Event: SCMS 2012

Title: Italian Americanisms: Popular Italian Cinema in the Light of the Transnational

Abstract: Defining the “popular” cinematic product has always been a fraught and problematic task for the academy. In Italian film studies – replete for so long with discourses surrounding neorealism, “national cinema” and the canonical post-war auteurs – only relatively recently have concerted efforts been made to demarcate this nebulous concept. As Italy’s hugely prolific genre cinema of the 1960s and 1970s becomes increasingly de rigueur, it is common practice for scholars to defend these films from the stigma of derivativeness from Hollywood, either by insisting on a hidden sophistication that likens them to revered auteur cinema, or by emphasising that their stylistic tics, their eccentric narrative structures and their disregard for verisimilitude constitute a purposefully contrary aesthetic, attuned to tastes entirely divergent from the global (and therefore, in post-war Western Europe, “Americanised”) “mainstream”.

This paper, however, will argue that the derivativeness from US paradigms to be found in these genres is in and of itself both an apt expression of a “popular” sensibility and, given the cultural-political conditions of the era, a consummately “Italian” process, registering and filtering the lived experience of the nation’s audiences. Vigorous debates that have occupied broader filmic discourse for decades have still to be conducted in a field dominated by the assumptions of auteur theory, with Italian genre cinema until recently being starved of the nuanced scholarly attention afforded its transatlantic cousin. By applying approaches from the fields of “trash” and “cult” cinema to this milieu, I will therefore discuss how the flaws and confusions within such genres as the peplum, the spaghetti western, the giallo thriller and the poliziottesco police drama inadvertently register the transitional nature of Italian identity in this era; their bewilderingly transnational dynamics serving up documents of an Italy in the throes of cultural and political upheaval. Beyond defensiveness or opprobrium, the question should not be whether these films are beholden to US culture, but why, and to what degree?