Event: Society for Italian Studies Biennial Conference.
The University of St. Andrews. 6-9 July 2011.

Title: “La resistenza popolare: Transcultural Memory in Giulio Petroni’s Tepepa“.

Abstract: That memories of the partisan movement played an important role in the communist subculture’s self-definition in post-war Italy is well-travelled scholarly territory. Where the negotiation and contestation of these memories through popular cinema is concerned, however, notable gaps remain. Specifically, in the 1960s, the Italian Western offered opportunities for filmmakers who had fought against Nazism – such as Giulio Petroni, Franco Solinas, Sergio Sollima and Giulio Questi – to transpose their wartime experiences into a modish cultural format. This paper argues that the transnational dynamics of the ‘popular’ cinematic artefact here served up, not only a forum for historical memory, but contemporary documents of an Italy in the throes of cultural and political upheaval.

The paper’s main case-study is Petroni’s Tepepa (1969): a film in which contested space within popular political memory serves as both a performative mode and a central narrative theme. Through analysis of Tepepa’s network of subjective flashbacks, I will firstly show how this tale of Mexican bandits seeks to re-enact partisans’ sense of betrayal by the modern state of Italy. That the filter for this meditation upon the selective nature of national and sub-cultural memory comes through direct recourse to Hollywood, however, also registers the transitional nature of Italian cultural identity in this era, problematising dichotomous notions which have tended to ghettoise filone cinema within the term ‘popular’.