Perhaps the most exciting cinematic event of 2006 was the release on DVD earlier this month -- finally, and in a terrific transfer -- of Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist.

Few films of the post-WWII era have been as influential as this one -- few films of any era have been as ravishing, as sensually exciting.

In the freewheeling atmosphere of the time, and with the final collapse of the old studio system, Hollywood in the late Sixties was in an experimental mood, though the experimentation often involved only superficial stylistic gimmicks -- the hand-held camera, promiscuous zooming, elliptical editing, split-screen images.

At the same time a new generation of filmmakers was coming into prominence which had been schooled in, and deeply loved, the classic Hollywood films -- among this generation were Coppola, Scorsese, Spielberg and Lucas . . . all of them, except for Spielberg, the products of film schools rather than of apprenticeship in the industry.

They were tackling new subjects and ones that were often more challenging than the old studio system could embrace but they were developing a style that owed much to the formal elegance of the cinema of the studio era.

Then, in 1970, The Conformist burst onto the scene, the work of a young Italian filmmaker who had not only mastered the formal elegance of the old studio style but was taking it into new realms of expressiveness and invention.  Indeed, The Conformist had something of the visual eloquence of the highest achievements of the silent era, of Murnau's and Vidor's films, whose extravagant poetic imagery had been lost with the coming of sound.

The effect was electric -- confirming all the creative instincts of the American film-school avant garde.  The movie was so important to Coppola that he, along with a number of other American directors, personally lobbied its distributor to release the film in the United States.  He used one of its actors in The Godfather, Part II, and its visual style influenced every frame of Coppola's masterpiece.

Bertolucci never made another film quite like it.  His visual imagination, his gift for dynamic plastic composition and choreography within the frame stayed fresh, but was often lavished on unworthy material and degenerated into mere mannerism.

The Conformist was of a piece because its story and its visual style reinforced each other.  Bertolucci was, in the film, breaking dramatically from the severe aesthetic strategies and rigorous intellectualism of his mentor Godard, indulging himself frankly in the cinema's power for sensual seduction -- all the while telling the tale of a promising student who betrays the political ideals of his old professor and eventually collaborates in the professor's murder.

The Conformist remains alive with the allure of forbidden pleasures, tense with the guilt of giving in to them.  The film is erotic but disturbing -- a dynamic that Bertolucci would explore more explicitly in Last Tango In Paris, but without the organic emotional coherence of the earlier film.