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”.