The Better Angles of Our Nature: Bertolucci’s ‘Il Conformista’

Pasolini’s Salò is a film about Fascism through sex; Bertolucci’s Il Conformista (or The Conformist, in English) is a film about Fascism through architecture. All politics is distilled into the structures people live in, or more to the point the way we fit into those structures via the camera.

No filmmaker understood the relationship between film and architecture better than Jacques Tati. Playtime, the director’s masterpiece, understands intuitively the relationship between M. Hulot and the environment and the way filming that environment pertains to one’s position within it. No other director could get away with sequences Tati pulls off in Playtime, precisely because Tati makes such unconventional choices. Playtime is a film where place is as important as person.

Tati’s technique is to be considered separate from other films that emphasize architecture. Kogonada’s architecture-centric Columbus seems to be on the same wavelength but is actually more akin to The Conformist, in which architecture is a fetish object rather than a lived experience.

At the center of The Conformist is Marcello Clerici, a rather pathetic Italian man who becomes a Fascist in 1930’s Italy as a way of simply going along. Clerici wants nothing more than normalcy, and his life is an exercise in taking the path of least resistance.

The Conformist is a beautifully photographed film, easily among the greatest of all time, alongside Days of Heaven or Raging Bull. Behind the pleasing use of color and light is the disturbing way that Clerici is repeatedly trapped in spaced defined by right angles. The hyper-angular nature of the architecture around him exposes a kind of rigidity that traps Clerici until, finally, he is framed behind bars, as if in prison.

The fascistic potential of architecture is greatly exaggerated. What makes something fascistic (“Fascist”) is how we position ourselves, or are positioned, within it. Bertolucci understood this: his film is an exercise in letting structures trap people.