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.