A heavily-armed battalion of communist students, led by a man dressed as Che Guevara, is a disconcerting spectacle at the best of times. When it appears in a Western, the viewer might be forgiven for checking the DVD case, only to be informed that the film is indeed described thus. Clearly, something is amiss.

Though the Italian (or “Spaghetti”) Westerns of the 1960s continue to undergo a mainstream renaissance, their complex and intimate relationship with the troubled politics of the era is often overlooked. In this talk, Austin Fisher examines how and why this genre became co-opted for the dissemination of Far-Left political invective as the ferments surrounding Vietnam and the international student movement shook global politics. Repeatedly, between the years 1966 and 1970, directors such as Damiano Damiani, Sergio Sollima, Sergio Corbucci and Giulio Petroni – as well as famed Marxist screenwriter Franco Solinas – identified in the Western’s established tropes new resonance for Italy’s nascent radical groups and militant constituencies.

That a format lifted from US popular culture provided the forum for such outlooks speaks volumes about the transitional nature of Italian identities in the post-war era. By locating these radicalised films as intriguing historical documents, Fisher illustrates a process of cultural blending and transnational appropriation, through which Americana offered endlessly manipulable building blocks for the negotiation of a contemporary sensibility.

Defining the “popular” cinematic product has always been a fraught and problematic task for the academy. In Italian film studies – replete for so long with discourses surrounding neorealism, “national cinema” and the canonical post-war auteurs – only relatively recently have concerted efforts been made to demarcate this nebulous concept. As Italy’s hugely prolific genre cinema of the 1960s and 1970s becomes increasingly de rigueur, it is common practice for scholars to defend these films from the stigma of derivativeness from Hollywood, either by insisting on a hidden sophistication that likens them to revered auteur cinema, or by emphasising that their stylistic tics, their eccentric narrative structures and their disregard for verisimilitude constitute a purposefully contrary aesthetic, attuned to tastes entirely divergent from the global (and therefore, in post-war Western Europe, “Americanised”) “mainstream”.

This paper, however, will argue that the derivativeness from US paradigms to be found in these genres is in and of itself both an apt expression of a “popular” sensibility and, given the cultural-political conditions of the era, a consummately “Italian” process, registering and filtering the lived experience of the nation’s audiences. Vigorous debates that have occupied broader filmic discourse for decades have still to be conducted in a field dominated by the assumptions of auteur theory, with Italian genre cinema until recently being starved of the nuanced scholarly attention afforded its transatlantic cousin. By applying approaches from the fields of “trash” and “cult” cinema to this milieu, I will therefore discuss how the flaws and confusions within such genres as the peplum, the spaghetti western, the giallo thriller and the poliziottesco police drama inadvertently register the transitional nature of Italian identity in this era; their bewilderingly transnational dynamics serving up documents of an Italy in the throes of cultural and political upheaval. Beyond defensiveness or opprobrium, the question should not be whether these films are beholden to US culture, but why, and to what degree?

The conference runs from Wednesday 11th to Friday 13th January, at the Luton campus. More details can be found on the conference website.

This fascinating season of films explores the myriad ways in which the Western genre has acted as a locus for political allegory as it has increasingly crossed cultural and national boundaries in the post-war era.

You can book tickets for the event here.

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Read it here: Radical Frontiers – Faccia a faccia

La resistenza popolare: Transcultural Memory in Giulio Petroni’s Tepepa

That memories of the partisan movement played an important role in the communist subculture’s self-definition in post-war Italy is well-travelled scholarly territory. Where the negotiation and contestation of these memories through popular cinema is concerned, however, notable gaps remain. Specifically, in the 1960s, the Italian Western offered opportunities for filmmakers who had fought against Nazism – such as Giulio Petroni, Franco Solinas, Sergio Sollima and Giulio Questi – to transpose their wartime experiences into a modish cultural format. This paper argues that the transnational dynamics of the ‘popular’ cinematic artefact here served up, not only a forum for historical memory, but contemporary documents of an Italy in the throes of cultural and political upheaval.

The paper’s main case-study is Petroni’s Tepepa (1969): a film in which contested space within popular political memory serves as both a performative mode and a central narrative theme. Through analysis of Tepepa’s network of subjective flashbacks, I will firstly show how this tale of Mexican bandits seeks to re-enact partisans’ sense of betrayal by the modern state of Italy. That the filter for this meditation upon the selective nature of national and sub-cultural memory comes through direct recourse to Hollywood, however, also registers the transitional nature of Italian cultural identity in this era, problematising dichotomous notions which have tended to ghettoise filone cinema within the term ‘popular’.

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A Cult Called Django
Amongst the Italian Western’s many devoted aficionados, Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966) is revered as a tour de force of the ‘Spaghetti’ aesthetic. Surreal, macabre and gleefully violent, its status as a non-Sergio Leone text bestows upon it a counter-canonical kudos further enriching its value as a ‘cult’ artefact. A pop-cultural phenomenon in its own right, its success spawned a host of imitations and unofficial sequels.

This paper will argue that the film’s cult status has arisen from a confluence of textual, cultural and industrial factors, which offers an intriguing case study of exploitation cinema’s assimilation into the global mainstream. Firstly, by locating Django within broader cultural vacillations between appropriation of, and resistance to, Americana in post-war Italy, I show how Django’s curious blend of generic and national influences has attained a cult ‘authenticity’: one which is ‘discovered’ and cherished by the dedicated fan. This surreal displacement of the Western genre into a distinctively native vision of Hollywood’s hallowed founding myth is thus analysed as a document of a certain kind of ‘Italian-ness’ – one in the throes of confusing cultural upheaval – which the more internationally-oriented films of Leone do not register so tangibly. Moreover, the film’s cult cachet in Anglophone markets was fostered by irregular distribution patterns, in part brought about by censorship, which secured the film a piecemeal cultural memory. Imprinted upon the popular imagination as a pop-art slideshow of ‘excessive’ set-pieces, Django became a transnational Rorschach test, appropriated, imitated and revered by cinephile, film buff and movie geek alike.

The paper will conclude by examining corollaries of these reception patterns: namely, the integration of Django into the consummate ‘cool’ of grindhouse cinema, and of this filmic milieu into the global mainstream. A frequent reference point in the work of such filmmakers as Tarantino and Rodriguez, Corbucci’s magnum opus has become part of a hermetically-sealed network of movie quotations. Removed from its social context, has the film therefore become just one of many depthless pop-cultural simulacra?

Cine-Excess is an annual international film conference and festival which attracts global film-makers, scholars, distributors and exhibitors to an event which features filmmaker discussions, a themed three day conference and 5-7 UK theatrical premieres.

Cine-Excess V focuses on the theme of the controversial cult image in its political, historical and aesthetic contexts. With the resurgence of critical interest in the 1980s ‘video nasties’, as well as whole new generation of films being subject to official state control, the cult image is now becoming a crucial index between the censor and the censored. In order to investigate this further, Cine-Excess V will consider global case-studies of the controversial cult image, looking at both their political and aesthetic particularities. The event will consider the cult image in a broad remit, focusing on a range of cult media and technologies, including film, television, games, comics, and digital media.

Cine-Excess V “Subverting the Senses: The Politics and Aesthetics of Excess” takes place from 26 to 28 May 2011, at ODEON Covent Garden, 135 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, WC2H 8AH. Ticket details can be found here.

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Spaghetti Lefties: Postmodern Politics in Robert Rodriguez’s Machete

The confrontational political tone of Robert Rodriguez’s latest Tex-Mex gore-fest Machete (2010) has caused controversy in the US amid accusations of inciting race war, its call-to-arms superficially encouraging Hispanic revolt against white America. So far overlooked in criticism of this film, however, is the fact that its narrative and political contents are lifted directly from Sergio Sollima’s Marxist Spaghetti Western La resa dei conti (1967).

This paper will show how Rodriguez’s film seeks to plug into a tradition of radical left-wing Italian Westerns from the late 1960s, before asking what are the cultural-political implications of this intertextual conceit. During the years in and around the international student movement, films by Sollima, Damiano Damiani, Sergio Corbucci and others appropriated Hollywood’s imaginary ‘Mexico’ for overtly countercultural purposes with tales of peasant resistance to Western imperialism. Rodriguez has long been purposeful in his reenactment of defunct exploitation genres – the Spaghetti Western foremost among them – but this has previously taken the form of stylistic and narrative homage alone, draining the source material of geographical, temporal and political specificity. By additionally appropriating the ideologies of these radicalised Cold War polemics to comment upon race relations in contemporary America, Machete offers an intriguing case-study of transcultural negotiation and temporal transposition.

Is Machete therefore merely another depthless simulacrum of the postmodern age, once more aping popular Italian cinema’s ‘cool’ stylistics alone, or does it resurrect an era when action cinema meant something politically, as well as financially?

‘Go back to the United States, Niño!’ (Quien sabe?, 1966)

I therefore argue that the cultural value of ‘popular’ or ‘exploitation’ cinema needs to be judged by criteria other than merely artistic merit, authorial vision or ‘quality’, since these films’ very flaws inadvertently tell us much about an Italian identity in flux and an era of turmoil.

Though hopefully a coherent and accessible whole, the arguments presented in this article also provide a taster of my forthcoming book Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western: Politics, Violence and Popular Italian Cinema (London: I.B.Tauris, 2011).

Click here to read the full article

Sergio Leone and the Western Myth: Reading the Ritual
a dissertation by Austin Fisher

Limited to selecting just twelve films for review from the vast array of Italian Westerns, my choices may raise eyebrows. This was my intention; for what good is an appreciation of genre cinema if we its audiences do not actively subject the received canons therein to constant scrutiny? Less a “top twelve” than a desire to look again at aspects of this oft-homogenised filone, it is to be hoped that the chapter will offer something new to academic study of popular Italian cinema, as well as sparking debate amongst fans. The contributions, in chronological order by Italian film release, are as follows:

Christopher Frayling: Per un pugno di dollari / A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone, 1964)

Dimitris Eleftheriotis: Johnny Oro / Ringo and His Golden Pistol (Sergio Corbucci, 1966)

Iain Robert Smith: Django (Sergio Corbucci, 1966)

Austin Fisher: El Chuncho, quién sabe? / A Bullet for the General (Damiano Damiani, 1966)

Robbie Edmonstone: Se sei vivo, spara! / Django Kill! (If You Live Shoot!) (Giulio Questi, 1967)

Mimmo Gianneri: La resa dei conti / The Big Gundown (Sergio Sollima, 1967)

Austin Fisher: Faccia a faccia / Face to Face (Sergio Sollima, 1967)

Phil Hardcastle: I giorni dell’ira / Day of Anger (Tonino Valerii, 1967)

Daniel O’Brien: Ehi amico…c’è Sabata, hai chiuso! / Sabata (Gianfranco Parolini, 1969)

Eleanor Andrews: Lo chiamavano Trinità / My Name is Trinity (Enzo Barboni, 1970)

Iain Robert Smith: Keoma (Enzo G. Castellari, 1976)

Robbie Edmonstone: Mannaja / A Man Called Blade (Sergio Martino, 1977)