Event: Kiss Kiss Kill Kill: A Symposium on the Forgotten Spy Film of Cold War Europe.
University of Hertfordshire. September 18th 2010.

Title: “Chronicles of Lead: Transatlantic Flow in 1970s Italian Cop Thrillers”

Abstract: In Italy, the 1970s are known as the anni di piombo: a phrase – literally ‘years of lead’ – referring to the wave of politically-motivated violence in this decade. The simultaneous trend of violent cop thrillers (known as polizieschi) both exploited the perception of a lawless society and unashamedly borrowed from contemporary Hollywood blockbusters. They are therefore overwhelmingly categorised either as reactionary fantasies of law and order, or as parasitic imitations of American imports. The finer implications of their dialogue with US cinema remain overlooked.

This paper advances an overdue discourse in Anglo-American criticism of 1970s Italian cinema: that of analysing the complex ways in which US popular culture was negotiated with and appropriated as a means by which to view, dramatise and resolve neuroses surrounding extremism, terror and the individual’s relationship to societal power structures. While a fluid Italian national identity in which transatlantic reference points had become ever-present is a key topic, I seek to look beyond such reductive notions as ‘imitation’ or ‘reaction’. This research highlights the nuances of these cultural exchanges, both by identifying what the filmmakers themselves sought to ‘do’ – politically and culturally – and by asking what inadvertent meanings arise from their engagement with transatlantic models. Polizieschi are thus situated in a hybrid continuum of politicised popular Italian cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, which gave voice to widespread unease concerning the operation of the modern state and attendant social breakdown by adapting US cinematic formats.

The paper asks to what extent these films’ recourse to Hollywood genre convention was an enactment of a collective need in Italian society: one of attaching a coherent narrative to an era of extreme cultural and political disorientation. By viewing these films, not as straightforwardly reactionary polemics, but as repositories of cultural memory and sites of popular trauma, the study considers how conflicting strands of politics and culture meet within polizieschi.