The Conformist · essays & theory

A reading · through the lens of theory

Marcello waits in a dark Paris hotel room for a telephone to ring, and across his face fall slats of light — bright bar, dark bar, bright bar — thrown by a window blind or a passing car. You could read the whole film off that face. A man cut into stripes, half lit and half erased, waiting for the signal that lets him help murder his old professor so that he can finally feel like everyone else. The first thing to say about The Conformist is that its gorgeousness is not décor. Where Vittorio Storaro lets the light fall is the argument.

Deleuze has a name for light used this way. He calls it expressionism: not a movement but a method, in which shadow and illumination stop being neutral and become charged, so that things carry a kind of non-organic life. Storaro borrowed Caravaggio's raking side-light and the Dutch habit of a bright figure against a black ground, and turned them into a moral instrument. Warm amber for Paris and its forbidden intimacies, cold bleached light for fascist interiors. The bars on Marcello's face are the divided self made visible before he says a word. The temperature of the light tells you which way his soul is leaning, scene by scene.

But the deeper Deleuzian fact about the film is its relation to time. The Conformist almost never lets Marcello act in a clean present. He is driven, he is steered, and at the climax he sits in a car at the edge of a forest and watches his professor stabbed to death in the snow, doing nothing. Deleuze would call him a seer rather than an agent — a figure to whom things happen, who registers and endures instead of resolving. In the older cinema a man perceives a situation and acts to change it. Here the sensory-motor circuit is cut. Marcello can only look.

What fills the space where action used to be is memory, and here Bertolucci and his editor Franco Arcalli do something precise. The film opens at the moment of consequence — the hotel room, the morning of the killing — and spirals backward, the way Citizen Kane excavates a dead man through contradictory witnesses. But Arcalli, schooled by Resnais and Hiroshima Mon Amour, cuts by sensory rhyme rather than by plot. A gesture in the present, a fall of light through a blind, summons the childhood. These are recollection-images: dated fragments of a former present, rising unbidden. Yet they never stay tidy. They bleed into one another out of order, until you stop feeling that Marcello visits his past and start feeling that he lives inside it. This is what Deleuze calls sheets of past — not a flashback you leave and return from, but whole coexisting regions of memory you move through sideways, like Bergson's cone of the past pressing on every present. The non-chronological design isn't ornament. It is the shape of a man who cannot get out of what happened to him.

And what happened is the engine. Beneath the bourgeois functionary lies an impulse-image world — Deleuze's territory of drives erupting under the social crust. The trauma with Lino the chauffeur, the gun, the body he believes he left behind: this is the originary world, the savage underlayer, of which fascist Italy is merely the derived milieu, the polite surface. Marcello's whole project — marriage, murder, normalcy — is a compulsion sliding down one line of slope toward self-erasure. He doesn't want power. He wants to disappear. The film's terrible insight, and Deleuze's too in his account of fascism as something desired from below rather than imposed from above, is that the most dangerous wish is the wish to be like everyone else.

Watch how the spaces carry this. In the Fascist Ministry, Marcello crosses a vast marble floor and the wide Techniscope frame swallows him; the human figure becomes an irrelevance of the architectural field. That is an any-space-whatever — a void that no longer functions as a setting for action, only as an affect of emptiness. Antonioni built it first in L'Avventura; Storaro makes it a portrait of a man who longs to be absorbed by an institution. The fascist order itself is a crystal-decomposition: an aristocratic, marble-and-colonnade world filmed at the height of its beauty precisely as it rots from within, exactly as Visconti scored the crumbling ballroom of The Leopard in warm dust-gold light, the camera circling with an amoral eye that aestheticizes what it should indict.

The single most Deleuzian shot is the dance. Anna and Giulia take the floor in a tango, the guests join hands, the crowd closes into a moving chain — and Marcello is left seated, immobile, encircled by a world that has begun to turn without him. Deleuze calls this the movement of world: the figure goes still while the world itself moves, the dance absorbing everyone but the one man who cannot give himself to it.

What did the film do to cinema? It proved that the fractured memory-film, the kind Resnais made austere and difficult, could be ravishing — that you could cut by feeling across time and still hold a mass audience, and that light could think. Coppola, Scorsese, and a generation of cinematographers took the lesson. Go back to it and watch two things only: where the light falls on Marcello's face, and the moment the world starts to dance and he stays still. You will understand fascism better than most history books will tell you, and you will have watched time itself become visible.