Now THAT’S shadowplay!
Brilliant scene from “Barnyard” Bertolucci’s THE CONFORMIST.
The Professor Quadri character in this scene is given Jean-Luc Godard’s home phone number, a sign that Bertolucci was ready to “kill” his hero, JLG. The professor’s murder perhaps also echoes Pasolini’s death, and Pasolini was Bert’s other cinematic mentor. This is the film where Bertolucci conclusively stepped out from their shadows.*
Jonathan “J-Ro” Rosenbaum once wrote, superbly, that Fritz Lang’s THE INDIAN TOMB contains “the only cave in movies that’s worthy of Plato’s,” but Bertolucci and Storaro here evoke that same cave beautifully, in a professor’s study in 1930s Paris…
*As David Ehrenstein points out, very politely, in the comments below, I am talkng insane bollocks here, since at the time of IL CONFORMISTA’s production, Pier Paolo Pasolini was still VERY MUCH ALIVE. So Bertolucci’s film is one of a select few that Predicts The Future.
December 10, 2007 at 2:27 am
But Pasolini was murdered in 1975. The Conformist was made in 1970.
December 10, 2007 at 8:45 am
Yikes! Good point. So it’s one of those MOVIE PROPHECIES, like the way Claude Lelouch’s CETAIT UN RENDEZVOUS prefigures the Diana crash…come to thhink of it, a whole blog post on these morbid coincidence might be nice, around Halloween maybe…