Before The Devolution

The Conformist

Directed by Bernardo Bertolucci

White Nights

Directed by Luchino Visconti

Three geniuses teamed up to create The Conformist: director Bernardo Bertolucci, cinematographer Vittorio Storaro and designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti. Their 1970 collaboration was as momentous as the work of Welles & company on Citizen Kane, showing a new generation how to look at movies. This was quite a feat after the many high-art film innovations of the 50s and 60s. BSS synthesized it all-playing with edited time, color, space, form-and then upped the stakes: taking modern cinema back to the arch romanticism of the silent era. In 1970 no one had ever seen a color movie that was as much a visual phenomenon. And it's still a knock-out. This week's rerelease at Film Forum proves that The Conformist has been the single most influential movie of the past 35 years.

It came before the de-volution. Bertolucci, Storaro and Scarfiotti worked with the belief (now gradually eroding in the digitial-video age) that cinema was, foremost, a visual art form; that its richest meanings and distinctive impact were the result of images. Images designed to amaze, ideas expressed through illustration, emotion conveyed through the tonalities of light. All that is now taken for granted through today's barbaric video practices where indie films look like home movies. Watching The Conformist is, more than ever, like being a starving man widening his eyes at a king's feast. The mist-shrouded view of the Eiffel Tower, the stroboscopic train ride, the high-contrast scenes in a radio studio and many other memorable sequences reawaken one's senses. You seem to taste "cinema" for the first time.

Marvelously, this sensory overload is not merely decorative; it has everything to do with the story that Bertolucci adapted from an Alberto Moravia novel. Jean-Louis Trintignant plays Marcello, a middle-class bachelor in 1938 Italy who anxiously follows the dictates of the fascist regime. On his way to set up the assassination of his college professor Quadri (Enzo Tarascio), now a Marxist living in Paris, Marcello recalls his past. He vows to "build a normal life" for himself, which means denying his own emotions, following the political norm-a cowardly self-denial that includes marrying a merchant's silly daughter, Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli). How Bertolucci, Storaro and Scarfiotti vivify the world around Marcello critiques his desperation. Nature, architecture, light are on display as if to taunt Marcello's small-mindedness. Sex troubles him, especially in the form of Quadri's bisexual wife Anna (Dominque Sanda), a tigerish, androgynous beauty. Her temptation shakes Marcello's soul. It also defines Bertolucci's style.

Scholar Peter Cowie quotes Bertolucci: "I was more influenced by movies?and the cinema I like is Sternberg, Ophuls, Welles." Those great stylists were among the most sensuous filmmakers; Bertolucci emulated their sensual, dreamy representations. The distance Marcello feels from his fabricated life can be felt in the film's extreme estheticism. His moral turmoil is dazzlingly movieish-the secret originality that was often mistaken for camp in Sternberg's Marlene Dietrich films. In The Conformist, Bertolucci looks back at the Italian Fascist period with exquisite irony. Marcello's political and sexual confusion becomes sumptuous, overwhelming.

When Marcello courts Giulia in her art deco home, she wears a striped dress and greets him in a room shadowed by Venetian blinds-a riot of dizzying, crisscrossing angles. (Wong Kar Wai's esthetic was hatched right here.) Their honeymoon train ride, with a sunset bursting through a window in a spectrum of colors, pays homage to both The Lady Eve and the stargate sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey-a surrealist mixture of ribaldry and wonder. Marcello's visit to his dope-fiend mother in the vine-covered estate he calls "decadent" anticipated the fetid richness of The Godfather, Part II. There's even the genesis of several tableaux from Tim Burton's newest film. To date, no contemporary graphic artist has matched the impact of The Conformist-the way Scarfiotti knowingly evoked a bygone era, Storaro's limpid colors and the coherence provided by Bertolucci's stylized interpretation of Marcello's dilemma.

Though countless filmmakers have stolen from The Conformist, its closest equivalent is Luchino Visconti's 1958 Il Notte Bianche-a boldly self-conscious meditation on movie romanticism photographed by Giuseppe Rotunno in astounding shades of black and white. Visconti and Rotunno's experiment is brilliantly preserved in Criterion's new DVD release. It complements the rainbow-hued Conformist, perfectly illustrating the visual penetration of its characters' souls (Marcello Mastroianni and Maria Schell as lovestruck loners trading their anxieties overnight and falling into epic infatuation). White Nights (my favorite of Visconti's masterworks) pioneered psychology through extravagant visual means-a rarely appreciated achievement even though Bertolucci & co. took up Visconti's baton.

Perhaps the one fault of The Conformist is that it is so dazzling, critics overlook its substance. Modernizing Visconti and Sternberg's theories on romantic projection, Bertolucci was ahead of his Stonewall-era contemporaries by pinpointing Marcello's sexual panic. The film isn't about fascist decadence but Bertolucci's basic theme-the quandary of fitting sexual identity into unexamined social standards. The flashback to Marcello's molestation as a youth is a welcome correction to the self-loathing homophobia in Gregg Araki's sadly popular, hideously misguided Mysterious Skin. Marcello's tragedy is universal-an inability to define himself despite inhumane accidents or political rules. Mastroiannni and Schell go through the same agony in White Nights. This insight is the gift of classic movies. It's why both White Nights and The Conformist are essential reissues. Without these examples, the ignorance and offense of Mysterious Skin might prevail.

When The Conformist was initially released in the U.S. in 1971, Altman's collaboration with Vilmos Zsigmond on McCabe & Mrs. Miller seemed the more extraordinary achievement. Both films are equally audacious and visually sublime, but The Conformist was the one that the whole world began to imitate-pilfering its style and misunderstanding its content. Here's the chance to get it right.

Not just movies but countless tv commercials and music videos have taken from The Conformist. Most are style without substance, but the best can be seen in my annual music-video presentation for the Film Society of Lincoln Center's Video Festival. (Showtime is Thursday, July 28, 6 p.m. at the Walter Reade Theater.) This year's program, titled "Music to the Eyes," highlights recent unique collaborations of music artists and video directors. Not snobbish high art, but what The Conformist typified: vibrant, visual pop.

It's a chance to see what was the single best film of 2004-Mark Romanek's uncensored version of Jay-Z's 99 Problems. I'll tell why and also introduce two awe-inspiring animated fantasies by Fred Deakin of the pop group Lemon Jelly and the design group Airside (Come Down on Me and A Man Like Me), which really deserve to be called The Incredibles. Plus, rare Bjork, poignant Morrissey and a millennial surprise. It will be a musical White night.

-A.W.