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 By locating these radicalised films as intriguing historical documents, Fisher illustrates a process of cultural blending and transnational appropriation, through which Americana offered endlessly manipulable building blocks for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

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

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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Here’s the full list of contents in this latest issue:

Editorial

Editorial
pp. 163-163(1)
Authors: Marcus, Millicent; O’Leary, Alan

Articles

Gendering mobility and migration in contemporary Italian cinema
pp. 165-182(18)
Authors: Luciano, Bernadette; Scarparo, Susanna

Out West, down South: Gazing at America in reverse shot through Damiano Damiani’s Quien sabe?
pp. 183-201(19)
Author: Fisher, Austin

Sexual dissidence and the mainstream: The queer triangle in Ferzan Ozpetek’s Le fate ignoranti
pp. 202-218(17)
Author: Rigoletto, Sergio

Percorsi di identità narrativa nella memoria difficile: La musica in I cento passi e Buongiorno, notte
pp. 219-244(26)
Author: D’Onofrio, Emanuele

Short Communication

Il Divo: A discussion
pp. 245-271(27)

Framing crisis and rebirth in Italian cinema: A roundtable

Framing crisis and rebirth in Italian cinema: A roundtable
pp. 272-289(18)

Editing Suite

Il cinema italiano intorno a Gomorra tra visibilità, semivisibilità, invisibilità
pp. 290-308(19)
Author: Uva, Christian

Cinegiornale

Conference report
Popular Italian Cinema: An International Conference
pp. 309-314(6)
Authors: Bayman, Louis; Rigoletto, Sergio

Conference report
Da ‘Sodoma’ a ‘Gomorra’: Framing Crisis and Rebirth in Italian Cinema
pp. 315-320(6)
Authors: Holdaway, Dom; Grisà, Mariarita Martino

Cinemonitor – Osservatorio Cinema (www.Cinemonitor.it)
pp. 321-323(3)
Authors: Grisà, Mariarita Martino

Sergio Martino’s Mannaja / A Man Called Blade (1977) is about as entertaining a death-rattle as one might hope to encounter, but a terminal gurgle it remains. The Italian Western phenomenon had persisted, in a variety of guises, since 1963. The precise make-up of this “Spaghetti” canon is still a matter for debate, but the 450-plus films therein attest to a remarkable longevity in the context of popular Italian cinema of the era where genres, or filoni, more often ebbed and flowed with the perceived whims of popular taste. As George Harrison knew only too well, however, all things must pass.

Martino’s film is commonly placed as a footnote to the more celebrated “twilight Spaghetti”, Keoma (Enzo G. Castellari, 1976), and indeed there are numerous points of similarity. Such was the formulaic, incremental nature of filone cinema, however, that pejorative accusations of imitativeness in the Italian Western are trite to the point of tedium. Certainly, Mannaja bears many tried-and-tested Spaghetti hallmarks (childhood flashbacks revealing the hero’s revenge motive, the corrupt capitalist hiding behind a cloak of propriety, the lone warrior caught between rival factions, to name but a few), but Martino tweaks these to fit a decidedly apocalyptic agenda, which warrants critique in its own right. From amidst this network of citations, it is the easily-overlooked sub-plot in particular which stands out for its defiance of audience expectation and its symbolic farewell to this most irreverent, and lucrative, of Italian genres.

Beloved by fans and critics alike, Tuco Benedicto Pacifico Juan Maria Ramírez (AKA “the Rat”) was lifted straight out of the Commedia dell’arte and granted a celluloid apotheosis by the collaboration of Sergio Leone and Eli Wallach in Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo / The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966). Tomas Milian would subsequently embrace the archetype with the guileful clowning of Cuchillo Sanchez, forever one step ahead of the dim-witted authorities (see La resa dei conti / The Big Gundown and Corri, uomo, corri / Run, Man, Run (Sergio Sollima: 1967, 1968)). This grubby, and perennially on-the-run, vagabond would become an enduring, and endearing, characteristic of the picaresque Spaghetti variant: a loud-mouthed comic foil, by turns hindering then assisting the filone’s near-ubiquitous cool, taciturn bounty-hunter.

The relationship between Mannaja (Maurizio Merli) and Burt Craven (Donald O’Brien) is a clear echo of this cat-and-mouse pairing: the reserved superhero and the rude mechanical respectively. When Mannaja lets Craven escape early on in the film, the hero’s fond smile and the good-natured banter indicate a repetition of this familiar motif. Yet already there is injected a more macabre element than is evident in the earlier Tuco / Blondie double-act. Mannaja’s very first scene is a horror-inflected pursuit through dense fog, punctuated by a haunting refrain, claustrophobic tight close-ups and frantic point-of-view shots from the terrified prey. Where Blondie (Clint Eastwood) merely leaves his partner in a pickle with a wry grin, Mannaja maims Craven with a carefully-aimed hatchet which severs his hand in centre-frame close-up. The Spaghetti Western’s mischievous humour is turning sour even at this early juncture in the film.

As the denouement approaches, Craven’s return to the narrative signals a further continuation of the Tuco / Blondie schema, when the vagrant arrives in time to save Mannaja from an elaborately sadistic death at the hands of the diabolical Valler (John Steiner). The hero’s slow recuperation, nursed by his down-to-earth partner, not only echoes Il buono, il brutto, il cattivo, but also resonates all the way back to Per un pugno di dollari / A Fistful of Dollars (Leone, 1964). Even when Craven proceeds to betray Mannaja, it merely promises a repeat of the comic distrust, perpetual back-stabbing and loose loyalties which pervade the “Dollars” trilogy, and recur throughout the filone’s development. After all, Blondie spares Tuco at the eleventh hour while, in La resa dei conti, Jonathan Corbett joins forces with his erstwhile prey Cuchillo. This “Blondie”, however, has had enough. Maurizio Merli – 1970s Italian cinema’s coolest and most ruthless cop temporarily transposed to the knockabout world of the Spaghetti Western – is not about to put up with any more bullshit from this irksome little perp.

T.S. Eliot’s apocalyptic vision of Western civilisation is chillingly evoked by the cry of the British bartender calling time on vivacity, merriment and laughter. Merli’s Mannaja is, I will concede, a less accomplished poet, but his declaration of intent to Craven is equally terminal, both for the character and for the Western filone: “It’s time, Bert.”

Time indeed. Time to end the irreverent burlesque. As Craven is dispatched, it is perhaps apt that it is a star of the poliziesco – a bleak, uncompromising filone which, by addressing the fraught issues surrounding violence in Italian society directly, began to challenge the Italian Western’s place as the nation’s foremost popular genre as the 1970s wore on – who arrives as the executioner in this his sole Spaghetti foray.

At the end, as Mannaja rides away, the theme tune offers a final valediction for this behemoth of cult cinema genres: “Now the time has come to leave.”

È finito.
Buona sera Tuco. Buona sera Sergio.
Arrivederci. Buona sera. Buona sera.

If this was indeed a farewell to the prestige studio Western, it is appropriate that the setting for The Virginian – the oft-mythologised Johnson County War of 1892 – should return as the site of the genre’s obligatory violent conflict. Heaven’s Gate takes the subversion of Wister’s 1902 novel – previously carried out by George Stevens’s Shane (1952) – to a radical extreme. These steadily more hostile depictions of the violent campaign waged by the Wyoming Stock Growers Association (WSGA) against smallholders and farmers reflects the increasing ambivalence to corporate power within the Western genre. Where Wister diagnoses fin de siècle social ills by championing the right of the WSGA to lynch ‘rustlers’, Shane affirms the farmer’s right to land. Cimino, however, posits the thesis that the cattle barons and the institutions of monied capital which support them are an elite, and genocidal, cabal.

Patrick McGee highlights the extent to which the Hollywood Western had, throughout its history, ‘repeatedly formulated the question of who has the right to wealth, the right to the power that wealth seems to bestow, and the right to freedom in the form that Marx specified as the definition of wealth’. [2] If, as this argument holds, Westerns had always been ‘about’ class struggle, yet traditionally obfuscated that imperative, then Heaven’s Gate is a singular act of unmasking. Frederick Jackson Turner’s ‘Frontier Thesis’ of 1893 is commonly applied to the Western genre for its elegiac affirmation of American exceptionalism; the Western ‘safety valve’ offering immigrants and workers the chance to forge their own destinies, thus averting the class conflicts which had bedevilled European social relations. Cimino’s film, however, demands that attention is turned towards Turner’s lesser-dramatised disquiet at the officially-declared closing of the Frontier in 1890: what Barry Langford describes as the ‘undertow of both nostalgia and anxiety for the future in Turner’s survey of an ostensibly triumphant present’. [3] McGee goes on to identify [4] in Cimino’s film, along with Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), Peckinpah’s Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid (1973) and Penn’s The Missouri Breaks (1976), an attempt to create what Walter Benjamin, in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940), termed a ‘Messianic cessation of happening’. The ‘brief epoch’ of the cowboy identified by Wister here takes on an altogether more radical slant, since the joint tasks of unveiling the Western’s dominant ideologies and subverting its established signifiers lie at the heart of Heaven’s Gate’s political agenda.

Figure 1 / Figure 2

This notion is ably symbolised by Cimino’s shot composition, as Jim Averill (Kris Kristofferson) rides towards Sweetwater shortly after his arrival at Casper railway station. A bereft immigrant woman struggles to pull the family’s wagon along the road, her two children trying to help by pushing from behind (Figure 1). Atop the wagon lies not only the family’s possessions, as they head for their new life as sharecroppers on the Wyoming plains, but the body of her husband, who has been murdered by thugs employed by the WSGA. Spliced between two side-on shots of this pitiful, static scene is an identical framing of Averill’s horse and carriage, speeding comfortably away from them after he has promised to get help (Figure 2). Most strikingly, by associating the widow’s position, as the draught of her wagon, with that of the horse at the front of Jim’s carriage, this juxtaposition emphasises her status in society as a beast of burden, offering an apt symbol for the manner in which the immigrants are butchered like animals through the course of the film. Additionally, each vehicle is ‘ridden’ by a male representative of his social class: one a wealthy Easterner, the other the brutally beaten dead body of an immigrant. Jim’s carriage, the commonplace vehicle of the Eastern ‘dude’ in the genre, signifies propriety and wealth, the framing implicating Eastern capital – of which Harvard-educated Averill is inescapably a representative – in the abject misery of the working classes.

These shots therefore unmask the Western genre’s obfuscation of class tensions, the inertia of the struggling workers demanding that history pauses to take cognizance of their plight. Jim’s backward gaze at the family as he rides away suggests his simultaneous feelings of guilt and of impotence to make good his promise of help, since in Heaven’s Gate all are embroiled in a rigid class system. ‘Whole damn country’ll be nothing but widows and orphans soon’, he mutters. Just like Walter Benjamin’s ‘angel of history’, indeed, his eyes are turned towards the past, perceiving in horror the ‘catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage’, yet powerless to halt the headlong procession into the storm ‘we call progress’. [5]

Jim Averill’s carriage rushing away from the wreckage of the class-struggle way out West is therefore replete with symbolism, since Heaven’s Gate is a self-conscious intervention in the pre-existing mythic discourse of the Johnson County War. Cimino’s counter-historical occupation of Wister’s hallowed epoch directly implicates the upper-classes of the East – of whom Wister was one – in both the oppression of the working classes and the cloaking of this brutal history.

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 Men Who Stare at Goats: a new Vietnam myth?

Bob Wilton (McGregor) comfortably fills the shoes of the greenhorn outsider plunged headlong into the savage wilderness, and is reliant for survival upon Lyn Cassidy (George Clooney): as archetypal a “man who knows Indians” as you are likely to find this side of the 1960s. The vast, unforgiving desert landscape, the threat to a normative white American polity, the captivity narrative at the hands of a dark-skinned enemy… these and countless other tropes lifted straight out of the classical Hollywood Western are too obvious to justify any more space in this brief missive.

The real point of interest this film offers the viewer, from an historiographical perspective at least, is its use of the recent conflict in the Middle East as a surrogate for the mythos surrounding the Vietnam War. A perilous, alien locale upon which white America’s ideological crises are projected and not necessarily resolved, the “Iraq” we see here is an amalgam of reference points: cultural, historical and cinematic. The appearance of countercultural icon Jeff Bridges as hippie soldier Bill Django – along with the counter-narrative to US militarism which he represents – is especially poignant, redolent of the radicalised appropriation of the Western which proliferated from the late 60s throughout the 70s, and constituted one of many death-knells to the genre’s affirmative ideological function (not least in two Westerns starring Bridges himself: Bad Company (1972) and the much-maligned Heaven’s Gate (1980)). The same underlying desire to rewrite the traumatic history of post-war US imperialism is tangible throughout Heslov’s film.

It is said that Vietnam killed the Western twice over: firstly, by destroying the moral certitude upon which the genre had constructed its narrative of inexorable progress, manifest destiny and regenerative violence; and secondly, as the War itself ended and passed into the collective memory as a repository for the USA’s national narrative, by replacing the Western as Hollywood’s primary mythic stage. It is too early to judge adequately, but The Men Who Stare at Goats indicates that the parallels so frequently drawn between Vietnam and Iraq may extend beyond the reductive clichés so beloved of the sensationalist press, and effect an equivalent shift in the popular imagination.