1900 (1976)

Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900 runs five hours and seventeen minutes in its original form, a duration that functions as a kind of statement in itself. The film follows two men born on the same estate in 1901, the landowner's son Alfredo and the peasant's bastard Olmo, tracking them through two world wars, the rise of fascism, and the reckoning of 1945. It is an opera without the singing, scored by Ennio Morricone with generous borrowings from Verdi, and it moves at the pace of a glacier that has read Marx.

The film's commitments are unambiguous and entirely economic. Peasants strike, organizers agitate, and the padrone class is presented as a parasitic inheritance passed from father to weak-willed son. Donald Sutherland's Attila, a fascist foreman with a taste for cruelty, serves as the monstrous enforcer of capital, and his execution in a pigsty arrives as the narrative's genuine catharsis. Communism here is not a debate topic. It is the tide that eventually rises, and the film's sympathies never wander from the laborers who push it forward.

Contemporary cultural advocacy is entirely absent, and the film seems untroubled by the omission. The cast is uniformly white and European. Women appear as wives, mothers, and pitchfork-wielding participants in the revolt, but the film has no interest in gender as a category of analysis. There is no LGBTQ content, no environmental concern, no body-diverse casting, no neurodivergent characterization, and no effort to bend the historical record toward modern ideological ends. The politics are old, orthodox, and class-first. When the film lectures, it does so with a sweeping canvas and a Morricone score, which softens the sermon. Five hours of agrarian uprising is a long time. It is never a boring one.