Aging & Wisdom Quote by Bernardo Bertolucci

Nostalgia is doing double duty here: it’s both personal memory and a cultural critique, with Bertolucci casting the 1960s as an era when imagination felt politically actionable. Coming from a director who made films steeped in revolution, sexuality, and ideology, the line reads less like a neutral generational comparison and more like a defense of a worldview: that art and politics once shared the same voltage.

The intent is pointedly elegiac. “A great sense of the future” isn’t just optimism; it’s a belief that history had momentum and that young people could steer it. He frames hope as a collective technology, something you “had,” almost like infrastructure. That’s a sly choice: it implies today’s youth aren’t failing morally so much as living in a different ecosystem, one that withholds the conditions for utopian dreaming.

The subtext is also a rebuke of the present tense. By saying what’s “missing,” he implies contemporary youth are trapped in management rather than transformation: navigating precarity, climate dread, political stalemate, and the algorithmic present that keeps attention looping instead of projecting forward. It’s a filmmaker’s complaint, too: cinema thrives on future tense, on the idea that characters can become something else. If society stops believing in change, narrative itself shrinks.

Context matters: Italian and European 1960s radicalism produced real movements and real backlash. Bertolucci’s generation didn’t just dream; it collided with institutions, sometimes violently, and often naïvely. The line is persuasive because it admits none of that directly; it makes the past feel clean and capacious, a lost horizon. That selective memory is the point: it’s an artistic myth of youth as possibility, deployed to shame a culture that has made possibility expensive.