Thinking about the present, reinvent the past

The Italian communism as seen by Nanni Moretti

Abstract

"What does it mean to be a communist?" is the question that Nanni Moretti attempts to answer in some of his films. With some variations, it is repeated in La sconfitta (1973) and Palombella rossa (1989), and is implicit in La cosa (1990) and Il sol dell'avvenire (2023). The effort to answer it is not uniform and is full of interruptions and discontinuities, alternating between a documentary register that seems to minimize the interference of the filmmaker, and a fictional register elaborated from recognizable elements of the present and a retrospective gaze that highlights the rememorative and speculative role of cinema in constructing an invented past or a possible future. What if the past had been different? The aim of this article is to reflect, through studies on narrativity, on excerpts from the mentioned films of the producer, director, and actor. The methodological procedure of film analysis provides clues about how Moretti's cinema uses different materials and styles to think about the present, remember the past, and fabulate a future in the face of crises and adversities. In this article, the focus will be especially on the work involving the insertion of Moretti's film within Moretti's film.