SOURCE: Burgoyne, Robert. “The Somatization of History in Bertolucci's 1900.” Film Quarterly 40, no. 1 (fall 1986): 7–14.

In the following review, Burgoyne discusses how Bertolucci's 1900 portrays history from the perspective of both the individual and the peasant class as a whole.

History in Bertolucci's 1900 is fashioned much like a gestalt drawing, with two highly antagonistic versions of time and events unfolding within the same narrative space. From one perspective, the film purports to analyze the “poetic awakening” of the Italian peasant class to their own historical significance; from another, it appears to concentrate on what psychoanalysis calls the destiny of the individual subject. As Bertolucci says, “everything that happens in this film on a personal level is thus relegated to have a larger, historical meaning.” (13) But in spite of this attempt to reconstruct the formation of individual subjectivity as an allegory of a broader history, these two narrative schemas—the imaginary history...