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.
The 4 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch where the light falls on Marcello's face, and where he places himself in each room.