Venue: The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. 16th April 2012.

Title: Go West, Comrade! Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western

Abstract: A heavily-armed battalion of communist students, led by a man dressed as Che Guevara, is a disconcerting spectacle at the best of times. When it appears in a Western, the viewer might be forgiven for checking the DVD case, only to be informed that the film is indeed described thus. Clearly, something is amiss.

Though the Italian (or “Spaghetti”) Westerns of the 1960s continue to undergo a mainstream renaissance, their complex and intimate relationship with the troubled politics of the era is often overlooked. In this talk, Austin Fisher examines how and why this genre became co-opted for the dissemination of Far-Left political invective as the ferments surrounding Vietnam and the international student movement shook global politics. Repeatedly, between the years 1966 and 1970, directors such as Damiano Damiani, Sergio Sollima, Sergio Corbucci and Giulio Petroni – as well as famed Marxist screenwriter Franco Solinas – identified in the Western’s established tropes new resonance for Italy’s nascent radical groups and militant constituencies.

That a format lifted from US popular culture provided the forum for such outlooks speaks volumes about the transitional nature of Italian identities in the post-war era. By locating these radicalised films as intriguing historical documents, Fisher illustrates a process of cultural blending and transnational appropriation, through which Americana offered endlessly manipulable building blocks for the negotiation of a contemporary sensibility.