Title: Radical Frontiers: Political Violence in the Italian Western.

Abstract: The Italian Western is frequently accused of emptying the Hollywood genre’s signifiers of ideological undertones to leave only stylised, yet meaningless, violence. It nevertheless spawned a sub-category in the late 1960s which identified in the Western’s propensity to violence a forum for debate concerning the ethics of armed insurrection.

This thesis assesses how and why these militant films arose from, and contributed to, wider processes of transatlantic appropriation, re-inscription and semantic negotiation. Their ideological revulsion for Occidental capitalism ostensibly places them at odds with the very concept of the “West”. The thesis demonstrates, however, that their radical imperatives are ineluctably entwined with the traditions of Hollywood’s hallowed founding text. Far from rejecting the preoccupations of the Western paradigm, such filmmakers as Damiano Damiani and Sergio Sollima restore to the genre’s pervasive brutality what Robert Warshow called its “serious orientation to the problem of violence”. Through manipulation of dramatic irony, revelation and point-of-view, they appropriate the language of Manifest Destiny to appraise contemporary disputes concerning violence within the extra-parliamentary groupings of the Italian New Left. They seek to articulate militant perspectives on imperialism and Third Worldism, latent domestic fascism, and the post-war “system”.

The thesis also shows, however, that the didactic meanings inscribed into these texts were instantly stripped away by contact with global popular culture in the postmodern era. Their simultaneous attempts to destroy “grand narrative” and to inscribe their own authoritative structures prove contradictory, as these films have themselves become reformulated by disparate audiences. Their international releases coincided with rising levels of cinematic violence in Hollywood. This, not their intended radicalism, has been the decisive factor in dictating their enduring legacy. The whims of international audiences, not the authorial voices of the films themselves, have thus determined the significance of these texts, in a continuum of cross-cultural negotiation.

Core Filmography:

• Corri, uomo, corri / Run, Man, Run. 1968. Dir. Sergio Sollima.
• Faccia a faccia / Face to Face. 1967. Dir. Sergio Sollima.
• Il grande Silenzio / The Great Silence. 1968. Dir. Sergio Corbucci.
• ¿Quien sabe? / A Bullet for the General. 1966. Dir. Damiano Damiani.
• La resa dei conti / The Big Gundown. 1967. Dir. Sergio Sollima.
• Il mercenario / The Mercenary. 1968. Dir. Sergio Corbucci.
• Se sei vivo, spara! / Django Kill! (If You Live, Shoot!). 1967. Dir. Giulio Questi.
• Tepepa. 1968. Dir. Giulio Petroni.
• Vamos a matar, compañeros / Compañeros. 1970. Dir. Sergio Corbucci.