Always after the revolution

My vague recollection of a line from Bernardo Bertolucci's second film is a rueful "for me, it is always after the revolution". It may not be an accurate memory of the sentiment of the young protagonist, but it certainly reflected my feeling at the time. If I had been better prepared in terms of the sexual revolution, I would have appreciated better the breakthroughs of both Bertolucci and Nicolas Roeg who have died within days of each other. It is also true of the Liberal political revolution which I was late catching up with. Bertolucci, however, referenced a different politics.

I do however feel a certain smugness in having seen Prima della rivoluzione soon after its release, while other commentators on the Web are now recalling The Last Emperor or reruns of Last Tango in Paris. It was probably in the Academy cinema in Oxford Street, or possibly the NFT on the South Bank (of which there is a flavour on this video), at a time when I was exploring as much of the cinema and music which was on offer in the capital as was available on a junior civil servant's salary. The mixture of transgressive sex and politics was striking, though one would have needed a more intimate knowledge of Italian communism to appreciate the symbolism at the time. It was a leap forward from the schoolboy sighting of Mylène Demongeot's naked breast in Les sorcières de Salem in the old Continental cinema in Wallasey.

A further explicit leap was Nicolas Roeg's Performance. I know where I first saw that one. It was in the Walpole in Ealing when I was on an IT course at the former ICL training centre and looking for something to do in the evenings. Smugness is tinged with regret in that early release was much cut, though even then, aided by some extraordinary cutting, it was shocking enough. The IMDb entry gives due credit to Donald Cammell whose ideas not only drove Performance, but seem to have inspired much of Roeg's later work. (Roeg's claiming much of the credit for the film is understandable, seeing as how his work on Doctor Zhivago, uncredited, helped Freddie Young to an Oscar).  After that, I think I caught up with all Roeg's early films and later enjoyed the BBC Arena documentary It's About Time. I trust that Auntie will dust this off and also include a more sizeable contribution from Theresa Russell, his muse for so long and latterly his wife (they seem to have separated eventually, but did they ever divorce?).

Coincidences, runs the old journalistic saying, go in threes. Is there another great film director about to breathe his last?