Lo smarrimento del presente

Nanni Moretti is the Italian author who more than others knew how to read the present, hand back the feelings, perceive their loss, and represent their fractures. From "I am an autarchist" to "My mother", in Moretti's cinema there is a radical crisis of the presence of the subject in the world, which takes the form of neurosis and disorientation, and which is covered by the construction of comic, exaggerated, idiosyncratic masks, always however able to grasp deep truths. It is a mix of drama and grotesque, of grief and joy, which condenses the aspects of a cinema that has been able to recount, like no other, the state of crisis of the subject, of a nation, of an era. The essay by Roberto De Gaetano enters into the living body of Moretti's cinema, measuring all the incandescence of his relationship with Italian current affairs (social and political), and with a restless, unresolved, often painful, often comical present.