I watched part one Bertolucci's 1976 film epic 1900 on DVD last night. It was the director's cut of his portrait of the complexities of the social and political history of Italy between 1901 and 1945, specifically in the region twenty miles from Parma. The central themes of this epic film are the local struggle between the peasants and the feudal landowners and, on the national and local levels alike, the rise and fall of Fascism. And sexuality and ideology.

The context of the initial release was an American studio releasing a Communist film at the height of the Cold War and the release was in a truncated form and it has been marked by censorship issues since it was first unveiled 31 years ago.

Bertulocci's aesthetic perspective is that of the realism and totality of Gyorgy Lukacs, the Marxist philosopher. Vittorio Storaro's cinematography constructs magnificent set-pieces with light, especially in the first half of the film when the story is drenched in the golden late afternoon sunshine of eternal childhood summer.

These cinematic images are constructed with a painter's eye, a writing with light , and a lyrical expression, move towards using opposing colors to identify his protagonists and a subtle correspondence between chromatic shades and characters' emotions. It is a cinematography with the historical understanding of a pictorial tradition going back to Piero della Francesca and Caravaggio.