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Italian Political Cinema

Public Life, Imaginary, and Identity in Contemporary Italian Film

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Edited By Giancarlo Lombardi and Christian Uva

Despite the powerful anti-political impulses that have pervaded Italian society in recent years, Italian cinema has sustained and renewed its longstanding engagement with questions of politics, both in the narrow definition of the term, and in a wider understanding that takes in reflections on public life, imaginary, and national identity. This book explores these political dimensions of contemporary Italian cinema by looking at three complementary strands: the thematics of contemporary political film from a variety of perspectives; the most prominent directors currently engaged in this filone; and case studies of the films that best represent this engagement. Conceived and edited by two Italian film scholars working in radically different academic settings, Italian Political Cinema brings together a wide array of critical positions and research from Italy, France, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States. The tripartite structure and international perspective create a volume that is an accessible entry-point into a subject that continues to attract critical and cultural attention, both inside and outside of academia.

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ISBN:
978-3-0353-9541-9
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.3726/978-3-0353-0815-0
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Subjects:
  1. The Arts
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  1. EPUB
  2. PDF
  3. Paperback
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Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien, 2016. VIII, 439 pp., 31 b/w ill., 3 fig.
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Marcia Landy - Nanni Moretti by Nanni Moretti: The Biopic as Counter-History

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Subjects:
  1. The Arts
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Still capture from Caro Diario, by Nanni Moretti (Sacher Film, RAI-Radiotelevisione Italiana (Rete 1), Banfilm, La Sept Cinéma, Canal Plus Productions)



 

| 239 →

MARCIA LANDY

Nanni Moretti by Nanni Moretti: The Biopic as Counter-History

Nanni Moretti is a controversial film-maker, his films described as ‘almost perversely unclassifiable’;1 his persona is identified as a ‘narcissist’, ‘egocentric Cassandra’, ‘egoiste’, ‘liberal ironist’, bad historian, postmodernist, even poor stylist. Moretti’s uses of himself and of other actual or thinly veiled political figures are responsible for some of the confusion, hostility, or alternatively, admiration generated by his films. His tendency towards the language of personal expression belongs to a form that vacillates between biography and autobiography, ‘elite’ and popular culture, documentary and fictional forms that can be fruitfully considered as hybrid and ‘marginalising’ creations.2 Moretti uses himself and his fictional personas in protean fashion to create a world that involves personal and social history, geography, sexual politics, cinema history, the physical body as political body, gestural, cinematic and written language.

From Ecce bombo, Io sono un autarchico, Palombella rossa, Aprile, Caro diario, La stanza deli figlio, Il caimano, and Habemus papam, Moretti’s cinematic works are dependent on his constant invocation of alter egos, fictional and actual figures, a self-conscious using them to sharpen his cinematic political inquest. Having acknowledged that he doesn’t like directors who use their films to change people’s minds3 the question becomes ← 239 | 240...

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