Bertolucci and his confreres circa 1966

Bernardo Bertolucci

In checking just what year it was that Bernardo Bertolucci’s Before the Revolution  went on at the Melbourne Film Festival I ran down the list. 

Just about 40 features and near a hundred shorts were screened including a retrospective of the films of Damien Parer, on loan from the Australian National Library. 

The festival website notes that Alain Resnais's remarkable short film Night and Fog was screened, as was Fires on the Plain (Kon Ichikawa).

Other films screened included Raven’s End (Bo Widerberg), Walkover, (Jerzy Skolimowski), Loves of a Blonde, (Milos Forman), Sandra, (Luchino Visconti), Charulata (Satyajit Ray), Cumbite (Tomas Gutierrez Alea), Diamonds of the Night (Jan Nemec), Heat (Larissa Shepitko), Let’s Have a Party (Paul Verhoeven), Man is not a Bird (Dusan Makavejev), Ordet (Carl Th Dreyer), Tarahumara (Luis Alcoriza), The Adventures of Werner Holt (Joachim Kunert), Age of Daydreaming (Isvan Szabo),  The Merry World of Leopold Z (Gilles Carle), The Moontrap (Perrault, Brault & Carriere), The Shameless Old Lady (Rene Allio) and Thomas the Imposter (Georges Franju).

Georges Franju

Which some people might calculate as a masterpiece or near-masterpiece strike rate of close to 50%. 

Makes you think. Long before Sundance and not an American indy in the mix.