by T. Jefferson Kline, from Bertolucci's Dream Loom. A Psychoanalytic Study of Cinema. Amherst: Univ. Of Massachusetts Press, 1987.

"However the thing might have been, whether it had really happened, it was nevertheless a dream, because it was not to be explained in a rational manner." -Alberto Moravia

"The Spider's Stratagem and The Conformist have in common the theme of betrayal, the presence of the past that returns, and the weight of the paternal figure," said Bertolucci of his two films released in 1970. "The difference is that in The Conformist the son, Trintignant, betrays Professor Quadri (the father figure) whereas in The Spider's Stratagem it is Athos the father who has betrayed. In any case the films treat two parricides which suppose a past and a memory." Seeing these two films as, in some sense, doubles of each other allows an appreciation of the many ways in which "betrayal" can be understood as fundamental to Bertolucci's larger project of this period. This movement from focusing on the betrayal of the father to concentrating on the son's treachery is rich in implications for the film itself, for the development of Bertolucci's larger work, and for the understanding of the dynamics of cinema itself.

At the anecdotal level of the film, the dynamics of betrayal are only too obvious in The Confomist. Once Professor Quadri's best student, Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant), journeys from Rome to Paris on his honeymoon in order to betray and murder his former mentor (Enzo Tarascio). Quadri himself is certainly a paternal figure for Clerici, who has "lost" his own father to an insane asylum. The young Fascist's recollections of his professor are highly ambivalent: Quadri was, on the one hand, the butt of his students' jokes. As an intellectual presence, however, he had a lasting impact on Clerici despite their grave political differences. As an antifascist, living in exile in Paris, Quadri is, like Athos's father, a figure of questionableloyalty: Is he traitor or hero? Clerici cannot decide. lie ultimately betrays Quadri, his own fascist ideals, and himself, for when it comes time to act he will simply watch from a car as others assassinate Quadri and his wife in the woods of Savoie. At the moment of crisis, he is not only incapable of acting on his fascist convictions, he is unable to lift a finger to save the woman who has inspired his life's greatest passion. His motives for this plan will remain a mystery to the Fascist bosses who have sent him on this expedition. Clerici can indeed be compared to Athos Magnani senior, because both are the architects of plots to assassinate father figures who have become political enemies, yet neither is able to act on the plan he has devised. In both films an intimate connection between treason and self-betrayal and between the separate identities of father and son considerably clouds the definition of Bertolucci's main character.

In The Conformist several other levels of betrayal are also at work. There is one scene in particular that considerably illumines several other aspects of this film. When, during their evening together in Paris, Professor Quadri asks Clerici to deliver a letter for the antifascist cause, Clerici, as a loyal Fascist, refuses. Quadri unexpectedly thanks him for that refusal and reveals that the request was a test to see whether Clerici would accept the letter and then betray its contents. This incident is remarkable at many levels. It is a prime example of betrayal at both paternal and filial levels, for Quadri has acted to trap Clerici by means of a clever ruse, yet Clerici's refusal to take the letter ironically appears to vindicate him at the very moment he is most committed to Quadri's destruction. The incident figuralizes the theme of appearance versus reality that has been the very center of an earlier discussion between the two.

Taken directly from Moravia's Il conformista, this scene contains a significant deviation emblematic of Bertolucci's entire relationship to the original. Whereas in the novel Quadri simply thanks Clerici for refusing to take the letter (p. 26o), in the film Quadri shows the letter to Clerici, revealing it to be a blank page. Quadri's letter, then, functions as a gratuitous sign-gratuitous precisely in terms of its relation to the Moravia original and of its necessity to the action of the film-of the unreliability of texts. Proffered by the professor whom Marcello feels he must betray in order to establish his own identity, this letter may also be interpreted as the Moravia novel itself in relation to Bertolucci's film.

Virtually every instance of writing in this film is highly charged: Literature functions constantly as a trap or contains empty, false, or indecipherable writing; in short, texts never seem to be reliable.

Of the four explicit mise-en-scenes of texts in this film, two involve Marcello's real father. In both cases, writing emphasizes the conflict and the ambiguity surrounding the paternal relationship. In the first instance, Giulia's mother produces an anonymous letter claiming that Marcello has inherited a syphilitic disease from his father, that is, that father has betrayed son through sexual activity. But Giulia guesses that the author of this infamous letter is "Uncle" Perpuzio, the father figure of her youth who had taken advantage of her when she was fourteen and then held her in sexual bondage for years. As signifier, the letter spells paternal betrayal at a variety of levels. Though it is true that this incident is included in Moravia's text, its reinsertion in the context of the cinematic narrative gives it an entirely different and, as it turns out, ironic connotation. As text, it produces a conscious denunciation of the authority of Marcel's father, and at an unconscious level it constitutes an autodenunciation of both text and author/ parent Perpuzio. Moreover, the simplistic equation between psychology and (biological) destiny, despite its inclusion in Moravia's novel, can, in this context, be interpreted as a critique of the novel itself, which indulges in exactly this sort of theorizing at the level of narrative. If the son is the betrayer in this film, the father or authority figure is hardly without blame.

The second example of paternal writing even more clearly establishes Bertolucci's ambivalent relationship to authority. When Marcello visits his father in the asylum, the old man is sitting in a huge forum-architecture ironically reminiscent of the Fascist authority's office-writing madly. In Moravia's novel, the son listens rather disinterestedly to the father's mad ramblings. In the film, Clerici seizes his father's manuscript and holds it up to ridicule, then takes his father's pen hand in his own and guides it in the writingof his father's signatureon his wedding banns, giving fatherasorigin and son as progeny equal authority. Next, Marcello taunts his father with recollections of the father's former crimes of torture and murder while an Italian resistance fighter, goading him until he breaks down and demands to be straitjacketed. Here Marcello creates another, albeit unconscious, equation between his father and himself, for he will soon repeat those crimes in the service of another political regime. He will, moreover, repeat this autoaccusation for the church father in the scene of the confessional. The entire scene convincingly portrays Marcello's obsession with repudiating and imitating authority simultaneously.

Clearly, writing, for Bertolucci, continues to be the locus of conflict and intense ambivalence. Even his own script of the film, as text, became a battleground:

Often cinema is merely an illustration of a story. That is the biggest danger you face when you make a film f rom a novel. That wab my problem when I made The Conformist. Many filmmakers use their scripts as if they had started from a novel; they simply make in illustrated film of the script. On the other hand, 1, too, start from a very precise script, but only in order to destroy it.... To write a script for me is a literary experience.... when I'm writing, I can't think of shooting because to write is to write. Words are words, not images.... I must be completely free when I'm shooting. I can't follow the script.(3)

The filial-paternal conflict, so firmly drawn up around the themes of the paternal logos versus the filial image, continue to haunt and animate The Conformist. But Bertolucci, however clever and expedient these visual critiques of texts may be, is not content to leave the issue there. The central scene of this film, the confrontation with Quadri over the interpretation of Plato's dialogue on the cave, moves the level of Bertolucci's critique to another plane altogether. In Quadri's apartment, Marcello reminds his former professor of his lectures on Plato and quotes:

Picture a sort of subterranean cavern with a long entrance open to the light on its entire width. Inside are men who have been there since childhood. Chained together they are forced to face the interior of the cave. Light glows from a fire some distance behind them. Between the fire and the prisoners imagine a long low wall has been built, as the exhibitors of puppet shows have partitions before the men themselves, above which they show the puppets.(5)

As he quotes this passage from Plato's Republic, Quadri is silhouetted as if on a screen against the harsh light of the open window behind him and consequently gives the impression of being merely a shadow on a "wall" of light, inadvertently illustrating the most celebrated text in Western culture on illusion and reality as tragic elements of our human condition. This cinematic tour de force brings many levels of this film together: As Quadri wams Clerici about the dangers of his own illusions, the professor is rendered merely an illusion by the lighting of the scene, subtly undermining the strength of his message.(6) By this visual insistence on the link between a darkened cavern and a lighted puppet show, Bertolucci uncannily displaces the subject of the Platonic text from the human condition to a series of other meanings.

If, as Jean-Louis Baudry has theorized ,(7) in both Plato's and Freud's depictions of the "other scene" the illusions discussed are actually deformations or "symptoms" in Freudian terms, then Plato's prisoner is, no less than Freud's psychotic, a victim of hallucinations in the waking state. The defense against such illusions turns out, ironically, to be conformity itself. Indeed, Joyce McDougall argues that "Normality is an overadaptation to the real world" and that "no one doubts that conformity erected as an ideal is a well compensated psychosis. " The scene in question becomes, then, a metaphor for Clerici's entire conforming approach to the world.

As a metaphorical prisoner of Plato's cave, Clerici takes on the additional representation of passive viewer, analogous in many instances to the film viewers themselves. Indeed, it is precisely this similarity between the cave and the cinema that Baudry develops in his essay on the origins of the cinema. Plato's insistence on the immobility of his prisoners is congruent, Baudry argues, to the first such immobility we experience, that is, "that of the child at its birth, deprived of resources of movement, and also that of the sleeper who repeats, as is well known, the postnatal state and even intrauterine life, and it is also the immobility that the visitor to the darkened movie theater experiences settled deep in his seat.."(9)   Bertolucci later confessed that the scene was indeed about cinema, "because when you read the cave of Plato's, the cave is exactly like the theater and the background is the screen and Plato says there is a fire and people walking in front of the fire and the fire projects the shadows in the background of the cave At's the invention of cinema."(10)

Now this multileveled interpretation of the "cave scene" of The Conformist suggests that, once again, Bertolucci has not only bnlliantly conducted a meditation on the difference between the written text and the cinema but centered that meditation in the relation between the ontology kit the cinema and that of man. Bertolucci "betrays" two texts here (Plato's and Moravia's) and in so doing hardens his position on writing-but in the very methods of his subversion he illustrates in a remarkably condensed form just how the cinema, in a language all its own, involves the viewer in the most fundamental of experiences.

There is yet another level of "betrayal" at work here. The allusion to cinema and the reduction of Quadri to a black and white, two-dimensional image suggest that the professor may symbolize one of Bertolucci's cinematic mentors. Indeed, Quadri's address and phone number-given as 17, rue St. Jacques; telephone: MED-15-37-belonged in 1971 to Jean-Luc Godard. Bertolucci confessed, in fact, that

The Conformist is a story about me and Godard. When I gave the professor Godard's phone number and address, I did it for a joke, but afterwards I said to myself, "Well maybe all that has some significance.... I'm Marcello and I make fascist movies and I want to kill Godard who is a revolutionary, who makes revolutionary movies and who was my teacher." (11)

Because Moravia most obviously constitutes the textual authority being explicitly imitated and implicitly contested in this film, it is crucial to understand in what other ways Bertolucci has adapted the novel to a specifically cinematic style. Remarkably, Bertolucci is more "faithful" to the anecdotal level of this novel than he is in any of his other films based on literary texts. Perhaps, by the time he made The Conformist, he felt less anxious about the relationship between film and literature. In this film, he managed to retain many of the elements of Moravia's narrative, choosing to situate his meditation on the specificity of cinema in other, more subtle elements of his film. Clearly, Bertolucci's first and most dramatic departure from Moravia's novel was his refusal to imitate the novel's insistently systematic chronology and causality, composed as though the novelist had to demonstrate a particular theory of psychoanalytic determinism.

From Marcello's first sadistically violent games in his parents' garden to his ultimate betrayal of Quadri, Moravia follows the progress of his protagonist with an almost deadening chronological rigor and proleptic foreboding. His parents' neglect of Marcel lo leads to the child's symbolic castration of "a fine clump of marguerites covered with white and yellow flowers, or a tulip with its red cup erect on a green stalk, or a clusterof arurnswith tall, white fleshy flowers . . . . leaving the decapitated stalks standing erect" (p. 7).

Moravia's narrator stresses that it is "inevitable" that Marcello should pass from these symbolic acts to a massacre of dozens of lizards, and from this frenzied agitation to the "murder" of the family cat. In this last act, Marcello perceives "an unmistakable sign that he was predestined, in some mysterious and fatal way, to accomplish acts of cruelty and death" (p. -iq). These fatal signs of Marcello's abnormality serve as the context for the central psychological moment of the novel. All too willingly seduced by Lino, a pederastic chauffeur, Marcello takes up the pistol constituting and symbolizing the exchange that was to have taken place and "kills" the perverse Lino.

The rest of Moravia's novel painstakingly charts Marcello's misguided attempt to atone for this childhood "crime" through a life of "well-defined, barren, reserved, benumbed, grey normality" (p. 72). He dedicates himself to total conformity by marrying the most apparently ordinary, uninspired, materialistic, middle-class woman he can find; by going to confession in order to be married ("a further link in the chain of normality," adds Moravia [p. 96] in case we should have missed the point), and by joining the Fascist

party, "as an abstract whole, as a great, existing army held together by common feelings, common ideas, common aims, an army of which it was comforting to form a part," despite the fact that, as individuals, he finds it "impossible to recognize himself in them and feels at the same time both repugnance and detachment" (p. 77).

It is of course heavily ironic that the Fascist party sanctions Marcello's plan to betray (and symbolically to murder) one of his former professors during Marcello's honeymoon in Paris. Rather than anonymity and atonement, Marcello finds within the Fascist ranks an ever more murderous destiny, so that "the figure of Judas, the thirteenth Apostle, became confused with his own, coalesced with its outlines, in fact was his own" (p. 193).  Moravia not only exposes fascism as a barely repressed perversion but also raises a more general question about the nature of conformity. Each time Marcello believes he has espoused normality, he discovers a new form of perversion. His "normal" bride turns out not only to have been the illicit child concubine of a well-known Roman lawyer but also to have carried on a lesbian affair immediately preceding their marriage. The priest who hears Marcello's confession rather perfunctorily exacts a few prayers of penance for the "murder" of Lino but expresses avid interest in the particulars of Marcello's sexual encounter with the chauffeur. Moravia's Quadri "sacrificed Ihis antifascist initiates] quite coolly in desperate actions ... that ... involved a cruel indifference to the value of human life" (pp. 182-83). Quadri's wife Lina not only doubles the perverted chauffeur of Marcello's "original sin" in name but repeats
Lino's homosexual seduction on Marcello's much too willing wife (p. 231). Fleeing this discovery, Marcello seeks seclusion on a park bench and ends up being approached by an older man with a large black limousine. Moravia's novel hammers doggedly away at the overwhelmingly evident message of  Il conformista: Normality, as Marcello imagines it, is an illusion. Society is a composite of polymorphously perverse individuals in a

topsy-turvy sterile world in which merely sensual relationships occurred from the most natural and ordinary to the most abnormal and unusual, [between] ambiguous figures of men-women and women-men whose ambiguity when they met was mingled and redoubled. [Pp. 233-34]

This repetitive explicitness, frequently bemoaned by Moravia's otherwise sympathetic critics, is mirrored by the author's overly insistent Mse of destiny. Moravia repeatedly alludes to Greek tragedy in general and to the Oedipus myth in particular. From his first taste of violence, Marcello discovers in it "an unmistakable sign that he was predestined, in some mysterious and fatal way, to accomplish acts of cruelty and death" (p. 19), a passage that bears but superficial resemblance to Borges's "Theme of the Traitor and the Hero."(12) Whereas Borges devises in "a pattern of repeated lines" an uncanny relationship between literature and its double, Moravia constructs a weighty monument to an unimaginative version of Freudian determinism. Marcello is caught, Moravia insists on reminding us, in

a trap of which you have been forewarned, which, even, you can see clearly, but into which nevertheless, you cannot help putting your foot. Or just a curse of . . . blindness that creeps into your movements, your senses, your blood . . . an intimate, obscure, inbom, inscrutable fatality . . . which stood like a signboard at the opening of a sinister road. He knew that this fatality implied he would kill somebody; but what frightened him most was not so much murder as the knowledge that he was predestined to it, whatever he might do.

If, on the anecdotal level, what attracted Bertolucci to Moravia's novel was "the ambiguity of the main character,"Is at the stylistic level Bertolucci clearly wanted to experiment with editing as a cinematic adaptation of Moravia's literariness. Previously Bertolucci had considered editing a kind ot autopsy or castration of the living material of the camerawork. With The Conformist he was to discover that, "even in editing, one can leave the door open to chance, that one can improvise, that rather than being only a moment of analysis, editing can reveal secrets hidden in the belly of the film that we never would have seen otherwise."16 Thus, to the deadening chronology of Moravia's novel, Bertolucci opposed improvisation and revelation; to Moravia's literariness, he proposed the "memory of my memory": a remembrance of films past, a cinema recaptured. To the figure of doubles in Moravia's text, he responded with a meditation on the primary doubling, always already accomplished, which is, according to Christian Metz, the nature of the cinematic signifier itself.

The film opens with Marcello (Trintignant) sitting somnolent on a bed in a darkened room, periodically illuminated by a red neon sign outside his window which spells ESTAN, a kind of present participle of the verb "to be. " In this initial position, he has coincidentally assumed a position nearly identical to that of both Charles Aznavour in the opening scenes of Truffaut's Tirez sur le pianiste and of the film viewer watching him, on whose face the same colored lights are intermittently reflected. When the phone beside him rings, he awakens from his reverie and reaches for the phone with a surprising suddenness. Hanging up the receiver, he grabs his hat from its perch on the nude posterior of the unidentified woman sleeping beside him and heads for the door. In the street below, he hails a 1930s-model car, leaps in, and begins the pursuit of another car through the mist of a snowy Paris morning.  It is an exposition worthy of the American detective films of the forties, a salute to Dashiell Hammett, whose Red Harvest Bertolucci has, for years, wanted to film.

Nothing is explained, and nothing will be explained through traditional narrative exposition and chronological sequence. The viewers must garner whatever understanding they can from a system of flashbacks out of a Point of time given as the film's "present" (the car ride out of Paris) to a series of moments that themselves do not proceed chronologically. Bertolucci's use of flashbacks is unusual not only for its disregard of chronology but also for the tendency to use flashbacks out of flashbacks. Progression occurs clearly by association rather than logic. Each scene presents images and/or information that must be stored and read associatively rather than analytically. The viewer is forced to watch in the way an analyst listens, for clues that can later be pieced together to form an interpretation. What is most cinematic about this arrangement is that the narrative "authority" of the film has been vested both in the associative process of the main character and in an omniscient camera. Rather than imitating Moravia's omniscient narrator, Bertolucci has, to use Nick Browne's phrase, situated the spectator simultaneously in many places in the film's text, imitating instead the multiple identities of dreams.

The first of the film's flashbacks jumps the spectator into a recording studio where Marcello is, characteristically, listening and watching. Indeed, his own status as passive viewer is emphatically marked by the wall of glass that separates him, like Razzori's glazed doors, from the women singing in the studio. Bertolucci frequently captures Marcello's reflection in the glass of the studio, perhaps alluding to the mirroring function of cinema itself. During this episode, Marcello listens to a group of women singing, a speech glorifying fascism, and a man doing bird calls-a potpourri of programming that puts a serious strain on the spectator's belief in the realism of the scene. Interspersed in this jumble of elements are shots of Marcellck dwarfed by enormous Fascist architecture on which yet another text, this time a Latin lapidary inscription of Hadrian (the Roman emperor who managed, unlike Caesar-and Quadri-to escape an assassination attempt), resists adequate deciphering. Whatever "warning" there may be in this text is lost on the viewer partly because of the force of the image itself and partly because of the rapidity of the editing of these sequences. It is impossible at a first viewing to situate these scenes logically or chronologically: Only at subsequent viewings do the pieces of this assemblage create a proper cinematic sequence. A sudden cut returns to the radio station, now darkened, where Marcello awakes (perhaps from the dream the film viewer has just witnessed) to find himself opposite a mysterious personage whose entry into the studio we have not witnessed. From their conversation, it ultimately becomes clear that this character is a Fascist agent sent to inform Marcello that his plan for a "working" honeymoon in Paris has been approved. Another cut projects Marcello just as inexplicably into a different Fascist architectural immensity -Flashes back and forth to and from the car ride out of Paris further confuse whatever narrative thread can be followed.

In direct contrast to the careful chronology and rational presentation of Moravia's text, Bertolucci presents the viewer with a content and a structure that can only be described as oneiric and implicitly cinematic. These scenes not only lack causal and chronological coherence but proceed by association, condensation, displacement, and doubling, all techniques of latent dreamwork.

The clearest example of these dream structures involves the uncanny reappearance of Dominique Sanda in three different roles. Unlike Moravia's text, which is reduced to making Lina's double an explicit and therefore consciously authorian device, here the impact, possible interpretation, and indeed the very fact of without commentary are left entirely to the film's spectator to measure. The cinematic rendition of this doubling thus succeeds to a much greater degrei than does the novel in placing upon the viewer the task of associating and organizing the visual material. Sanda is most prominently cast as Anna Quadri, wife of the professor whom Marcello inexplicably wants to kill.Notably, the first reference to Anna in the "present tense" of the film (the automobile trip to Savoie) comes via Marcello's dream: "I just had a strange dream. I was blind. You were taking me to a clinic in Switzerland. Quadri was operating on me. The operation was a success; I got my sight back. Then I ran off with Anna. "

In this dream, Marcello condenses his own character with that of the older Italo, who is blind and whom he will feverishly denounce at the end of the film; with his father, a madman in a clinic; with Hitler, whom he has previously referred to in terms that perfectly describe his own father; and with Quadri, for Marcello takes Quadri's place in the dream. It is an Oedipal scenario complete with an allusion to the infant's castration anxiety (blindness) and a manifest threat of that anxiety Quadri's operation), followed by successful union with the mother figure, Quadri's wife. Notably, Manganiello (Gastone Moschin) figures in the dream as chauffeur and therefore a double of Lino, the pederastic chauffeur who seduced the child Marcello. Marcello's blindness may also signify a denial of both male seduction fantasies and dreams of murderous revenge. Switzerland, that is, the mountains of Savoie, condenses the destination of their present trip (where Marcello will indeed kill Quadri) with a state of neutrality, the perfect conformity that has blinded everyone to Marcello's perversity-what Joyce McDougall has called "a well compensated psychosis."(17)
 

Remarkably congruent in content and structure to the entire film, each of the elements of this dream appears in manifest or latent form in the film, and each undergoes a similar degree of primary process distortion, or dreamwork. Condensation, displacement, and doubling are the structural counterparts of the series of fantastic and/or oneiric elements permeating the narrative.

When Marcello first visits Giulia's apartment, a confluence of decor, costume, and lighting gives the entire scene an obsessive and inexplicable striped effect, suggesting the emotional ambivalence predominant in Marcello-and, undoubtedly, the prison of marriage he is about to enter. On their train ride to Paris, the decor outside the compartment window is patently unreal. Bertolucci says that he wanted to have two levels. One was the realistic level inside the train and the other one was a sort of film in the film. A window like a magic lantern. So, outside the time is very surrealistic, very magic, because in two minutes you have sunset and night, and [there are] also some dissolves in the window but not in the train.(18)

Fantastic voyage indeed! Bertolucci underscores the undecidability of Marcello's position by having him recite, during this train ride, a poem of D'Annunzio, who supported fascism yet is famous for his decadent poems in which he passionately celebrates sensual pleasures without any real concern for morality or conscience.

The bordello in Ventimiglia is inexplicably grandiose; the desk and bookshelves of Raoul's office, for some never-to-be-explained reason, are lined with walnuts, and on leaving that offiice Marcello makes three utterly uncharacteristically grandiloquent gestures with the pistol, ending in a mock gesture of suicide. Dominique Sanda's brief appearance in this "brothel" is uncanny, for the viewer has but fleetingly glimpsed her in the arms of a Fascist minister and has not yet encountered her in her role as Anna Quadri. Thus the "recognition factor," to the degree that the viewer succeeds at all in this, can be exercised only hazily and in retrospect and cannot be verified except by a second viewing of the film. Indeed, many viewers of The Conformist are surprised to learn that Sanda is cast in three roles. Ultimately, the effect of this chronology produces a kind of subliminal, rather than explicit, identification of Anna as "whore" and "Fascist mistress--an effect specific to theproperties of cinematic montage and all too explicit in the novel.

Once in Paris, Anna accepts Marcello's sexual advances despite her obvious dislike of him, a scenario that one would expect only of a dream script. When he attempts to discover the address of her dance class, he finds a perfectly new label announcing that address attached unrealistically to an otherwise well-worn pair of ballet shoes. Dreams are notorious for mixing past and present and generally ignoring such logical contradictions. During the soirie with Quadri and Anna, Marcello &on takes up our posture of inactive spectator as Anna and Giulia perform one of the most sensual and visually rich dances ever filmed. When Marcello does join the dance, it is in a "paranoid" fashion: The entire population of the dance floor makes a human reel (reminiscent of the "embobinage" of Spider's Stratagem), rolling him up like a mummy-or the body of a dreamer-in the middle. This scene, moreover, evokes associations of two earlier scenes, one in which Marcello is set upon sexually by a group of schoolboys and a later one in which the bodyguards in Quadri's apartment suddenly surround him on all sides and escort him to the professor's study. A photo of Laurel and Hardy appears mysteriously on the window of the dance hall in Montmartre almost as a road sign: ---Ricorda:cinema !'

In light of the extensive dreamwork permeating the entire film, we may appreciate the fantastic rendering of Quadri's assassination as a kind of oneiric extension of the dream Marcello has just moments before reported to Manganiello. The entire scene is self-consciously patterned after two separate but significant moments: on the one hand, the various cinematic versions of the murder of Julius Caesar in the forum, another powerful if implicit allusion to the Roman architecture that houses the Fascist leadership; and, on the other hand, the final scenes of Truffaut's Tirez sur le pianiste in which a car nearly identical to Quadri's ascends a winding, snowcovered Alpine road toward a tragic destiny in which a woman is shot by several assassins as she flees through the snow. This subtle homage to Truffaut's cinematic retranscription of an American gangster novel reinforces Bertolucci's alignment with experimental yet popular cinema and his rejection of Godard's expressly unpopular political film stance.

The mist shrouding this scene is the closest Bertolucci comes in any of his films to a cliche of dreaming. Quadri's examination of the still figure in the car blocking their way couples silence with immobility in an uncanny way. The several assassins who appear from nowhere out of the mist are filmed in such a way that their knives seem to cut endlessly into Quadri's bodyalmost an "active" freeze-frame device that causes time to seem to stand still without stopping the action. Curiously, despite these many stab wounds, inflicted in balletlike cadence, Quadri's sweater reveals but a superficial amount of blood. In contrast, Anna, shot in the back by her pursuers in the woods, reveals a face unrealistically smeared with what is unmistakably red paint. Bertolucci said of this scene: "I thought that this exaggeration of blood on Anna was sort of a compromise with my old meaning, so audiences could think, 'It's not true, it's not true, it's not true... is a fantasy.... It's imaginary.' "(19)

What makes this scene particularly metacinematic is Marcello's immobility. He sits throughout the entire assassination watching through the windshield, again a spectator to this dassic drama. Even when Anne rushes to the car and presses her face to the glass, he sits unable to move-like Plato's enchained slaves, or like the dreamer he has personified throughout 'this film. This posture of an "actively passive" complicity in repressive and mortal violence most forcefully metaphorizes Clerici's fascism and painfully implies the potential fascism of the so-called apolitical position of the spectator in the film act. Once again, as film viewers we are forced to identify with and reluctantly imitate Marcello's behavior when confronted with such violent images, and, once again, Bertolucci pushes us to contemplate our relation to these images. When Anna leaves

the car and flees through the woods, Bertolucci's hand-held camera takes up exactly the position of the assassins, running after her, losing sight of her, awkwardly leaping over obstacles and, finally, after contemplating her dying figure, slowly turning away. From passive complicity we have subtly but surely been mobilized to active repression, a further uncomfortable reminder of the possible implications of our own tendency as film viewers to identify (like the dreamer) with all the positions offered by the film. This is undoubtedly the reason behind Bertolucci's lighthearted autoaccusation- "I'm Marcello and I make fascist movies and I want to kill Godard who is a revolutionary." Each filmmaker, however, has his own way of drawing our attention to the dynamics of spectator response to the manipulations of cinema.

Anna's fantastic "death" culminates a presentation of character that never strays far from the oneiric. As the object of desire of Marcello's dream in the car, she already holds a powerful and inexplicable attraction for him as of their "first" meeting. Within minutes of his arrival at their Paris apartment, he draws Anna into an empty room, pulls her to him, and kisses her. Visually, however, as I have noted above, this is not their first encounter. Marcello has already glimpsed this woman in the arms of the Fascist minister who authorizes his murder of Quadri. This earlier scene is itself remarkable, for it is choreographed as a classic primal scene. During his visit to the palatial offices of the minister, Marcello suddenly finds himself quite inexplicably peering through a set of curtains, like a curious child, down the length of an enormous hall where a woman, legs dangling over the edge of the minister's desk, glances pointedly at Marcello and then lies provocatively full length on the desk while the minister explores her body. For the third time in the film, Marcello occupies the film viewer's position both structurally and psychologically. Later in the film, Marcello's mother's legs will be filmed in exactly the same manner, dangling out of her bed, while her son fishes for her shoes and the syringe that symbolizes her sexual oppression. Immediately following the scene at his mother's house in which his mother's lover is eliminated, Bertolucci cuts to a shot of Marcello in the car on the road to Savoie, who says, "We have to save her. " The object of this rescue fantasy could equally well be Anna or his mother.

As I have indicated in another context, Sand& reappears in yet another role during Marcello's inexplicable layover in Ventimiglia. The brothel he visits is a grandiose architectural space visually analogous to both the minister's office and Marcello's father's asylum. As whore in this setting, she cries "I'm crazy!" from Manganiello's Fascist arms, evoking both the primal scene previously witnessed and the condition of Marcello's father. Thus when Marcello reencounters her in Quadri's apartment in Paris, she has already, if subliminally for the viewer, become the objw of his desire: mother/whore/ victim. As the condensation of sexual pat tne. of various figures of authority, she becomes, by definition, desirable. The Anna figure elicits fantasies of love, betrayal, and rescue consistent with those normally experienced by the male child in the Oedipal phase. Marcello's feelings of revenge and rescue are thus quite simply displaced onto Quadri from this condensation of his earlier "experiences" with Anna.

Another major condensation in The Conformist involves the characters of Lino, Manganiello, and Alberi. The Lino incident, central to Moravia's novel, occurs there as a logical and fated moment in the progression of Marcello's violent tendencies and as the unique and consciously felt explanation for his obsessive conformity. In Bertolucci's dream structure, Marcello's seduction by Lino appears as a flashback rather late in the film, and only then as an involuntary association produced by an analogous moment during the trip in Manganiello's car.

Only in retrospect can the viewer understand that Marcello has already projected the Lino role on Manganiello as well as on his mother's sexually exploiting chauffeur, for when Manganiello in his big black limousine first follows Marcello along the street toward Signora Clerici's house, the viewer has not yet seen the Lino seduction scene to which this scene alludes. Bertolucci's editing here dearly keeps the "secret in the belly of the film " but alludes to it by a kind of "symptomatology": The entire scene is filmed with the camera tilted at a forty-five-degree angle, suggesting that something in this sequence creates a disequilibrium. Marcello flees from Manganiello's car and succeeds in closing a large wrought-iron gate similar to those he passes through as a child in Lino's limousine. Marcello then suggests that Manganiello get rid of Alberi, his mother's chauffeur, an act that symbolicallycondenses revenge on Lino (dressed identically to Alberi), the source of his original sense of guilt, and on Manganiello himself, as a double of Lino. Hereagain, Marcello does not act; he whispers his wished for solution to theimposing Manganiello and then scuttles away, behaving exactly like thechild who, covering his eyes, believes he is invisible. What keeps this

doubling from becoming heavy-handed is Bertolucci's editing: The Linoaffair occu rs in the film after the Manganiello scenes, illuminating them onlyin retrospect, in the same way that a dream will jumble chronology and "make sense" only after interpretation.

The Lino relationship functions as Marcello's particular obsession, even repetition compulsion. The most striking occut.e. ce of this repentive structure involves Anna (whom Moravia heavy-handedly named Lina). In her seduction of Giulia, she reproduces with extraordinary fidelity-but with the positions reversed-the gestures Lino had used in seducing the child Marcello: She kneels "innocently" between the seated Giulia's legs, head on knee. Bertolucci places Marcello in a darkened hallway and joins the film viewer in a voyeuristic appreciation of this primal scene, just as he had done when Marcello had spied on a double of Anna in the minister's office. The difference here is that Marcello watches the uncanny repetition of his own seduction as a child, here acted out in a feminized version. It is worth recalling that, in the "original" version of this event, Lino lets down his long hair, calls himself Mme. Butterfly, and instills enough sexual ambiguity into the event to make Anna's seduction even more uncannily repetitive. Moreover, her reduplication of the seduction with the positions reversed itself alludes to Marcello's imitation of Uncle Perpuzio's seduction of Giulia as confessed to Marcello during the train ride to Paris. Whereas Giulia was the victim in her confession, she takes the dominant position in the re-creation of the scene during the train ride.

The scene of Anna's seduction of Giulia thus effects, without ever explicitly stating it, an extraordinarily rich condensation of levels and characters in the film, for Anna compositely doubles Lino (as homosexual seducer), mother, whore, and Marcello himself, given his unconscious tendency to project the elements of his early relationships onto all those around him. The scene also manifests the dream's tendency toward multiple determinations by engaging in a wish-fulfillment fantasy of seduction, for if Anna doubles Lino then, structurally, Marcello's deeper fantasy would involve being seduced by her! Finally, Marcello's position of voyeur in this scene repeats the stance he has taken repeatedly throughout this film: Time andl-rime again, he prefers to watch rather than act and thus doubles the position 'of the film's spectator, allowing the spectator to project him/herself into any or all of these condensed roles. While developing a tale of political intrigue and psychological complexity, Bertolucci has interwoven subtly but surely a critique of his viewer's (and his own) conformity to roles prescribed by the very nature of the cinematic experience, where a primary doubling at the level of the image always already precedes the doubling at the level of character. Although the content and imagery of his film differs dramatically from his earlier works, a continuing concern with the specificity of cinema pervades, with remarkable consistency, all of his works through The Conformist.

This scene of voyeurism is to be repeated one more time: at the end of the film when Marcello discovers Lino alive, engaged in the seduction of another young boy, using the same language he had used with Marcello so many years before. Marcello's reaction is immediate: If Lino is not dead, then he is not a murderer and cannot be guilty of murdering Quadri. But Quadri is dead, and someone must be responsible: The most obvious solution is for Marcello to project his guilt onto the blind Italo, and he begins violently to denounce his helpless friend, symbol of the blindness and fascism he has for so long adopted. In the final shot, we see Marcello looking ambiguously at the bed on which lies the naked boy just propositioned by Lino: another double. The glance and the relationship are as ambiguous as every other gesture made by Marcello, who has never stopped using authority figures as scapegoats for a crime uncommitted and a desire unassuaged.

The fragmented, uncanny, and oneiric quality of the entire film, then, can be understood as "a memory of my memory," a thoroughly and unmistakably cinematic transcription of Moravia's literary effort. By rearranging Moravia's chronology to conform to a purely associative process, Bertolucci not only escapes many of the narrative limitations of the novel but effects a remarkable demonstration of pure cinema. By locating the primary point of view both in Marcello and in an omniscient camera, Bertolucci practices a dif fusion of identities that is particularly oneiric (and cinematic). In this way, elements in the novel's objective structure that tend to overly strain the reader's credibility can be comprehended as the mental associations or dreamwork of a single consciousness and so predispose the film's viewer to identify not only with that consciousness but with the film's very fabnc. In so doing, Bertolucci directly, if implicitly, educates the viewer to the (potentially fascist) implications of the act of viewing.

The genius of Bertolucci's film is that it succeeds in transforming Moravia's rather traditional narrative elements into a new and more meaningful structure while at the same time subtly but surely addressing the issue of the relationship between original text and film at every level of the work. Unlike The Spider's Stratagem, the son in this film is no longer enmeshed in the father's history. If it is his "destiny" to kill the father, Bertolucci succeeds where Marcello has not: He manages his "murders" (of Moravia and Godard) on a purely symbolic and creative level.(20)

As copy and as parricide, Bertolucci's Conformist not only invites us to reconsider the necessarily ambivalent relationship theorized between authority and creativity but extends that theory to a new and important realm: the relationship between text and image. As such it is a logoclastic and iconocentric enterprise.

It might be well, then, to give another level of meaning to Marcello's, dream, which we recall as: "I was blind. You wete taking me to a choic in Switzerland. Quadri was operating on me. The operation was a success , I got my sight back. Then I ran off with Anna." As film viewers, we only really comprehend the nature of films through the fantastic voyage within a psychologically protected space (which is the operation of this film) and specifically through the optics of Quadri's discourse on Plato's cave. Once we comprehend our position as viewers, we can appreciate the dynamics of desire and fantasy at work in the cinema.

It remained for Last Tango in Paris to extend and deepen this meditation on the nature of the cinematic experience.

Notes

1 Cited in Ungari, Scena madri, p. 71.

2 Alberto Moravia, The Conformist, trans. Angus Davidson (London: Secker and Warburg, 1953); all references in the text will be to this edition. (Original edition: Milano: Bompiani, 1951.)

3 Amos Vogel, "Bemardo Bertolucci: An Interview," Film Comment 7, no- 3 (Fall 1971): 26; Bernardo Bertolucci, "Seminar," Dialogue on Film 3, no. 15 (April 1974): 14, 16.

4 Cited in Roud, "Bertolucci's Spider's Stratagem," Sight and Sound 40, no. 2 (Spring 1971): 6-1.

5 Plato, The Republic, in Collected Dialogues, ed. E. Hamilton and H. Cairns, trans. Lane Cooper (New York: Pantheon, 1961), book 7, P. 747-

6 It is perhaps coincidental that quadri means "diamonds" in Italian, for what is difficult for Moravia's Marcello is the combination of political purity and ruthless hardness in the older man. But Bertolucci did not keep all of the original names in his film, and if he did so here it may have been because quadri not only means "diamonds" but sounds like quadra (a quadrant), from which the expression in Italian dare la quadra a qualcuno, meaning to hold someone up to ridicule; like quadro, meaning "square" or "sensible," "paintings," or "outline"; but also like quadraiao, a picture seller!

7 Baudry, "Dispositif," PP- 56-72.

8 Joyce McDougall, Plaidoyer pour une certaine anormalité (Paris: Gallimard, 1978), pp. 220-21.

9 Baudry, "Dispositif," P. 58; translation mine. Baudry further theorizes on the relation between the movie screen and the "dream screen," so convinced is he of the close relationship berween film and dream: "Il est évident que l'écran du rêve est un résidu des traces mnésiques les plus archaiques. Mais on pourrait supposer en outre, ce qui est au moins aussi important, qu'il ouvre la compréhension de ce qu'on pourrait appeler le dispositif formateur et la 'scène primitive' du rêve qui s'tablit en pleine phase orale."

10 . "Bernardo Bertolucci Seminar," P. 21.

11 Goldin, "Bertolucci on The Conformist," p. 66.

12 See above, Chapter 4

13 "Bernardo Bertolucci Seminar," p. 16

14 Ungari, Scena madri, P - 71

15.Tassone, Le Cinma italien parle, P. 54

16..Ungari, Scena madri, P- 72.

17 McDougall, Plaidoyer, P. 221.

18 Ungari, Scena madri, p. 73.

19

20. Cf. the following observation of Edward Said: "Each text pushes aside -ordinary discourse in order to place before the world a textual composition whose authority derives from two sources: the ancient originals whose style is being copied and the present text's appearance in the form of a preserved duration. To put pen to a text is to begin the movement away from the original; it is to enter the world of the text-as-beginning as copy and as parricide. The Oedipal motif lurking beneath many discussions of the text ... makes more sense if we regard the text-copy as totem and the making of such a text as the beginning parricidal deed that Freud spoke of in Totem and Taboo." Beginnings, P. 209.