Below are abstracts of my conference papers.

Event: Annual MeCCSA Postgraduate Conference.
Bangor University, Wales. July 2009.

Title: “Spaghetti Westerns Caught in the Crossfire: Translating the Stylistics of Political Violence”

Abstract: Amidst the political ferments of 1968-69, two Italian Westerns whose narratives sought to expound militant anti-imperialist polemics – Damiano Damiani’s Quien sabe? and Sergio Sollima’s La resa dei conti – were released in US cinemas. Their ideological inscriptions, however, went almost entirely unnoticed in this international marketplace.

This paper argues that this failure to reach their intended audience was intimately related to processes of elaborating cinematic violence. Through analysing the cinematography of key films, the study highlights an oft-overlooked divergence between the Spaghetti Western’s stylistics and those proliferating in late-1960s Hollywood. The Italian genre, repeatedly held to constitute a decisive influence on the stylistics of 60s and 70s US cinema, was in fact characterised by violence of a singularly retrospective tenor, harking back to the defunct norms of the Production Code era. Conversely, the countercultural practices of New Hollywood which were simultaneously transforming US cinema were rejecting this very aesthetic with pioneering methodologies of depicting on-screen brutality.

Damiani’s and Sollima’s radicalism was therefore lost in translation because they adhered to the Italian Western’s conventions, whose archaic cinematic language signified no political imperative to many US countercultural audiences. These radical communities were speaking in different languages cinematically as well as verbally.

Event: Popular Italian Cinema: An international conference.
King’s College, London. May 2009.

Title: “Out West, Down South: Gazing at America in Reverse Shot through Damiano Damiani’s Quien sabe?”

Abstract: Amongst Italy’s political Left, the ostensibly aspirational lure of Americana in the post-war years was frequently inflected with ambivalence and misgivings over the socio-cultural impact of an increased transatlantic flow. Such disquiet is widely identified in films by Italy’s acclaimed auteurs (La dolce vita and Rocco e i suoi fratelli being two notable examples). Where discontent with the Economic Miracle and the onset of US-led modernity is concerned, however, the milieu of filone cinema is frequently overlooked. This paper demonstrates that, with its burgeoning appropriation of the Western genre in the 1960s, this superficially imitative category of filmmaking in fact offered a paradigm for cognitive resistance to the hegemonic codes of US popular culture.

Damiano Damiani’s Quien sabe? (1966) forms the locus of this argument. Arising from the radical pen of Franco Solinas, this film’s militant polemic is, on a narrative plane, transparent. Through an examination of its meticulously choreographed cinematography, however, the paper interprets Quien sabe?’s didactic manipulation of camerawork, mise en scène and point-of-view as equally central components in this agenda. A bravura riposte to modes of representation dominant in Hollywood’s Cold War appropriations of revolutionary Mexico, Quien sabe? is read as a direct counterpoint to Robert Aldrich’s Vera Cruz (1954). It takes possession of what Richard Slotkin calls Hollywood’s “counterinsurgency Westerns” on behalf of those “Southern” peoples hitherto marginalised by the genre’s normative framings. By turning the film camera around, Damiani registers an altogether less-than-awe-struck gaze at bourgeois culture, from the perspective of those discontented with US hegemony, both in Italy and abroad.

That Italy’s post-war “Americanisation” was less a process of linear subordination than one of appropriation, re-inscription and semantic negotiation is tangible through Damiani’s lens. By reworking the heavily-coded signifiers of the Western genre, Quien sabe? reflects processes of creative participation in the meanings of transatlantic artefacts which characterised much of the nation’s cultural discourse in this era. Far from acquiescing to the received signifiers of mass culture, the film’s status as “popular” cinema rests upon its aspect as a forum for resistance, and a voice for sub-cultural communities.

Event: Cultural Borrowings: A Study Day on Appropriation, Reworking and Transformation.
The University of Nottingham. March 2008.

Title: “A Marxist’s Gotta Do What a Marxist’s Gotta Do: Political Violence on Italy’s Ethical Frontier”

Abstract: Italian appropriations of the Hollywood Western in the 1960s and 1970s are commonly viewed as iconoclastic, postmodern undertakings, emptying the genre’s signifiers of ideological undertones and leaving only extreme, stylised violence in their place. Indeed, the “Spaghetti” Western arose from processes of transatlantic borrowing evident across post-war Italian society which, while emulating American models of modernity, appropriated and re-formulated the ubiquitous symbols of U.S. popular culture. From this hybrid genre in turn emerged a sub-category which openly championed armed insurrection against Occidental capitalism; nowhere, it would seem, could the appellation ‘Western’ be more incongruously employed.

My paper, however, asserts that this militant sub-genre did not alter the inherent preoccupations of the Hollywood paradigm, instead identifying therein entirely appropriate means through which to disseminate such Fanonist ideologies. Ambivalence towards authority and advocacy of extreme violence are issues at the heart of the Hollywood Western which nevertheless possessed immediate significance in Italy in the late 1960s and 1970s, when the rapid modernisation of the Economic Miracle was met with political terrorism. If the wider Italian Western was guilty of draining the Hollywood version’s pervasive brutality of all meaning, this is not a charge that can be levelled at such radicalised film-makers as Franco Solinas and Sergio Corbucci; such films as ¿Quien sabe?, Tepepa and Compañeros instead constitute a populist manifestation of contemporary debates concerning the efficacy of armed insurrection amongst New Left Italian militants.

In America, “Vietnam” Westerns displayed pacifism, reconciliation and remorse. Compañeros typifies the synonymous Italian reaction: “The time has come to respond to violence with violence. To respond any other way is cowardice”. That such cultural transposition could be effected with so little formal subversion displays both the ideological malleability and the contradictory nature of what Robert Warshow called the Western’s “serious orientation to the problem of violence”.

Event: Images at the Threshold: A Postgraduate Film Conference.
The University of Bath. April 2007

Title: “Go West, Comrade: Recollection, Transposition and Populist Radicalism in the New Left Westerns of Sergio Sollima”

Abstract: In 1966, Italian director Sergio Sollima adapted a treatment by Franco Solinas concerning the oppression of Sardinian peasants into a Western, entitled La resa dei conti (1967). By transposing this political tale to Texas and Mexico, Sollima both escaped censorship by appropriating the popular “Spaghetti Western” tag, and appealed to Latin American sympathies at a time when Third Worldist doctrine was de rigeur amongst Italian militants. That the Western possessed political potentiality was widely recognised, but Sollima’s radical parables are problematic to such generic categorisation, since both here and in his second Western, Faccia a faccia (1967), his primary aim was to appropriate this century-old iconography from another continent to narrate his personal experiences of politicisation during the Fascist period.

This paper explores the temporal and geographical transposition of Sollima’s memories, and asks why it was that this conceit found such currency amongst the Italian student movement of 1967-8, above and beyond his fashionable Third Worldism. I suggest that the director identified in the myth of the “Wild West” a past charged with signifiers which crystallised and illuminated contemporary politics, brushing history ‘against the grain’ in an analogous agenda to that of the Frankfurt School, whose doctrine had a profound influence upon the emergent New Left counterculture to whom these films appealed. Sollima’s fusion of memory and myth harnessed the energies of recollection to stimulate revolutionary consciousness, and connected with this young, “hip” audience, disillusioned with Italy’s economic miracle and enthralled by the teachings of Marcuse and Benjamin.