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.