“Class Struggle as Melodrama and Festival: Bertolucci’s Novecento at Fifty” is a short essay by Alberto Toscano, written for the catalogue of the exhibition Bernardo Bertolucci. ‘IL’ Novecento, curated by Gabriele Pedullà, on show at the Palazzo del Governatore in Parma (Italy) from 27 March to 26 July 2026, and published by Electa. It now appears in English translation on Communis with permission from both Electa and Alberto Toscano.
“Novecento is a monument not only to the ‘monstrous’ contradiction—between Hollywood capitalism and his own identification with the peasant struggles in Emilia—that Bertolucci chose to inhabit and even exploit, but above all to the contradictions of a communist worldview—between agrarian utopias and a ‘sense of the State’—which was already alien to the countercultural movements of the 1970s, in search of other celebrations and other liberations.”
—Alberto Toscano
Class Struggle as Melodrama and Festival: Bertolucci’s Novecento at Fifty
In the fall of 1976, “La Nouvelle Critique,” the journal of the French Communist Party, published an in-depth dialogue between Bernardo Bertolucci and the Gramscian scholar Christine Buci-Glucksmann on Novecento, described by the director as “a shameless monument to all the contradictions within which a filmmaker moves, if he wishes to express himself in our society.” Contradictions that intertwine, flaunt themselves, and explode in the film’s finale, on that “day that contains fifty years,” 25 April 1945. Liberation here represents the resolution of that rural class struggle that Novecento allegorizes in a deliberately melodramatic key, in an anti-fascist variation on Verdi’s “force of destiny.”
As the director acknowledged, recalling the objections of PCI [Italian Communist Party] leader Giancarlo Pajetta, who disapproved of that people’s tribunal, among the most politically and aesthetically daring and compelling choices in Novecento is the staging of the trial of the landlord, which takes place within the confines of the Corte delle Piacentine—already the backdrop for episodes marking the shared yet opposing lives of landlords and peasants, such as the appearance of those new machines that were meant to disrupt the rural world, but which ultimately do not greatly affect its seasonal rhythms. The trial is preceded by an act of justice that is more plebeian and unruly, yet also marked by a collective and feminine violence of a distinctly peasant nature: the capture and wounding of Attila with pitchfork blows, followed by his execution, and the shearing of his accomplice and lover, Regina.
The ignoble and ex eslege end of the sadistic fascist, however, is not enough to clear the way for judgment against the wretched representative of that class which, as Olmo explains, bears responsibility for the catastrophe (“The fascists were the masters who sowed them: they wanted them, they paid for them.”). The peasants and their partisan bands must first tear down the fence, inside the courtyard, of that miniature concentration camp in which Attila and his henchmen had perpetrated a horrific massacre of resistance fighters. They must also paint over with red paint the fascist slogan that stands out on the farmhouse next to the coat of arms from the Berlinghieri family: “It is the plow that cuts the furrow, but it is the sword that defends it.”
But this tribunal of liberation—with Olmo as judge of the people, his daughter Anita as court reporter, Alfredo as the defendant, and the peasants as the chorus of the prosecution—requires not only a prior arrangement of the stage space in which it will unfold, but also a whole series of absences, or omissions.
First of all, there is no trace, except perhaps in the smoke rising on the horizon, of German troops—the result of Bertolucci’s choice to privilege in his interpretation of the liberation “the moment of class struggle over that of national liberation against the Nazi-Fascist oppressor.”
It is clear that Bertolucci’s aim was not to document or even narrate the class struggle, but to stage it as a rupture and a suspension of historical time; a reenactment of the time of peasant festivals that transforms it into a utopian time.
To transpose the class struggle into the realm of melodrama, the classes and their representatives—or stand-ins—must also undergo significant simplification. Alfredo, as well as his father and the other landowners who had incited squadrist violence as an antidote to the socialization of the countryside, have little to do with the major industrial capital that bet on fascism, nor with the General Confederation of Agriculture, which, by uniting large and medium-sized landowners and agricultural industries, supported the preventive counter-revolution and the “bourgeois jacquerie” in the Bassa. Even on the peasant side, there was far more organization than Bertolucci lets on. As historian Renzo Del Carria observed in a harsh critique of the film published in Lotta Continua: “The historical truth is that in 1920 the entire Po Valley was dominated by the peasant leagues that governed it, imposed taxes, compelled and forcedthe landlords to distribute produce as they wished, issued passes from one village to another, etc.”
Novecento. Stage photography by Angelo Novi. Courtesy Fondazione Bernardo Bertolucci via Regione Emilia-Romagna Patrimonio Culturale.
It is clear that Bertolucci’s aim was not to document or even narrate the class struggle, but to stage it as a rupture and a suspension of historical time; a reenactment of the time of peasant festivals that transforms it into a utopian time. The ingredients of this unique construction—utopia and melodrama—are manifold. Fundamental is the use of facial features, not only as a close-up aesthetic but as a casting strategy. The faces of the peasants, as they surround the landlord and accuse him of their misery, function as elements of a political syntax. Bertolucci recounts that it was his assistant director, Gabriele Polverosi, “who for months scoured the countryside between Parma, Mantua, and Cremona in search of the oldest faces he could find. It was a very meticulous and also exciting task because we had the feeling that we were facing the very essence of the peasants I remembered from my childhood, whom I had mythologized and whom I feared no longer existed.”
Those faces were also a living, breathing refutation of Pasolini’s thesis on “anthropological genocide” and proof that “precisely thanks to the tools provided by socialism and communism between the 1920s and 1940s, the farmers of Emilia were aware of the treasure that their culture constituted.” Not only the faces, but also the songs and music of the armed farmers, the small theater they they improvised after the tribunal, the enormous red flag—a mosaic of hammers and sickles sewn back together and buried in the courtyard—all seem to be elements of that “progressive folklore” that, a quarter-century before Novecento, the anthropologist Ernesto De Martino had discovered in the countryside of Emilia-Romagna.
The archaic and utopian presence of those faces—contemporary witnesses to a peasant-based communism—stands in irreconcilable tension with the political era, whether that of 1945 or 1976. How are we to interpret the abrupt interruption of the celebration of judgment and liberation by the arrival of the CLN [National Liberation Committee] representatives and the mandatory surrender of weapons? In the interview with Buci-Glucksmann, the death of the master’s role but not of the master himself—the climax of Olmo’s speech—is presented as a utopian representation of the historic compromise, even of a fruitful dialectic between Marx and Freud (non-violent class struggle and the symbolic death of the father). But if, as Bertolucci states, “cinema is always live,” the film’s contemporaneity—fifty years on—can only exacerbate those contradictions that Bertolucci identified as the very substance of Novecento.
Just consider that the People’s Court is modeled not so much on the history of the Resistance as, as the director admits, on photographs of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (which ended in 1976). And Alfredo’s line, uttered with bitter irony after a carabiniere snatched the last rifle from Leo, the young man who had been his jailer—“The master is alive”—could very well be read as a skeptical quip about the historic compromise, or about the fate of an unarmed struggle.
Novecento is a monument not only to the “monstrous” contradiction—between Hollywood capitalism and his own identification with the peasant struggles in Emilia—that Bertolucci chose to inhabit and even exploit, but above all to the contradictions of a communist worldview—between agrarian utopias and a “sense of the state” —which was already alien to the countercultural movements of the 1970s, in search of other celebrations and other liberations. Ultimately, Bertolucci’s Novecento turned out to be a very short century (and it is no coincidence that the director abandoned the idea of a third act).
Featured image: Bernardo Bertolucci and cinematographer Vittorio Storaro on set during the shooting of The Conformist (1970). Photo courtesy of ACMI.
Translated from the Italian original by Rolando Prats.
