Film Criticism and Authorship: The Case of Martin Scorsese and David Lynch in Italian Newspapers

This master’s thesis is one of the projects I am most attached to. Beyond bringing together two of my strongest interests - semiotics and cinema - it also accompanied seven months of my life spent moving between Bologna’s libraries, opening dusty archive folders, and scrolling through old newspapers on microfilm readers. It taught me a great deal about patience and about the discipline of academic research. The thesis examines how Italian daily film criticism mediated the authorship of Martin Scorsese and David Lynch for a general readership. It asks how the authorial identities of the two directors were translated, framed, and negotiated within the discursive space of national newspapers, and it is based on a corpus of 262 reviews published in five Italian dailies - Corriere della Sera, la Repubblica, Il Messaggero, La Stampa, and Avvenire - covering the fiction features of both directors across theatrical releases and major international festival contexts. The broader aim was to understand how journalistic criticism positions filmmakers within cultural hierarchies, making them legible to readers through recurring values, oppositions, and interpretive categories.

I built the corpus, defined its boundaries, and developed the analytical framework for the project. This meant selecting and organising reviews across decades, newspapers, and reception contexts, while excluding materials that would have required a different semiotic treatment, such as retrospectives, in-depth feature articles, and documentary reviews. I then carried out a comparative analysis of how the five newspapers represented Scorsese and Lynch, tracing the discursive patterns through which their films and public identities were framed. More specifically, I examined how criticism attributed different forms of value to their work - technical mastery, artistic ambition, accessibility, opacity, market orientation, and cultural prestige - and how those values contributed to constructing each director’s authorial image for a non-specialist audience.

My approach combined interpretive semiotics with the analysis of journalistic discourse. Drawing on Umberto Eco’s notion of the Model Reader, I treated reviews as mediating texts that actively shape the relationship between author, public, and context. I also used the conceptual tension between high culture and kitsch, as developed in Apocalittici e integrati, to observe when and how the two directors were positioned as culturally legitimised auteurs, and when their work was instead simplified, downgraded, or adapted to the logics of mass culture. A key methodological choice was to read critics as part of the collective enunciation of each newspaper - that is, as expressions of a broader editorial and cultural horizon. This made it possible to compare not only what was said about Scorsese and Lynch, but also how different newspapers made them intelligible, acceptable, controversial, or prestigious for their own readers.

• —Qualitative research
• —Critical writing
• —Media analysis
• —Research synthesis