Why Does Il Conformista Still Matter? Bertolucci, Pasolini, and the Fascist Aesthetic

When the White House posts a montage of Hollywood blockbusters cut against US drone strikes on Iran, it raises a question Italian cinema has spent seventy years wrestling with: can cinema ever truly resist power — or does it always end up serving it?

In this episode, hosts Hugo Emmerzael and Elliot Bloom take Bernardo Bertolucci's newly restored masterpiece Il Conformista (1970) as their guide. Moving through Liliana Cavani's The Night Porter and Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò, they trace how a generation of Italian filmmakers tried to dismantle the seduction of fascism by inhabiting its aesthetics — and ask what that tradition tells us about cinema's role in manufacturing national myths in 2026.

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Films discussed: Il Conformista (1970), The Night Porter (1974), Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975)

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