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 By locating these radicalised films as intriguing historical documents, Fisher illustrates a process of cultural blending and transnational appropriation, through which Americana offered endlessly manipulable building blocks for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.

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?

The conference runs from Wednesday 11th to Friday 13th January, at the Luton campus. More details can be found on the conference website.

This fascinating season of films explores the myriad ways in which the Western genre has acted as a locus for political allegory as it has increasingly crossed cultural and national boundaries in the post-war era.

You can book tickets for the event here.

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Read it here: Radical Frontiers – Faccia a faccia

Spaghetti Lefties: Postmodern Politics in Robert Rodriguez’s Machete

I’m going to look at a phenomenon that has been gathering pace for a few years now, as “cult” cinema increasingly enters the global “mainstream”, and one-time fanboys of grindhouse violence and “cool” pop culture seek to re-enact the cinema of their youth.

This is most visible in the ongoing project of Quentin Tarantino, Robert Rodriguez and others to resurrect exploitation genres of the 60s and 70s, and I’m going to use Rodriguez’s recent film Machete as my main case-in-point. This film firstly continues Rodriguez’s relentless and self-conscious attempt to re-enact the style and aura of the Spaghetti Western but, more specifically, it also seeks to plug into some of the political elements of that Italian genre, which I’ll outline.

So, I want to consider what the cultural-political implications might be of this rampant intertextuality.

• Firstly, by taking a look at the culturally specific political resonances which were inscribed into certain Spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s.
• Then I’ll look at how Rodriguez seeks to engage with this legacy in Machete.
• and I’ll finish by arguing that the processes we can see at work in this film give us an indication of the broader path “cult” cinema has taken over the last forty or so years. I’ll suggest that the cultural-political specificity of various genres is being emptied out as they’re increasingly assimilated into the mainstream in a soup of knowing pop cultural references.

Firstly, then, I just want to quickly outline this project of overt quotation and pastiche, in which Rodriguez and Tarantino have invested so purposefully and programmatically, seeking to reprise the “schlock” milieu of violent low-budget genre cinema from the drive-ins and grindhouses of the late 60s and the 1970s. One of the most popular genres playing in this arena of cinematic consumption was the Italian, or “Spaghetti”, Western, largely in double-bills alongside kung fu, horror, Blaxploitation and other disparate popular genres from around the world.

The references to the Spaghetti Western in the work of Rodriguez and Tarantino are far too numerous to list fully here, so I shall just summarise some of the most explicit examples:

• Rodriguez’s “El Mariachi” trilogy alone is replete with conspicuous influences: a hero’s guitar case loaded with weaponry and a blind gunslinger miraculously finding his targets, for example, directly quote lesser known Spaghetti Westerns (Django and Il pistolero cieco respectively), while the third instalment’s title – Once Upon a Time in Mexico – is an undisguised and obvious nod to Sergio Leone.
• Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds opens with a similarly undisguised tribute to Leone with the intertitle “Once Upon a Time in Nazi Occupied France”, and then employs the score of Sergio Sollima’s rather more obscure Spaghetti Western La resa dei conti to set up a tense confrontation.

What’s notable about these knowing tributes is that they each place the Spaghetti Western as just one ingredient in a melting pot of pop culture references, subsumed amidst equally enthralled nods to other categories like anime, Blaxploitation, kung fu, slasher horror and Hong Kong action cinemas.

Each of these, of course, arose from separate and specific cultural contexts, which are discarded by this surface borrowing, and Tarantino’s two volumes of Kill Bill are the prime examples of this generic porosity. Kill Bill presents a bewildering array of such references, each playfully inviting an audience to identify musical refrains, bits of dialogue, cinematic techniques and visual quotations, all culled from disparate national cinemas, which are united only by their grindhouse distribution or related “cult” status in the USA.

These quotations are all stylistic or narrative and, operating purely at this “textual” level, each empties its source material of national or chronological specificity. They are carried out with a self-consciously postmodern sensibility, very close to what Jean Baudrillard termed the “hyper-real”, wherein networks of images and signifiers, removed from their socio-political and temporal contexts, play upon each other without any reference in reality.

Then, the most recent collaboration between Rodriguez and Tarantino – the aptly titled double-bill Grindhouse – takes this hyper-reality to the next level. Again, here we have nods and winks, a bewildering array of knowing 1970s pop culture references and “cool” dialogue all playing a self-referential game with the audience.

What makes this nostalgia project so remarkably archetypal of Baudrillard’s “hyper-real” is its pained effort, in both its cinematic construction and in its marketing, to simulate the experience of 1970s grindhouse movie-going.

• Both of the constituent films – Tarantino’s Death Proof and Rodriguez’s Planet Terror – are shot with purposefully manufactured scratchy film stock, along with deliberate “faulty” jump cuts in the editing.
• Add to this, the self-consciously outmoded double-bill marketing pitch, complete with an intermission and a fake trailer simulating this “drive-in” experience.
• And the lurid marketing posters from a bygone age, which are synthetically aged as if they are indeed authentic 1970s products.

Even the framing devices around the films help to simulate 1970s exploitation cinema, with the “R” rating intertitle and the psychedelic “Our Feature Presentation” announcement leading into each film.

So here, the actual “event” of 1970s grindhouse cinema is arguably no longer separable from the simulacrum, so close to the “original” is this hyper-reality, down to the minutest details. Grindhouse is no longer just making reference to 70s cinema; it’s seeking to recreate it as a perfect simulacrum.

For Baudrillard, such a nostalgic process of trying to recreate the past so meticulously means that the “reality” dissipates. In this case, the “reality” can be seen as the socio-economic or political conditions of the various national cinemas, which ended up playing in US grindhouses and being venerated by US audiences. So, these films are very much examples of Baudrillard’s “depthless simulacra”, and I’ll return to this point in my conclusion.

To arrive at Machete, then, this film originated as the aforementioned fake trailer used in the manufactured intermission in Grindhouse, and it was only expanded into a full film after Grindhouse was released. So its entire raison d’etre is one of helping in the process of simulating this milieu, this 70s drive-in experience, and it was again shot with scratchy film stock, and marketed with similarly synthetically aged posters, as we can see here.

From this perspective, then, Machete is a hyper-real, depthless simulacrum in the truest sense: an imitation of an imitation, spawned from and recreating this hermetic universe of cinematic re-enactment, divorced from the original’s cultural context at yet another remove.

There is though an intriguing additional aspect to this film in the way in which it selects and uses its source material. Again, here we find a loving re-enactment of one of Rodriguez’s favourite 70s grindhouse genres – this time, again, the Spaghetti Western – but now, there appears to be an attempt to engage quite openly with, not only the stylistic tics, but the political resonances, of this source material.

Machete is a modern-day story of an impoverished Mexican who crosses the border into Texas and becomes caught up in the evil machinations of North American big business and political corruption. He’s framed to cover up the crimes of officialdom, and spends most of the film on the run from a corrupt white man’s law. Predictably, he fights back against “the Man” with ruthless force, to be apotheosised as a Third World hero.

This plot is almost identical to Sergio Sollima’s 1967 Italian Western La resa dei conti and, of course, this is no coincidence. La resa dei conti, as I mentioned before, had previously been quoted by Tarantino for its stylistic attributes (specifically, its soundtrack) in Inglourious Basterds, and it’s become one of the most loved “cult” Spaghetti Westerns, cherished by “real” fans, who take pride in searching beyond the international fame of Sergio Leone.

Sollima’s film is also one of a number of Italian Westerns released in Italy between 1966 and 1970, which were made by filmmakers seeking quite overtly to communicate Far Left political views on Vietnam, anti-imperialism, latent fascism and state power. These films tried to use Mexican peasants violently rejecting Western influence as symbols for contemporary conflicts around the globe, in this era of aggressive American counterinsurgency abroad and growing mass protest in Italy and other Western nations, when Third Worldist doctrine was de rigueur amongst the emergent Italian New Left and the efficacy of armed insurrection against Western governments was a hot topic of debate.

By purposefully registering, negotiating and polemicising countercultural mores in the volatile political arena of late 1960s Italy, these films are fascinating documents of their time and place, in a number of ways: by, for example, displaying the vogue for often over-simplified Maoism, Fanonism and other confrontational radical philosophies in the era; but also, by appropriating the Western genre as a vehicle for these political oppositions, they give an intriguing insight into the cultural confusions in Italian identity in the post-war era, when US popular culture was becoming ever more ubiquitous (if you want to read more about these films and their place in the pantheon of popular Italian cinema, I’ve written a book all about them!).

The parallels between La resa dei conti and Machete are conspicuous, and these are not just narrative, but also symbolic.

• Firstly, the Mexican peasant hero in Sollima’s film is named Cuchillo, which is Spanish for “knife”. Cuchillo only ever fights with knives, even when his malevolent Western adversary has a gun, and Sollima made many statements emphasising that this was supposed to be a symbol for the revenge of the Third World against the USA: a kind of Viet Cong guerrilla in the Wild West.
• Rodriguez’s hero, who also favours knives, is named Machete: a farm tool commonly used to symbolise peasant resistance. Machete is, like Cuchillo, very obviously a confrontational representative of the Third World, railing against the capitalist West, as his catchphrase – “You just fucked with the wrong Mexican” – makes pretty clear.

• Secondly, both films feature scenes in which powerful, corrupt white Americans literally hunt wretched Mexicans for sport. Sollima used this to portray Cuchillo as a man of the land, escaping from and outwitting the West in another attempted allegory for Vietnam.
• In Machete, illegal aliens crossing the border into Texas are hunted and gunned down by caricatured right-wing crazies, and this depiction caused some controversy in the conservative media in America, with Rodriguez being rather hilariously accused of inciting race-war. Either way, he’s seemingly attempting to make some kind of point about contemporary Hispanic-white race relations in the USA.

The pertinent question for my purposes, though, isn’t how controversial, sincere or indeed banal Rodriguez’s political message might be (and, incidentally, it’s very banal indeed), but what this process of transcultural borrowing might mean.

I’ve previously stated that the quotations of exploitation cinema to be found throughout the work of Rodriguez and Tarantino drain the originals of cultural-political specificity. However, by not only appropriating the style and feel of the Spaghetti Western, but very deliberately selecting La resa dei conti to create a polemic on racial politics and coercive state mechanisms in contemporary society, is Rodriguez actually resurrecting the long forgotten political inscriptions that played so prominent a role at the time of the Italian films’ production?

Certainly this has been done before:

In 1993, Mario van Peebles borrowed extensively from these politicised Italian Westerns, and merged them with the radicalised tenor of Blaxploitation to create the curious revisionist Western Posse: a tale of black outlaws in the Wild West ruthlessly fighting back against a racist society, and this was made in direct response to the Rodney King beating and the LA riots of 1992.

The purposeful selection in Posse of the Italian Western as a reference point for this counter-history of the USA’s most ideologically-charged mythology, along with the conscious application of 1970s political oppositions to contemporary American race relations, highlighted the innate countercultural appeal commanded by the Spaghettis, hinting that the political messages of these films had survived and been cherished by certain marginalised audiences in the grindhouses of 70s USA. So, is Machete doing something similar, again identifying the political currency in the Spaghetti Western, and resurrecting the significance it once had to subaltern 1970s audiences, to comment on contemporary politics?

Well, I wish I could say yes, but I think it’s actually just another game with the audience of spotting myriad cult cinematic references.

This becomes very clear when you see the conclusion to Machete, which lovingly rebuilds the makeshift fort from Mad Max II, to set up an explosive final showdown. Once again, these influences are melded together to create a sense that the Spaghetti Western is synonymous with other modishly violent cult films. Add to this the film’s central role in the Tarantino/Rodriguez Grindhouse project, complete with its scratchy stock and aged posters, and this really isn’t doing anything to recover the culturally specific political elements of the genre at all.

Posse of course also merges pop culture references, but Van Peebles carefully selects elements of film history for their importance to countercultural audiences of the 70s. Rodriguez’s far more slapdash approach to selecting his sources means that any meanings get lost in a labyrinth of surface references to the merely “cool”.

So, I want to conclude by thinking about what the significance is for cult cinema and its relationship to contemporary popular culture more broadly of this process, whereby these political Spaghetti Westerns have entered mainstream cinema as part of a hermetically-sealed world of “cool” movie quotations.

I’d like to return to Baudrillard, who I think can provide an apt paradigm for appraising Machete. In Simulacra and Simulation, he argues that the USA, and its cinema in particular, are evidence of a pervasive hyperreality, where fiction and reality are no longer distinct, and cultural signifiers no longer refer to any reality at all. Memorably, he uses Disneyland as an exemplar of this frozen childlike state, full of nostalgia for an era that never existed in the first place.

I would argue that Machete belongs firmly within this discourse surrounding the postmodern condition: a superficial obsession with nostalgic pastiche, which Fredric Jameson described as a “symptom of a society that’s become incapable of dealing with time and history.” Indeed, there’s a strange denial of history going on here, and a desperation to cling on to the past through images alone.

So what we see occurring in Machete, and Kill Bill and Grindhouse before it, is a mixture of genres from various national cinemas arising from diverse and specific cultural conditions, entering this hyperreal vortex of the US distribution market, and being spat out the other end, reworked with all traces of the historic and economic eras and milieus that spawned them having been stripped away.

The intriguing document of 1960s Italy which is to be found in La resa dei conti is emptied of its cultural and political specificity to reside among other “cultish” grindhouse fayre, all similarly drained of meaning in this soup of free-floating pop-cultural reference points.

… and this I think is indicative of broader trends as the tropes of what’s become known as “cult” cinema are removed from their social contexts, and assimilated into mainstream popular culture to form a network of purely cinematic quotations.

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

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’.

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A Cult Called Django
Amongst the Italian Western’s many devoted aficionados, Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966) is revered as a tour de force of the ‘Spaghetti’ aesthetic. Surreal, macabre and gleefully violent, its status as a non-Sergio Leone text bestows upon it a counter-canonical kudos further enriching its value as a ‘cult’ artefact. A pop-cultural phenomenon in its own right, its success spawned a host of imitations and unofficial sequels.

This paper will argue that the film’s cult status has arisen from a confluence of textual, cultural and industrial factors, which offers an intriguing case study of exploitation cinema’s assimilation into the global mainstream. Firstly, by locating Django within broader cultural vacillations between appropriation of, and resistance to, Americana in post-war Italy, I show how Django’s curious blend of generic and national influences has attained a cult ‘authenticity’: one which is ‘discovered’ and cherished by the dedicated fan. This surreal displacement of the Western genre into a distinctively native vision of Hollywood’s hallowed founding myth is thus analysed as a document of a certain kind of ‘Italian-ness’ – one in the throes of confusing cultural upheaval – which the more internationally-oriented films of Leone do not register so tangibly. Moreover, the film’s cult cachet in Anglophone markets was fostered by irregular distribution patterns, in part brought about by censorship, which secured the film a piecemeal cultural memory. Imprinted upon the popular imagination as a pop-art slideshow of ‘excessive’ set-pieces, Django became a transnational Rorschach test, appropriated, imitated and revered by cinephile, film buff and movie geek alike.

The paper will conclude by examining corollaries of these reception patterns: namely, the integration of Django into the consummate ‘cool’ of grindhouse cinema, and of this filmic milieu into the global mainstream. A frequent reference point in the work of such filmmakers as Tarantino and Rodriguez, Corbucci’s magnum opus has become part of a hermetically-sealed network of movie quotations. Removed from its social context, has the film therefore become just one of many depthless pop-cultural simulacra?

Cine-Excess is an annual international film conference and festival which attracts global film-makers, scholars, distributors and exhibitors to an event which features filmmaker discussions, a themed three day conference and 5-7 UK theatrical premieres.

Cine-Excess V focuses on the theme of the controversial cult image in its political, historical and aesthetic contexts. With the resurgence of critical interest in the 1980s ‘video nasties’, as well as whole new generation of films being subject to official state control, the cult image is now becoming a crucial index between the censor and the censored. In order to investigate this further, Cine-Excess V will consider global case-studies of the controversial cult image, looking at both their political and aesthetic particularities. The event will consider the cult image in a broad remit, focusing on a range of cult media and technologies, including film, television, games, comics, and digital media.

Cine-Excess V “Subverting the Senses: The Politics and Aesthetics of Excess” takes place from 26 to 28 May 2011, at ODEON Covent Garden, 135 Shaftesbury Avenue, London, WC2H 8AH. Ticket details can be found here.

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Spaghetti Lefties: Postmodern Politics in Robert Rodriguez’s Machete

The confrontational political tone of Robert Rodriguez’s latest Tex-Mex gore-fest Machete (2010) has caused controversy in the US amid accusations of inciting race war, its call-to-arms superficially encouraging Hispanic revolt against white America. So far overlooked in criticism of this film, however, is the fact that its narrative and political contents are lifted directly from Sergio Sollima’s Marxist Spaghetti Western La resa dei conti (1967).

This paper will show how Rodriguez’s film seeks to plug into a tradition of radical left-wing Italian Westerns from the late 1960s, before asking what are the cultural-political implications of this intertextual conceit. During the years in and around the international student movement, films by Sollima, Damiano Damiani, Sergio Corbucci and others appropriated Hollywood’s imaginary ‘Mexico’ for overtly countercultural purposes with tales of peasant resistance to Western imperialism. Rodriguez has long been purposeful in his reenactment of defunct exploitation genres – the Spaghetti Western foremost among them – but this has previously taken the form of stylistic and narrative homage alone, draining the source material of geographical, temporal and political specificity. By additionally appropriating the ideologies of these radicalised Cold War polemics to comment upon race relations in contemporary America, Machete offers an intriguing case-study of transcultural negotiation and temporal transposition.

Is Machete therefore merely another depthless simulacrum of the postmodern age, once more aping popular Italian cinema’s ‘cool’ stylistics alone, or does it resurrect an era when action cinema meant something politically, as well as financially?

‘Go back to the United States, Niño!’ (Quien sabe?, 1966)

I therefore argue that the cultural value of ‘popular’ or ‘exploitation’ cinema needs to be judged by criteria other than merely artistic merit, authorial vision or ‘quality’, since these films’ very flaws inadvertently tell us much about an Italian identity in flux and an era of turmoil.

Though hopefully a coherent and accessible whole, the arguments presented in this article also provide a taster of my forthcoming book Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western: Politics, Violence and Popular Italian Cinema (London: I.B.Tauris, 2011).

Click here to read the full article

I am here expanding upon my previous research on the Italian police dramas (known as poliziotteschi or polizieschi), which proliferated in the 1970s. I seek to illuminate these films’ complex engagement with the socio-political ferments of their era, and ask what this tells us about the reach of American popular culture in post-war Italy. I shall look at political and cinematic factors which contributed to the emergence of this violent filmmaking trend, before offering some conclusions concerning the poliziesco’s significance as both a space of transnational exchange and, ultimately, an expression of postmodern bewilderment: a peculiar breed of hyper-reality, which registers a hankering after narrative coherence in an era characterised by labyrinthine intrigue.

Firstly I must outline the most obvious – that is to say, the most culturally visible – factor in the emergence of these films: the arrival on the Italian market of internationally successful Hollywood cop thrillers, such as Dirty Harry (1971) and The French Connection (1971), as well as related crime or vigilante films (most notably Michael Winner’s Death Wish (1974)). These products of Nixon-era neuroses over social breakdown and urban violence, with their depictions of maverick crime-fighters refusing to play by the rules, were instant hits in Italy as elsewhere, and the narrative, thematic and ideological tropes of this trend were instantly replicated to cash in on a winning formula.

This, indeed, was a characteristic pattern of popular Italian cinema in the 1960s and 1970s, where numerous such cycles, or filoni, would proliferate in an incremental balance between repetition and innovation, all with an eye firmly on the perceived whims of the popular market which was of course frequently in thrall to Hollywood’s output. Consequently, though a handful of early examples had emerged prior to April 1972, it was with the Italian release of Dirty Harry in that month that the poliziesco trend really took off. Around one hundred such films would be released during the 1970s, and this film had a palpable impact both on the cycle’s recurrent plot devices and on its ideological outlook.

In Sergio Martino’s Milano trema – la polizia vuole giustizia (1973), for example, a rogue cop uses his own violent methods of law enforcement in defiance of an effete, impotent legal system which is failing in its duty to uphold the rule of law, letting rapists and murderers go free. Martino’s film is typical of the poliziesco cycle, which time and again pits the lone hero against a society overrun with street gangs, protection rackets, mafiosi and terrorists, along with assorted sadists, perverts and punks. In Milano trema, only the hero’s uncompromising methods are proved to work until, disgusted with the system he has defended, he discards his police-issue revolver, in an clear nod to the iconic final sequence of Dirty Harry (and, by extension, that of High Noon).

In other words Milano trema, along with a host of other polizieschi, replicates the narrative and ideological tropes of Don Siegel’s Hollywood blockbuster to the letter. Furthermore, Dirty Harry itself transposed key elements of the classical Western genre, which the poliziesco also inherits: the lone hero cleaning up a community threatened by lawlessness and savagery; an innate distrust of the institutions of state; and the righteousness of lethal force in defiance of a weak, cowardly codified legality, to name but a few examples. Add to all this the cycle’s ubiquitous testosterone-fuelled, high-octane car chases, which directly emulate the famous pay-off sequences of American ‘tough cop’ thrillers such as Bullitt (1968) and The French Connection, and we can see a wide-ranging network of overtly transatlantic citations converging in these films. Viewed from this perspective, it is tempting to see the poliziesco, and the Spaghetti Western before it, as operating in a parasitic relationship with the instantly-recognisable codes of Hollywood mythology.

With recent academic trends heralding a more inclusive approach to popular European cinema, however, more politically- and historically-grounded readings of these films have become prominent. Specifically, as research into Italian cinema begins to unburden itself of the yoke of post-war ‘neorealism’ and the country’s canonical auteurs, the poliziesco is increasingly included in an ‘alternative’ canon (see Barry, 2004 and Bondanella, 2009). Such analysis tends to highlight the poliziesco’s entwinement with the era of Italian history subsequently dubbed the anni di piombo, or ‘years of lead’: a period characterised by a wave of politically-motivated violence which scarred the national psyche throughout the 1970s.

Much has been, and is being, written on the relationship of cinema to this period, but I want to further point up a couple of aspects concerning the era’s representation which have particular relevance to this cycle of films and its ideological outlook: firstly, the perception of a broken society spiralling violently out of control; and secondly, the widespread distrust of officialdom and instruments of state.

The levels of urban violence in Italy during the anni di piombo were unparalleled in contemporary Europe. The years 1969-1980 saw over 12,000 incidents of politically-motivated violence – that’s three a day – and around six hundred terrorist groups of both left- and right-wing extremists were counted (Antonello & O’Leary, 2009: 1). The perpetrators were, in fact, relatively few in number when compared to the era of mass protest in the late 1960s, but the types of violent acts carried out tended to be, quite intentionally, highly visible and newsworthy: assassinations, bombings, bank robberies, shoot-outs with police and so on. Far Left groups in particular – the most notorious being the Red Brigades or Brigate rosse – thus sought to create a widespread sense that the status quo in Italian society was dysfunctional, to accelerate the course of history towards Marxist-Leninist revolution. Throughout the decade, as popular perception and public opinion became coloured by these upheavals, ‘law and order’ became an increasingly fraught issue in the media and, by extension, in election campaigns.

It doesn’t take a huge effort of will, then, to see that films depicting out-of-control street gangs, opportunistic protection rackets and psychotic political extremists might carry a contemporary, and local, imperative in such a turbulent period. Such uncompromising heroes as those portrayed by Maurizio Merli, whose laconically brutal persona appeared in no fewer than twelve polizieschi between 1975 and 1979, offered vicarious fantasies of law and order, with a tough, no-nonsense cop defying his superiors and dishing it out to petty criminals and terrorists alike.

Yet the poliziesco’s engagement with the anni di piombo goes deeper than a linear application of this tried-and-tested ‘tough cop’ schema, which can justifiably be criticised for a decidedly reactionary political outlook. More than depicting merely a weak officialdom, polizieschi go beyond simple fantasies of law and order, and explore the murky workings of power in the Italian state. These films repeatedly depict an actively malevolent, corrupt ‘system’, which is complicit with the heinous crimes against which our lone hero struggles. This surpasses the distrust of government and countercultural sentiment being expounded in Hollywood at the time, in such films as All the President’s Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976), to articulate widespread misgivings about Italy’s political elite.

Such a proclivity towards conspiracy theory – known in Italy as dietrologia – was fuelled by a persistent opacity surrounding the instruments of state, and strong suspicions that the secret service was playing a role in aiding and abetting the atrocities of the anni di piombo in an attempt to foment the conditions for an authoritarian coup. The litany of unanswered questions, shady cover-ups and ambiguous culpabilities reads as a bloody run-down of the iconic events of these years: the bombings of Milan’s Piazza Fontana in 1969 and of Brescia’s Piazza della Loggia in 1974; the kidnap and murder of Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978; and the Bologna train station bomb in 1980.

The poliziesco’s investment in this discourse of conspiracy is explicit. In film after film, murky cabals of ruthless capitalists, evil power-mongers and corrupt public servants hide behind a veneer of respectability, invisibly pulling the strings of sadistic street gangs to provoke chaos in society. Fernando di Leo’s Il boss (1973) depicts politicians and police in league with the Mafia; in Sergio Sollima’s Revolver (1973), the hero is caught in an impenetrably faceless web of intrigue; while in both Enzo G. Castellari’s Il grande racket (1976) and Martino’s aforementioned Milano trema, the murderers and rapists whom the hero has chased throughout are revealed to be under orders from judges, lawyers, politicians and police chiefs.

The following two clips, both from Milano trema – la polizia vuole giustizia, epitomise the poliziesco‘s often eccentric approach to the events of the anni di piombo. In the first, we see a bank job reaching its bloody conclusion, carried out by a bunch of violent radicals (the tough cop hero, by the way, has infiltrated the gang and is here working as their getaway driver). In the second clip, we briefly hear the final revelatory admission to the hero by the chief of police that he has been the hidden crime boss all along. (I have spliced them together into one file).

So far I have mostly focussed on authorial intent; that is, on the opportunistic imitation of US cinema, on the fantasy narratives of tough cops, and on the acerbic critiques of governmental institutions. To conclude, however, I shall look at an inadvertent cultural significance which arises from polizieschi, and points to a more nuanced transatlantic relationship than is immediately apparent when viewing these films. Are they reactionary, parasitic facsimiles of the box-office giants emanating from the USA, fantasies of law and order, or conspiracy theory-fuelled paranoia? The answer is of course all three, and this, I think, is the most interesting point about these films. The narrative, iconographic and ideological tropes of US cinema are appropriated, and adapted to an Italian socio-political milieu.

The clips embedded above offer an exemplar of this point. Certainly, they directly register the controversies of the era which I have already summarised, both by caricaturing the professed aims of contemporary radicals to alter public opinion through violent action, and then by articulating the widespread perceptions of state complicity in a ’strategy of tension’ aimed at exerting authoritarian control over Italian society.

Returning to my earlier points about the influence of US cinema on this cycle of films, however, the modes of representation employed are significant: in particular, the filmmakers’ investment, firstly in the spectacular – the white-knuckle car-chase emulating such films as Bullitt (1968) and The French Connection (1971) – and secondly in narrative coherence and closure – the revelatory denouement or ‘twist’, laying bare and attaching a face to state complicity in unambiguous terms. These elements operate within a broader signifying practice whereby instantly recognisable tropes of American cinema are deployed as a means of viewing, dramatising and resolving neuroses surrounding extremism, terror and the individual’s relationship to societal power structures.

Fredric Jameson has described conspiracy theory as ‘the poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age… a degraded figure of the logic of late capitalism, a desperate attempt to represent the latter’s system’ (O’Leary, 2009: 54). Conspiracy theory, Jameson holds, aspires and pretends to know, to explain, but the narrative closure it seeks is a mere parody of authentic analysis of the individual’s complex relationship with political and economic systems. Viewed from this perspective, the poliziesco’s recourse to Hollywood iconography and genre convention can be read as an articulation of a collective need in Italian society: that of attaching a coherent narrative to an era of extreme cultural and political disorientation.

At one point in Lucio Fulci’s poliziesco Luca il contrabbandiere (1980), a policeman at the scene of a murder comments that ‘Italy is starting to look like America in the 1930s’. Given the poliziesco’s close relationship with Hollywood conventions, this highlights an important cultural convergence and hyper-reality in these films. Both the diegetic comment itself and the wider perception it implies are based on an ’America’ of the popular imagination – in this case one of prohibition, speakeasies and mob hits – lifted directly from Hollywood and transposed into the anni di piombo.

Polizieschi were by no means alone in this process of transatlantic negotiation. Indeed, they belong to a continuum of political engagement within popular Italian cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, which filtered unease concerning the operation of the modern state and attendant social breakdown by adapting US cinematic formats. Between 1967 and 1970, for example, an earlier trend within the Italian Western had carried overtly countercultural sympathies with condemnations of a corrupt, avaricious bourgeois society in such films as Sergio Sollima’s La resa dei conti (1967) and Faccia a faccia (1967), Giulio Questi’s Se sei vivo, spara! (1967) and Sergio Corbucci’s Il grande Silenzio (1968).

At times, even radicalised militants themselves viewed the events of the anni di piombo through recourse to Hollywood. The theatrical self-consciousness of the Red Brigades, for example, is starkly illustrated by the memoirs of activist Valerio Morucci. He continually frames his group’s deeds by reference to the bandits and sheriffs, the hitmen and the cops and robbers from the many Westerns and films noirs which so fascinated him (Tricomi, 2009: 21).

Both protagonists and commentators, therefore, were seeking to interpret the era’s complex and bewildering events through the application of simpler, binary and instantly recognisable ready-made paradigms from US cinema. Polizieschi partake in this pre-existing trend as expressions of a peculiar hyper-reality. Jean Baudrillard’s comments on the exhibitionism of terrorism (2001) seem nowhere so apt.

The anni di piombo were more than just a series of violent events. The period became a locus for national trauma, which had a profound impact across Italian cultural life. The critically-lauded contemporaneous works of Elio Petri, Francesco Rosi and Marco Bellocchio are widely studied for their commentary on the anni di piombo and the attendant intrigues surrounding state complicity. While equivalent responses within popular Italian cinema have more often been ignored or dismissed, the poliziesco is just one example of such formulaic cinema addressing the political controversies of the day.

Far from straightforwardly reactionary polemics, they are repositories of cultural memory and sites of popular trauma, within which conflicting strands of politics and culture meet. Their ideological and cultural eccentricities are an organic product of the turmoil and confusions of their era. By their very nature as playfully trans-cultural undertakings, these films register a certain kind of ‘Italian-ness’: one within which Americana has of course become an ever-present factor, but also one which has taken possession of this iconography in a diverse, at times complex dialogue.

This article is based upon research undertaken for
Kiss Kiss Kill Kill: A Symposium on the Forgotten Spy Film of Cold War Europe
The University of Hertfordshire
September 18th 2010

Works cited

• Antonello, Pier Paolo and Alan O’Leary (2009), ’Introduction’, in Pier Paolo Antonello and Alan O’Leary (eds) (2009), Imagining Terrorism: The Rhetoric and Representation of Political Violence in Italy, 1969-2009 (London: Maney), pp.1-15.
• Barry, Christopher (2004), ‘Violent Justice: Italian Crime / Cop Films of the 1970s’, in Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik (eds), Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945 (London: Wallflower), pp.77-89.
• Baudrillard, Jean (1988), America, trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso).
• Baudrillard, Jean (2001), ‘The Spirit of Terrorism’, trans. Rachel Bloul, Le monde (2 November).
• Bondanella, Peter (2009), A History of Italian Cinema (London: Continuum).
• O’Leary, Alan (2009), ‘Moro, Brescia, Conspiracy: The Paranoid Style in Italian Cinema’, in Pier Paolo Antonello and Alan O’Leary (eds) (2009), Imagining Terrorism: The Rhetoric and Representation of Political Violence in Italy, 1969-2009 (London: Maney), pp.48-62.
• Tricomi, Antonio (2009), ‘Killing the Father: Politics and Intellectuals, Utopia and Delusion’, in Pier Paolo Antonello and Alan O’Leary (eds) (2009), Imagining Terrorism: The Rhetoric and Representation of Political Violence in Italy, 1969-2009 (London: Maney), pp.16-29.