In this sense, Novecento could not have been made at any other time.

It is a film born of a divided Italy. In June 1976, a month after the film’s premiere at Cannes, Enrico Berlinguer’s Italian Communist Party achieved a historic result in the general election, and the Christian Democrats realised they could no longer govern as before. These were the years of the historic compromise, of social tensions, of massacres, of terrorism, of a country torn apart by real and symbolic violence. But they were also years in which culture still sought to respond to complexity with complex forms. Not by simplifying, but by accumulating. Not by reducing, but by expanding.

Today we are accustomed to specialisation. Everything has its own field, its own language, its own department. Literature on one side, cinema on another, politics elsewhere, science even further afield. Even the university, after all, has accustomed us to dividing knowledge into ever more precise compartments. In Bertolucci’s day, however, the artist could still be a complete figure. Just think of Pasolini: poet, director, writer, journalist, public intellectual, sportsman, polemicist. Not a profession, but a force field.

Novecento belong to that world. To that mindset. To an era when cinema could still attempt to be literature, painting, politics, theatre, anthropology, psychoanalysis, folk tale and grand historical fresco. A bit like those school essays where one tried to link everything together: history, art, philosophy, literature. Except that here the connection is not a forced exercise. It is the very way in which the film views the world.

Bertolucci takes us to his Emilia: the red-checked tablecloths, the wine in flasks, the countryside, the bodies, the landowners, the peasants, the conviviality, the violence, the political myth of the land. Bertolucci was a Marxist, a member of the Italian Communist Party, and *Novecento* is also his attempt to bring his vision of history to the screen. An idea permeated by class struggle, red flags, and revolutionary hope. But also by enormous contradictions.

Because this film, which celebrates the peasant world and the struggle of the exploited, was also made with American money. And it is precisely here that one of its most interesting tensions arises. On the one hand, the communist epic; on the other, the big international budget. On the one hand, the red flag; on the other, Hollywood. At the time, many criticised him for it. Some accused him of selling out, of betraying the very ideals he claimed to represent.

And yet perhaps it is precisely this contradiction that makes Novecento so powerful. The film is born out of the very contradictions of the century it seeks to portray. It does not resolve them, nor does it hide them or make them seem more palatable. It lays them bare. It weaves them into its very fabric.

When it was released, Novecento angered almost everyone: critics, psychologists, feminists, animal rights activists, communists. There were accusations, controversies, scandals, even attempts at censorship. The screenplay was seized on grounds of obscenity. Bertolucci, after all, had already realised with Last Tango in Paris that sex was not an incidental element, but a political, psychological and social arena. Following the fall of the Hays Code and the transformation of Western cinema, drives, bodies, desires, violence and dark areas that had previously been excluded from representation began to appear on screen.

In Novecento, sex is never just sex. It is power, domination, infantilism, sadism, desire, shame, class. It is an uncomfortable subject because it forces us to look at what a society would prefer to keep out of the picture.

The exhibition in Parma also effectively captures the film’s pictorial dimension. One gallery features a number of masters of late 20th-century Italian painting: Guttuso, Schifano, Burri, Boetti and Fontana. These are often politically charged works, permeated by red, by a sense of social tension, and by a visual power that engages in an ideal dialogue with the film. For in Novecento, Bertolucci does not merely recount a historical event: he summons an entire artistic imagination into the cinema.

Red, of course, is one of the main protagonists. The red of flags, of blood, of struggle, of shame, of anger, of celebration, of revolution. An ancient and ambiguous colour, which in Western history has symbolised life and death, the sacred and sin, power and rebellion. In the 1970s, it also became the colour of a decade: of politics, of flags, but also of adult cinemas, of legal pornography, of a new way of showing the body. In Novecento, all this returns. Red is never just a colour: it is a battlefield.

Then there is the relationship with Pasolini. At the very time Bertolucci was working on Novecento, Pasolini was filming Salò. Two monumental films, two opposing visions of power, history and the body. The exhibition also recounts a curious episode: a football match between the Salò crew and the Novecento crew. But that match, symbolically, seems to be much more than just a game. It is a clash between two ways of understanding cinema.

Pasolini seeks a form of sacredness. In his films, the mundane often tends towards the sublime, towards an archaic, tragic, spiritual dimension. Bertolucci, on the other hand, seems to want to do the opposite: to take grand ideas, grand symbols, grand political narratives and drag them down to earth, into the fields, into bodies, into the real world of the peasants. He does not want the sacred frame. He does not want Pasolini’s frontal approach. His cinema moves, flows, traverses; it does not stand still.

Bertolucci also draws on Godard, on the Nouvelle Vague, on an idea of cinema as the centre of the world. He himself would describe Godard as a sort of third father, after Attilio Bertolucci and Pier Paolo Pasolini. But here too, the relationship with his fathers is one of love and patricide. Bertolucci takes, absorbs, passes through, then moves on. His films come from life, certainly, but from a life already filtered through cinema. It is life that influences the film by passing through other films, other images, other forms.

That is why Novecento is a film that would be almost impossible to make today. Not because we no longer have the time to watch it. Not just that, at least. But because the way we narrate and analyse the world has changed. Today we tend to compartmentalise, to simplify, to specialise. Novecento, on the other hand, accumulates. It holds everything together. Local history and global history. Communism and Hollywood. Painting and pornography. Pasolini and Godard. Soviet cinema and the Emilian countryside. The Fourth Estate and the laid table. The red flag and the flesh. The feast and the massacre.

It is not necessarily the case that our present is worse. It is different. It has a different approach, different tools, different forms. But that is precisely why returning to Novecento today is important: because it shows us a cultural mindset that no longer functions in the same way as ours. A mindset that still believed in the possibility of the fresco, of the ‘world-work’, of total narrative.

And finally, even though I don’t usually like to end with a quote – because quotes often sound like the sort of lines you’d hear from a cover band on a Friday night – here it makes sense to do so. Because Novecento truly attempts to recount an entire century through a single day, a single land, two lives, many social classes, and many generations. There is also a sense of hope, which returns in the scene where the flag is unearthed on 25 April: the possibility that something might change, that the future is not merely a repetition of the past.

Bernardo Bertolucci said: ‘In Novecento, there is a single day that encompasses fifty years, the entire first half of the century: it is 25 April.’