The dead ends that criticism often gets into are the result of a narrow gaze that is unable to think of the “forms of contemporaneity” within a history of the forms of Italian cinema. Roberto De Gaetano will reflect on the genealogy of the artistic (film) and discursive (criticism) practices of contemporary Italian cinema, placing them in a broader temporal horizon, and will touch not only on the works but also on the discourses that accompanied them, and the key concepts around which these discourses revolved, starting from the overused concept of “realism”.
Roberto De Gaetano was born in Rome in 1965. He is a full professor of Filmology at the University of Calabria. He has worked on cinema and philosophy (Il cinema secondo Gilles Deleuze, Roma 1996, Il visibile cinematografico, Roma 2002, Teorie del cinema in Italia, Soveria Mannelli 2005) and on the analysis of the forms of Italian cinema (l corpo e la maschera. Il grottesco nel cinema italiano, Roma 1999, La sincope dell’identità. Il cinema di Nanni Moretti, Torino 2002). He has dedicated important studies to contemporary cinema, which have concerned the figures of time (Passaggi, Rome 1996), the event of love (Tra-Due, Cosenza 2008) and the relationship between forms of representation and the present world (L’immagine contemporanea, Venice 2010). He directs the four-monthly cinema magazine “Fata Morgana”.