In the current edition of the Reader, I wrote on Jafar Panahi’s 3 Faces (which plays at the Gene Siskel Film Center through Thursday), focusing on how Panahi has incorporated himself into his work of the 2010s. Panahi recognizes that he’s a great subject for cinema: he’s a dissident artist who continues to make movies in Iran despite being banned from doing so until 2030. While the director’s story may be extraordinary, his use of filmmaking to regard himself belongs to a well-known tradition. Directors have been putting themselves in their films since movies began (think of Georges Méliès appearing on-screen to present his latest wonderment) but the tendency for self-reflection really took off in the 1960s with the rise of various cinematic new waves and a sense of awareness in both filmmakers and spectators about their place in movie history.
Mia Madre Writer-director Nanni Moretti (The Son’s Room) drew on his own life experience for this 2015 study of an Italian filmmaker (Margherita Buy) trying to shoot a movie while, at home, her mother is slowly dying. The domestic scenes, which include Moretti himself as the filmmaker’s brother, are well played but familiar, giving way to ham-handed dream and reverie sequences that illustrate the heroine’s growing anxiety at her approaching loss. Fortunately the movie-production scenes deliver plenty of laughs, courtesy of John Turturro as a vain, temperamental American movie star who blows take after take and dines out on his stories of an imagined creative partnership with Stanley Kubrick. The movie within the movie, starring Turturro as a haughty factory owner clashing with his workers over layoffs, is Moretti’s little inside joke about his own left-leaning early features. —J.R. Jones v
