The myth of the great cave.³³

To create the ambience of the setting, Marcello has closed one of the study windows to cast half the room in darkness, while the sunlight from the other window and the smoke from a smouldering cigarette stand in for the fire of the allegory. As Marcello describes the scene within the cave he gestures with his arms, indicating the height of the wall and the movement of the shadows, at one point forming his silhouette into a ‘Roman salute’ (Figure 3). But when Quadri opens the window to end their conversation, Marcello’s shadow is obliterated by the streaming sunlight.

In this rendering of a familiar ancient myth via evocative dialogue and visual elements, this episode draws the viewer’s attention again to many of the themes that dominate the film, encouraging a contemplation of the potentially contradictory messages both within the scene and throughout the film. On one level, the scene is a direct discussion of contemporary politics: Quadri wants Marcello to understand that he is being deceived by the illusions of Fascism, and the highly stylized use of the setting serves to convert the philosophical concept into a physical manifestation. Yet here too a partial, fragmentary reference yields only a superficial interpretation. Recourse to the full myth suggests another possible interpretation. ‘Socrates argues that the enlightened must not be allowed to remain aloof, but must share their illumination with their fellow citizens — an implicit condemnation of Quadri’s move to abandon Rome and leave his Italian followers to their own devices’.³⁴ Quadri remains barely discernible in darkness throughout the sequence; it is Marcello’s figure that is illuminated to illustrate the allegory. Perhaps also in play here is the popularity of Platonic philosophy in Fascist and National Socialist circles; Mussolini himself purportedly kept a copy of The Republic on his desk.³⁵ While Marcello claims to have abandoned his thesis on Plato in favour of a career in Fascism, he has actually embraced a political philosophy that appropriated Plato for its own purposes.

Yet the scene also complicates the very medium of presentation. The rectilinear light source in the study replicates not the natural contours of a cavern, but the projected light of the theatre, the very location of the audience’s experience. As described by the cinematographer for The Conformist Vittorio Storaro:

In a way, Plato’s myth of the cave is also the myth of cinema. The figures in the cave are akin to audiences today, the fire behind them is like a movie projector, and the people carrying statues, passing in front of the fire and creating shadows on the wall are like the film itself. It’s a perfect metaphor for cinema.³⁶

The myth of the cave also applies to the interpretation of dreams and memories, for the dreamer sees images that represent reality, but that often mean something else entirely. Bertolucci at this moment invites the viewer to question the validity of both Marcello’s memories and his own rendering of them via film. This manoeuvre can readily be achieved by using a text that bears historical weight, which itself has been subject to the exertions of time and interpretation, and can thus simultaneously facilitate the layered complexities of the diegetic discussion and the subtextual messages connected with the film and its maker.

Quadri’s death scene furthers the questioning of what is real and what is shadow within Marcello’s memory, for the sequence makes use of important classical references as well. Here Marcello is an eyewitness to the deaths of both Quadri and his wife; the car driven by Manganiello helps to hem in the Quadris’ car on a desolate mountain road. Numerous trench-coated figures emerge from the woods, and Quadri is surrounded by assassins armed anachronistically with knives, who each stab him repeatedly from all sides (Figure 4). The camera begins at an intimate distance, taking in the first few stabs, alternating with reaction shots from Anna (terror) and Marcello (cold impassivity). The camera angle then swings dramatically upward to take in the entire scene, a view impossible for a human observer. ‘Bertolucci uses the camera a great deal to create, disrupt, and modify the viewer’s point of view and his or her identifications in the narrative’.³⁷

Despite the numerous wounds, Quadri’s garments display very little blood — his death is an artistic tableau, a visual reference. As several critics have noticed, this sequence is an allusion to artistic and cinematic depictions of the death of Caesar,³⁸ such as Vincenzo Camuccini’s early nineteenth-century Death of Caesar in the Museo di Capodimonte (Naples) or in Julius Caesar (Joseph Mankiewicz, 1953).³⁹ On the other hand, when Anna is pursued through the misty woods and shot by the assassins, her face is covered in lurid red blood, a real visceral death in contrast with the essentially symbolic and ‘historical’ death of her husband. Her death instead has a modern, cinematic parallel, namely the final scenes of Truffaut’s Tirez sur le pianiste (1963).⁴⁰ The two deaths hold different places in Marcello’s memory, yet both together bring our thoughts back to the discussion in Quadri’s study. ‘If we interpret Plato’s myth of the cave not as a static confrontation between truth and illusion, but as a dynamic model of conversion, then the light and dark imagery in the murder scene corresponds to the moral choice that besets Marcello. By opting not to intervene on behalf of Anna, Marcello chooses the Platonic shadows rather than the light’.⁴¹ The viewer sees these deaths subjectively as Marcello does, facilitated by the visual and cinematic cues created by Bertolucci’s shadows and light.

As the film enters its final act, the departures from Moravia are even more substantial, and it is here that Bertolucci reintroduces and elaborates upon the classical references from the beginning of the film. Following the radio announcement of the fall of Fascism, Marcello meets his blind friend Italo (a character invented by Bertolucci and usually interpreted in Oedipal terms) at their ‘usual place’, on a bridge that has now been festooned with anti-Fascist posters and irregularly illuminated by searchlights. As Marcello points out to Italo that he is still wearing his Fascist party lapel pin, a group of motorcycles roar toward them dragging a metal head of Mussolini clanking behind.⁴² As the camera reverses angle to show the vehicles crossing to the other side, the whole scene is revealed: Marcello and Italo are cowering against the railing of the Ponte Sant’Angelo, with the massive hulk of the Castel Sant’Angelo in the background (Figure 5). Once again the use of location superimposes multiple ideas, especially taking into account the classical references described above. The Castel Sant’Angelo is obviously the final resting place of Hadrian, whose dying words Marcello mumbles during one of his first memory episodes. The camera emphasizes the symbolic and oneiric presence of the past, recentring the shot on the ancient edifice even as the characters move out of frame, scurrying away from the monument they have barely acknowledged. It is for the viewer to understand that the past looms over the present action, for the setting connects both with Marcello’s earlier quotation of Hadrian, and the weighty legacy of history in Rome.

The final scene takes place in another ancient monument, one with even more potential for palimpsestic analysis. Marcello and Italo wander into the semi-circular corridor of an ancient structure, which has now become occupied by Romans on the edge of subsistence. Most scholars gloss over the specificity of this location, focusing on the film’s thematic denouement without acknowledging the context’s potential. ‘The ancient amphitheatre is not shown in its dilapidated majesty and vastness; the camera investigates dark and protected hiding places, where fires burn and grates suggest prison’.⁴³ The few scholars who acknowledge the space identify it as the Colosseum,⁴⁴ perhaps due to the contemporary association with the queer scene in Rome,⁴⁵ for this is where Marcello will have his final confrontation with Lino. But like many of the other ancient references used in the film, the monument is never revealed in its totality, rather its identity and meaning must be contextualized. The sequence was in fact shot in another Roman entertainment venue, namely the Theatre of Marcellus (Figure 6).⁴⁶ Here Bertolucci connects back to the architectural and historical themes interwoven in the Piazza Augusto Imperatore sequence at the beginning of the film, for the Theatre of Marcellus was also the focus of significant urbanistic and archaeological intervention by the Fascist regime. This ancient space was not physically accessible in modern times prior to the creation of the Via del Mare, a Fascist urbanistic project from 1926 to 1932 that was inaugurated by Mussolini’s infamous ‘Nuova Roma’ speech on the Capitoline.⁴⁷ The creation of this road was intended to both isolate the ancient monument from structures of subsequent eras and sanitize the surrounding neighbourhood by relocating its lower-class denizens to suburban borgate.⁴⁸ Ironically, the portico of the Theatre is shown here as a locus of urban poverty and non-procreative sexuality, activities that both Augustus and Mussolini sought to diminish via their architectural and archaeological interventions.

It is here Bertolucci creates a visual translation for Moravia’s sole classical citation. In a scene from the novel not included in the film, Marcello is propositioned by an older British gentleman on the streets of Paris, who upon learning Marcello’s name, quotes Virgil’s Aeneid:

A long silence followed. The old man appeared to be lost in reflection; or rather, thought Marcello, he seemed to be making an effort to remember something.

At last he turned toward Marcello and recited, with an air of triumph, ‘Heu miserande puer, si qua fata aspera rumpas, tu Marcellus eris.’

Marcello knew the verses well, he had been required to translate them in school, and at the time they had made him the brunt of the other boys’ jokes. But uttered at that moment, coming right after the offer of the cigarettes, those famous words gave him an unpleasant sense of awkward flattery.

This changed to irritation as the old man launched a long, summary look at him from head to toes and then said informatively, ‘Virgil.’⁴⁹

This moment in Moravia is revealing, for the ancient quotation revives in Marcello memories of the past, not thoughts of antiquity but of the time when his encounter with Lino occurred and formed his psychological and political outlook. It is quoted without translation, with the expectation that the reader will recognize the reference and its meaning. With the change in medium from novel to film, Bertolucci translates this textual quotation into a physical location, a place where Marcello’s memory is reawakened and his identity confirmed. As Italo and Marcello slowly trudge through the theatre’s annular corridor, they overhear an older man propositioning a teenage boy: it is Lino. Marcello confronts him, accusing him of the deaths of the Quadris, of paedophilia, of being a Fascist. After Lino escapes into the darkness of the Theatre, Marcello despondently warms his hands on a small fire outside the boy’s makeshift home. In the final shot of the film, Marcello turns away from the shadow cast by the fire to look toward the boy through the bars of his cubicle, finally allowing himself to acknowledge his desires. In Italian the structure is called Teatro di Marcello; this is literally where Marcello finally sees and is seen. In looking back towards the boy within the film, Marcello also is looking directly at the camera and the audience, towards the light of the projector. The illusions both within the film and of the film are broken; the stratigraphy of memory collapses.

Conclusion—monuments and monumenta

For the ancient Romans, a monumentum was by definition connected with memory, ‘quod mentem moneat’ (Isid. Orig. 15.11.1 et al.): it is something that calls to mind something else. While often used specifically to remember the dead, as with the Mausoleum of Hadrian, monumenta also include ‘cetera quae scripta ac facta memoriae causa’ (Varro Ling.Lat. 6.49) other things which have been written or created for the sake of memory. The value of a monumentum was its ability to preserve a consistent and linear connection to the past for future generations. In The Conformist, monuments, whether ancient or modern, architectural, textual, or cinematic, can also be seen to perform this iconic function, to serve as singular emblems of past events, people, or ideas. Yet at the same time, the monument becomes inherently unstable and ‘oscillates between a standing for itself and a standing in for other entities, abstractions, or values’,⁵⁰ due to the ruptures created by the cinematic medium. The representation of subjective memory in the film, both Marcello’s individually and of Italian culture collectively, complicates the straightforward connotation of a Roman monumentum. Monuments are misidentified, appropriated, and inconsistent in their interpretation — the Res Gestae is both a Roman and Fascist monument, Plato’s myth of the cave is both anti- and pro-Fascist — they are the medium of Bertolucci’s message. For monuments can also function in their other etymology, that which warns the mind, especially as their meanings become more complicated over time. ‘In The Conformist, Bertolucci tells the other story implicit in Open City — that of one man’s reasons for collaborating with a murderous regime. Where Rossellini’s didactic intent in 1945 was to generate a new Italian society based on Resistance ideals, Bertolucci’s emphasis suggests a far darker lesson for the viewing public of 1970’.⁵¹ As Bertolucci himself said of the film, ‘For Italy, the film is really very savage’.⁵²

Finally, it is important to note that The Conformist was made at a significant historical moment, in terms of both film history and Italian identity. The Italian film industry at Cinecittà was revived following the neo-realist period, making the city of Rome synonymous with cinema itself. ‘The bond between the national cinema and the capital is deep, both thanks to the prominence of Rome in our collective imaginary, and simply enough, to the increasing centralization of the national film industry to the city … Thus among the patrimony of countless identities that have emerged historically within the city, one of the most worthy of note is its metamorphosis into the “city of cinema”’.⁵³ Within twenty years of World War II, Rome saw the development of the ‘Hollywood on the Tiber’ phenomenon, through which numerous American productions were filmed in the Eternal City, as well as the emergence of several Italian auteurs and the birth of characteristic genres and filoni of Italian filmmaking such the peplum, giallo, and spaghetti western. In this time period, commercial films often reconstructed the city within the confines of the studio (as with Hollywood Roman epics or La Dolce Vita) or as a romantic or touristic backdrop, a city of ‘iconic value’, as seen in films such as Roman Holiday (1953), Three Coins in the Fountain (1954), or Rome Adventure (1962).⁵⁴ But by 1970, Rome’s status in cinema was shifting to reflect a new social and cultural reality.

The Conformist was made at the transition to a new cultural and historical period, characterized by a distinct downturn in the stability of the Italian film industry and increased violence within Italian society, fuelled by political corruption, organized crime, and domestic and foreign terrorism: the so-called anni di piombo from the late 1960s to the early 1980s.⁵⁵ This period was marked by an ambivalence and uncertainty about the legacy of the past, not just of Fascism but of the whole scope of Italian history from ancient Rome to the post-WWII resistance and reconstruction. This social outlook provoked the sophisticated and nuanced usage of historical references within film, particularly in the form of location shooting. ‘These films were produced during a moment of exceptional crisis for Italy, its film industries and its urban institutions. They can be best understood as products of a distinctive conjuncture in which the social and political role of architecture and the built environment was being radically called into question’.⁵⁶ This is especially true for filmmakers such as Bertolucci, who were born following the fall of Fascism and were bent on understanding the ideals and failures of the post-war reconstruction. It is worth noting that 1970 also saw the release of two other seminal films, both also shot on location in Rome: The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Dario Argento) and Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion (Elio Petri). These particular films, and the Italian giallo and political film genres in general, are additional avenues that can be explored to enhance the understanding of ancient monuments, both textual and architectural, in modern Italian culture.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank the Department of Classics at Johns Hopkins University for its support in the research and writing of this article. I am also extremely grateful for the helpful comments and corrections provided by the reviewers of this journal.

References

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTOR

Genevieve Gessert is Director of General Education and Associate Professor of Archaeology and Classics at The American University of Rome. Her current work focuses on the history of archaeology under Fascism, on which she has a forthcoming monograph. Her research and teaching interests include classical reception in diverse media, particularly film and graphic novels, and the topographical history of Rome.

Footnotes