Review: Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900 on Olive Films Blu-ray

This three-disc set of 1900 is significant for presenting Bertolucci’s most epic epic in its most complete form.

1900A handful of iconic films are inseparable from a single, equally iconic review. Whether it was a pan, a rave, or somewhere in the middle, is immaterial: The piece of writing and the film are, by chance rather than design, now joined at the hip in the minds of every well-read viewer that encounters the film from that day forward. There’s John Ford’s Wee Willie Winkie, which inspired Graham Greene to write a provocative contemplation of wee Shirley Temple’s “adult” appeal. (A consequent lawsuit by 20th Century Fox further inspired Greene to flee to Mexico.) 1900 was Italian maestro Bernardo Bertolucci’s first film after Last Tango in Paris, the runaway international success of which can at least partly be attributed to a goalpost-shifting, all-stops-out rave by New Yorker critic Pauline Kael.

1900 didn’t necessarily send Kael into comparable flights of exaltation, but her review is almost as much a landmark as the one for Last Tango in Paris, in its way. Before getting to the business of weighing and measuring the qualities and liabilities of Bertolucci’s epic, a multi-generational mural that seeks to envelop the whole of the century up to that point, Kael circled the pool before swimming, meditating on the very idea of the director’s—any director’s—grandest gesture, the epic that danced on the knife edge between brilliant and insane, noble and foolish. It wasn’t a “think piece,” in today’s parlance, not the way Kael transmitted levies and decrees from her high judicial seat. Rather, it sought to address as directly as possible the tendency for auteurs of a certain stripe to render unto mortal audiences a monument of—and to—the cinema, a true gesamtkunstwerk in motion-picture form.

The gesamtkunstwerk, generally attributed (not exclusively) to Richard Wagner, has a special resonance with the cinema. While in the 19th century a “total art work” would combine or hybridize elements of several different media, the movies seemed to be one-stop shopping for visionaries with similar dreams of amalgamation and “total”-ness, pitched at the grandest scale, and encompassing the largest themes. Directors like D.W. Griffith and Abel Gance, as well as Hollywood moguls like David O. Selznick, attempted such Herculean exertions, but a film like 1900 is unimaginable during earlier decades. It requires the picture-window magnitude of widescreen cinema (without the lateral restrictions of the Cinemascope frame). It requires the new open-mindedness of art-house moviegoers in a post-Midnight Cowboy, post-Last Tango in Paris era, given the graphic nature of some scenes—some of which, without getting too specific, you’ll never, ever, be able to un-see. There’s the relentlessly mobile camera, requiring the most up-to-date production technology, and which seems to prowl and sweep at the same time. And there’s the melting pot of American and European stars, emblematic of an international cinema scene preordained by Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s The Barefoot Contessa and Vincente Minnelli’s Two Weeks in Another Town.

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Similar barriers between story and history are obliterated. 1900, of course, doesn’t draw lines around the world’s 20th century so much as limit the breadth and depth of the whole world to the story of modern Italy, from the death of Verdi in 1901 to the innumerable planes of struggle following WWII. This isn’t the kind of film that adheres to any tradition of screenwriting discipline; resolutely episodic, even its episodes (which are countless) are often amorphous, flowing and breathing into what happened before, and what comes after.

The heads of the principal characters are drunk on tempestuous cocktails of primal urges, political convictions, and sexual impulses. No corner of Italian society seems to escape Bertolucci’s attention, but, if anything, it’s most frequently concerned with class warfare, setting up Robert De Niro’s Alfredo Berlinghieri and Gérard Depardieu’s Olmo Dalco as respective totems of the landowner and peasant class, locked in eternal conflict, right to the end of the line—and to the present moment. Bertolucci’s concept of the epic is to fashion a living, fluid organism that spans the distances between several poles of extremity: ancient and modern, agony and ecstasy, life and theater, rich and poor. Foremost, perhaps, is Bertolucci’s trademark ability to weave intimate spaces into infinitely larger tapestries. If it fails, as some critics have noted—beginning with Kael—to live up to its ambition to stand as the greatest of all films, it is perhaps only because the century is itself profoundly, humanly disappointing.

Image/Sound

It would be hilariously unfair to compare Olive Films’ Blu-ray edition of 1900 to Criterion’s production of The Leopard, which, naturally, is the other title that comes to mind when you think of gargantuan, tracking shot-heavy Italian epics featuring Burt Lancaster. Shot on 70mm, Luchino Visconti’s 1963 Palme D’Or winner simply doesn’t give Bernardo Bertolucci’s movie a fighting chance, in the high-definition, digital arena. For a more even playing field, pop in one of Fox’s Blu-rays for Sergio Leone’s “Man with No Name” trilogy. Compared to those bright, tactile, if too clean, images, 1900’s picture looks consistently hazy, its contrast levels askew, its bright colors bleeding hither and yon, a rolling river of light speckling continually marring the center two thirds of the frame. The sound is better than acceptable, given the circumstances of recording multiple soundtracks: Olive’s two-disc spread comes equipped with three DTS tracks, English, Italian, and French—all original from the production. As with Criterion’s set for The Leopard, you’ll choose the one that suits your temperament, as none is meant to be the “right” one.

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Extras

Not counting the trailer, there’s only one supplement: an insightful, feature-length documentary on the director, “Bernardo Bertolucci: Reflections on Cinema,” which is found on the set’s third disc. With a broad array of interview clips and decent production values, it’s a must-see for any student of Bertolucci, whether you’re an ardent devotee or just getting acquainted.

Overall

A disappointing transfer of Bertolucci’s grandest gesture, Olive Films’s three-disc set of 1900 is nevertheless significant for presenting his most epic epic in its most complete form.

Score: 
 Cast: Robert De Niro, Gérard Depardieu, Burt Lancaster, Dominique Sanda, Sterling Hayden, Donald Sutherland, Francesca Bertini, Laura Betti, Werner Bruhns, Stefania Casini, Anna Henkel, Ellen Schwiers, Alida Valli, Romolo Valli, Bianca Magliacca, Giacomo Rizzo, Pippo Campanini  Director: Bernardo Bertolucci  Screenwriter: Franco Arcalli, Giuseppe Bertolucci, Bernardo Bertolucci  Distributor: Olive Films  Running Time: 315 min  Rating: NR  Year: 1976  Release Date: May 15, 2012  Buy: Video

Jaime N. Christley

Jaime N. Christley's writing has also appeared in the Village Voice.

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