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charge, as do the other literary allusions in the film, creating a sense of melancholy which is
intensified by the awareness that life will never be the same again.
This bleak impression is cued by the film even before the opening credits, with
Fabrizio referring in voiceover - on a darkened screen - to his current dismal state of mind,
before reciting Talleyrand's aphorism 'Those who did not live through the period before the
revolution cannot understand what the sweetness of life is' which appears at the end of the
opening credits. In 1965 Bertolucci clarified that he used it as an 'epigraph to the film'; by
articulating it at the beginning and not at the end of the film, he wanted to give the aphorism a
more complex, different meaning: 'He who lives before the revolution doesn't feel, in my
view, the sweetness, but the anguish of life' (Marcorelle and Bontemps, 1965: 16). However,
this technique evokes an observation by Morrey about the self-conscious opening line of
Godard's Le petit soldat (1960) (4) whose positioning he finds to be incongruous as 'it would
seem more appropriate at the end'. In Before the Revolution it could also be said, as Morrey
indicates, that this incongruity emphasizes the film's reflexivity (Morrey 2005: 31). While
this analogy implies that the device might have derived from the Godardian ideas inspiring
Bertolucci, the significance of the technique for this study, with its affective/cognitive
framework, resides in the way that the sense of emotion generated by the enunciation is
mediated by the device's self-conscious, declamatory essence. The possible affective
resonance within Fabrizio's words is muted by the cerebral and self-aware manner in which
the words are said, an effect that reflects the way emotion is expressed in Bertolucci's early
work, its spontaneity frequently attenuated by its stylized, self-conscious articulation.
What links the film s literary references is that the emotions, such as melancholy, that
may be experienced by viewers are filtered through an initial, intellectual awareness of their
origins in other art forms. This phenomenon is explained by Grodal through the concept of a
motivational link between cognition and emotion; he argues that, in counter-cinema, when
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