Before the revolution

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Movie
German title Before the revolution
Original title Prima della rivoluzione
Country of production Italy
original language Italian
Publishing year 1964
length 115 minutes
Rod
Director Bernardo Bertolucci
script Bernardo Bertolucci
Gianni Amico
music Ennio Morricone
and Schlager by Gino Paoli
camera Aldo Scavarda
cut Roberto Perpignani
occupation

Before the Revolution ( Prima della rivoluzione ) is Bernardo Bertolucci's second feature film, an art film completed in 1964 in which he deals with political theses widespread in the 1960s.

theme

The young Fabrizio from the wealthy bourgeoisie of Parma , despite his origins a Marxist, and his marginally older aunt Gina, who is visiting, begin an incestuous relationship. They talk about political theories, move through the streets of Parma and the surrounding landscapes and indulge in melancholy. Important conversation partners of the two are a communist elementary school teacher who is a friend of Fabrizio and an old uncle Gina who regrets his inherited estate, which he will lose through bankruptcy. In the end, Fabrizio turns away from the party and marries a daughter from a middle-class family.

According to Bertolucci, he deals with the fear of a bourgeois who has consciously decided in favor of Marxism and fears that because of his origins he will fall back into the bourgeois milieu because the roots are very strong. Fabrizio stands for the impossibility that a bourgeois can be a Marxist; the true revolutionary force is the proletariat . The sequence on the Po is also seen as a harbinger of the ecological discussion.

Bertolucci called Stendhal's The Charterhouse of Parma his favorite book; however, the similarities between the film and the novel are limited to the location, the adoption of character names and a very loose thematic reference.

Fabrizio lives in anticipation of a revolution to come. The opening credits quoted Talleyrand : “ Celui qui n'a pas vécu avant la révolution ne sait pas ce qu'est la douceur de vivre. "(Those who did not live before the revolution do not know the sweetness of life.)" Perhaps it is not so much the word revolution that counts, but before , that is, the reflection, the return, sometimes the nostalgia for a bygone era , for a freshness, sweetness and lost innocence. ““ This is not, as the title might suggest, a militant story of heroic revolutionary struggle, but an elegy on those pre-revolutionary bourgeois lives that were doomed. “The placement of the Talleyrand quotation in the statement of the film caused a lot of trouble, but Bertolucci claims it was ironic.

Style and shape

While Bertolucci dealt with foreign material in a personal style in his debut La Commare Secca , in his second feature film he has, conversely, subjected partially autobiographical themes based in his hometown to "foreign" styles. He was visibly influenced by two role models, Michelangelo Antonionis and above all Jean-Luc Godard . Nevertheless, before the revolution he called his first really own film. The ellipses in the narrative and the long static shots, for example at the bathing pond , are based on Antonioni . Style elements such as image jumps , repetitions and circular apertures come from Godard . The meaning of some scenes only becomes apparent at a later point. In a dialogue, Bertolucci has Fabrizio's friend announce his own view, which raises the camera work of a film to a moral question. The style of a director always includes his worldview.

Emergence

Before the revolution, it was financed by the lender Angelo Rizzoli. Bertolucci later stated that two weeks before filming began, production manager Mario Bernocchi had been called up for military service and on top of that had been imprisoned for quarrels with superiors; he got him out with the help of the mafia to keep the schedule.

Bertolucci would have loved to hire Raoul Coutard , who had worked on several Godard films, as cameraman , but he was already booked for Fahrenheit 451 by Truffaut . The choice therefore fell on Aldo Scavarda , who had previously photographed Antonioni's art film drama Playing with Love ( L'avventura ). In an even more marginal function as assistant to the swivel , also worked Vittorio Storaro with that from The Spider's Stratagem most important as a cameraman for Bertolucci's staff was.

reception

Before the revolution , it was released in Cannes in 1964 , where it received the Jeune Critique special award. In Italy the audience showed no interest and the (left) criticism was mostly negative; many Italian communists resented the work. A few years later, however , before the revolution, it found greater acceptance among Parisian student circles. Bertolucci attributed this to the fact that his film was ahead of its time in its criticism of the communist party.

After Before the Revolution , Bertolucci could not find a producer for another feature film for four years.

Reviews

“A multi-layered, playful avant-garde film that poetically and sociographically subtly paints the authentic image of small-town Italy in the 1960s. The predominantly undramatic and lyrical narrative at the same time underlines the still captivating documentary character of the film: it gives insight and information about an era, the mood of a generation, their efforts and their resignation. "

"The complexity of the film and the mixture of realism and poetry require a lot of empathy from the audience, but Bertolucci's work provides the more mature viewer with important insights into the thinking and feeling of Italian youth."

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Bernardo Bertolucci in conversation with the Cahiers du cinéma , March 1965; and Bernardo Bertolucci in Les Lettres Françaises, January 10, 1968, Paris.
  2. ^ Kuhlbrodt, Dietrich: Bernardo Bertolucci. Film 24 series, Hanser Verlag, Munich 1982, ISBN 3-446-13164-7 , p. 114
  3. Bernardo Bertolucci in conversation with the Cahiers du cinéma , March 1965
  4. ^ Pierre Pitiot, Jean-Claude Mirabella: Sur Bertolucci . Editions Climats, Castelnau-le-Lez 1991, ISBN 2-907-56343-2 , pp. 17-18: “Ce n'est peut-être pas tant le mot révolution qui importeque prima , c'est-à-dire la réflexion, le retour, parfois also la nostalgie d'un temps antérieur, d'une fraîcheur, d'une douceur, d'une innocence perdues. "
  5. 1001 Films - The Best Films of All Time , Edition Olms, Zurich 2004, p. 438
  6. ^ Dietrich Kuhlbrodt: Bernardo Bertolucci . Film 24 series, Hanser Verlag, Munich 1982, ISBN 3-446-13164-7 , p. 108
  7. ^ Claretta Micheletti Tonetti: Bernardo Bertolucci. The cinema of ambiguity . Twayne Publishers, New York 1995, ISBN 0-8057-9313-5 , p. 43
  8. ^ Yosefa Loshitzky: The radical faces of Godard and Bertolucci . Wayne State University Press, Detroit 1995, ISBN 0-8143-2446-0 , p. 14
  9. ^ Reclams Filmlexikon, Philipp Reclam jun., Stuttgart 2001
  10. Bernardo Bertolucci in: Film Quarterly , Fall 1966, Vol. 20, No. 1
  11. ^ A. Garibaldi, R. Giannarelli, G. Giusti: Qui commincia l'avventura del signor. Dall'anonimato al successo, 23 protagonists del cinema italiano raccontano . 1984
  12. Bernardo Bertolucci in conversation with the Cahiers du cinéma , March 1965
  13. see credits of the film
  14. ^ Il Giorno , September 22, 1967, Milan; and Bernardo Bertolucci in Jean Gili: Le cinéma italien . Paris, 1978, pp. 64-65; and Dietrich Kuhlbrodt: Bernardo Bertolucci . Series Film 24, Hanser, Munich 1982, ISBN 3-446-13164-7 , pp. 107 and 114
  15. Before the revolution. In: Lexicon of International Films . Film service , accessed March 2, 2017 .Template: LdiF / Maintenance / Access used 
  16. Evangelischer Presseverband München, Review No. 327/1968.