The Dreamers of the marxist revolution

I recently rewatched one of my favourite films, "The Dreamers" by Bernardo Bertolucci. Behind the cinematic references, an important discussion on the need to save the culture & strive for revolution.

Ever since I was introduced to The Dreamers (2003), I have grown an immense love for it and made it a mission to watch it every year at least once. This is a comfort film to me despite the heaviness and weirdness of the plot. As I watched it again the other day, it resonated so hard with the current state of the world. The reason I love this film so much is because Bertolucci dared to be overtly political, overtly Marxist, overtly Maoist, overtly highlighting the importance of a revolution.

Credit: collage by me

When I was a film student, a little over 10 years ago, I was introduced to Bertolucci’s entire filmography. I had already watched his Oscars winning film, The Last Emperor (1987) but that was about it. Of course, as a film student at uni, I was surrounded by fellow film buffs who would rejoice giving their two cents on THE ultimate film d’auteur and just any indie films they got to see. Classism is very big amongst film students at university, which is not news, since culture entirely is classist. As French sociologist, Pierre Bourdieu has highlighted in his habitus theory, what is considered good culture is based off bourgeois taste. Film students are also overwhelmingly left leaning, in French we call them gauche caviar, which describes liberals who don’t truly have a revolutionary spirit but fantasise about having one. Yet, you get to encounter some real revolutionary spirited people, whom I got to meet and have my first real taste of Marxism and I will never be grateful enough for that.

Bertolucci and the Italian communist legacy

Bernardo Bertolucci is an Italian film director and screenwriter, born in 1941 in the heightened phase of fascism in Italy and the whole of Western/Southern Europe. He was raised into an artistic family, and if you know history, you know that fascist Europe hated the artists. Many of them dared to be vocally anti-fascists. Bertolucci bathed in that anti-fascism milieu, and that is something he tinted numerous of his films with. He was a self-proclaimed Marxist and made sure people knew about it.

Italy once had Europe’s biggest and largest communist party. I feel like it is impossible to talk about Italy history without mentioning its communist legacy, which still lives on today. Although very repressed since the US meddling in the 1948 Italian elections, where the CIA provided millions of dollars to right-leaning political parties to weaken the popular communist front. Surely, the US did not stop at the 1948 elections and went beyond the Italian political life and infiltrated every corner of it to diminish and eventually disintegrate the communist party.

Credit: collage by me

The first “niche” film I had watched of Bertolucci, besides The Last Emperor, was Before the Revolution (1964). His first ever film to win international accolades. This film is described as an autobiographical piece, depicting an Italian middle class student, Fabrizio, who struggles to balance his middle class background with communism and not see the irony in all of it. Simultaneously, his love interest, Gina, also comes from the same social class background but has no interest in political life, let alone Marxism¹. That was my first entry to Italian communism and the history of it. Despite being acclaimed in the cultural world and some political circles, the film would be banned to the public for many years in various countries in Europe and across the pond. From then on, I was hooked and sought to watch more of Bertolucci’s work. I proceeded to watch The Conformist (1970), 1900 (1976), Luna (1979), Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man (1981) and then I stumbled onto The Dreamers (2003) and that film stuck with me more than the others.

The Conformist is a depiction of the evil of fascism indoctrinated into vulnerable people willing to do anything for it, even when it means plotting the assassination of an anti-fascist colleague. The same goes with 1900 which tells the story of two childhood friends, a landowner and a peasant, who take different paths politically and the struggle that Italy went through in the first half of the 20th century as fascism spread wide and far. As for Luna and Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man, those are about family affairs. The first one includes an incestuous relationship between a mother and her son, whereas the second is about the conflicted relationship of a father and his son. Both have really disturbing and heavy subjects discussed and are also slightly political. The Dreamers is a mix of political and conflicted, weird family affairs. The best of both worlds I love about films. Obviously I could only be heavily drawn by this feature.

Théo dreams of Mao, the revolution and films

The Dreamers is a film about Matthew, an American student, a massive film buff, moving abroad to Paris during the Vietnam War, entangling himself romantically with his new-found friends, twin siblings Théo and Isabelle, also film lovers.

In the 1960s France, the culture is in shambles. André Malraux, the culture minister at the time, tried to sack Henri Langlois, the co-founder of la Cinémathèque Française and a film archivist. This move, dubbed the Langlois affairs led to massive protests in France and beyond in the cinema world as Langlois was an ardent film lover who saved many films during the Vichy regime when Nazi wanted to destroy what they deemed a threat to their rule. He was seen by many as a hero and an inspiration for his relentless activism to keep cinema alive. French directors of the New Wave such as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Alain Resnais showed full solidarity and admiration for Langlois. Bertolucci also admired Henri Langlois, hence why The Dreamers is, in a way, an homage to him and he would later on, find himself directing the documentary Henri Langlois vu par… (2014), where prominent figures of the cinema world reminisce and pay homage to Langlois.

Bertolucci’s fascination for Langlois stems from his month-long stay in Paris in 1960 after passing his graduation exams. He spent the whole month going to la Cinémathèque Française with his cousin, fellow film director, Giovanni Bertolucci. Just like Bernardo and Giovanni, Matthew, Isabelle and Théo spend the majority of their time at la Cinémathèque. Between fictional and archival images, the viewer is immersed in the cultural and social uprising brewing. In French, we have a term for the people who lived through that uprising: les soixante-huitards (the sixty-eighters) are the ones who took part in the social uprising in May 1968. Back then, like every uprising, the youngsters, were violently repressed by the government that sent in swaths of policemen to beat them up, with impunity. Rewatching The Dreamers and witnessing how Bertolucci depicted police brutality truly gave me chills. Even as a fictional piece based on real life events, the art imitates life kind of moment reminded me that nothing has really changed since.

Théo is the revolutionary spirited of the bunch. He reads Mao, has effigies of him and schools his artist father on the revolution:

“Before you can change the world, you must realise that you, yourself are part of it. You can’t stand outside looking in.”

Before he completely got sucked in that weird love triangle with his sister and Matthew, after the temporary closure of the Cinémathèque (resulting of Malraux’s will to sack Langlois) Théo would regurlarly lead the student communist assembly of his university. He is sensitive to social issues, even the ones, that happen abroad. He has a couple of arguments with Matthew about those issues; one involving young Americans being sent to the slaughterhouse in Vietnam, all on the whim of rich oligarchs. There is a scene where he reads Mao out loud about how revolution is an act of love. Théo truly believes in a revolution for a radical system change that will save the culture and the people. He wholeheartedly deems that the people deserve better because they have been wronged and robbed. He is so strongly into it, that he can even find references in films he has watched. Matthew even confronts him on it, wondering if he truly believes in the revolution or if he is just fantasising it because, believing it, would mean to be in the streets marching.

The next paragraph contains a spoiler, but nothing to ruin watching the film regardless 🫣

“Books not guns, culture not violence”, here are the words that give Théo hope and inquire Matthew about Théo’s commitment to a revolution. Matthew mentions a few times throughout the film that he opposes violence. So much so that when they find themselves in the streets during an uprising, Matthew tries to dissuade Théo from joining in because violence is bad and leads to nothing, in his words. An argument ensues, which ends up in Théo kissing Matthew and dragging his twin sister, Isabelle, to join the youngsters confronting the police with Molotov cocktails.

Fighting for art & us in an age of apathy

In this era of hyper individualism, witnessing the cultural and entertainment worlds being so silent on global deadly and traumatic events is not only deafening, but it keeps reminding me that neoliberalism co-opting the culture realm did so to make sure it would serve the empire. The Dreamers, was released in 2003 and as mentioned previously, Bertolucci was a self-proclaimed Marxist and made sure he could let it be known in his films. In The Dreamers, communist flags are flowing, characters are openly talking about the revolution and Maoism. In The Dreamers, the political storyline has a strong place, because it emphasises that cultural and societal changes only happen through radical changes and radical changes ask for a revolution.

I have read many pieces and comments and rants from artists and fellow cultural actors about the restrictive space for critical thinking when it comes to observing what capitalism has done to our sector. It is so because the people running this sector are the capitalists and they have the power to decide who they want to platform and what message they want to spread. Although, I am talking about today, I wrote earlier how Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution was banned in most western countries and retrieved only when he got canonised as a great filmmaker. In actuality, Bertolucci’s work was picked apart a lot and even labelled propagandist by some for daring to openly criticise fascism or openly profess his marxism. Bertolucci started his career right after fascism was “defeated”² in Europe. You would think that after how scarred Europe was because of it, it would be massively welcomed to shit on a vicious, bigoted and deadly political ideology but with US neoliberalism crippling in during Europe’s reconstruction and the Red Scare sweeping in the continent by storm, it was actually taboo to do so. Let us not forget that the US intervened in Italian politics to destroy a strong communist party and they did not stop in Italy. There is a reason why the US has about 750 military bases around the world but have no foreign bases on its own territory. American imperialism is a hell of a drug that did not spare European soils.

Credit: collage by me

Rewatching The Dreamers saddened me to see that very little has changed when it comes to culture being threatened to be defunded or shut down, police violence and a fucked up system. Even if it is fiction, fiction stems from somewhere and it is every day life. I know our society does everything it can to dissociate the fictional from the reality but both are intrinsically tied. You don’t make fiction out of nothing, it comes from observing what is happening around us. I also know that our ruling class has made us frightened of the idea of a revolution but never in history has the system changed from the kindness of the people benefitting from it. We have studied many revolutions; some of them have worked and been diminished deadly straight away and some have failed. But let me reiterate that neoliberal capitalism is a hell of a drug, we all have been made to get a taste of it and forced into consuming it. The weaning phase will happen when we will overthrow the system and that phase will take time. You don’t wean away an addiction overnight. We need a system change, we need a revolution and after it will happen, we need to understand that weaning out of the old system is going to be a process, one we need to go through nonetheless. Vladimir Lenin explained it well in The State and Revolution (1917) and it has put everything into perspective for me ever since.

In the meantime, keep organising, keep your community close and keep growing it. We need each other more than ever because we keep us safe. Keep on dreaming, it will get better.

1. I use communism and Marxism interchangeably as synonyms. Marxism is a political theory developed by Karl Marx, a German philosopher born into a secular Jewish family who converted to Christianity. He described himself as a communist and is best known for his 1848 pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto he co-wrote with comrade, Friedrich Engels.

2. Put in airquotes because fascism has never been defeated in Europe. It was repurposed and repackaged into neoliberalism to help US world domination. Today, European countries feel immense debt towards the US for funding its reconstruction.