Written for the now-discontinued Eureka blu-ray edition in 2016.
In August 1974, Gideon Bachmann arrived in Italy to report on the production of Bernardo Bertolucci's Novecento for Sight & Sound. He had planned to spend one day on the set, but ended up staying for a whole week, with a diary of his experiences being published in the magazine a few months later. After a couple of days spent watching Bertolucci at work, taking note of the impressive scale (and spiralling cost) of everything, and growing frustrated at his failure to secure an interview with the director, he wrote, “What is it that makes film directors so sure of their value? Whence this presumption of being involved in an activity that must take precedence over other human obligations? Haven't we perhaps allowed them too much mythology, too much adoration?”
Cut to three years later. The fruits of Bertolucci's labours were finally presented to the paying American public in November 1977, but only after a long, acrimonious and very public battle between the director and his producer Alberto Grimaldi. The 315-minute version of Novecento shown at the 1976 Cannes Film Festival was whittled down to a relatively skimpy 195 minutes by Grimaldi, conscious of his contractual obligations to Paramount. Grimaldi had banned Bertolucci from the editing room, prompting the director to take legal action to protect his vision. “That isn't my film; that's a trailer, a travesty,” Bertolucci exclaimed in the press when asked about the new cut commissioned by his producer. “My friend is surrounded by sycophants who tell him he is God,” Grimaldi responded. “It started with Tango.”
The film made by a director after enjoying their first enormous success is a test. A few years before Michael Cimino went off the deep end and killed a studio with Heaven's Gate, Novecento was viewed as the prime example of a wunderkind being given his freedom and running for the hills with it. Last Tango in Paris was not only an astonishing critical and commercial hit in 1972, but a film that was instantly seen as a cinematic landmark, a breakthrough in adult artistic filmmaking. Following the more modest but still widely admired The Conformist and The Spider's Stratagem in the previous years, this was the kind of achievement that has other filmmakers heaping praise on the director (“How dare I make another film?” Robert Altman said, “My personal and artistic life will never be the same.”), has every actor lining up to work with him, and has studios throwing money in his direction in the hope of reaping the same artistic and financial rewards. Where does a young director go in that situation? Bertolucci decided to go big. Although his film is titled 1900 in many countries, a more accurate translation of Novecento is Twentieth Century, which immediately gives you a sense of the scale of his ambition.
Novecento was briefly mooted as a six-part series for Italian television, although what small screen in the mid-1970s could have contained the scope of Bertolucci’s images? This is self-consciously an epic work, large in every sense, and it’s no coincidence that Bertolucci begins his tale on January 27th 1901, with the announcement of the death of Giuseppe Verdi. The director is taking his lead from Verdi and telling his story in an operatic register, demanding grand, emotive performances from his actors (compare the dignified restraint Burt Lancaster exhibited in Visconti’s The Leopard to his work here), and instead of finding a consistent rhythm or narrative flow throughout the film, he focuses on staging loosely connected individual sequences that each build to a crescendo and aim to enrapture the viewer with their swelling melodramatic fervour. No wonder Pauline Kael spent much of her famous New Yorker review marvelling in equal parts at Bertolucci’s brilliance and foolhardiness, before summing up the film’s appeal by stating that “Next to it, all the other new movies are like something you hold up at the end of a toothpick.”
But despite the gigantic size of Novecento, Bertolucci’s flirtation with the idea of presenting it on television is telling. He wanted his socialist epic to be a film that spoke directly to the masses, a film that bypassed intellectual analysis and worked on a level of pure emotion, through arresting images and rousing rhetoric, culminating in a climactic speech being delivered directly into the camera. The film can be blunt and even crude in its approach, with Bertolucci taking a broad strokes approach to his storytelling, and the people we see in the film are less characters than symbols. His two protagonists Alfredo Berlinghieri (Robert De Niro) and Olmo Dalcò (Gérard Depardieu) are born into different classes on the same day in 1901. Alfredo is the scion of a bourgeois landowning family while Olmo is the bastard son of a peasant, and as the film charts their fluctuating fortunes and enduring, if complicated, friendship over the subsequent half-century, it becomes clear that the weight of history rests heavily on their shoulders. Through these two characters – plus a third, Attila, who we meet a little later – Bertolucci’s microcosmic film aims to show us the changing face of Italian politics, industry and class across five decades. Novecento pits the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and the communists against the fascists in a struggle for the country’s soul, and there is no doubt whose side the director is on.
Giuseppe Pellizza da Volpedo’s 1901 painting The Fourth Estate, which is shown under the opening credits, sets the visual tone, with Bertolucci and Vittorio Storario shooting the communists and the peasant masses as heroic figures throughout Novecento. They are noble, dignified, the salt of the earth; they work, eat, sing and dance together; they are a community. When faced with superior force during the workers’ strike of 1908, they band together and lay down in the road against the armed soldiers on horseback. When four men are killed in a building burned by fascists, they carry the charred bodies through the streets in protest, unafraid of reprisals. When women working in the fields take up pitchforks against the fleeing fascists on Liberation Day in 1945, they sing, “Even though we are women, we are not afraid,” a song that became popular again among left-wing Italian women during the strikes and demonstrations of the 1970s – Bertolucci linking then and now.
Compare this with the way Bertolucci shoots the fascists. It’s hard to think of many more despicable characters in the history of cinema than Attila Mellanchini. Played with leering, eye-popping intensity by Donald Sutherland and egged on by his Lady Macbeth-like wife (Laura Betti), he’s a grotesque embodiment of fascist ideology; a sadist and pervert who gleefully attacks children, animals and old women and is responsible for the most violent and upsetting moments in the film. Attila is the only fascist who really exists as a character in Novecento and therefore he acts as a representative for the entire order. On the few occasions when Attila does get his comeuppance – his humiliation escalating from straw to horse shit to pitchforks – it’s always the collective that rounds on him, but Attila is not in fact acting alone, he has a whole support network behind him, and you could even argue that, despite his cartoonish villainy, he is not Novecento’s true villain.
A key scene in Novecento takes place inside a church, where the landowners meet to discuss the growing unrest among the peasants. They agree to employ a private army of Blackshirts to maintain control, and thus, the fascist movement in Italy is born, with the links between the church, the bourgeoisie and the fascists being explicitly made. When his father dies, Alfredo becomes the padrone, inheriting the increasingly violent Attila along with the land, but he can do nothing to curb his fascist attack dog. Right from the start of Novecento, when both Alfredo and Olmo are boys, Bertolucci keeps finding ways to show us Alfredo’s inferiority in contrast to his lower-class friend. From comparing their penises (Alfredo’s foreskin is too tight) to daring to lie on the tracks as a train passes overhead (Alfredo flees at the last minute), to the fact that Olmo leaves to fight in the war, returning as a man, while Alfredo dresses as a soldier but stays at home, having been kept out of harm’s way by his rich father. Alfredo is fundamentally weak, and it is this weakness that allows fascism to flourish on his watch.
On a number of occasions he is encouraged to take action against Attila and stand up for Olmo and the peasants, often by his wife Ada (Dominique Sanda, whom Angela Dalle-Vacche suggested only exists in the film to deflect attention from the homoerotic tension between Alfredo and Olmo), but all Alfredo can do is look away and withdraw. Even when Olmo is taking a vicious beating from the fascists, Alfredo hesitates, only stepping in when the danger has passed. When he finally dismisses Attila towards the end of the film, Alfredo knocks on the peasants' doors and proclaims his action as if expecting applause, but it is too little, too late. Alfredo is not a fascist, but as he is told throughout the film, he is something even worse; a landowner who pays lip service to the needs of those in his care but who ensures his own protection above all else. He is an enabler.
Bertolucci has spoken of Novecento as being a film partially born from a sense of guilt, the guilt of being a member of the Italian Communist party but hailing from bourgeois origins. Thus, for all of its sprawling and outsized ambitions, the character of Alfredo makes this a deeply personal epic for the director, and reminds us of an era when such films were possible. Even in the mid-1970s, however, it's hard to believe that a major American studio could invest millions of dollars in a five-hour Italian epic replete with shocking violence and full-frontal nudity, not to mention the explicit celebration of communist values that occurs at the end of the film. Novecento's finale led to accusations of political naïveté on the part of the filmmaker, with the fascists being run off and the peasants putting Alfredo on trial, but Bertolucci insisted this was less naïveté than hope. “In my film the trial of the landowners seems to be taking place in 1945, but in reality it is situated in the future. It is a dream,” he told Le cinéma italien in 1978. “This entire sequence is an anticipation; it is a dream of something yet to be”; but the utopian vision of the sequence is complicated in the film's closing moments.
When Olmo steps in to save Alfredo from execution, insisting that the padrone, the cause of their ills, is now dead, and Alfredo Berlinghieri should be allowed to walk away as a living testament to the padrone's demise; the villagers celebrate with songs and the triumphant waving of red flags, cheering as if the country is now theirs, but this celebratory mood is short-lived. The provisional government arrives to confiscate their guns, and as Alfredo is rescued by Olmo, he tells his old friend with a wry smile, “The padrone is still alive,” before the two begin tussling once more in a futile, comical manner. The country does not yet belong to the people, there will always be a padrone, and the struggle continues.
