Nanni Moretti as filmmaker and character

This research stems from an interest in exploring the ambivalence about political commitment expressed in the films of Nanni Moretti, a theme that cuts across almost the entirety of the filmmaker's oeuvre. But this issue prompts larger theoretical questions: how do we know exactly what Moretti's stance is, if it is expressed through films which for the most part tell fictional stories? How are we to treat the relationship between the filmmaker's opinions, expressed in his capacity as a public figure, and those the fictional characters in his films articulate? What to make of the autobiographical echoes in the films, and of the fact that the director performs under his own name in some of them? At a more abstract level: should art criticism take into consideration information about the artist? What kind of evidence about the circumstances (both historical and personal) in which an artwork was made is relevant to its appreciation and interpretation? Part One of the dissertation engages these questions, in an attempt at finding a theoretically firm footing in debates about authorship, authorial intention, and biographical criticism, which I then apply to a detailed investigation of Moretti's films, in Part Two. The concepts of the "biographical legend," "paratext," and "hypothetical intentionalism" (in contrast to "actual intentionalism") play a central role in my study, as do those of "art cinema" (as a mode of narration), and Brechtianism. In an attempt to combine the macro and the micro, a fine-grained analysis of what happens in the films is integrated in an account of the historical and aesthetic frameworks in which the films were made. The thesis seeks to demonstrate that contextual information about the director - including concerning his life and his intentions - casts an indispensable light on Moretti's films, but this is not the same thing as imagining a transparent link between what is depicted in the films and the filmmaker's actual life. Self-representation is filtered through Moretti's particular use of irony, his consistent engagement with paradox, and his Brechtian effort to convey his characters (particularly the protagonists of his films) as riven by internal contradiction. Moreover, while Moretti does abide by some principles of realism - including "objective realism", in the art cinema tradition - the notion that his fictional films attempt to mirror reality in any direct sense would be wrong. In conclusion, while Moretti's films do have something to say of political import, they do this in a complex manner, which avowedly comprise paradoxical aspects. We can illuminate these features only by looking closely at the films and appraising them against the relevant historical and intellectual frameworks.