Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch The Conformist
1971 · Bernardo Bertolucci · The Conformist on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice bars of light and shadow crossing Marcello's face. (light)
Storaro repeatedly photographs Marcello half in shadow, his face cut by stripes of light from blinds, windows, and passing cars, again and again across the film.
Payoff: The visual pattern reads as a divided man before he ever explains himself in words. In the reading: expressionism. The reading calls this expressionism: light and shadow used as a charged, moral force rather than as neutral illumination.
Track which cities are shot warm and which are cold. (light)
Paris is bathed in a smoky amber warmth, while the Italian interiors are lit cooler and more bleached. The temperature of the light changes with the country Marcello is in.
Payoff: You can tell where his loyalties are pulling him just from the color of the room.
Watch Marcello cross a vast, empty marble floor alone. (staging)
In the Fascist Ministry, the camera holds a wide frame that lets the architecture swallow him, reducing the man to a small moving shape inside a huge, empty hall.
Payoff: The staging shows you his deepest wish before the plot does: to be absorbed and disappear into something larger than himself. In the reading: crystal-decomposition. The reading calls this a crystal-decomposition: a grand, beautiful order filmed at the exact moment it is rotting from within.
Follow the film as it drifts into scenes from childhood. (structure)
A gesture or a fall of light in the present keeps triggering a jump backward, and the editing links these moments by rhyme, a similar shape of light or posture, rather than by plot.
Payoff: You experience Marcello's past pressing on his present exactly the way he does, rather than as separate flashbacks.
Watch how little Trintignant's face ever changes. (performance)
Trintignant plays Marcello calm and quiet almost throughout, maintaining a surface of bourgeois reasonableness that only flickers with panic for a moment before it is suppressed again.
Payoff: The blankness is the performance. You are meant to read repression and cowardice into a face that refuses to show you either directly.
Once you have seen it
Notice the film's final revelation about Lino's fate. (structure)
In the final passage, after Mussolini's fall, Marcello learns that Lino, the man he believed he killed as a boy, is alive and that the murder he built his whole life around avenging never actually happened.
Payoff: His entire adult conformism turns out to rest on a memory that was never true.
Watch Marcello sit motionless in the car during the attack. (staging)
At the climax Marcello does not act. He sits in the car at the edge of the forest and watches his old professor killed in the snow without moving or intervening.
Payoff: The film's most decisive moment is defined by his total lack of action, which is the point of the whole character.
Catch Marcello staying seated while the dancers form a chain. (staging)
Anna and Giulia dance, other guests join hands, and the crowd closes into a moving ring. Marcello is left alone in his chair, the one still point in a room that has started to turn.
Payoff: The whole party moves without him, which is the clearest image the film gives you of a man who cannot join anything, even a room dancing for fun. In the reading: movement of world. The reading calls this the movement of world: the figure goes still while the world itself keeps moving without him.
Track how the forest killing echoes the childhood scene. (structure)
The postures and imagery of the assassination in the snow rhyme with the earlier scene of Lino's shooting, the film visually tying the two violent scenes together across decades.
Payoff: Bertolucci builds the adult crime as a repetition of the childhood one, even though one of them, it turns out, was never real.
Carry this in: Watch where the light falls on Marcello's face, and notice the moment the room starts to dance without him.