PRIMA DELLA RIVOLUZIONE

Rarely has a talent burst upon the film scene with such brilliance as Bertolucci did with this film, perhaps the most germinal work of the new cinema. A flood of poetic visuals, montage, and sound, it is a shamelessly passionate, intensely personal statement of political and sexual coming of age. Bertoluccis entire oeuvre is permeated by an unresolved tension between a luxuriant, vibrant aestheticism and an attempt at radical, committed cinema. A profound feeling for a tactile, sensuous, pictorial cinema of radical form, texture, color, and composition is balanced by a strong sensitivity to social issues, including the dilemmas of the radical bourgeois in a period of capitalist decline.