Moretti's Epistemological Realism: Cultural Heritage and Intellectual Distance in CARO DIARIO

Abstract

The article provides a close reading of Nanni Moretti's Caro diario (1993) with a specific emphasis on the aesthetic, cultural, and intellectual traditions with which the film engages. Contributions to realist film theory by Bazin, Zavattini, and Pasolini are discussed and presented as fundaments for this innovative cinematic essay which in particular draws on these theorists' respective ways of evaluating quotidian facts as profilmic material. The film's increasingly introspective approach to social testimony proves however to move away from Zavattini's ideal of cinema's collective dimension, while accepting instead Pasolini's reluctance to identify himself as a ‘national-popular’ artist. However, where Pasolini would assume a myth-seeking, apocalyptic vision, Moretti sees intellectual irony as the means to perform an epistemological search into private and everyday social experience, as well as to both provide and call for an entirely new form of cinematic writing.