Bernardo Bertolucci

A man who wants above all to be ordinary joins the fascist secret police and accepts an assassination as the price, and The Conformist films his cowardice in some of the most beautiful compositions of the 1970s. That tension holds across the work: political argument delivered through opulence. 1900 runs two Italian lives from 1901 to liberation, The Last Emperor shoots the Forbidden City with the run of it, and the camera never stops moving.

Signature

• Sweeping camera movement and Storaro's architectural light.
• Political history carried by one or two intimate relationships.
• Sexuality used as the site of the power argument.
• Epic length and scale in service of a private failure.

Films here also carry Identity Crisis, Forbidden Love, Moral Ambiguity, Class Warfare, Civil Unrest.