Thesis Work 2

Neil Campbell - The Rhiziomatic West (2008)

The Rhizomatic West (2008) examines the American West through a perspective derived from Deleuze and Guattari's co-authored work, emphasising their concept of the rhizome. Author Neil Campbell interprets the rhizome as both "root" and "route", to engage with ideas of the west and 'westness' as they have manifested in a number of media including film, literature, photography, architecture and music. In terms of film specifically, he discusses Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns. Besides the "cultural roots" controversy identified by Frayling(1998), Campbell suggests that they might be considered a "critical" or "minoritarian" cinema of the sort introduced by Deleuze towards the end of Cinema 2 in relation to Third World and Quebecois cinemas. The idea of a minor cinema, comparable to that of a minor literature, comes from Delueze and Guattari's reading of Kafka. Significantly Deleuze interprets minor cinemas as going beyond the movement-image and time-image alike in certain ways: The overtly political cinema of the Soviet filmmakers and of populist Hollywood directors such as Frank Capra was based upon the premise that "the people" already exist and merely needed to be mobilised. "In American and in Soviet cinema the people are already there, real before being actual, ideal without being abstract." (Delueze, 2005: 208) While Hitler, Stalin and the failures of the "American dream" each challenged this belief, the majority of filmmakers in the West continued to endorse it, even within the time-image:

"[I]f there were a modern political cinema, it would be on this basis: the people no longer exist, or not yet... the people are missing.
No doubt this truth also applied to the west, but very few authors discovered it, because it was hidden by the mechanisms of power and the systems of majority. On the other hand, it was absolutely clear in the third world, where oppressed and exploited nations remained in a state of perpetual minorities, in a collective identity crisis. Third world and minorities gave rise to authors who would be in a position to say, in relation to their nation, and their personal situation in that nation to say: the people are what is missing. Kafka and Klee had been the first to state this explicitly. (208-209)

Although there are obviously differences between the position of my Italian directors and the likes of the Brazilian Lino Brocka and the Quebecois Pierre Perrault, there are a number of reasons for considering the films of Leone, Argento and Questi in relation to such Third World and minoritarian filmmakers beyond those identified by Campbell.

The spaghetti western and giallo filone might be understood as differently accented takes upon the dominant Hollywood western and thriller genres which, in the hands of Leone, Argento and Questi, cannot be aligned completely with either the classical Hollywood movement-image cinema nor the modernist European time-image cinema. In this regard it is significant that while Deleuze himself never mentions Leone in the Cinema books, he does suggest that "it was the neo-western that first demonstrated [the] break-up" of the "American people" (208). The point is that the likes of Altman's McCabe and Mrs Miller (1971), Penn's Little Big Man (1970) and Peckinpah's The Wild Bunch (1969) would probably not have been possible without the Italian westerns of Leone and others. While Penn and Peckinpah had both made westerns before Leone, Campbell significantly positions Michael Cimino's Heaven's Gate (1980) as a US reworking of Once Upon a Time in the West, noting their common themes and motifs, such as capitalism, prostitute protagonists and epic scale.

It is also notable that the spaghetti western was popular with Third World audiences, as demonstrated by the way Sergio Corbucci's Django is positioned within Perry Henzell's The Harder They Come (1973) as an inspiration for reggae singer Jimmy Cliff's "ragamuffin" anti-hero. More generally, the more overt "political spaghettis" of Corbucci and others, which Leone later critiqued with Duck You Sucker, were popular with Third World audiences. They appreciated their anti-imperialist and colonialist sentiments, problematic though these undoubtedly were from the perspective of western film theorists such as the Cahiers du cinema collective and the Screen group. Another point of connection here is Glauber Rocha. His Black God, White Devil (1964) has been cited as an inspiration for Once Upon a Time in the West, with both films exploring the relationship between myth and history and featuring duster coat clad gunmen. In addition Rocha also appeared as an actor in Godard/The Dziga Vertov Group's Wind from the East (1970) alongside Gian-Maria Volonte, with the film itself being Godard/The Group's reinterpretation-cum-deconstruction of an Italian western. Within it Rocha actually comments on the relationship between different cinemas, outlining the distinctions between Godard's political cinema and his own, as a Third World/Third Cinema filmmaker.

Relating the Italian western back to its domestic context, meanwhile, the important point is that the films often played to a terza visione audience which was disproportionately southern Italian, rural, male, working class and less educated. Else, as with Leone's films, they had a crossover appeal and played to the terza visione alongside their prima visione counterparts, disproportionately northern Italian, urban, middle class and more educated. This ability to reach the terza visione audience was what made Italian intellectuals, themselves disproportionately northern, alternately despair about and engage with filone cinema. On the one hand, for example, the Bologna-born Pasolini described Rome's Cinecitta studios as [belching stomach quote]. On the other hand, he appeared in neo-realist theorist, historian and director Carlo Lizzani's western Requiescant (1967), as a revolutionary priest. The terza visione audience can thereby be understood as having affinities with the Third World and Quebecois audiences: They too were a Deleuzean minority, in terms of power if not numbers. Likewise, if the films of Leone and Argento, two Romans with southern parents, were successful at the Italian box office, this was down to their cross-visione appeal more than the approval of hegemonic northern Italian critics. Here the contrast between Argento and Bertolucci regarding to Leone is telling: The two younger men were hired by Leone for Once Upon a Time in the West as the "young intellectuals" who could assist in taking his filmmaking to a new level. Subsequently the Parma-born Bertolucci, whose father Attilio was a poet and critic, proved more critical of the limitations of Leone's films than the Rome-born Argento, whose father was a film producer. As John Fawell (2005) says in his discussion of their collaboration, Argento was a "true believer" in the filone cinema in a way Bertolucci was not. If we think about Questi, meanwhile, the issue is again that he made films which were too filone or movement-image for the majoritarian Northern Italian critics, but too arthouse or time-image for the minoritarian Southern Italian audience.

Crucially, these are all aspects of Leone's work and its relation to Deleuze which Campbell does not address. Nor, perhaps more surprisingly, does he discuss Deleuze's anti-Bazinian analysis of the Hollywood western as a genre which was as much rhiziomatic as arborescent:

[I]t would be dangerous to reserve an epic genius for Ince and Ford, attributing to other more recent directors the invention of of a tragic or even romantic western. The application of Hegel and Lukacs' formula of the succession of these genres works badly for the Western: as Mitry has shown, from the outset the Western explores all these directions - epic, tragic, romantic - with cowboys who are already nostalgic, solitary, ageing, or even born losers, or rehabilitated Indians. (151)

The issue here is one of squaring Deleuze's impressionistic analysis with Will Wright's more empirical work: Whatever its limitations, especially with regard to the Italian western, as Frayling (1998) argues, Wright's Sixguns and Society (1975) also has the virtue of charting the rise and fall of different western narrative forms in relation to their box-office popularity. If there were already westerns which departed from the dominant formula in the 1930s and 1940s, such as Raoul Walsh's Pursued (1947), then their commercial success or otherwise (to the extent that such factors as star presence can be factored out) provides us with an indication of which trajectories or "lines of flight" for the western, whether arborescent or rhiziomatic, worked best with the majority audience.