Considered one of the greatest films of all time, The Conformist is the first of two films directed by Bernardo Bertolucci in 1970 about the intermingling between fascism and the unconscious. Though based on Alberto Moravia's 1951 novel—about Marcello, a member of the Fascist secret police tasked with the assassination of a former professor, an anti-Fascist intellectual now residing in Paris—the film plunges into murkier territory with its magnification of Marcello's repressed sexuality. Marcello's secrets guide the film's non-linear structure, which interrupt the journey to Paris with the friction between memories and historical change—the former always resisting and eluding the latter. The Oedipal rivalry between Marcello and Professor Quadri is also pointedly personal for Bertolucci: Quadri's address and phone number matches that of Jean-Luc Godard, a mentor figure of similarly bourgeois origins with whom the younger director now found himself at odds after May 1968, primarily because of their very different notions of what it means to make revolutionary cinema. – Kelley Dong