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.