Cine-Club
Thursday 6 February 2014 at 20:00
CERN Council Chamber
Ecce bombo
Directed by Nanni Moretti (Italy, 1978) 103 minutes
Nanni Moretti, born in 1953, is one of the most influential and radical filmmakers in Italy. Enfant prodige du cinema, Moretti tries to find work as assistant-director right after graduation when he starts shooting his first Super-8 shorts. His first feature film “Io sono un autarchico” (I am an autarchic), filmed in 1976 in his own apartment with his friends as actors, brings him success both with the critics and the public. In 1978 the Cannes Film Festival selects his second film, “Ecce Bombo”; the success of which consecrates Moretti as one of the main and most interesting new authors in European cinema.
Ecce Bombo is an intelligent and funny film, a superbly sharp social commentary picture of a generation, delivered with humour and satire: a synthesis and a reflection on society at the aftermath of the sexual revolution unleashed in the late 1960s. The findings of this examination can be enlightening and have much to say about the dynamics of the relationship between the individual and his or her community, the social milieu he or she inhabits, and how they affect each other. This 1978 classic of cinema is definitely an entertaining and astute 'study' of society, which the medium of the cinema affords.
Thursday 13 February 2014 at 20:00
CERN Council Chamber
Bianca
Directed by Nanni Moretti (Italy, 1984) 96 minutes
In 1984, after the success of the Venice-awarded “Sogni d’oro” (Sweet dreams), Nanni Moretti films Bianca. Bianca depicts a decade, the beginning of 1980's, and contains some of the most legendary sequences of Moretti's cinema: the big Nutella (chocolate and hazelnuts cream) pot, the soccer match when the goal falls under the kick of Michele Apicella, the final monologue about shoes, gaits, friendship and couple life. The leading male, Michele Apicella (Nanni Moretti), is a math teacher. He teaches in the post-modern Marilyn Monroe school, and his nature is naïve and disquieting at the same time: moralist, obsessive, he spies on his acquaintances' private life and records every new development of these couples.
Bianca is another chapter in Moretti’s rigorous and fine examination of society and relationships in those years suspended between the failure of the ideals embraced in the 1970s, and the triumph of the blatant lightness of 1980s. Bianca is a jewel: a funny, delightful and profound film.
by Cine-Club