Windows can block out light, let it through, or change it. In three Italian films looking back on World War II, the directors use cinema as a window into the past. The first film that this essay will address, Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist, uses windows in the film as a metaphor for choice: one can either keep an open mind and let light in, or remain in the dark both literally and figuratively. The second film, A Special Day by Ettore Scola, treats windows in a similar manner. In this case, though, windows are no longer metaphorical: they are the actual medium through which lives become entangled and ideas shared. The third film is Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful, which treats windows as escape routes for the characters and audience alike. In all of these films, the directors are drawn to windows not only as cinematographic light sources, but more importantly as thresholds into or out of reality.
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The Conformist by Bernardo Bertolucci
In The Conformist, Bertolucci uses natural light streaming from the windows as a metaphor for enlightened truth; closing the shutters, on the other hand, bars access to the threshold, occluding the reality outside. Bertolucci is careful throughout the entirety of the film to create sharp edges between light and shadow. This stark contrast is pervasive in several scenes, including the first interaction we witness between Marcello and Giulia. As the betrothed couple share a private embrace, the angle of the shutters casts distinct stripes across the walls, the furniture, and the two lovers. Giulia’s black and white striped dress amplifies the severity of the effect, which serves to imply a sharp disconnect between the two. From the very beginning of the film, Bertolucci is directing our attention to fenestration and the juxtaposition of light and darkness.
Around the mid-point of the film, Bertolucci elaborates on this motif. It is a turning point in the tortuous story—the moment when Clerici finally meets his old Professor Quadri in Paris. Clerici opens the conversation by alluding to one of the Professor’s past quirks: requiring that all the shutters in the classroom be closed before commencing each lecture. After swiftly closing some of those in the Professor’s study, Clerici resumes his monologue with another memory. This time, he brings up one particular lecture that Quadri delivered on the famous philosophical allegory known as Plato’s Cave. In this thought experiment, a line of men are chained and forced since childhood to face an interior wall of the cave. Because they have never experienced a real, three-dimensional world, the men uncritically mistake the shadows on the wall for the actual objects which they reflect.
The blocking of this scene is crucial, as it closely parallels the cave scenario: Quadri stands beneath the only open window, facing Clerici (and, behind him, the camera) who lurks in the shadows across the room. Bertolucci uses this staging to compare Clerici to one of the prisoners in the dark cave, and Quadri to someone who has experienced the lighted reality of the outside world. The student/teacher dynamic heightens this dichotomy, as does Quadri’s status as a traveler. When Clerici turns around and faces the wall, he doesn’t see the shadow of an object at the mouth of the cave—instead, he sees his own shadow. When the Professor reopens the shutters, Bertolucci quickly cuts back to the wall so that we can see Clerici’s shadow disappear. In the context of Plato’s Cave and of his mission to assassinate Quadri, Clerici’s shadow on the wall represents his self-identification as a fascist, which Quadri attempts to challenge by bringing Clerici into the light. This important scene holds the kernel of Bertolucci’s thesis for The Conformist: that if a group of people are privy to only one perspective, they will uncritically accept it—regardless of how ridiculous it seems to the outside world. This is Bertolucci’s attempt at explaining conformism and fascism. At the climax of the film, during Quadri’s assassination, it is once again a glass window (this time a car window) which separates Clerici from reality.
A Special Day by Ettore Scola
Bertolucci’s window metaphor plays itself out in a much more literal sense in Ettore Scola’s A Special Day. Whereas windows in The Conformist serve as a metaphor for general openness to ideas, in this film they are the actual medium through which Antonietta meets Gabriele, the antifascist. Alone in the apartment following her family’s departure for the parade, Antonietta opens a window to let in some fresh air. Almost immediately, Rosmunda (their pet mynah bird) flies through the opening and circles around the apartment complex, eventually perching on the other side of the courtyard seven or eight stories off the ground. Horrified, Antonietta sprints around the building to the apartment on whose windowsill Rosmunda chose to touch down. That apartment belongs to Gabriele.
One gets the sense that Rosmunda’s decision to alight there was fate; after all, she chose the only other apartment in the complex that would have been occupied on the day of the parade. The timing of Antonietta’s entrance into Gabriele’s life is similarly fateful, as it may have come just in time to distract him from suicidal thoughts. It has been said that windows are the eyes of a home, and if that is true, then Rosmunda’s flight creates eye contact between two worlds: fascist and antifascist. In the cinematic language of looks and glances, this type of contact is particularly telling. In practical terms, each visits the other’s apartment and thereby gains an appreciation for the other’s perspective. Gabriele notes, “How strange it is to look into your own apartment from a friend’s.” In other films, such as Hitchcock’s Rear Window, the act of gazing through a window is frequently associated with suspicions of guilt. A Special Day pushes through the panes of glass and into the homes, then turns the gaze back around at the self. It is also interesting to note the different way in which Scola treats “the outside,” as compared to Bertolucci. In The Conformist, the outward side of a window is supposedly enlightened—or so the metaphor goes. But in A Special Day, the parade happening outside is just the opposite of enlightenment: it is an orgy of propaganda, glorifying blind faith in the fascist party. In the film Life is Beautiful by Roberto Benigni, windows take on a completely different meaning.
Life is Beautiful by Roberto Benigni
For Guido, Dora, and Giosué Orefice, windows offer an escape from reality. The irony here is grim. In The Conformist, for example, Clerici willingly closed himself off, metaphorically shielding himself from the light of truth. But for those imprisoned in concentration camps during World War II, darkness and disconnect were the truth, and they were all too familiar with it. But given a window, where could Guido and his family escape to? Outside each building would be a swarm of Nazis, and outside the camp would not be much better. During two scenes in particular, Benigni allows the characters to escape through windows into the beautiful world of art.
The first scene comes before Guido is taken away, even before Guido and Dora elope. It is the scene in which Guido impersonates an inspector from Rome coming to talk to Dora’s school about the superiority of the Aryan race. He makes light of the racist curriculum, succeeds at impressing Dora, and when the real (and disgruntled) inspector finally shows up, Guido makes his escape through a window. As he climbs through the portal, Guido turns back to Dora and says, “Princess, we’ll see each other in Venice.” With the assistance of a sound bridge, Benigni then cuts to the opera house, where the company is just beginning the third act of Offenbach’s Les contes d’Hoffmann. The next shot perfectly frames the stage’s proscenium arch, which parallels the window which Guido has just climbed through and serves as the theatre audience’s entry point into the drama. This is the first instance of windows being used as portals into art.
The second scene comes later in the film, when the Orefices have all been imprisoned at a concentration camp. It strongly parallels the first. Guido is serving as a waiter during a Nazi dinner party, hoping that his old friend Doctor Lessing will show him the secret to escape. Disappointed by his interaction with the Doctor, Guido wanders around the building and happens upon a gramophone shoved into the corner of a room. Finding the record he was hoping for, Guido moves the device closer to the window and proceeds to serenade the camp – but especially his wife – with “Belle nuit, ô nuit d’amour”: the duet which opens act three of Les contes d’Hoffmann. Although Doctor Lessing did not help Guido and his family escape, Guido is still able to use a window to offer his wife a brief escape into the world of art music.
In the same way that a proscenium arch can serve as a window across worlds for a theatre audience, so too can the frame of a film reel projected onto a screen. In fact, Benigni uses the tinted window of film to shield the audience from many of the horrors that would have taken place in the concentration camp. For instance, we never truly see death. At one point, Guido encounters what seems to be a mass grave; but, thanks to Benigni, it is shrouded in fog and nearly invisible. Because Benigni plays Guido in the film, it can be said that he treats the audience in much the same way as he treats Dora and Giosué: he uses art as a window to shield us from, and help us escape from, reality.
Conclusion
In The Conformist, windows can either let the light of truth into a room or occlude it. In A Special Day, open windows literally allow new ideas to enter (in the form of a gay, antifascist man), helping Antonietta to gain a new perspective on the truth about her country. In Life is Beautiful, on the other hand, the truth of fascism and Nazism is painfully clear to the characters. Benigni helps Guido’s family, in addition to the film audience, escape from that reality through the window of art.
Although screens have the potential to serve as a window out of the real world, it is important that we remain able to distinguish the truth. For, if we spend more time looking at screens than we do experiencing reality, would not we, like Plato’s prisoners, eventually mistake shadows for the real thing?
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