1900
1976, 310’
Original Italian version
Director: Bernardo Bertolucci
Screenplay: Bernardo Bertolucci, Franco Arcalli, Giuseppe Bertolucci
Cast: Robert De Niro, Gérard Depardieu, Burt Lancaster
Country: Italy, France, Germany
Distribution: Cineteca di Bologna
The film relates half a century of Italian history, through the parallel destinies of Olmo and Alfredo, until April 25, 1945, Liberation Day. Although they belong to different social classes, in this period the two milk siblings grow up together, live through the early days of the mechanization of farm work, lose their beloved grandparents, and experience the long 1908 strike and the disasters of the Great War, while the land bourgeoisie helps the rising Fascist party gain power to defend their own interests. It is the beginning of the Ventennio Nero, the twentyyear period Italy was ruled by the Fascists. Hated by the foreman Attila, a fascist from the first moment, the widowed Olmo finds himself compelled to be an itinerant pork butcher and secretly continues the struggle for social justice. Alfredo, unable to firmly react to the abuses carried out by the new order, becomes a shadow of his former self, especially after the departure of his wife Ada, whose descent into alcoholism is perhaps just a sign of her keen understanding of how things are developing towards another ruthless world war. The images on the collapse of Nazism and Fascism in 1945 are reshown, followed by Olmo’s return home, the revengeful rage of the peasants, and finally by the trial given to Alfredo in the farmyard by the workers’ tribunal. However, the masters always manage to escape punishment, just as, several decades later, Alfredo’s suicide attempt in the final frames of the film does not succeed.