I mentioned to a friend that I was going to try and write about Bertolucci's La luna, a film shot mostly in Rome and released in 1979.

He said, ‘But that's a terrible film. It's so literal. It knows everything it's doing’. I said that that was what I was going to try to write about. He replied, ‘Then you'll just be explaining why it's a bad film’. Although I might admit to loving this film, I can also admit that it may in fact, be a bad film: for instance, it seems a series of parts, rather, perhaps, than an integrated (not to say organic) whole. But my own partiality towards it extends from its own – its own partiality. In part, what I want to explore here is partiality itself, the cathexis, prioritization and, finally, the fetishism of parts of films, of parts of Rome, of parts in films where parts of Rome become visible, oft en fleetingly. La luna is hardly a film about Rome. But in watching it, we are thrown about and around Rome; we are made to lurch from here to there and back. Something feels important about where and when Rome appears, or is made to appear (both happen) in this film.