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 By locating these radicalised films as intriguing historical documents, Fisher illustrates a process of cultural blending and transnational appropriation, through which Americana offered endlessly manipulable building blocks for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

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.

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

Limited to selecting just twelve films for review from the vast array of Italian Westerns, my choices may raise eyebrows. This was my intention; for what good is an appreciation of genre cinema if we its audiences do not actively subject the received canons therein to constant scrutiny? Less a “top twelve” than a desire to look again at aspects of this oft-homogenised filone, it is to be hoped that the chapter will offer something new to academic study of popular Italian cinema, as well as sparking debate amongst fans. The contributions, in chronological order by Italian film release, are as follows:

Christopher Frayling: Per un pugno di dollari / A Fistful of Dollars (Sergio Leone, 1964)

Dimitris Eleftheriotis: Johnny Oro / Ringo and His Golden Pistol (Sergio Corbucci, 1966)

Iain Robert Smith: Django (Sergio Corbucci, 1966)

Austin Fisher: El Chuncho, quién sabe? / A Bullet for the General (Damiano Damiani, 1966)

Robbie Edmonstone: Se sei vivo, spara! / Django Kill! (If You Live Shoot!) (Giulio Questi, 1967)

Mimmo Gianneri: La resa dei conti / The Big Gundown (Sergio Sollima, 1967)

Austin Fisher: Faccia a faccia / Face to Face (Sergio Sollima, 1967)

Phil Hardcastle: I giorni dell’ira / Day of Anger (Tonino Valerii, 1967)

Daniel O’Brien: Ehi amico…c’è Sabata, hai chiuso! / Sabata (Gianfranco Parolini, 1969)

Eleanor Andrews: Lo chiamavano Trinità / My Name is Trinity (Enzo Barboni, 1970)

Iain Robert Smith: Keoma (Enzo G. Castellari, 1976)

Robbie Edmonstone: Mannaja / A Man Called Blade (Sergio Martino, 1977)

Cultural Borrowings: Appropriation, Reworking, Transformation, edited by Iain Robert Smith
“A Marxist’s Gotta Do What a Marxist’s Gotta Do: Political Violence on the Italian Frontier”, by Austin Fisher

To promote this volume, the editor has created his own rather amusing work of “cultural borrowing” by adapting a popular internet meme:

The poliziesco can be – and has been [2] - read as a collective response to the traumas surrounding the anni di piombo (a phrase – literally “years of lead” – referring to the wave of political violence which scarred the Italian national psyche between the years 1969 and 1983). This said, these violent tales of maverick cops refusing to play by the rules of an ineffectual state are more commonly seen to be no more than transatlantic parasites: reactionary facsimiles of such globally visible phenomena as Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry and William Friedkin’s The French Connection (both 1971). This reductive interpretation overlooks the extent to which this filone frequently registers nuances inherent to Italy’s post-war transatlantic relationship: a point underscored by Revolver. Sollima’s film in fact displays the complex ways in which popular cultural manifestations of US-led modernity were negotiated with and appropriated as a means by which to view, dramatise and resolve neuroses surrounding extremism, terror and the individual’s fraught relationship to societal power structures.

From the late 1960s onwards, Sollima’s eclectic oeuvre repeatedly acted as a repository for socio-political outlooks which accorded with the belief systems of the Italian New Left (that is, broadly speaking, the student movement in and around 1968, and related groupings with aims of protest and/or revolution), but also gave voice to widespread contemporary unease concerning the operation of the modern state. In particular, the sense of mistrust - known colloquially as dietrologia - of instruments of government is palpable through his didactic manipulations of the cinematic medium. Sollima’s most accomplished Westerns La resa dei conti and Faccia a faccia (both 1967) depict a corrupt, labyrinthine Wild West ruled by a murky cabal of ruthless capitalists. In the modern-day Città violenta (1970), Charles Bronson’s hit-man finds himself similarly caught in a web of intrigue, on the run from a brutal yet powerful criminal network. Revolver belongs firmly within this paranoid continuum, displaying Sollima’s filone-hopping deftness with yet another tale of men on the run from a malevolent and apparently omnipotent “system”. Its structural and thematic resemblance to his earlier films, indeed, is striking.

Franco Solinas’ original screenplay for La resa dei conti was set in contemporary Sardinia. In it, a police officer pursues an elderly peasant accused of molesting a child, but the climax reveals the peasant to be innocent, framed by corrupt local officials to cover up their own misdeeds. The policeman, awoken to the corrupt nature of the system he has served, still sees no alternative but to shoot the innocent man in cold blood and protect himself. Sollima’s Wild West version of the tale reversed the ending into a crowd-pleasing, if politically anodyne, rebellion against the bourgeois conspiracy, but with Revolver he makes amends, at last staging the bleak ending denied the earlier film. Its cat-and-mouse relationship between an ex-lawman and a petty crook with powerful enemies closely follows the structure of La resa dei conti, until retired cop Vito Cipriani finally laments that “we’re up against something far bigger than ourselves” and shoots his roguish companion Milo Ruiz (Fabio Testi) in the back to save his own skin. This time, “The Man” has won.

These two films are therefore effectively in dialogue with each other: opposing resolutions to the filmmaker’s countercultural neuroses, and personal expressions of the alienation of the subject in late capitalism. Yet the relationship between them goes deeper than merely giving voice to this internal dilemma. Alan O’Leary identifies in Italian cinema which seeks to deal with the anni di piombo through recourse to conspiracy theory “the mythically-inflected manifestation of an inability to orient oneself in a complex social system”. [3] By turning to transatlantic formats as means through which to filter the traumas of contemporary Italy, both La resa dei conti and Revolver enact just such a need for a coherent narrative in a time of  cultural and political disorientation. In each, Sollima requisitions a popular US format and projects contemporary Italian neuroses upon a mythic icon of Americana (firstly the Western, then the cop thriller).

That the poliziesco is, on a formal level, indebted to such international successes as Dirty Harry and The French Connection is beyond doubt. True to the reactive, opportunistic nature of filone cinema, this spate of Italian films appeared directly on the back of the lucrative US trends spawned by these box-office behemoths. While Dirty Harry seeks to dramatise and resolve Nixon-era fears over increasing urban violence in the US, however, the poliziesco appropriates the form and adds a distinctively Italian twist of paranoia. In this way, Revolver is an exemplar of its filone.

[2] See Barry, Christopher, ‘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, 2004).

[3] O’Leary, Alan, ‘Moro, Brescia, Conspiracy: The Paranoid Style in Italian Cinema’, in Pier Paolo Antonello and Alan O’Leary (eds), Imagining Terrorism: The Rhetoric and Representation of Political Violence in Italy 1969-2009 (London: Maney, 2009), p. 54.

This article has since been built upon by new research,
which can be accessed here.