InRO Weekly — Volume 1, Issue 1

THE CRUSHING FUTILITY
OF HUMAN ACTION
BERNARDO BERTOLUCCI’S
THE CONFORMIST
[A new 4K
restoration of
Bernardo Bertolucci’s
The Conformist is playing
at Film Forum January 6-19.]
The '60s and '70s were a highly politically-charged time for Italian
cinema. The country's neorealism movement chronicled working class
lives in a post-WWII Italy — a newly post-fascist society still reeling from the
fallout of the deadliest, most devastating conflict in human history. But unlike
these grounded proletarian dramas, films like Ettore Scola's A Special Day, Lina
Wertmüller's Seven Beauties, and most infamously Pier Paolo Pasolini's hellish Salò,
or the 120 Days of Sodom confronted the nation's fascist past directly and in subversive,
often highly controversial ways. Bernardo Bertolucci's luscious political thriller The
Conformist, meanwhile, rendered the grim realities of fascism in ways none of his
contemporaries did: alluring, hazy, anxious, and rife with repressed sexuality.
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