Nanni Moretti in France Industrial and Cultural Models of an Italian Auteur’s Success Abroad

Introduction The last 4 films directed by Nanni Moretti − La stanza del figlio (2001), Il caimano (2006), Habemus papam (2011), and Mia madre (2016) − have all made the top 20 of Italian cinema’s box office results in France in the last 20 years. This invites further inquiry into the circulation and impact of Moretti in the French cultural context, as an emblematic case study of how the notion of the “Italian auteur” is constructed abroad. Going beyond the success of his films at the Cannes Film Festival and the institutional retrospectives (such as the one at the Cinémathèque Française in September 2011), we will focus on domains that are less known but equally influential. The visibility of Moretti, in fact, depends on a larger media presence than that of the specialist press (such as the numerous articles in Cahiers du cinéma and Positif): TV airings of his films, interviews in various media, his presence in newspapers and cultural magazines, his festival participations, marketing strategies and theatrical distribution, and so on. This paper’s objective, then, is twofold: on the one hand, to trace the multiple ways in which Moretti’s work circulates in France, including theatrical and televised distribution; on the other, to highlight the forms of construction of his “star” image in this specific cultural context. For these purposes, in the first two sections we adopt a media industry perspective, based on quantitative data of film distribution and television broadcasts. A second part, composed of sections 3 and 4, focuses on qualitative sources through a cultural studies methodology. This integrated approach aims to investigate how industrial strategies intersect with the cultural repercussions of Italian cinema’s circulation abroad, through a case study characterized by multiple exchanges between Italy and France.


Contemporary Italian Cinema Abroad: Models of Circulation
Looking at the last ten years' theatrical admissions of Italian cinema abroad (2007)(2008)(2009)(2010)(2011)(2012)(2013)(2014)(2015)(2016)(2017), an almost perfect correlation exists between the ten most popular Italian films globally and the top ten in Europe. Both top tens include films directed by Matteo Garrone, Luca Guadagnino, Nanni Moretti and Paolo Sorrentino − all of whom can be easily included in the category of the so-called auteurs. On the other hand, the comparison of the performance of Italian films abroad and their results in the domestic market reveals a total lack of consistency. While popular cinema and comedies in particular are greatly appreciated in Italy, auteur cinema remains the most exported category: despite its limited economic impact in the global box office, the latter is still culturally influential in defining the image of Italy abroad. 2

Title
Year If we count the number of spectators for Italian films distributed in the relevant European country in relation to the total number of spectators for other non-national European films, Italian cinema reaches its highest scores in Greece, Switzerland and The Netherlands. While in the case of Switzerland there are obvious linguistic reasons, in Greece the statistic is skewed by the success of Quo Vado? (2016, Gennaro Nunziante), starring Checco Zalone (one of only a few cases where an Italian comedy found success abroad). The Netherlands, on the other hand, fit into a more homogenous European trend, which sees Garrone, Sorrentino, Guadagnino and Moretti among the most appreciated directors. These data reveal the relatively low 2 It must also be noted that, on a closer inspection, the tendency of Italian auteur cinema's relative success in the United States and western Europe doesn't correspond to a similar success in countries with a higher level of intensity in terms of distribution of Italian films: in the latter countries, the impact of Italian auteur cinema seems to be thinned by  Indeed, these latter transnational film practices give rise to two different trends in the circulation of Italian auteur cinema: a) one that we can define as the "French circulation model", where Italian films seem to follow an arthouse European circuit, made of international film festivals and awards, film institutes and cinematheque events and screenings, and obviously the critical reception of these films in cinephile magazines; b) secondly, an "Anglo-American circulation model", to which corresponds the worldwide circulation of Italian products filmed in English and/or with an American cast corresponds. Although these are currently the most successful models for the circulation of Italian cinema abroad, the number of admissions mentioned above remind us that they remain relatively marginal practices on a global scale. It is also interesting to notice that both of these contemporary models of circulation do not neatly fit into the historical patterns described by Elsaesser, such as the ideological opposition between European arthouse cinema and the Hollywood market, or the identification of specific national brands with arthouse cinema. 7 In order to better understand the first of these two trends (the one that we have labeled as the "French circulation model"), we will now delve into the details our case study.

The Circulation of Italian Cinema in France: The Case of Moretti's Last Four Films
Looking at the top 20 of Italian cinema's admissions in France in the last 20 years, we can highlight several elements of interest. First of all, most of the films in this ranking can be categorized as arthouse films. Indeed, there are nearly no comedies, with the exception of two animation films − La gabbianella e il gatto (1998, Enzo D'Alò), 11th place, and Winx Club − Il segreto del regno perduto (2007, Iginio Straffi), 7th place − and three of Roberto Benigni's films − La tigre e la neve (2005, 5th place), Pinocchio (2002, 13th place) and, of course, La vita è bella (1997, 15th place). 8 Benigni's case is interesting precisely because of his hybrid image as both a comedian and an auteur, as well as the double-edged success of his films in France (largely loved by the audiences, rather despised by the critics). 9 The most recurrent name in this list is, however, that of Moretti: let us turn to a discussion of his impact in French media industry, considering both theatrical admissions and the model of co-production, distribution, and circulation of his films. 7 For this perspective, see T. Elsaesser, European Cinema: Face To Face With Hollywood, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2005, pp. 13-31. 8 All the theatrical data on admissions of films released in Europe are extracted from the digital database LUMIERE Pro, European Audiovisual Observatory, Council of Europe; also information on production and distribution companies discussed below comes from this database, while data on numbers of theatrical copies were found in the yearly publications L'annuel du cinéma, Paris, Les fiches du cinéma, available at the Centre national du cinéma et de l'image animée.   The day after its premiere in Cannes (18th May), it was released in 100 copies by Bac Films − which was one of the film's co-producers − with the title La chambre du fils. 10 The co-production deal plays a strategic role on several levels. As Marco Cucco noted, 'though Italy is one of the five leading European countries, and therefore contributes significantly to the rest of the continent's film production and box-office takings, the other four (France, Germany, Spain and the UK) realize significantly more co-productions'. 11 While this seems to represent a big missed opportunity for Italian cinema, we should also note that over the last ten years France has been the main, if not almost the only, partner in co-productions. As noted by Tiziana Ferrero-Regis, 'for Italian producers and directors, co-producing with France means that they can take advantage of many incentives destined to French cinema, including a direct support to distribution and exhibition of co-productions'. 12 This is obviously because France is the most important player in the European film industry, also thanks to its solid system of public funders and private film companies. As Cucco observed, 'coproducing with France enables better-financed products, as well as the possibility to rely on qualified professionals, to access the profitable French market, and to sell films to third countries'. 13 The importance of co-production with French companies is even clearer if we consider the whole distribution and circulation strategies of these films. Moretti, Sorrentino, and Garrone (among others) have benefitted from their presence in the French film industry as a guarantee of international exposure for their films. In this multi-stage industrial process, the recurrent participation at the Cannes Film Festival, as well as the French theatrical releases and TV broadcastings of the same titles, represent the natural outcome of a very precise industrial pattern. 14 This tendency is particularly true for − and modeled by − the circulation practices of Moretti's films in France.
Following the path traced by Moretti's previous film, Il caimano had its premiere at Cannes on 22 May 2006. In the days immediately afterwards, the film is theatrically released, again by Bac Films, in 200 rental copies. Despite the doubled number of copies (200 for Il caimano against 100 for La stanza del figlio), the former's admissions (238.691) were almost four times less than those of the latter. Even if it didn't match La stanza del figlio's outstanding average admissions (7.806 per rental copy), Il caimano still remains in the top 20 of Italian film admissions in France in the last 20 years, with the average of 1.193,4 admissions per rental copy. Compared with the previous film, the co-production of Il caimano was developed even further: six French producers and distributors joined in 15 (while the majority stake remained again in Italian hands, with the direct involvement of Sacher Film).
We can observe similar patterns also in the last two of Moretti's films: both Habemus papam and Mia madre were Italian-French co-productions; 16 in addition, two French TV networks were involved in the co-production of Mia madre, pointing to a shift from mainly film industry partners to the wider media industry. 17 Thus, the number of French partners has increased significantly: the two companies for La stanza del figlio in 2001 became six for Il caimano and Habemus papam in 2006 and 2011, up to the eight companies for Mia madre in 2015.
As far as their circulation is concerned, the last two films directed by Moretti were distributed by Le Pacte, the above-mentioned company founded in 2007 by Jean Labadie after leaving Bac Films. This attests to the strong personal connection between Moretti and Labadie (which has overcome any distribution agreements or relationship between the respective companies), and even to a larger engagement of Labadie in the circulation of Italian cinema. For instance, he has also distributed the films of Matteo Garrone and Saverio Costanzo in France. 18  French public television channel and part of the Public Service Broadcasting France Télévisions group), with the collaboration of Wild Bunch (a pan-European film distributor established as an independent company by former employees of StudioCanal), Canal+ and CinéCinéma (the current Ciné+, a set of thematic television channels broadcasting movies) 16 Both films were produced by Sacher Film and Fandango (both Italian) with the participation of Le Pacte and France 3 Cinéma, in collaboration with Canal+, Sofica Coficup (Sociétés de Financement d'oeuvres Cinématographiques ou Audiovisuelles, a French investment company created for the collection of private funds for the financing of film production), Backup Media (a French production and distribution company founded in 2002 in order 'to create a bridge between finance and entertainment') and France Télévision. 17 They were ARTE France Cinéma (the film branch of the public Franco-German TV network) and the above-mentioned Ciné+, with the addition of Palatine Étoile 11 (an independent French film production company). 18  Moretti's most political film of those years, Il caimano, facilitated discussions of Italian politics and, more in general, Italian topics on television: this is evident if we look at interviews broadcasted in several political or cultural programs, such as Metropolis on ARTE 20 or Le grand journal on Canal+. 21 Many of them, in fact, focus not only on Moretti's cinema, but also − and even more so after the release of Il caimano − relate to him as a political activist of the anti-Berlusconi movement. In order to further investigate this aspect, in the next sections we will integrate this 19 All data on TV appearances of Moretti's films and interviews come from the database of the French Institut national de l'audiovisuel, Paris. media industry approach with a focus on the critical reception of his films and his public image in France as an auteur, intellectual, activist and, at the same time, celebrity.

The Personal and the Political: Moretti in the French Cultural Field 22
The enthusiastic reception of Moretti's films in France is emblematic of a longstanding trend in the "discovery" and canonization of Italian cinema, which can be traced back to the postwar period. 23 Since the 1950s, the critical paradigm centered around the politique des auteurs has provided a hierarchization of France's cinematic output and a lens through which knowledge about other national cinemas is translated and disseminated. The auteur-centric approach still heavily influences the contemporary circulation of Italian cinema in France, affecting theatrical distribution and the programming of dedicated festivals, 24 as well as the critical landscape. 25 Given these contextual factors, it is particularly interesting to study the circulation of Moretti's films at the intersection of the two categories mentioned above: "national cinema" and "auteur film". The hypothesis suggested in what follows is that these two notions are not only central in the recognition and appreciation of Moretti in France, but also play a strategic role in legitimizing current hierarchies in the French cultural field. Questioning any fixed meaning or presumed "authenticity" of such categories, we will rather focus on how their functions are similar to that of invented traditions, as described by Eric Hobsbawm: 'establishing or symbolizing social cohesion or the membership of groups, [...] legitimizing institutions, and [...] the inculcation of beliefs, value systems and conventions of behaviour'. 26 An insight into how "auteur" and "national" cinema work in close correlation is provided by Mark Betz. In his discussion of distribution and screening practices of arthouse European cinema, he argues that such films have been consistently 'left free to carry on as signifiers of stable national cinemas and identities or as gleaming expressions of their auteur's vision, somehow not blurred by the quite specific determinants of cross-national cooperation'. 27 This "stabilization" of national belonging in the phase of circulation and reception − by which the name of the auteur anchors the film to a single national canon, despite the international strategy of co-production − remains common to this day, and clearly applies to Moretti's cinema. The importance of the partnership between Italy and France, in fact, is rarely acknowledged or highlighted in the French media coverage of his films. The 22 We borrow here the title of R. Barotsi  one context which stands out as an exception is that of the film industry press: for instance, an article from the journal Écran total focuses on the key role of Labadie, highlighting that he has distributed Moretti since Caro Diario (the budget breakdown for Mia madre included in the same article also shows the various forms of financial support received directly or indirectly from the French State). 28 In most film criticism and in the generalist media coverage, however, the French contribution appears tied to a single discursive framework: the difficulty of producing politically engaged films in Italy, and the supposedly greater freedom allowed by France's partnership. For Il caimano, Moretti decided not to apply for funding from the Italian public network Rai, and not to distribute the film in theaters controlled by Medusa (the company integral to Silvio Berlusconi's media empire). Explaining these choices in an interview, he mentioned the goal of 'preserving the independence of [Sacher film]' from the direct influence of Italian politics. 29 In a similar vein, a piece in Le Monde reported that some sequences of Habemus Papam were shot in palazzo Farnese (home of the French embassy in Rome), after the Vatican refused to concede its locations; in the same article, the French ambassador commented that usually similar requests were denied − but the journalist added that, in the case of Moretti, 'a sort of asylum' was granted: 30 this type of coverage carries echoes of the historical trend of fuoriuscitismo (the escape of Italian political opponents to the neighboring country).
Moretti's political engagement is indeed a defining aspect of his presence in the French mediascape. 31  Christmas gift from the filmmaker to his son, goes by the sweet name of Navona, the square where everything began...'. 34 The TV network ARTE placed him at the intersection of two categories: that of Italian public intellectuals − Moretti's speech from piazza Navona was included in the piece on the Paris Salon du livre entitled 'È pericoloso Berlusconi?' −, 35 and that of 'réalisateurs engagés' − a service on "political" filmmakers from the Cannes film festival featured him alongside Ken Loach, Abderrahmane Sissako, Lucas Belvaux, Richard Kelly, William Friedkin, Bong Joon-Ho, Bruno Dumont. 36

The Celebrification of an Italian Auteur
Other elements point to the fact that Moretti has exceeded these two labels (public intellectual and political filmmaker), crossing over into the category of "auteur as star". This process of celebrification 37 has been facilitated by the French cultural landscape, in which 'the intellectual can be elevated to a "star" status that would be unthinkable in many other countries'. 38 Film auteurs have benefitted from a fascination that extends well beyond the narrow reach of cinephiles, and relies on a model of 'concentric circles of legitimation'. 39 According to Alison Smith, the celebrification of Jean-Luc Godard provided the mold for that of many other auteurs: through the creation of a strongly typed and almost iconic persona, his image 'trickled from the specialist press into more general acceptance'. 40 This same pattern seems to apply to Moretti: besides discussing the merging of biography and fiction in his films, French media coverage has also focused insistently on Moretti's image (his body, posture, clothes, gestures, voice, etc.). Typically, the attempt is to produce a sense of closeness with the celebrity − see for instance the opening paragraph of a Libération article: 'At first sight, an agitated body. His foot bounces under the table. He crosses and uncrosses his legs. Through jolted and swinging movements, his chest keeps hitting the back and the arms of the chair. His short-nailed hands run from his beard to his neck. It's odd to see this 1,90-meter carcass, dressed with a sober and somber elegance, seething in such a frenzy'. 41 The fact that Moretti acts in his own films obviously further contributes to popularizing his own image, adding to the 'narratives with biographical resemblance' and the 'characters with (presumed) psychological resemblance to himself' which many auteur films share. 42 A passage from Le Monde captures the degree of recognizability he has acquired in France: 'There are no doubts, it's him. The beard, the velvet trousers, the shirt buttoned up to the wrists identify the filmmaker Nanni Moretti as, in the past, the blindfold used to identify John Ford'. 43 It is no accident, then, that interviews and articles often feature large pictures with poses that reinforce a star-like iconography: see, for instance, a jumping Moretti (reminiscent of Philippe Halsman's black-and-white shots of jumping celebrities) [ fig. 1] and a portrait in which he sits on his trademark scooter [ fig. 2

Télérama between Aurélien Ferenczi and Moretti (titled 'Nanni et ses frères')
seamlessly intertwined these three aspects: the curiosity towards Moretti's private sphere, his political stances, and his ability to speak for the Italian auteur tradition. 47 The trajectory of films commented here − from Carmine Gallone's fascist propaganda peplum Scipione l'Africano (1937) through neorealism and some of the most internationally celebrated directors − ends with Moretti's own Aprile. The interviewee lends himself to a teleological vision of film history, projecting the notion of auteur back onto the neorealist period: Ferenczi asks 'This year is the centenary of Rossellini's birth; is he a filmmaker that matters a lot to you?', and Moretti replies 'Of course. In Italy, in the immediate postwar period, cinema rebuilt itself through the auteurs. Only later an industry was rebuilt, with more traditional films'. 48 A crucial function of this type of coverage is that it combines the accumulation of celebrity capital for Moretti with a pedagogical project aimed at a cultured but not necessarily cinephile readership: in his sociological analysis of the field of French cinema, Julien Duval showed how film knowledge is disseminated not only by the specialist journals, but also 'on the pages of the publications that are most read by the social groups characterized by high cultural capital'. 49 The reach of magazines such as Télérama (above 500.000 copies in 2017) is much larger than that of Cahiers du cinéma (approximately 17.000 copies): 50 these generalist publications perform a "translation" for the cultural elites of the specialist knowledge produced by cinephile film criticism. This process at once validates the legitimacy of the symbolic capital of film specialists and maintains current hierarchies of taste in the consumption of cinema.
Moretti's success in France, thus, participates in the larger promotion of what Pierre Bourdieu defined as legitimate culture − a system which benefits from widespread investments on behalf of the French State. The current configuration of "legitimate" cinematic taste reflects a series of transformations that have taken place in the French cultural field over the last decades: in particular, the changing relationship between the institutions of cinephilia, on the one hand, and public policies of support to the cinema on the other. Martine Chaudron suggested that the notion of "auteur" went from being polemically used against "official" cinema to a stronghold of the French State's policies (the famous exception culturelle, in which cinema plays a strategic role). 51 In the 1950s and 1960s the politique des auteurs was instrumental in the autonomization of the field of cinema, 52 but in the following decades a number of factors led to a realignment between the State's cultural institutions on the one hand, and the critics and filmmakers first associated with the nouvelle vague on the other. This "reconciliation" between the French State and auteur cinema culminated in a number of policies put in place, especially from the 1980s (during Jack Lang's mandate as Minister of Culture) to this day. 53 Among several examples of this trend, Laurent Jullier and Jean-Marc Leveratto discuss the aid provided to arthouse theaters in urban centers, and the creation of programs for teaching film in high schools: 'each year, in collaboration with the Cahiers du Cinéma, the French Ministry of Education co-publishes books on the films included in the Baccalauréat's curriculum, as well as didactic DVDs directed by Alain Bergala. This "Cahiers" spirit is omnipresent in the programmes'. 54 It is no surprise, then, that the canon constructed through public education remains heavily auteur-oriented. With regards to Italian cinema, in 2016 Moretti's Mia madre was included in the list of films taught in the lycéens et apprentis au cinéma program, 55 alongside three other "usual suspects": Dino Risi (Nel nome del popolo italiano), Paolo and Vittorio Taviani (Cesare deve morire), Pier Paolo Pasolini (Mamma Roma).
The effects of these concerted efforts of legitimation are clearly detected by inquiries on the consumption of films: analyses of cultural taste show that in France auteur films remain the category whose appreciation is most closely linked with higher education levels 56 − in other words, more than all other kinds of film, auteur cinema still performs a strong distinctive function. Julien Duval adds an interesting element to this, highlighting the breakdown of preferences expressed by different profiles of higher executives and professionals (cadres): 'auteur films appear in the first position among the "professionals of journalism, art and the entertainment industry" (a category that, particularly in France, benefits from substantial economic aid from the State), in the 3 rd position among "professors, scientific professionals" and "liberal professions", but only in the 10 th position among "administrative and business executives"'. 57 The 'cultivated taste' of the 'professionals of journalism, art and the entertainment industry' is associated not only to their socio-economic position, but also to the symbolic capital of a 'social milieu organized around common beliefs'. 58 In conclusion, the circulation and reception of Moretti's films in France relies on a "stabilization" of their national identity via the category of "Italian auteur cinema"; this implies an erasure of the fact that they are co-produced through a consolidated partnership between Italian and French companies, and have access to several forms of public aid also in France. These films benefit from (and are an integral part of) the channels of promotion of "Italian auteur cinema": in an apparent contradiction, they circulate as "typical products" of a foreign national tradition, through the channels of the French State's cultural policies. In order to make sense of this, it is useful to return to Moretti's celebrification process, as part of the larger tendency to turn auteurs into stars. The celebrification of auteurs borrows some of the mechanisms from the "traditional" star system, in order to produce an intellectually legitimate pantheon of directors which the cultural elites can celebrate. Like the traditional star system, the celebrification of auteurs also performs ideological functions, such as masking ideological contradictions and "magically" resolving dichotomies. The dominant discourses around Moretti in France, as we have seen, project exclusively onto another country − Italy − the national belonging of his films, playing down the support of French political and cultural institutions. Thus, "auteur cinema" and "national cinema" can operate as mutually reinforcing "invented traditions": they contribute to naturalizing the hierarchies of taste promoted by public policies in the domain of cinema, and masking the ways in which cultural elites convert the economic support received from the State into a form of symbolic capital. A partire da questo dato, il contributo analizza l'impatto dei film di Moretti e la loro circolazione nel contesto culturale francese. Tale caso di studio permette di approfondire i processi di costruzione dell'idea di autore italiano all'estero. Dopo aver analizzato i rapporti italo-francesi e il sistema mediale transnazionale che accompagna la produzione e la distribuzione del cinema di Moretti in Francia (dalle co-produzioni alla partecipazione Festival di Cannes, sino ai dati relativi ai passaggi televisivi dei suoi film), l'articolo approfondisce la ricezione critica del suo cinema e la costruzione della sua immagine di regista e "celebrità" mediatica per le elite culturali francesi. L'obiettivo è quello di tracciare la molteplicità dei percorsi che i film di Moretti intraprendono in Francia, attraverso un approccio che integra la dimensione dell'industria dei media e le ricadute simboliche del successo di un autore italiano all'estero.