Nanni Moretti
Io sono un autarchico

«The comic nests in the hinges of history like a corrosive rust. It indeed arises from radical changes in the scale of values, so that what was real and thus sacred yesterday, becomes unreal and thus desecrated today.» (Alberto Moravia on "Io sono un autarchico")

The plot is simple, but it does not follow a linear thread. There is no plot, nor a true narrative development (as in the subsequent "Ecce Bombo"). The structure is horizontal, interlocking. The young Michele (Nanni Moretti) is abandoned by his wife (Simona Frosi) along with their young son. He is recruited by Fabio (Fabio Traversa) to act in his experimental theater play. After a terrible training, rehearsals begin. A pompous critic (Beniamino Placido) is contacted to attend the show. Despite the modest success achieved, the group thins out after an unsuccessful attempt to start a debate with the audience.

It might seem strange, and indeed it is. A debut with a cost of just 3.5 million lire, non-actor actors (friends, relatives, future intellectuals), a young director in his twenties from a middle-upper class background. It's 1976, Italian cinema is in crisis. Young authors struggle to emerge and the "old lions" (Sordi, Tognazzi, Manfredi, and Gassman) have a hard time replicating the qualitative success of the past. When Nanni Moretti's screenplay "Militanza Militanza", written in '75 together with Fabio Traversa, is rejected, he has no choice but to do everything alone, armed with a super8 camera and a good dose of determination. This is "Io sono un autarchico", a manifesto of rebellion, a clear statement of intent where good Nanni enjoys (getting angry) taking aim at everyone, not just the cinema of the time. The most surprising aspect is the critique (the "mockery", Moretti would say years later) of his own socio-cultural and political environment. The film (un)realistically portrays the youthful counterculture of the '60s that then flowed into the '70s, the aimlessness, the boredom, the alienation of the still young veterans of '68, "a comedy of manners set among the protesters" (Piero Scaruffi). The "experimental" cellar theater is ridiculed by a series of hilarious scenes: At that time "Towards a Poor Theatre” by Jerzy Grotowsky was the key text for an entire generation of elite theatre artists. And so Moretti stages the so-called training, a sort of purely physical practice that should guarantee the perfect balance of body and mind, which here is reduced to a long and exhausting mountain hike from which some will not return home. Raw and amateurish as you like, but it is hard to deny the effectiveness of such playful desecration. The entire sequence is part of those typical Morettian moments when it's unclear whether one is witnessing reality or is immersed in a dreamlike dimension: the group of self-styled actors is attacked by Indians (in Rome!), the leading actor even shoots a companion to free him from the boisterous despair that oppresses him, killing him. The Roman filmmaker will return to similar "surreal" scenes in future films, suspended between real and imaginary, all framed in an absolutely "naturalistic" style.

Already in this first work, most of the shots are on a fixed camera. In truth, more due to the technical limitations of the camera than to a heartfelt stylistic choice, despite the director's known appreciation for this way of "framing" scenes, many of which, in fact, are exhausted in a single shot.

"Io sono un autarchico" represents a unique case in Italian cinematography.

Note: Although the film is simplistically associated with the "woodyallesque" of the contemporary Allen (a label Moretti will not be able to shake off even in subsequent films), in the modest opinion of the writer, the two authors cannot be seriously compared. The American author boasts a vastly different cultural background, not to mention that the Woody Allen everyone knows (the one full of quirks, tics, neuroses) made his entrance only the following year, in the fundamental (and equally famous) "Annie Hall" (1977). For this reason, it would be unfair to dismiss Moretti as simply an epigone of Allen, despite the various thematic similarities identifiable between the two.