The Oedipal conflict between father and son is a motif that has structured much of Bernardo Bertolucci's cinema. A desire to escape paternal influence is, for example, at the basis of Bertolucci's decision in his early twenties to abandon poetry and choose cinema as his privileged medium of expression (his father, Attilio, was a famous poet). Such a desire anticipates the materialisation of specific anxieties about his artistic influences in his earlier films. The theme of the son's rebellion against the father pervades Bertolucci's love/ hate relationship with his two main cinematic mentors, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Jean-Luc Godard. Influenced by their aesthetic and political preoccupations, his earlier films reveal the extent to which Bertolucci as a young filmmaker was trying to deal with the intellectual authority of his ‘fathers’ whilst pursuing his quest for an autonomous cinematic language. The Oedipal theme became increasingly central in the films that Bertolucci made after 1968. Vito Zagarrio has pointed out how Bertolucci was only the most radical and consistent representative of a generation of young Italian filmmakers that, in the aftermath of 1968, was obsessed with the figure of the father and the theme of the parricide. Envisaged as a family crisis (where the family stands for the nation), this conflict crystallises a tension between the younger generation of Italians who came out of the post-1968 social movements and the cultural legacy of the previous generation. As Paul Ginsborg has noted, one of the most popular slogans of 1968 was ‘I want to be an orphan’. The slogan provocatively highlighted the symbolic rejection of the nuclear family as a site of oppression and social closedness. It suggested a critique of parental authority in the traditional family as linked to the repressive workings of the dominant social order. Most importantly, by alluding to a symbolic act of filial rebellion, the slogan reverberated with the more general anti-authoritarian spirit of 1968.

This chapter concentrates on two of the films made by Bertolucci after 1968 that, in harnessing the subject matter of the Oedipal conflict, appear most influenced by the spirit of generational rebellion of these years. Structured around parricidal narratives, The Conformist (Il conformist: 1970) and The Spider's Stratagem (Strategia del ragno: 1970) make use of the Oedipal story to develop an investigation into the memory of Italy's fascist past.