(detail)
1900
Mark Cousins


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I know what could be said about this image – there are movie stars in it, for example, so you could start with that – but I don’t know what I will say. 

My eyes fall upon an image, or it ‘floats us smoothly down a stream; resting’ as Virginia Woolf wrote, then moves on.

Can we agree that it’s not easy to move on from this? It stops us in our tracks, our scouring of the visual world for newness. So many images are worn out. If this had been a man in the middle and two women on either side, it would be worn out, but instead it has that thing that the great writer Viktor Shklovsky called ostranenie. He meant resuscitation, awakening from custom or somnambulance; an image or phrase that is new, previously unforeseen.

As I don’t know what I will say about this image from Bernardo Bertolucci’s film 1900, shot by Vittorio Storaro, I will type up a list of things in my head as I look at it. I might then re-order them into an argument about what the image means, but probably not because that sounds journalistic or more confident about why I am writing this than I am. 

Still from Bernardo Bertolucci’s 1900
(Paramount Pictures, 1976).
  • This is one of 457,000 frames in the film. The tiniest of details.
  • And yet each single frame of a movie gets its moment on the big screen alone, so for a fragment of a second, this is the whole movie.
  • I can’t stop thinking of power as I look. Actor Stefania Casini is thrusting, forward. The men are supine, hands behind their heads, submissive.
  • Robert De Niro plays a scion to the manor born, in 1901, in northern Italy. Gérard Depardieu is a peasant, socialist. They are friends but politically divided.
  • Mussolini’s fascism – the power grab, the wound which has yet to heal in Italy – is yet to happen.
  • So instead of fascism here, we see something closer to Freud.
  • Neither actor is fully aroused in this scene, so Casini puts De Niro’s hand on Depardieu’s penis, saying ‘your friend… maybe you can do something better?’
  • Casini studied architecture, became a documentary filmmaker – themes of feminism, childhood, Islam, etc. and a good movie about Albania – and worked with Andy Warhol and Peter Greenaway.
  • Her character is about to have an epileptic seizure here. Is it implied that being with these two guys triggers it?
  • Casini loved Bertolucci. He made her feel safe, she trusted him when ‘doors were open’.
  • He treated Maria Schneider really badly in Last Tango in Paris. Schneider was vulnerable before she shot that film (early substance abuse, moving between parent figures, etc.). Bertolucci and Marlon Brando, who played the lead in Last Tango, must have known this, so had an extra duty of care.
  • They were like De Niro and Depardieu here, in some kind of triptych. They wanted the woman in the situation, but maybe also didn’t. 
  • I was friends with Bertolucci. I asked him why there are so many penises in his films – 1900, The Dreamers, The Sheltering Sky, etc. He said, ‘Because I’m a feminist.’  Women have been required to be naked in cinema for decades, so why not men?
  • Schneider’s treatment was not feminist.
  • Casini said of De Niro: ‘He was a curious kid who couldn’t resist opening a secret door.’
  • What does that mean?
  • There’s certainly a non-mainstream sexuality in this frame isn’t there? It’s not male-gazey.
  • If you think it is male-gazey, why?
  • I stopped using the phrase male gaze many years ago. The ‘androgynous gaze’ opens things up rather than close them down. The male gaze assumes heterosexuality and mechanistic looking.
  • So why did I just use it?
  • Maybe because I’m thinking back to Bertolucci’s 1960s radicalism, and so I’m using older language? 
  • It’s since been revealed that Depardieu is a bit of a cunt.
  • This image is about the temporary suspension of rules. It’s like that World War I story of Christmas Eve. British and German adversaries played football.
  • Posh Bernardo imagines future antagonists – aristocrat and peasant – united in eros.
  • Which perhaps means that Casini’s character is central. She is reality in this image.
  • There’s the famous moment in Ernst Lubitsch's great film Ninotchka. Greta Garbo plays a stern Soviet communist who finds herself falling in love with the (capitalist) glamour of Paris, the city of lights.
  • She drinks champagne and speaks passionately of the Soviet revolution, but says ‘not yet’.  She wants a pause before the barricades.
  • This image is a pause before the barricades.


What are your barricades? What were Casini’s? It sounds as if she’s had a good life. She was in Dario Argento’s Suspiria, which is another spotlight. 

I’m so glad that she felt safe in the middle of this image, co-creating this image. There wouldn’t have been many other women in the room. 

The complexity of what we see. Would other American male movie star have done this scene this way? In the year of the film’s release – 1976 – Star Wars was being filmed and Punk happened. And Shere Hite published The Hite Report on Female Sexuality.

Also in 1976, turtle-necked Michel Foucault brought out The History of Sexuality. His phrase about power coming from the bottom up still sounds wrong, except it’s not.

This image might tell us why.

What do you think?







Mark Cousins is a film director and writer.