Daily Inspiration Quote by Bernardo Bertolucci

Bertolucci’s line is a small, elegant dismissal that doubles as a manifesto about what cinema is for. “I don’t film messages” swats away the most dutiful expectation placed on serious directors: that every shot should arrive with an argument neatly tied to it, like a memo. His follow-up lands the punch. If you want messages, use the post office - a service built for delivery, clarity, and confirmation of receipt. Film, in his view, isn’t logistics.

The intent is defensive and provocative at once. He’s refusing the role of moral courier without admitting to apathy. The subtext is that “messages” are a kind of contamination: they flatten ambiguity into instruction, turning art into civic pamphlet. Bertolucci came up in a post-neorealist Italy where politics and aesthetics were constantly negotiating control of the frame. His own work (from The Conformist to Last Tango in Paris) is saturated with ideology, sex, history, and power - but rarely with a single, stable takeaway. That’s the point. He wants the audience implicated, not instructed.

The context matters because “message movies” are often praised as responsible. Bertolucci counters with a more slippery idea of responsibility: to sensation, contradiction, desire, the unconscious. The irony is that he’s delivering a message while denying messages, but it’s the kind only an artist would admire - a refusal that insists cinema’s real content isn’t what it tells you to think, but what it makes it impossible to stop feeling.