The first time I saw Bernardo Bertolucci’s Prima della rivoluzione … I was overcome with awe, at times bewildered. There was amazement, it’s a sense of pure emotion that I couldn’t really describe in words. I still have a hard time describing it. To this day, I get moved when I think of the film, because it’s so beautiful … He spoke to me, through the language of cinema. His images seemed to flow right out of him straight to the viewer, in this case to me. So, Prima della rivoluzione inspired
me, drove me to make my own work. As I sat there and watched it that first time, I knew that I had been graced and lucky enough to be in the presence of the emergence of a new and special cinematic voice, a presence of poetry and beauty and absolutely overwhelming talent. It was a moment that marked me for life. Martin Scorsese, Berlinale Retrospective Young at Heart – Coming of Age at the Movies, 2023 My memory of Prima della rivoluzione is just like someone who, while dreaming, wants to dream. It’s considered a bit like the manifesto of young cinema. In fact we were very young in 1963 when we shot it and in 1964 when we made the final cut. We had everything that makes up the agony and ecstasy of authorship. The film was made in an Italy that came out of the shock of the Sixties, out the shock of the dead in Reggio Emilia, the shock of the Genoese revolution, of dock workers who occupied the centre of town. So it was an Italy full of political energy, an Italy that reacted, an Italy in which Fabrizio, thus somehow moi-même, finds that the guiding party, the Communist party, has given up its role… utopian-revolutionary, and there’s dissatisfaction, a bitterness that is what we would later find in the movements of 1968. I only realised much later that Prima della rivoluzione was my way of coming to terms with my father’s city, Parma. Coming to terms, I believe, by somehow expropriating it from my father, by making many things that belonged to him mine, starting with the city but including people that had become almost mythic to me because I encountered them during my adolescence, people that would appear in later films.

Bernardo Bertolucci, interview by Giuseppe Bertolucci and Tatti Sanguineti,
“Cinegrafie”, n. 17, 2004