If you must tell someone about a film, then perhaps say something original? No tedious 'saying of the plot'?
Just one thing really - the pitchforks in Bertolucci's 1900. Early on in 1900 Attila (Donald Sutherland) and Regina (Laura Betti) are hunted-down across a field by the farm women wielding pitchforks. (Don't some of us find this sequence to be the finest in a sprawling movie that is rescued from its meanderings by several of these unforgettable set-pieces?) One of the women who is atop a cart-load of hay identifies "Attila e Regina" who are trying to make their escape, and the camera moves down from her to fix on an arc of pitchforks which are all lifted simultaneously from the hay. Right there is a 'confection'. Isn't that what it is? This lifting of the pitchforks in unison - registers. It makes itself noticed because it is a bit of 'unrealism' in what is otherwise a movie of uniform 'realism'. This piece of decoration more suits a West-Side-Story type musical than a Bertolucci film doesn't it? But wait . . .
Every film director has a 'voice'. Isn't one of the things Bertolucci says in 1900 (and in all of his films?) that he does not 'make up' things and put them there before his audience; rather it is the case that everything is already there in 'reality', and what he does is to notice it, approach it with his director's eye, and present that to his audience? Isn't he in one sense a 'realist'? There is much that is bizarre, much that is melodramatic, in 1900 - but there is nothing 'artificial' surely? For some of us, this artificial granule of the pitchforks quickly gets lost in the cup that becomes the flavour of 1900, but the granule does not dissolve. And then (seemingly hours later) the granule is explained of course. It is within one of the only two sequences that are repeated in the movie, it is tied up in the big flashback. Towards the end of 1900 that woman on the hay-cart is surveying the panorama and recounting what she sees to the women below, again she lowers her voice and announces "Attila e Regina" and we realise that we have reached the point where the flashback began hours ago. We're back with the story. And of course we see that the camera had been recording 'reality' all along. Those pitchforks had been leaned in that pattern by chance after all. Thus is the granule explained and dissolved. It had stuck in the mind because it was inconsistent. Apparently Bertolucci is steeped in politics and in social documentary. And that arc of pitchforks looked unreal, something that a director must have decorated on to the screen. Of course doesn't this little event end up reinforcing the thing (filming what is supposed to be 'there') which it was about to undermine, and if that was intentional then it really is quite a smart trick.
(You do realise don't you that it is not just me who notices these leaned pitchforks. No really. Everybody's talking about them.)
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