Time & Perspective Quote by Bernardo Bertolucci

Nostalgia is doing two jobs here: mourning and indictment. Bertolucci isn’t merely confessing that his tastes changed; he’s sketching a timeline of cinema’s lost electricity. “I used to love Hollywood movies” lands like an old romance recalled with affection, but the follow-up - “great phases and moments” - is pointedly non-specific, as if the evidence is obvious to anyone who lived through it. He’s invoking eras, not titles: the periods when Hollywood felt porous, risky, alive to new sensibilities.

Then comes the pivot word that matters: “unfortunately.” It’s a sigh, but also a judgment. The phrasing “now is not the moment” dodges a clean takedown and makes the critique sharper. He’s not arguing Hollywood is permanently bankrupt; he’s saying it has chosen, for this particular historical moment, to be artistically timid. That temporal framing is classic Bertolucci: politics as atmosphere, culture as a barometer. A “moment” is when art either meets reality or refuses it.

The subtext is a filmmaker who came of age in an era when cinema could be sensual, ideological, and formally ambitious - and who watched the American studio system increasingly optimize for global safety: franchisable plots, pre-sold IP, the kind of aesthetic that plays well everywhere because it risks saying almost nothing anywhere. Coming from a director whose films were often scandal magnets and state-of-the-debate objects, the line carries a quiet dare: if the world is burning, why does your biggest cinema look like it’s trying not to offend the algorithm?