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Italian 1960s Auteur Cinema (and beyond): Classic, Modern, Postmodern

Theoretical Introduction

The 1960s have often been considered, along with the 1920s, the most innovative decade in film history. As is well known, the contribution of Italian cinema to such a special period is major. Combined with the earlier experience of neorealism, the Italian cinema d’autore of the 1960s is responsible for the worldwide transition from classical to modern cinema or, in Gilles Deleuze’s words, from the cinema of the “movement‐image” to that of the “time‐image” (Deleuze 1986, 1989).¹ From 1945 to roughly 1970, no national cinema—not even French cinema—produced as many influential films and stylistic trends as did Italian cinema.

In this chapter, I will consider auteur cinema of the 1960s in order to outline its formal and ideological contours in relation to transnational scenarios. Being an auteur in Italian (and European) 1960s cinema does not simply mean manifesting a personal style. Authorship is inextricably intertwined with a set of dynamics related to modernity and specifically to notions of the modern subject and modern art. Auteur cinema appears as a specific manifestation of a broader tendency beginning in the early twentieth century.

Jean‐François Lyotard (1984a, b) has proposed a theory of narrative modes comprising three different paradigms: classicism, modernism, and postmodernism. In his view, the specificity of each mode depends on a different relation between narrative and knowledge. Such a relation is based on the ways the three instances of narrator, narrated, and narratee are connected to one other. Classicism privileges the referent (narrated) over the sender (narrator) and receiver (narratee). In classicism, narrator and narratee are “mere contingencies upon the truth of the narrated” (Readings 1989, 66). By contrast, in modernism the instance of the sender is privileged over the referent and receiver. Modernity “requires first a subject, the instance of an I, someone who speaks in the first person. It requires a temporal disposition … where a perspective on the past, the present and the future is always taken from the point of view” of a specific consciousness (Lyotard 1984a, 7). This subjective center of consciousness is a modern figure. As in classicism, modernism “erect[s] one instance of narrative to the point where it governs narration from outside, becomes a metanarrative” (Readings, 67). As we will see, Lyotard’s comments on narrative modes recall contributions by others on the theory of filmic modes and can thus be easily extended to the analysis of cinema.

In these introductory remarks, I will posit a framework for discussing auteur cinema in light of the paradigm of modernity and notions of subjectivity, narration, and style. One of my arguments will be that authorship has a unique status at this historical juncture, and one that does not last long. The bulk of the chapter will focus on three major filmmakers Luchino Visconti, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Federico Fellini. Considering the trajectory of Antonioni and Fellini beyond the decade, as well as the career of Nanni Moretti, I will then demonstrate how the modern auteur is superseded by the postmodern auteur.

Italian scholarship has tended to establish a clear‐cut opposition between genres and auteurs rooted in a distinction between entertainment and art. Of course, such categorization does not pertain only to the Italian context, but Italian scholars have been more reluctant than others to devise a less dichotomous paradigm. More specifically, drawing on the Romantic notion of art, auteur studies have investigated the status of individual directors as artists in terms of style and poetics. The general tenet of auteur theory is implicitly based on what M. H. Abrams (1953, 22) has called the expressive theory of art: “a work of art is essentially the internal made external, resulting from a creative process operating under the impulse of feeling, and embodying the combined product of the poet’s perceptions, thoughts and feelings.” Conversely, there has been an insufficient attempt to look at auteur cinema in broader terms: that is, beyond the context of the specific filmmaker.

I would contend that it is possible to think theoretically about auteur cinema and that Italian 1960s cinema is especially well suited to such a project. Notwithstanding stylistic differences, most Italian art‐film directors of the period show strikingly similar concerns—so much so that we could speak of auteur cinema as a genre. The common denominator may be found, broadly speaking, in the interest in subjectivity: auteur cinema obsessively narrates the trajectory of the “self” as it tries to come to terms with “the world.” Here, I turn to an essay by Italian philosopher Elena Pulcini (1995), “La passione del moderno è l’amore di sè” (“The passion of the modern is love for oneself”). While the emphasis on the self and subjectivity is a particularly modern enterprise, for Pulcini the modern subject takes up different shapes and guises; while Descartes’ rational self is characterized by “an anthropology of fullness,” Hobbes’ conception of the self is marked by “an anthropology of lack” (142). Western philosophy has also advocated different theories of split subjectivity and consciousness, culminating in Freud’s model (154–55). Indeed, modern auteur cinema’s primary themes concern weak subjects, existential crisis, and narcissistic and introspective plots. While most art‐film directors share such matters, social milieu—as well as stylistic and rhetorical strategies—vary significantly. Style matters because it is related to epistemological investigations as a means through which meaning is expressed or conveyed. It is particularly interesting to analyze the relationship between the fictional character and the film’s auteur: when we speak of self and subjectivity, we are, in fact, speaking of these two entities. Such a relationship is a fundamental feature of art cinema and may range, roughly, from partial identification to distantiation/distance. Much of the film’s message depends on the ways such a dichotomy is articulated.

David Bordwell has offered a very useful theory of art/modern cinema. Focusing chiefly on the French New Wave and the 1960s Italian cinema d’autore in Narration in the Fiction Film (1985) and “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice” (1979), he starts from the assumption that art cinema is a specific mode of film practice “possessing a definite historical existence, a set of formal conventions, and implicit viewing procedures” (Bordwell 1999, 716). Art cinema is an international phenomenon appearing after World War II. The later neorealist films are the first instance of this “genre,” which then spread worldwide in the 1950s and 1960s with auteurs such as Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Alain Resnais, the French New Wave directors, and so on. One of Bordwell’s aims is “to show that whereas stylistic devices and thematic motifs may differ from director to director, the overall function of style and theme remain[s] remarkably constant in the art cinema as a whole” (717). In contrast to classical narration, art cinema privileges character over plot. The plot is riddled with gaps, and cause–effect relationships are disrupted. While the film downplays action, it “exhibits character”: art‐cinema protagonists “tend to lack clear‐cut traits, motives, and goals. [They] may act inconsistently … or they may question themselves about their purposes …. If the Hollywood protagonist speeds toward the target, the art‐film protagonist is presented as sliding passively from one situation to another” (Bordwell 1985, 207). As is the case with modernist novels, the art film’s purpose is to pass judgment on modern life and the human condition. The art‐cinema protagonist must admit that he or she is facing “a crisis of existential significance.” The emphasis on character is also tuned to formal and iconic devices for expressing a character’s moods and mental states. We can think, for example, of Fellini’s choice to dramatize Guido’s psychic life in Otto e mezzo (8½, 1963), by using wide‐angle lenses or deep focus. Another example is Antonioni’s use of landscape. Because of characters’ heightened relevance, the spectator’s point of entry into the film might also be limited to them.

The role assigned to character seems to be strictly related to that of the film’s director. Bordwell (1985, 211) states that art film tends “to flaunt narrational procedures” in such a systematic fashion that they cannot but proceed from an auteur. The auteur thus “becomes a formal component, the overriding intelligence organizing the film for our comprehension.” In place of stars and genre conventions, formal authorial traits—repeated film after film—become a recognizable signature that shapes the auteur’s style to the extent that, despite the emphasis on character, the spectator identifies with authorial style rather than character and diegesis, as would have been the case in classical narration (1999, 719–20).

Starting from these assumptions, I would like to consider how each filmmaker dramatizes his relation to modernity. My discussion will be framed by filmic, philosophical, and cultural paradigms.

Visconti, Popular Auteur

Among the major art‐film directors of Italian 1960s cinema, Visconti is the least modern. I would like to start out by touching upon certain tenets of the debate on modernity in the effort to define the status of Visconti’s production in relation to authorship, high art, and popular culture. It is in this context that I will discuss Visconti’s visual, narrative, and rhetorical politics. My aim is to rescue him from the realm of “high art” and to show that his authorship resides in his ability to merge in a unique way the strategies of art cinema and those of popular culture.

When Rocco e i suoi fratelli (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960) came out, Marxist critic Guido Aristarco (1976, 78), Visconti’s fiercest supporter, stated that the film’s success proved what “he always thought, namely that [Visconti] was the most classic of Italian post‐war filmmakers.” From a different perspective, if we consider Christian Metz’s essay, “The Modern Cinema and Narrativity,” we are struck by Visconti’s notable absence. Written in 1966, Metz’s article is a theoretically sophisticated and comprehensive analysis of the status of modern cinema in the early 1960s. Visconti’s name is mentioned once, along with others, but he is never discussed, nor are any of his films ever mentioned. Indeed, this cannot surprise us, since Visconti’s style and mise‐en‐scène, as well as his overall aesthetic project, don’t seem to share any element with what Metz defines as modern cinema. For Metz, modern cinema is best exemplified by Antonioni’s “nondramatization” (a cinema of dead spaces), Godard’s cinema of improvisation, and Resnais’ “controlled diction.” But, above all, Metz is fascinated by the tendency toward “a certain type of truth … that is extremely difficult to define …. It is the exactness of an attitude, of the inflection of a voice, of a gesture, of a tone …. One finds evidence of the accuracy of this approach” not only in Godard, Truffaut, and some of Antonioni’s films but also in Jacques Rozier, Joseph Losey, Ermanno Olmi, Vittorio De Seta, Dušan Makaveyev, and others (Metz 1991, 197–98). This aspect is absent in Visconti, who prefers more classical standards with regard to acting, framing, and spatial organization.

But Visconti’s position vis‐à‐vis the classical and the modern is not easily determined, even though, paradoxically, Metz’s position confirms Aristarco’s. Obviously, his work may not be merely inscribed within the category of classical cinema. One way to envision a viable theoretical framework for discussing Visconti’s work is, I would suggest, to consider his work as a convergence of antithetical elements. Visconti’s cinema has a dual nature: it combines intellectually challenging narratives and themes, drawn from a whole array of literary and artistic sources, especially nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century Italian and European culture,² with genre forms—in particular melodrama and historical epic—whose visual styles are highly spectacular. Moreover, melodrama’s emotional impact is contrary to the supposed reflexive and intellectual modes of high art. In a similar fashion, Visconti’s vision may filter through his identification with the main character—as with the prince in Il gattopardo (The Leopard, 1963). Yet, the emphasis on character does not endanger the primacy of plot, as is often the case in art/modern cinema. In Visconti, both storytelling, which is central to classical cinema, and character and auteur, which are fundamental to modern cinema, have a primary function. With a few exceptions, a careful play between the conventions of art/modern cinema and of popular cinema defines Visconti’s work. Each film negotiates in a different way the filmmaker’s dual position, so that visual styles, narrative modes, spectator address, and authorial vision are variously activated. Let us start with Rocco e i suoi fratelli.

Rocco e i suoi fratelli exemplifies, more than any other film, Visconti’s involvement with the “popular.” While its theme and plot echo explicitly La terra trema (The Earth Trembles, 1948), its style could not be more different. Visconti’s reliance on melodrama certainly accounts for the film’s popular appeal: in the 1960–1961 season at the Italian box office, the film was second, while Ben‐Hur (William Wyler, 1959) was first, and Spartacus (Stanley Kubrick, 1960) third (Pravadelli 2001, 662). The film was conceived in light of Gramsci’s thought, and indeed it is an excellent example of testing the viability of one of Gramsci’s most useful concepts, that of the national‐popular. Rocco e i suoi fratelli’s Gramscian underpinnings are evident both at the thematic and the formal/stylistic levels. Through the trajectory of the Parondi family, the film narrates the possible alliance between the northern proletariat and the southern peasantry “under the hegemony of the proletariat, in order not only to provide a mass base for political action but also to prise open the interstices of the north–south industrial–landowner alliance” (Forgacs 1993, 212). From a stylistic perspective, the film’s melodramatic register is equally in tune with Gramsci’s position. As is well known, in his famous writings on the “character” of Italian literature, Gramsci (1964, 68–70) argued that melodrama is the only national‐popular form of Italian culture (i.e., the only form with the broadness of appeal to serve as a potential platform for a progressive and egalitarian transformation of consciousness), and that in this regard cinema has taken over the function previously assigned to stage melodrama.

In narrating the trajectory of the Parondi family, Visconti has been able to fuse, in a very effective way, the social phenomenon of southern migration to the urban and industrial north in 1950s Italy with the conventions of melodrama: in particular, the subgenre of family melodrama. It is probably true, as Geoffrey Nowell‐Smith has stated (1973, 176–77), that Rocco e i suoi fratelli “is not an entirely satisfactory film” since it is unable to resolve the conflict between its two sides, the epic mode (the journey of the Parondi family) and the dramatic (“the story of the triangle Simone‐Nadia‐Rocco”). However, it is perhaps more accurate to say that the film is ambiguous, since, like 1950s Hollywood family melodrama, it is built upon a gap between narrative and style. While plot events and narrative construction privilege the morally positive character, Ciro Parondi, who integrates into industrial Milan, style greatly emphasizes, via melodramatic excess, the negative characters, Rocco and Simone Parondi, who refuse or are unable to integrate.

In melodrama, each character is called to perform a certain role, to channel his or her desire in order to fit the new family model that melodrama is engaged to support. Hence, in melodrama, the narrative and ideological conflict is usually invested in the opposition between an older and a newer system. The genre’s position vis‐à‐vis its narrative material is to some extent ambiguous: while the story sides with and rewards middle‐class characters, whose sexual and moral behavior is controlled, if not prudish, the film’s style privileges the morally corrupt characters. For this reason, the film’s more melodramatic and memorable moments are those in which moral outliers and even depraved characters express their excessive desire. In those episodes cinematic style is itself excessive: camera angles and movements, colors, music, and lighting visually express the body’s excessive drives and desires. On the other hand, more controlled characters are usually framed with a plainer and less “interesting” style. The film’s ambiguity thus resides in the opposite trajectories of story and style.³

In Rocco e i suoi fratelli, Simone and Rocco are both excessive characters. The triangle Simone–Nadia–Rocco, whereby the two brothers share the same woman, is the main sexual transgression. Simone’s sexuality is excessive in several ways: he rapes Nadia, while his friends force Rocco to watch the scene, and later kills her because she refuses to start a new relationship with him. Simone also prostitutes himself to Morini, a businessman he has met during his boxing career. On the other hand, after deciding to leave Nadia, Rocco refuses any other sexual or emotional relationship—a renunciation that is its own kind of transgression. As in Hollywood family melodramas of the 1950s, the most melodramatic and excessive moment of the film is the most sexually charged event—that is, the scene in which Simone kills Nadia.

By contrast, Ciro is characterized by different traits, and his sexual desire is properly channeled to form a family. Gramsci’s comment that “the new industrialism wants monogamy: it wants man as worker not to squander his nervous energies in the disorderly and stimulating pursuit of occasional sexual satisfaction” suits Ciro Parondi well (Landy 1991a, 569). Style is tuned to such ends. Ciro is treated in a visually simple manner, and the excessive and expressionistic formal elements of melodrama activated for Simone, Rocco, and Nadia, are carefully avoided. Thus, Visconti‘s film articulates narrative and thematic differences in stylistic terms, creating a stark opposition between doomed characters and survivors. If this is the standard coding of melodrama, it is important to notice that it is quite rare in Visconti’s work to find an optimistic tone, a positive attitude toward change. Indeed, most of his future protagonists will be trapped in the past. Don Fabrizio, Il gattopardo’s main protagonist, is the next case in point.

Il gattopardo was a major commercial as well as critical success.⁴ In fact, it represents a crucial case of the dual nature of Visconti’s authorship, oscillating between high art and popular culture, intellectual and popular appeal, thought and spectacle. The film is drawn from a “serious” literary text, Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il gattopardo (1957), which deals with major historical matters. From a visual perspective, it is influenced by a wide spectrum of nineteenth‐century pictorial movements—that is, high art. But Il gattopardo also demonstrates a penchant for turning the pictorial into spectacle—thanks especially to Giuseppe Rotunno’s cinematography, Mario Garbuglia’s art direction, and Piero Tosi’s costumes—which is a matter of popular rather than high culture. The epic mode lends itself to both: to history and to its popularization. Naomi Greene (1991, 390) has noted this doubled aspect in both Visconti’s Senso (1954) and Il gattopardo: “[both] are deeply analytic in their approach to history, inspired by a Marxian view of social classes and economic structures” so that “even the extreme estheticism … is linked to underlying themes” and “the stage of history and the stage of spectacle emerge as interwoven domains.” Therefore, “like many of Visconti’s characters, the Prince of Salina in Il gattopardo is aware of himself as an actor upon a stage which is … that of [both] history and film.”

The prince plays several functions and is the key to the film’s placement within the contours of modern cinema. But Il gattopardo is also a perfect test case for both Lyotard’s and Bordwell’s ideas on the modernist mode of representation. If we relate Bordwell’s suggestions regarding character, auteur, and style to Lyotard’s notion of modern narration, we can claim that in modern cinema the auteur, through his personal style, performs a metanarrative function. The character is strongly linked to the auteur and is often his alter ego. In Il gattopardo, it is clear that Visconti strongly identifies with the prince. Don Fabrizio is a coherent character, and his actions match his psychology. In contrast to modern characters’ inability to understand the world, Don Fabrizio is well aware of the political dynamics of his time. He feels at ease only with the past, not with the present. To this end, Visconti often frames him in the act of looking: his gaze is not empty like that of Antonioni’s protagonists, but perfectly conscious (Figure 14.1).

Photo displaying a man looking at a painting identified in the novel as La mort du Juste. — **Figure 14.1** The prince looks at a painting identified in the novel as *La mort du juste*. In fact, the misidentified painting is Jean‐Baptiste Greuze’s *Le Fils puni* (*The Son Punished*, 1778). *Il Gattopardo* (*The Leopard*, Luchino Visconti, 1963). Screen grab.

In Il gattopardo, the point‐of‐view shot is particularly important, breaking classical conventions and, in so doing, inscribing a significant degree of identification between Visconti and his protagonist. The episode in which Tancredi visits Villa Salina with two garibaldini officers is shot from Don Fabrizio’s point of view. However, in contrast to classical standards, we never see the subject of the gaze, only what the subject sees, since the protagonist remains offscreen for the whole episode. (Don Fabrizio’s perspective is also inscribed orally through his description of the frescoes to his guests.) In this way, one is made aware that filmmaker and protagonist occupy the same material space behind the camera. One can argue that, in this episode, character and auteur are, from an enunciative perspective, the same.

Yet, the film is hardly shot from an entirely subjective perspective. While there is great complicity between filmmaker and character, Visconti weighs carefully character and plot, subjective and objective points of view. Storytelling remains central, though it is not always rendered through action, but also via highly descriptive moments. The film represents the past in tune with nineteenth‐century narrative tradition—that is, by privileging omniscient narration by means of a plurality of points of view. To this end, Visconti has simplified certain stylistic traits of the novel by erasing, for example, Tomasi di Lampedusa’s use of free indirect speech. This aspect is a major component of Visconti’s aesthetic project. Not only is the prince a coherent character, but the film also presents itself, above all else, as a strongly coherent and organic piece of art. It is built around a tight narrative structure matched to a framing style based on the principles of centering and deep‐focus cinematography. In Il gattopardo, sequences are usually marked by dissolves—a typically classical editing device—and, overall, editing is highly invisible. The spatial dimension and the relationship among space, characters, and objects follow the same principle since “the visual space never appears fragmented … but is always presented as a totality” (Bertetto 2000, 218). These aspects account for Visconti’s late classicism and his belief that the world is legible and can be interpreted.

Although the prince is the vehicle for thinking about the formation of unified Italy, the taste for spectacle and the function of entertainment are never abandoned. Some changes vis‐à‐vis the novel have also gone in this direction: the spectacular scenes, such as the ball, and the historical episodes of the battle of Palermo, have been given a much greater emphasis in the film than in the original.⁵ The perfect imbrication of high and popular art is evident if we consider the overall function of spectacle, since Visconti transforms art into spectacle. While the film’s visual style has been conceived in relation to several nineteenth‐century pictorial traditions, such as the Macchiaioli (Bertetto 2000), the cultural density of the film develops along with its spectacular register. In the end, the two levels—high and popular art—coexist side by side.

A further aspect worth considering is that Il gattopardo was conceived almost as a blockbuster: the producer, Goffredo Lombardo, invested a huge amount of money and financed a press campaign well before the shooting. The fact that the novel had been a bestseller also contributed to the film’s publicity. Il gattopardo, as often is the case with blockbusters, is an excessive and opulent film, especially with regard to the interiors: furniture, drapes, and objects of all sorts populate the aristocratic Sicilian palaces, while all the costumes were made with great care. Visconti was obsessed with perfection: every day 500 white flowers arrived from Liguria; thousands of candles were lit and constantly changed, and so on. Mobile framing also contributes to the visual spectacle. The camera moves elegantly from inside to outside the ancient buildings, as in the beginning when it almost caresses the palaces. Lighting and color are also important aspects of the film’s visual texture, thanks especially to Rotunno’s ability to capture external lighting and to smooth shadows to avoid expressionistic lighting. The use of different shades of yellow and brown creates a sensuous atmosphere: in this case, Visconti has clearly been inspired by the tradition of the Macchiaioli. The film’s success both with audiences and critics indicates that it is probably the best example of the doubled nature of Visconti’s authorship, of his ability to merge art and entertainment, reflection and spectacle.

In the opening sequence of Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa… (Sandra, 1965), Visconti frames modernity in a way that sheds light on his “classicism.” The film starts with a prologue, set in Geneva, where Sandra and her husband Andrew give a farewell party before leaving for Volterra, the woman’s birthplace. In Volterra, where the whole film will take place, Sandra needs to take care of some family matters. The prologue is unusual and should be seen, in my opinion, as an authorial comment on “modern style.” While it is not devoid of narrative function—Sandra’s reaction to the César Franck piece (Prelude, Chorale, and Fugue) indicates that the music will play an important role in the film—we are struck by its visual style, since it doesn’t at all “look like” Visconti’s. In the first shots, characters are not centered, and tend to be placed at the edges. Framing is so casual that at some point someone’s head is cut off; then one of the guests walks in front of the camera and obscures the visual field. The seemingly careless, uncentered, framing, somewhere in between Godard and Antonioni, appears to imitate a certain modern style that, by 1965, had become standard in European cinema. The apartment decor and the cosmopolitan setting—the guests speak in French, English, and Italian—gesture toward modernity in a social and economic context. The trip to Volterra is also shot in a modernist, quasi‐Godardian style: the camera is placed in the moving car and frames the landscape in documentary fashion. Similar to Godard in À bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960), when at the beginning Michel drives from Marseille to Paris, Visconti uses jump cuts and random framings. By contrast, in Volterra, Visconti will resume his “old‐fashioned” style. In the old and sensuous family home, time appears to have stopped; when Sandra arrives, she finds that nothing has changed. Places and people, especially her brother Gianni, are trapped in a gloomy and regressive mode.

While we recognize Visconti’s recurrent theme of the opposition between old and new, past and present, it is interesting that in this context he uses the prologue in a metacinematic way. Visconti wants to show that he could shoot in the “modern style” but that he chooses not to, perhaps because it is not appropriate to his aesthetic project. We can also get an idea of Visconti’s opinion of “the new” and mass culture by looking at the way he uses music. The popular music we hear at the radio is shown to be trivial and banal, just an easy melody with no meaning, in clear contrast to Franck’s classical composition. The latter not only plays a role in the film’s formal structure, but also contributes to the narrative—proving to be related to the secret of Sandra’s family, especially the relationship between Sandra and her mother.

But the relationship between high art and popular culture is not so simple; in Volterra, the film plunges very strongly into the realm of melodrama, while at the same time Sandra’s experience follows the Proustian trajectory of recovering the past. While the film’s title is a line from Giacomo Leopardi’s poem Le ricordanze, Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu is also an important source. As Henry Bacon has suggested (1998, 1), “the main theme of Franck’s Prelude has much the same function in Sandra as the tea in which Marcel soaks his ‘petite madeleine.’” The cultivated sources of the film—Franck, Leopardi, Proust, D’Annunzio—have a narrative function, in the sense that they are related to Sandra’s search into her family dynamics: her incestuous relationship with her brother Gianni and the problems with her mother, who is held responsible, along with her second husband, for their father’s death in a concentration camp. Such themes are typical of or amenable to melodrama. The melodramatic register is even more evident in the visual dimension: drapes, curtains, and shawls are used to create a dichotomy between masking and revealing, a typical melodramatic strategy that conveys the subject’s struggle with her own desire and identity.⁶ Lighting also contributes to this effect, especially in the episode in which Sandra and Gianni return to the old cistern: through a sensuous game of reflections the two re‐experience their love. In other moments—for example, when Sandra visits her mother’s apartment—mirrors, statues, lamps, and other ornaments function as a sort of visual trap for the protagonist, whose body (as tends to occur with the body in all melodramas) is encircled by objects.⁷ In the end, Sandra is able to cope with the past, while Gianni cannot accept his sister’s decision to leave Volterra and commits suicide. When Sandra witnesses the inauguration of her father’s memorial, she finally seems ready to join her husband in New York—modern city par excellence—and return to her “new” and “modern” life. Yet, in contrast to Rocco e i suoi fratelli, in which Ciro Parondi represents a positive future, this film provides no sense of what the future will be. The filmmaker’s only interest is in the past; with Vaghe stelle dell’Orsa…, Visconti has started to move toward the solipsistic regression of his last period.

Antonioni, the Modern Auteur Par Excellence⁸

Antonioni’s four films of the early 1960s, from L’avventura (1960) to Il deserto rosso (Red Desert, 1964), are paradigmatic examples of modern cinema in the context of Italian and European auteurism. Antonioni’s modernism is first of all a combination of a distinctive shooting style—a particular way to frame characters in relation to space—with a specific narrative format, privileging weak cause–effect relations. Both aspects have been singled out by film critics since the mid‐1960s to define the director’s status in art cinema. Besides his shooting style, there is a crucial element that singles out Antonioni in relation to Visconti and Fellini—namely, his choice to narrate women’s trajectories. This aspect is important to our analysis, as it conditions in a special way the relation between auteur and character.

Antonioni’s famous “sguardo” (“gaze,” “look,” or, more broadly, “way of seeing” and “shooting style”) has been the subject of many critical debates and contributions over the years. As we mentioned earlier, Christian Metz (1991) coined the term “dedramatization” to indicate Antonioni’s “a‐dramatic” mise‐en‐scène: a filmic form devoid of contrasts and, conversely, composed of uniform and monotonous blocks. This a‐dramatic composition is more radical in Antonioni’s tetralogy than in his previous films. As Lorenzo Cuccu has argued (1973, 33), such a strategy can be tested out in terms of the characters, as their behavior is relentlessly scrutinized by the camera, which “registers and observes their most familiar and mundane gestures—insignificant for classical standards.” Building on Cuccu’s comment, we can argue that Antonioni values gesture over action, a radical choice in tune with Minimalism that expresses a different notion of subjectivity. In this context, and consistent with the term’s usage by Susan Sontag (1966), “gestures” comprise a host of activities (walking, sleeping, waiting) that are insignificant or minimally purposeful—as opposed to highly intentional, decisive. The use of gesture is related to characters’ psychic condition. Antonioni’s protagonists, in fact, lack psychological depth since they act without clear motivation or specific aim. One of the most common gestures is the stroll—what Deleuze (1989, 3) has called “bal(l)ade.” Walking or strolling around without a specific purpose is a frequent feature of Antonioni’s protagonists. In L’avventura (L’Avventura, 1959) characters move casually even when they look for Anna on the desert island. In L’eclisse (L’Eclisse, 1962), Vittoria is followed by the camera while she moves in the empty boulevards in the EUR district or in the crowded little streets of downtown Rome where her mother lives. In the opening scene of Il deserto rosso, Giuliana arrives, walking with her son to her husband’s work place, strolls amid industrial waste, then finally stands to eat a sandwich voraciously. In all the films there are several such episodes. In Antonioni, strolls often end with moments of mere waiting and are shot in conjunction with the character’s look. Thus they appear as paradigmatic examples of what Deleuze (1989) has called “pure optical” images.

In my opinion, Deleuze’s notion of “optical image” is helpful only if it is associated with the notion of subjectivity. One might ask, in fact, who looks and who thinks for Deleuze. Is there a difference among the three subjects implicated in cinema: the character, the filmmaker, and the spectator? The notion of look appears more useful than that of image in this regard. The filmic apparatus is founded on a plurality of looks that can converge with or diverge from each other. In narrative cinema we may single out three specific looks: the look of the camera, the look of the projector, and the diegetic looks of characters on screen. The fusion of the three activates a strong degree of identification (Mulvey 1989). Conversely, if the mise‐en‐scène posits a gap between camera look and diegetic look—that is, between the filmmaker’s point of view and the characters’—the identification is broken. Such a break can take different forms, but it nevertheless characterizes 1960s auteur cinema as a whole.

Antonioni’s particular “sguardo” is founded on the gap between the camera/auteur’s gaze and the character’s look. While identification is undermined, such a gap is also responsible for Antonioni’s distinctive ethical and affective politics. Most scholarship on this director has stressed the self‐reflexive quality of his “sguardo.” I, instead, would propose to consider it in light of an ethics of filmmaking that privileges the affective dimension among filmmaker, viewer, and character. (My use of the terms “ethics” and “affective” will become clear in a moment, in relation to the work of Emmanuel Levinas.) Antonioni’s camera often approaches human bodies from a certain distance through prolonged camera movements that create a sort of dance or choreography, encircling and caressing characters. Antonioni’s attitude toward the body of the actor/performer is in tune with a whole array of artistic practices of the time, among which Happenings and Warhol’s early films seem the closest. In Happenings, actors make simple gestures like walking, sitting, and standing. Rather than engaging in proper actions, bodies move as if emotionally empty. Bodies are treated like material objects, and surfaces and lack any human traits. Similarly, in his early films, most notably Eat and Sleep (1963), Warhol films painter Robert Indiana while he eats, and friend John Giorno while he sleeps. While Antonioni is not as radical, he nevertheless films his characters, especially female protagonists, as they walk, sleep, or wait. As bodies become mere surfaces to observe and describe rather than interpret, Antonioni provides a strong critique of the cinematic representation of the psyche and psychological dynamics. Perhaps because these levels of experience are strongly codified and well known, Antonioni turns his attention to another issue: what comes before representation (and therefore before meaning). In this regard, Antonioni’s cinema represents a transition from a “cinema of desire” to a “cinema of affect” in Emmanuel Levinas’s sense.⁹

Levinas (1989) has devised a theory of the relation between Self and Other that can help us to define the relation between auteur/camera and character. Levinas’s ethical perspective starts from the assumption that the Other is irreducible to the Self. In endorsing an ethical perspective, he also believes in the radical difference of the Other. The Other is not a category as in structuralist or poststructuralist thought—that is, it may not be reduced to a concept. For Levinas, the Other’s radical difference is anchored to the body. Levinas refers to the Other’s radical difference as the “face.” The face is not an idea, but the concrete presence of the Other. It shows the singularity of the other. What matters for Levinas is the encounter of I and You, Self and Other, and in particular, the Other’s irruption into the field of the Self. The French philosopher has argued that there exists a parallel situation in modern art. In visual arts, the artist’s look should not control the represented space: “an incomplete, rather than complete state … is the fundamental category of modern art” (147).

Antonioni’s ethical attitude toward the subjects filmed may be found in his treatment of female protagonists: in his filming the small gestures and micro‐movements of the performers’ bodies. In seizing the radical singularity of each body and movement, Antonioni follows Godard’s procedure to catch, in Metz’s (1991, 197) terms, “ a certain type of truth.” “It is the exactness of an attitude, of the inflection of a voice, of a gesture, of a tone.” Metz’s definition is strikingly in tune with Levinas’s notion of the “face of the Other”: the body is seized in its radical singularity, not because it performs an action, but as mere presence. In Antonioni, the camera grasps “the exactness” of Monica Vitti’s bodily attitudes during moments of pure waiting or when she eats, walks, or sleeps. The camera lingers on her body, and duration has the purpose of revealing every small detail of her face and all the micro‐gestures and movements of her body. The cases in which the woman’s walk ends by a barren wall are particularly effective in this regard: when Vitti poses by a flat surface, her features are made particularly visible. The affective and ethical dimensions of the images thus created are founded on three related aspects: camera distance, camera mobility, and duration of the shot. The camera is neither voyeuristic nor distant, operating from medium long shot to close up. Camera movements are slow and semicircular: they either surround bodies, as if to caress them, or they precede characters’ movements. The camera specifically avoids fast tracking shots toward characters (such as those in Hitchcock). This movement would entail a voyeuristic and objectifying approach to the body. In Antonioni, the characters often move toward the camera rather than the opposite: the two types of movement appear as a cinematic translation of the opposition between possessing and caressing.

In L’avventura, we find three types of ethical–affective moments. First are the episodes where Claudia strolls around while waiting for somebody. The most elaborate moment is when she waits for Sandro in the Sicilian square while he goes to a store to ask about Anna. This moment is particularly revealing as the camera makes a complicated movement ending on Claudia as she leans on a barren wall. In this sequence, Antonioni plays beautifully on the dialectic between stasis and movement. Second are the idle movements, as in the long episode on the island, that punctuate the film. Although everybody looks for Anna, all the characters wander around as if they had no aim. Third, there are several long takes of Claudia’s body lying, or in bed sleeping, where the suspension of action is particularly clear. The episode in the villa at the end of the film, when she is in bed while Sandro is at the party, her micro‐movements framed by the camera, is noteworthy in this regard—and reminiscent of Warhol’s Sleep.

Photo displaying a woman named Claudia waiting in L’avventura. — **Figure 14.2** One of the many instances of Claudia waiting in *L’avventura*. (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960). Screen grab.

Il deserto rosso shows not only similar strategies and techniques but also formal innovations. For example, Antonioni constantly uses the telephoto lens by defocusing the background while keeping in focus only Giuliana. Such an effect is augmented by a congenial use of color, as with the green coat at the beginning. (Il deserto rosso is the director’s first color film.) By controlling the relation between focus and nonfocus—that is, between space and character—the camera stresses Giuliana’s physical presence. Her polished and lightly made‐up features are made all the more evident in opposition to the polluted surrounding. This choice is significant since the entire film recounts the protagonist’s unstable psychic condition. But Antonioni is not interested in explaining Giuliana’s behavior. As in L’avventura, he is interested in showing the absolute singularity of Giuliana’s “face.” In Blow‐Up (1966) and Professione reporter (The Passenger, 1975), the director enters the realm of postmodern filmmaking, though Identificazione di una donna (Identification of a Woman (1982) returns to the affective politics of Antonioni’s 1960s films.

Fellini, from the “World Text” to the “Self Text”

In the trajectory we have delineated so far, Fellini’s work, particularly his two masterpieces La dolce vita (La Dolce Vita, 1960) and Otto e mezzo, occupy a middle ground in relation to Visconti, Antonioni, and modernity. While Fellini is less experimental than Antonioni in terms of narration and mise‐en‐scène, he is also “more modern” than Visconti. However, Fellini’s work epitomizes the narration of the crisis of the self even more than that of Antonioni, as he transforms the crisis of the “I” into the very theme of Otto e mezzo. More generally, the two films may best be discussed in relation to each other as they both focus on the crisis of the subject but represent it in opposite ways. La dolce vita, which critics have often termed a fresco, may best be defined as what Franco Moretti (1996) has called a “world text,” or a modern epic. In epic, the world is a totality inseparable from individuality. By contrast, in Otto e mezzo, self and world are separate. The film radicalizes the subjective perspective and represents the world as filtered through the protagonist’s psyche. In both, the main protagonist is played by Marcello Mastroianni who, as an artist—a failed novelist turned journalist in La dolce vita, a successful film director suffering a crisis of inspiration in Otto e mezzo—has rightly been seen as Fellini’s alter ego. Moreover, in both films, the protagonist’s father is played by the same actor, Annibale Ninchi, whose Emilian accent—Ninchi was born in Bologna—recalls that of Fellini. Therefore (as later in Amarcord, 1973), Fellini’s autobiography looms large, and the director is explicit about it.

Despite such similarities, the films are clearly different in terms of imaginary, narrative mode, and visual style. La dolce vita shares certain tenets of the existentialist dimension in modern cinema. Marcello is a melancholic character. Unable to fulfill his desire to become a writer, he must settle for a less dignified job: he is a journalist who chronicles Roman nightlife and cultural events for a popular magazine, with the help of some paparazzi. In this capacity, Marcello scouts the city streets and cafés, especially those of the Via Veneto, and goes to parties and celebrations in private apartments and villas. Like Antonioni, Fellini depicts the vacuity of the lives of the upper classes. Bourgeoisie and aristocrats, artists, and people working in spettacolo spend their time doing nothing or simply having fun. Like Antonioni’s films, La dolce vita shows Italy’s cosmopolitanism by stressing the international atmosphere, as Rome is full of people speaking in foreign languages.

The film’s epic mode makes it distinctive in the context of modern cinema. Moretti’s (1996, 11–16) argument that the paucity of epics is an intrinsic aspect of the epic form or genre in literature seems to apply to cinema as well. Films like Fellini’s are quite rare. Moretti takes Hegel’s theory of the epic form as his starting point. For Hegel, epic is concerned with the manifestation of a totality: in epic, action is “connected with the total world of a nation and epoch” and is “the clearest revelation of the individual.” In this regard, modern epic is truly different: the modern hero is passive; he doesn’t act but becomes a spectator. His “presence seems always to leave things as they are, in a kind of gigantic spectacle.” Finally, in the modern epic, inertia offers the only opportunity for totality. “In this new scenario, the grand world of the epic no longer takes shape in transformative action, but in imagination, in dream, in magic.” Moretti’s argument is particularly fit for an interpretation of Fellini’s two films, as the elements Moretti selects pertain either to La dolce vita or to Otto e mezzo. In particular, it is evident that the transition from transformative action to imagination and dream describes the difference between Otto e mezzo and the earlier film.

Particularly important for our discussion is the cinematic language Moretti uses to describe modern world texts: the protagonist is a spectator, and the world he lives in a spectacle for his gaze. One is reminded that the same transformation occurs in film via the transition from classic to modern cinema. Deleuze (1989, 2–5) specifically argues that action defines classic cinema and that neorealism manifests the crisis of this model with the advent of a “new image.” Neorealism and later auteur cinema of the 1960s “is a cinema of the seer,” defined not by action but by “purely optical [and sound] situations.” Deleuze argues that in Fellini this amounts to the transformation of the everyday “into a travelling spectacle.”

In La dolce vita, we identify a convergence among the crisis of the hero, his passivity, and the mise‐en‐scène of Rome as a spectacle. Marcello wanders in the city streets all day and night; from his apartment to the environs of his newspaper, which are the cafés of Via Veneto; from the locations where the spectacular events he chronicles happen to his friends’ parties. The city of Rome is filmed in its startling beauty at night, especially in the most famous episode: Anita Ekberg wading into the Trevi Fountain. In this and other episodes, the use of depth of field, along with contrasting light, is fundamental to the spectacular regime of the image. Marcello and Sylvia’s stroll amid baroque piazzas and monuments is made more striking by the beautiful black and white deep‐focus photography. In the Trevi Fountain episode, cinematographer Otello Martelli resorted to a wide‐angle lens “in order to hide the narrowness of the square and increase its spatial range” (Canga 2004, 88). But deep focus is used extensively both in interior and exteriors scenes, as in the episodes of the Caracalla club and of the beach.

While Rome is a spectacle for Marcello’s look, the image is also a spectacle for the film’s viewer. La dolce vita is first of all a film about the spectacularization of modern life. Everything is on display, and events matter only because the media transform them into something that matters. Bertetto (2010) has rightly evoked Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle (1967) to explain this fundamental aspect of Fellini’s film. What is also noteworthy is that any aspect of life can become a spectacle, from the most obvious, such as female beauty, to the less evident, such as religion. When Marcello looks at Sylvia bathing in the fountain, the film employs one of the basic codes of classical cinema, the male look at the sexy female body. It is an example of what Laura Mulvey (1989) theorized in her famous 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” But the image of Anita Ekberg and Marcello Mastroianni should be read not only literally but also in relation to the reflexive paradigm of the film. The mise‐en‐scène of Ekberg’s beauty is so excessive that it might question the very code—male active look/female passive body—upon which it is based. Indeed, the force of Mulvey’s argument is that there is a direct link between the gender structure of the point‐of‐view shot and that of the narrative trajectory. In classical cinema, the male voyeuristic look controls the female body, while through his deeds and actions he controls and acts upon the diegesis. But in the new scenario of modern cinema, or modern epic, as Moretti would say, the male loses control of space and diegesis. The modern antihero is acted upon rather than controlling what surrounds him. In La dolce vita, one may argue that beauty and spectacle act upon Marcello and render him passive: a spectator rather than an agent of action. In this light, even though the film preserves the “classical” paradigm theorized by Mulvey, it is Sylvia who possesses Marcello and not vice‐versa. Ekberg’s power of subjugating the male through her powerful eroticism returns a couple of years later in more clearly “diabolic” form, in “Le tentazioni del dottor Antonio” (“The Temptations of Dr. Antonio,” 1962), albeit in a comic inversion. In this film, one of the four episodes of Boccaccio ’70 (Mario Monicelli, Fellini, Visconti, Vittorio De Sica) Antonio Mazzuolo tries to use every means at his disposal to get a gigantic billboard of Ekberg, sensuously advertising milk’s nutritional qualities, removed, and moralist Antonio cannot cope with the temptation to which he is constantly subjected, eventually fantasizing her as an enormous devil. It is important to note that here it is the image (of woman) that has agency. In “Le tentazioni del dottor Antonio,” Fellini continues to stress the relevance of visual media and spectacle in modern subjectivity.

The sexual dynamics epitomized in La dolce vita’s Trevi Fountain scene is an essential component of Fellini’s imaginary. As we can see in the drawings of his dreams (Fellini 2008), his ideal of female beauty is the hugely (at times grotesquely) endowed female form, reflected in 1940s and 1950s Italian cinema in the emergence of the maggiorata (the name for corporeally ample actresses who had, in many cases, been beauty‐pageant contestants). Like Sophia Loren, Anita Ekberg’s special glamour and attractiveness cannot be reduced to a type, as she is unique, but she is nevertheless part of the transition from a “stardom of the face” to a “stardom of the body” that occurs in France with Brigitte Bardot, in the United States with Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, and in Italy with Gina Lollobrigida and the maggiorate (Pravadelli, 2014). Fellini’s sexual imaginary in the early 1960s is torn between two opposite types of femininity: the big‐breasted, earthy, and traditional woman, and the skinny intellectual modern type. In both La dolce vita and Otto e mezzo, the latter is represented by Anouk Aimée. In the first film, she is Maddalena, an attractive free spirit and friend/lover of Marcello, while in Otto e mezzo she is Guido’s wife, Luisa.

While female beauty is an essential component of the film’s discourse on spectacle, such a discourse encompasses every aspect of the social fabric, including religion. Bertetto (2010, 145) has stated that “if even religion is inscribed in a system of communication and transformation that privileges its spectacular side it means that the horizon of spectacle has become central and invests the whole world.” The film starts with a huge statue of Christ transported by a helicopter across Rome. At one point, the helicopter descends so that the men inside can greet three women sunbathing in a roof. The women stand up to admire the bizarre spectacle, as well as the men. As the men jokingly ask them for their telephone numbers, the women nod and smile, but do not give out the information. The film thus begins by showing the equally spectacular status of the female body and Christ’s body, linking in a very effective way two of the major themes of Fellini’s cinema, women and religion. Naturally, the most important spectacular religious episode is the fake miracle, in which a huge media set is prepared to broadcast the children’s vision of the Madonna. The transformation of reality into a set is yet another example of the film’s deep involvement with the regime of spectacle and, by extension, the image. While La dolce vita has rightly been heralded as a paradigmatic example of modern cinema, its discourse focuses on a key aspect of postmodern culture and aesthetics: the supremacy of image over reality.

Women, sexuality, and religion are also central to Guido’s trajectory in Otto e mezzo. Focusing on the protagonist’s solipsistic quest, rather than on the epic mode, this film seems closer to modern cinema’s focus on human subjects in crisis. But Otto e mezzo also tackles another major issue in modernist aesthetics, the relation between art and life, as Guido’s crisis is both personal and artistic. Guido is postponing the beginning of his new film and is curing himself in a luxurious spa in hopes of finding some inspiration for the film and some peace in his personal life. But here his producer and screenwriter, actors and the whole crew, join him—along with his lover and, upon his own request, his wife. Everybody demands some explanation or decision from him. This level of concrete experience is mixed with Guido’s intense psychic life, comprising memories from childhood and dreams. Guido’s imaginary life is a flight from reality and presents scenarios of liberation, as well as possible solutions to his problems. But at the press conference real life takes its toll, and Guido sees no way out and decides not to make his film. However, the ending on the beach suggests the possibility of a different outcome. Guido joins all the people he has met in a circle around a circus ring, and the child Guido, playing the pennywhistle, is also present, leading a group of clown musicians and a dog inside the ring. This was one of the locations of the film, and, in a sense, it still is; after all, the film will probably get made.

The ending synthesizes the two levels of Guido’s life: reality and imagination. But the two registers are not opposite, as Guido’s fantasies are so pervasive that they influence his real life. To this end, Fellini has devised a set of stylistic and formal choices whose aim is to deform reality. In other words, while from a diegetic perspective we can separate reality from imagination, from a visual one reality appears not so different from imagination as it is filtered through Guido’s psyche and is thus deformed. In this regard, the mise‐en‐scène of Otto e mezzo relies heavily on strategies such as depth of field, expressive lighting, camera movements, and so on, that alter the visual field. But Fellini’s focus on mental processes also breaks the conventions of space and time. Rather than a precise string of sequences alternating reality and imagination, narration is closer to the structure of the dream process, whereby episodes follow one another without being caused by specific actions, but only by Guido’s psychic work. In this fashion, the “real” world of the dreamer mixes with the dream. The relevance of the psychic register is closely related to the film’s visionary quality, especially to its continuous change and movement. The spectator experiences a sense of dizziness because of the camera movements and because of the uninterrupted variation of location and characters, who constantly move in and out of frame. At the end, when reality and dream, childhood and adult life, mix in an imaginary timeframe, the spectator, like Guido, is led to think that artistic creation, like life, must be inclusive and nonselective.

From Modern to Postmodern Auteur

In his monumental study of modern European cinema, András Bálint Kovács (2007, 338) argues that the year 1966 “represents simultaneously a summit and a turning point. It was a summit because many of the most important films of modernism appeared in the period, and a turning point because many new trends or new periods started after this year.” While 1966 was a turning point in many modern directors’ careers, for Kovács “the most spectacular turn was made by Antonioni, who seemed to have closed his great modernist series with Red Desert (1964) and returned to a more conventional and popular narrative style in Blowup” (339). While I agree with Kovács’ periodization, I cannot agree with his interpretation of Antonioni’s new style. I would in fact argue that Blow‐Up represents Antonioni’s turn to postmodern cinema. More broadly, Blow‐Up can be seen as the first episode in the transition from Italian modernist to postmodernist auteurism. Such a transformation concerns some of the major directors of 1960s cinema as well as some figures of the later generation.

Antonioni’s postmodern aesthetics is based on the deconstruction of representation. In Blow‐Up, the opposition between photography and film activates a complex theoretical apparatus surrounding the relation between fiction and reality. While modernity usually addresses such a relation in order to establish the difference between the two registers, postmodern aesthetics does not embrace such a dichotomy. The postmodern image is defined by a certain degree of indeterminacy whereby it is impossible to clearly separate reality from fiction, dream, or fantasy. Jean Baudrillard’s concept of simulacrum (1983) is a key element in this context. For the French philosopher, reality is so fully mediated, it disappears, superseded by images or signs. In fact, reality, in the sense of something underlying or original, no longer exists. In the mid‐1960s, Antonioni’s position appears quite radical in this respect. In Blow‐Up, only the still camera is able to catch the real event—the killing in the park. Neither the human eye (the protagonist played by David Hemmings) nor the movie camera (the director Antonioni) can register what really happened. The still camera eye and the photochemical process of blowups are able to register the killer, “his” gun, as well as the corpse lying on the grass. In a curious reversal—very much in tune with Baudrillard’s ideas—the image precedes and precludes reality: it is the blown‐up image that “creates” reality, as it shows what nobody had seen taking place. (Perhaps Antonioni is making the point that reality is precluded from cinema but not from photography, suggesting he was not yet ready to renounce the real altogether.)

In Professione reporter, Antonioni pushes far ahead in this direction, albeit in the context of subjectivity. At the beginning, the protagonist Locke is frustrated. His job bores him, and his marriage is in crisis. His professional and emotional relationships are dull and unsatisfactory. Then suddenly he has the opportunity to change his life by trading his identity with that of somebody else. When he sees an acquaintance from his hotel, Robertson, dead, he exchanges his and Robertson’s passport pictures. Now he can “be” somebody else; he can be Robertson. While this unexpected opportunity could give Locke a kind of freedom, his new identity will actually get him killed.

Fellini’s postmodernism is of a different nature. Overall, the transition from modernism to postmodernism in the context of auteur cinema can occur at different levels. First of all, it is the figure of the modern auteur as master, as a powerful demiurge, that disappears. According to Bálint Kovács (2007), the “death of the author” is well represented in Fellini’s late films. In Orchestra Rehearsal (1978), for example, besides the obvious allusions to politics, the main theme “was artistic creation in a situation where the central auteurial will could not prevail.” At some point, it becomes impossible for the conductor “to enforce his own unique auteurial vision on the musicians” (385). In a pivotal essay on Fellini, Frank Burke (2002, 33) has traced Fellini’s postmodernity in Fellini’s Casanova (1976). Burke states that “Casanova is a stunning example of Jean Baudrillard’s simulacrum. It is a film constructed entirely on the basis of absence, in which representation itself is representation only of absence.” A further aspect of postmodern authorship involves the transformation of the role of the author. In postmodern cinema, the auteur “becomes a part played in the narrative” (Bálint Kovács, 384). Fellini is again a pioneer: think, for example, of his self‐interpolation as actor/protagonist in Fellini: A Director’s Notebook (1968), I clowns (The Clowns, 1970), Roma (Fellini’s Roma, 1972), and Intervista (1987).

In contemporary cinema, Nanni Moretti is the best example of a postmodern auteur. Like Fellini, Moretti uses a common strategy of avant‐garde cinema, that of playing the leading role of his own films, and in so doing he subverts the status of the modern auteur. In five of his first six films, from his debut, Io sono un autarchico (1976), to Palombella rossa (1989), Moretti plays his alter ego Michele Apicella. It has long been a cliché in Italian film criticism that “Moretti plays himself,” since Apicella is a young radical intellectual just like the director. But such a simplification is problematic because it betrays the belief in a humanistic notion of subjectivity as well as in cinema’s realist underpinnings. On the contrary, Moretti’s (like Fellini’s) presence in front of the camera subverts the opposition between fiction and reality and subtends a postmodern notion of subjectivity. While the modern auteur is a demiurge who controls the diegetic world from afar, a postmodern auteur like Moretti inscribes himself in the text so that it is no longer possible to remain outside narration. As Lyotard (1984b) has argued, in a postmodern mode of representation, all the different subject positions are implicated and none of them can claim meta‐narrative privilege.¹⁰ Nanni Moretti is not simply the auteur‐director of his films; Nanni Moretti is the fictional character Michele Apicella, and Michele is an imitation of the real Nanni. Yet, the real person Nanni Moretti is either hypothetical or fictionally constructed: as a person he remains offscreen, and when he stands in front of the camera he is acting. Moretti’s “I” is thus divided into three different subject positions: the “unattainable” real person, the actor/fictional character, and the director. Moretti’s multiple I enters into a circuit of indeterminacy that is far from both realism and modernism. The interplay among the figures of character, person, and director is instrumental to Moretti’s investigation of identity. His cinema is in fact obsessed with identity and can best be defined as a convergence of modernist and postmodern traits. The protagonist’s meanderings testify to the crisis of action and the emergence of the character as spectator, as in much of modernist cinema (De Gaetano 2002). Caro diario (1993), and especially its first episode “In Vespa,” is probably the best example. Moretti wanders around the streets of Rome riding his Vespa in a sort of Antonioniesque remake. But it is his very presence and the interplay of different subject positions that connote his cinema as postmodern. While this seems truest of Caro diario, where Moretti finally plays himself and not Michele Apicella, there seems to be no difference between his “character” here and Michele in the previous films. More than Moretti himself would perhaps admit, the interchangeability of subject positions and the porosity of identity marks the undeniable postmodern thrust of his cinema.

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