[Another somewhat different film, that avoids narrow definitions of filone, but which is again well worth looking at]
In the wake of the Cahiers du Cinema editorial collective's categorisation of films as complicit or against the system in form and / or content and Jean Luc-Godard's comparable theory and practice of making political films politically, the cinema scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s - i.e. read post May 1968 - was a complex and conflicted one for the committed film-maker.
According to these hegemonic theories he or she was supposed to make films which were radical in both their form and content. The problem with radical content without radical form, for these theorists, was that it could easily be recuperated by the system. The problem with radical content combined with radical form, as shown by much practice, was that it tended to lead to the alienation of all but the already converted, or those who understood the new semiotic-structuralist codes by which the text was to be engaged with and its meanings determined.
These pro and con debates were behind the famous split between Bernardo Bertolucci and Godard around this time, with The Conformist representing either an attempt to reach the mainstream audience who had rejected the Godardian Partner or an admission of defeat, of becoming part of the system as one would ideally like to destroy.
Whereas both directors like were able to re-emerge, whether through their subsequent work - the convenient (s)exploitation of Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris, made for maximum scandal and pseudo-intellectual accessibility- or their earlier work - the apotheosis of Godard's A bout de souffle, despite his own retrospective repudiations - many of their counterparts were effectively caught between Scylla and Charybdis, lacking the ability to either find or maintain pre-existing critical support.
This wouldn't have been an issue if, in line with the emergent anti-auteurist, post death of the author (Barthes) / author function (Foucault) ideas proposed by the post-structuralist avant-garde, the author had been disregarded.
But, let's face it, it was a case of suicide pact, you first, where no-one would have bothered with any of Godard's Dziga-Vertov Group films had they not had his name connected with them and had they chosen - in line with his equally intriguing uses of creative montage and challenges to conventional notions of good cinema - the name of the Ed Wood Group instead.
I mention all this by way of preamble - or ramble - because it's impossible to understand writer-director - i.e. total auteur - Francesco Masselli's An Open Letter to the Evening News and its fate without considering such issues.
The content is relatively simple, radical but also self-critical:
A group of Marxist intellectuals, including a writer, a publisher, a film-maker and several professors and professionals, unhappy with both their own lack of "organic" relation to those they would lead to class consciousness and thereby help liberate, a la Gramsci, and the official position of the Italian Communist Party, decide to write an open letter to the party-sponsored Rome newspaper Paese Sera announcing their intention to go to fight, and if need by die, in / for Vietnam.
It is pure gesture politics, not to be taken at face level. Similar volunteer delegations to Vietnam from the USSR and China have been refused - for one thing they lack any organic connection to the Vietnamese people and thus appear agents of imperialism / colonialism - with there also being no reason to believe than anyone at Paese Sera or within the party will (mis)read the open letter as anything other than the gesture it is encoded to be decoded as.
Unfortunately for those involved a rival paper unexpectedly gets hold of the letter and publishes it first, leading to an escalation of commitment that seems likely - especially with the support of more prominent intellectuals, including Sartre; the PCI itself; and a change of policy from the North Vietnamese authorities - to actually take the men to Vietnam and their likely deaths....
Formally, the film is also radical, albeit with a quasi-documentary approach that is perhaps more easily understood than a more diverse admixture of styles. Everything is shot with an at times shaky hand-held camera, with frequent zooms and out-of-focus shots, and a natural-looking - though in fact highly pre-meditated - use of light which sees many images either too light or too dark. Scenes tend to begin in media res, without establishing shots, and sometimes continue after any dramatic point has been made. These dramatic points are themselves often difficult to determine, with the exchanges between the characters seemingly more improvised than scripted. Finally, an intimate knowledge of the social, political, historical and cultural landscape of the times and the PCI 's involvement in each is assumed. (Put crudely, the PCI, like their Christian Democrat rivals, functioned to provide a total way of life, from cradle to grave, for their followers, with interventions in all spheres.)
In other words, it's demanding, refusing to easily yield anything to the viewer - especially the outsider at a distance of nearly 40 years.
Yet, this is also what makes it so ripe for rediscovery and so damned interesting.
Two aspects in particular come to mind.
First, the apparent conflation of performers and characters, that Renato Romano is apparently playing someone called Renato Romano and Daniele Dublino someone called Daniele Dublino: Is this neo-realist, in having presumably left-wing intellectual artistic types playing left-wing intellectual artistic types; a Brechtian strategy where the actors are supposed to speak their lines as if in quotes to indicate the discrepancy between role and performer; some combination of both; or something else entirely. (Why should one theatrical practice be taken as universal, outwith the place, time and general context of its origins?)
Second, with far less apparent self-consciousness on the part of Maselli, the role played by women within the narrative. A few domestic and other exchanges excepted, the female characters are very much in supporting roles: though helping draft the letter and providing commentary on it and the men's actions throughout, none are actually themselves committed to the revolutionary gesture as co-authors or signatories.
It is here that, I would argue, the film reveals its position on the very cusp of the 1970s, as a text torn between older (i.e. class, colonialist /imperialist) and newer (i.e. feminist, gay) struggles for freedom and equality.
There's a Italian feminist slogan about - I'm paraphrasing, but I wish I could remember / find the original - comrades in the square, fascists in the home, that seems apposite here...
Tuesday, 5 May 2009
Banditi a Orgosolo
In some ways this is a very different kind of film from those I usually discuss here.
It’s squarely an art house and auteur film, made in the numerically minority but critically dominant neo-realist style, rather than being a popular film.
In other ways there are remarkable similarities.
For it’s also a somewhat forgotten film, whose auteur, Vittorio de Seta, would seem to have been dealt a cruel blow by fate through the similarity of his name to that of the better known Vittorio de Sica and the emergence of his more traditionally neo-realist film at precisely the same point in time as directors like Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Francesco Rosi were moving beyond it.
The irony is compounded by the fact that de Seta’s film at times feels much like a cross between de Sica’s The Bicycle Thieves, Rosi’s Salvatore Giuliano and Rosi’s mentor Luchino Visconti’s La Terra trema – i.e. two acknowledged neo-realist classics and a classic of the post neo-realist cinema.
Bicycle Thieves contains a similar story, with an incident taken from life, featuring a decent, ordinary man who suffers a misfortune that, because of social injustice, leads to tragedy.
But De Sica’s film is urban and modern, in sharp contrast to the traditional Sardinia of De Seta’s, where class consciousness, at least in narrow Marxist terms of bourgeoisie and proletariat if not in broader Hegelian ones of master and servant, is absent.
De Sica’s film also presents a father / son dynamic, which De Seta’s reconfigures as between older and younger brothers, closer in age and likely experience but with similar dynamics of misunderstanding and incomprehension.
Rosi’s film presents another tale of banditry set on another marginal island, Sicily. But Salvatore Giuliano was a personality whose story, by the time of Rosi’s curious quasi-documentary reconstruction – curious for its attention to detail and the structuring absence of Giuliano himself, almost always represented through others’ testimony and projections, like a Charles Foster Kane – was hoped to have become history through the forward march of progressive politics and policies.
De Seta’s film is set in present-day Sardinia, where nothing has really changed, with a typical protagonist who is almost always present and, even when not, remains the centre of attention on account of being equally wanted by the authorities.
Unlike Giuliano, who had an wider ideology, Banditi’s Michele Cossu is guilty of nothing but being in the wrong place at the wrong time with a wrong understanding of the world.
Brought up to understand that one does not get involved in others affairs, he has no choice (i.e. in terms of anthropological rather than existential freedom) but to let some fugitives stay in his hut overnight. Similarly when the Carabinieri arrive, asking questions, he had no choice but to deny that he has seen anyone, despite material evidence to the contrary. And thus, when the Carabinieri and the bandits exchange fire, resulting in the death of one of the former and knowing full well that he will be taken as an accomplice in the crime, that he has no choice but to flee with his flock of sheep – the flock which, purchased on credit, offer his only hope of improving his family’s position and escaping his father’s fate of tending to the padrone’s animals rather than his own.
It’s in comparison with La Terra trema that Banditi a Orgosolo’s weaknesses, such as they are, come to light. While both films have naturalistic performances from non-professional actors – Michele Cossu and his brother play Michele Cossu and his brother – and present plenty of enthnographic details, such as the puttees worn by the shepherds here, Banditi has two aspects which I felt detracted.
The first, albeit one common to almost all neo-realist films, is the use of non-diegetic music that seems, to me, to cut against the realist ideal even if it enhances the melodramatic impact. (In the neo-realist’s defence, we can also not that the use of post-synchronised sound had always given Italian cinema a greater camera mobility than its rivals.)
The second is that everyone seemed to speak in a comparatively standard Italian, in contrast to the Sicilian dialect employed by the fishermen in La Terra trema, which famously had to be subtitled in order to be made comprehensible to non-Sicilians.
Maybe this reflects the changing reality represented by the two films, that the Sicilian and Sardinian islanders were increasingly being brought into wider Italian society.
But the opening narration in de Seta’s film, which states the only aspect of the modern world the shepherd’s were familiar with was the gun, would seem to contradict this.
Maybe it thus represents a rare concession to the audience, that our understanding of these people and their situation would be enhanced by dubbing into a more standard Italian, so that attention would not be distracted – at least for the domestic audience, the ones with the potential to make change – by the subtitling.
If it’s a case of ethics over aesthetics, its thus understandable and not sufficient to distract from De Seta’s truly extraordinary achievements here.
It’s squarely an art house and auteur film, made in the numerically minority but critically dominant neo-realist style, rather than being a popular film.
In other ways there are remarkable similarities.
For it’s also a somewhat forgotten film, whose auteur, Vittorio de Seta, would seem to have been dealt a cruel blow by fate through the similarity of his name to that of the better known Vittorio de Sica and the emergence of his more traditionally neo-realist film at precisely the same point in time as directors like Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Francesco Rosi were moving beyond it.
The irony is compounded by the fact that de Seta’s film at times feels much like a cross between de Sica’s The Bicycle Thieves, Rosi’s Salvatore Giuliano and Rosi’s mentor Luchino Visconti’s La Terra trema – i.e. two acknowledged neo-realist classics and a classic of the post neo-realist cinema.
Bicycle Thieves contains a similar story, with an incident taken from life, featuring a decent, ordinary man who suffers a misfortune that, because of social injustice, leads to tragedy.
But De Sica’s film is urban and modern, in sharp contrast to the traditional Sardinia of De Seta’s, where class consciousness, at least in narrow Marxist terms of bourgeoisie and proletariat if not in broader Hegelian ones of master and servant, is absent.
De Sica’s film also presents a father / son dynamic, which De Seta’s reconfigures as between older and younger brothers, closer in age and likely experience but with similar dynamics of misunderstanding and incomprehension.
Rosi’s film presents another tale of banditry set on another marginal island, Sicily. But Salvatore Giuliano was a personality whose story, by the time of Rosi’s curious quasi-documentary reconstruction – curious for its attention to detail and the structuring absence of Giuliano himself, almost always represented through others’ testimony and projections, like a Charles Foster Kane – was hoped to have become history through the forward march of progressive politics and policies.
De Seta’s film is set in present-day Sardinia, where nothing has really changed, with a typical protagonist who is almost always present and, even when not, remains the centre of attention on account of being equally wanted by the authorities.
Unlike Giuliano, who had an wider ideology, Banditi’s Michele Cossu is guilty of nothing but being in the wrong place at the wrong time with a wrong understanding of the world.
Brought up to understand that one does not get involved in others affairs, he has no choice (i.e. in terms of anthropological rather than existential freedom) but to let some fugitives stay in his hut overnight. Similarly when the Carabinieri arrive, asking questions, he had no choice but to deny that he has seen anyone, despite material evidence to the contrary. And thus, when the Carabinieri and the bandits exchange fire, resulting in the death of one of the former and knowing full well that he will be taken as an accomplice in the crime, that he has no choice but to flee with his flock of sheep – the flock which, purchased on credit, offer his only hope of improving his family’s position and escaping his father’s fate of tending to the padrone’s animals rather than his own.
It’s in comparison with La Terra trema that Banditi a Orgosolo’s weaknesses, such as they are, come to light. While both films have naturalistic performances from non-professional actors – Michele Cossu and his brother play Michele Cossu and his brother – and present plenty of enthnographic details, such as the puttees worn by the shepherds here, Banditi has two aspects which I felt detracted.
The first, albeit one common to almost all neo-realist films, is the use of non-diegetic music that seems, to me, to cut against the realist ideal even if it enhances the melodramatic impact. (In the neo-realist’s defence, we can also not that the use of post-synchronised sound had always given Italian cinema a greater camera mobility than its rivals.)
The second is that everyone seemed to speak in a comparatively standard Italian, in contrast to the Sicilian dialect employed by the fishermen in La Terra trema, which famously had to be subtitled in order to be made comprehensible to non-Sicilians.
Maybe this reflects the changing reality represented by the two films, that the Sicilian and Sardinian islanders were increasingly being brought into wider Italian society.
But the opening narration in de Seta’s film, which states the only aspect of the modern world the shepherd’s were familiar with was the gun, would seem to contradict this.
Maybe it thus represents a rare concession to the audience, that our understanding of these people and their situation would be enhanced by dubbing into a more standard Italian, so that attention would not be distracted – at least for the domestic audience, the ones with the potential to make change – by the subtitling.
If it’s a case of ethics over aesthetics, its thus understandable and not sufficient to distract from De Seta’s truly extraordinary achievements here.
Saturday, 2 May 2009
Argento / Hammer
Argento and Luigi Cozzi have sometimes mentioned their idea of collaborating with Hammer on a Nazi-era version of Frankenstein.
Is there anything in the Hammer archives on this - i.e. letters, story treatments etc?
Is there anything in the Hammer archives on this - i.e. letters, story treatments etc?
Friday, 1 May 2009
Giallo score project
Any thoughts / comments you, the community, have on this idea from Chris Bellis would be welcomed:
The Giallo Score
The concept revolves around a basic survey of the Giallo genre but with a gimmick. Films of the genre seem to adhere to a particular set of rules. Fans of the genre expect the films to play by most of the these rules, with some room for creativity of course. So the gimmick is that each film in the survey would be scored based on how strictly it adheres to the rules of the genre. Each film on the site would include the typical synopsis, review, and screen grabs, but also a score that could be used to compare itself against other films of the genre.
I ran with the idea. I did some initial research, built the framework for the site, and started writing. I was pretty jazzed about it too. I soon realized that I would need to do some extensive up-front writing before launching the site so as to publish something with a bit of substance. Inevitably, life got in the way and the project stalled for a bit. Coming back to it now, I admire the work I've put into the project so far and certainly don't want to scrap it. But the more I think about the "score" aspect of the project the more I'm wondering if it's as brilliant of an idea as I originally thought. I guess that's why I decided to write you. Being a writer and an expert on the genre I was hoping you might be able to give me some unfiltered advice.
Below are a couple of samples from the project.
This first is a snippet from the mission statement (a thesis of sorts):
The overall style of the Giallo is one of self-expression; of ideas, moods, and feelings. As such, one would expect each "successful" example of the genre to be unique in this way. And yet at the same time every Giallo shares at least a few common elements. Some of these are story driven, some are style qualifications. But regardless of category these “rules” are seldom broken within the genre. A truly successful Giallo is one that manages to create a unique stylistic experience without straying too far outside the boundaries that establish its classification within the genre.
The Experiment
GialloScore.com is experiment in Giallo analysis in which the classic as well as some of the lesser known Gialli are scrutinized against a set of rules. These rules are categorized and weighted in an attempt to establish patterns within the genre. Each entry in this survey will receive a “score” based on the number of qualifications that the film adheres to. As the number of films in the survey increases, the most highly regarded examples of the genre should emerge at the top of the rankings.
Because GialloScore.com is an attempt to use scientific analysis to interpret a subjective art form, certain assumptions must be made. Most importantly, the “rules” by which the films are judged are devised arbitrarily and are subject to change as the survey develops. By no means should this experiment represent the final word on the subject but instead should be viewed as one of many valid interpretations of the Giallo genre.
Regardless of the overall score, each film will be assigned a purely subjective viewing recommendation, and it is completely plausible that a lower scoring film will still receive a high recommendation.
Here are a few examples of the "rules" and how they are applied to the overall score. There are many more, I just included a few here so as to not bog you down with too much to read.
Staples
The following are fundamental Giallo criteria and should be weighted heavily (up to 15 points each)
Italian Director - 15 points.
The director must be Italian.
Hidden Identity - 15 points.
The identity of the killer must be hidden for as long as possible, usually until the last few minutes of the film.
Amateur Detective - 10 points.
The identity of the killer should be discovered by someone other than the police. This person should be considered an "amateur" or a "lay person" and should be motivated by the need to clear themselves of suspicion or the threat of becoming a victim.
Standards
The following criteria are trends within the genre and should be given medium weight (up to 5 points each)
First Person POV - 4 points.
The director employs first-person perspective shots from the killer's point-of-view during murder and stalking sequences.
Director > 1 - 4 points.
The director is credited with at least one Giallo preceding or following this one.
Signatures
The following criteria are minor details and should be given low weight (1 point each)
Odd Clue - 1 point.
A clue to the murderer's identity hidden within, or associated with a piece of art or jewelry (e.g. Painting, Necklace, etc).
Impossible scientific method - 1 point.
The identity of the killer is discerned through an impossible scientific method or technology (including those that had not been invented during the time period of the film).
Subjective
Additional points awarded at the reviewers discretion
Style Bonus - 10 points.
For each individual film, a maximum of 10 style points can be added to the score. The style points are comprised of a combination of cinematic elements including cinematographic technique, editing, visual effects, set design, location, costume, and soundtrack.
Influence Bonus - 5 points.
A film can earn a maximum of 5 additional points based on its influence over the genre as a whole. Typically these films appear earlier in the genre time line and are credited with "setting the standard"
Considering the entire list of rules, a film can receive a maximum of 155 points. This produces both predictable (Profondo Rosso scores 141, Duckling scores 133) and unexpected (Lizard scores 91, Lenzi's Quiet Place to Kill scores a 49) results.
The Giallo Score
The concept revolves around a basic survey of the Giallo genre but with a gimmick. Films of the genre seem to adhere to a particular set of rules. Fans of the genre expect the films to play by most of the these rules, with some room for creativity of course. So the gimmick is that each film in the survey would be scored based on how strictly it adheres to the rules of the genre. Each film on the site would include the typical synopsis, review, and screen grabs, but also a score that could be used to compare itself against other films of the genre.
I ran with the idea. I did some initial research, built the framework for the site, and started writing. I was pretty jazzed about it too. I soon realized that I would need to do some extensive up-front writing before launching the site so as to publish something with a bit of substance. Inevitably, life got in the way and the project stalled for a bit. Coming back to it now, I admire the work I've put into the project so far and certainly don't want to scrap it. But the more I think about the "score" aspect of the project the more I'm wondering if it's as brilliant of an idea as I originally thought. I guess that's why I decided to write you. Being a writer and an expert on the genre I was hoping you might be able to give me some unfiltered advice.
Below are a couple of samples from the project.
This first is a snippet from the mission statement (a thesis of sorts):
The overall style of the Giallo is one of self-expression; of ideas, moods, and feelings. As such, one would expect each "successful" example of the genre to be unique in this way. And yet at the same time every Giallo shares at least a few common elements. Some of these are story driven, some are style qualifications. But regardless of category these “rules” are seldom broken within the genre. A truly successful Giallo is one that manages to create a unique stylistic experience without straying too far outside the boundaries that establish its classification within the genre.
The Experiment
GialloScore.com is experiment in Giallo analysis in which the classic as well as some of the lesser known Gialli are scrutinized against a set of rules. These rules are categorized and weighted in an attempt to establish patterns within the genre. Each entry in this survey will receive a “score” based on the number of qualifications that the film adheres to. As the number of films in the survey increases, the most highly regarded examples of the genre should emerge at the top of the rankings.
Because GialloScore.com is an attempt to use scientific analysis to interpret a subjective art form, certain assumptions must be made. Most importantly, the “rules” by which the films are judged are devised arbitrarily and are subject to change as the survey develops. By no means should this experiment represent the final word on the subject but instead should be viewed as one of many valid interpretations of the Giallo genre.
Regardless of the overall score, each film will be assigned a purely subjective viewing recommendation, and it is completely plausible that a lower scoring film will still receive a high recommendation.
Here are a few examples of the "rules" and how they are applied to the overall score. There are many more, I just included a few here so as to not bog you down with too much to read.
Staples
The following are fundamental Giallo criteria and should be weighted heavily (up to 15 points each)
Italian Director - 15 points.
The director must be Italian.
Hidden Identity - 15 points.
The identity of the killer must be hidden for as long as possible, usually until the last few minutes of the film.
Amateur Detective - 10 points.
The identity of the killer should be discovered by someone other than the police. This person should be considered an "amateur" or a "lay person" and should be motivated by the need to clear themselves of suspicion or the threat of becoming a victim.
Standards
The following criteria are trends within the genre and should be given medium weight (up to 5 points each)
First Person POV - 4 points.
The director employs first-person perspective shots from the killer's point-of-view during murder and stalking sequences.
Director > 1 - 4 points.
The director is credited with at least one Giallo preceding or following this one.
Signatures
The following criteria are minor details and should be given low weight (1 point each)
Odd Clue - 1 point.
A clue to the murderer's identity hidden within, or associated with a piece of art or jewelry (e.g. Painting, Necklace, etc).
Impossible scientific method - 1 point.
The identity of the killer is discerned through an impossible scientific method or technology (including those that had not been invented during the time period of the film).
Subjective
Additional points awarded at the reviewers discretion
Style Bonus - 10 points.
For each individual film, a maximum of 10 style points can be added to the score. The style points are comprised of a combination of cinematic elements including cinematographic technique, editing, visual effects, set design, location, costume, and soundtrack.
Influence Bonus - 5 points.
A film can earn a maximum of 5 additional points based on its influence over the genre as a whole. Typically these films appear earlier in the genre time line and are credited with "setting the standard"
Considering the entire list of rules, a film can receive a maximum of 155 points. This produces both predictable (Profondo Rosso scores 141, Duckling scores 133) and unexpected (Lizard scores 91, Lenzi's Quiet Place to Kill scores a 49) results.
Latest poster purchases, and a couple of others
The ones I bought:
Secrets of a Call Girl, with one of Fenech's best performances
Autopsy
The Weapon, The Hour, The Motive
A couple of others I didn't:
The best of Bava's westerns
The Eye in the Labyrinth
Secrets of a Call Girl, with one of Fenech's best performances
Autopsy
The Weapon, The Hour, The Motive
A couple of others I didn't:
The best of Bava's westerns
The Eye in the Labyrinth
Sacco and Vanzetti
The basic facts in the case of Sacco and Vanzetti are simple:
Two Italian-born anarchists who had emigrated to the US, were arrested and charged with having committed murder during a robbery, tried, convicted and sentenced to death on dubious evidence. Despite appeals and various high profile figures of the time pleading for clemency, the sentences were eventually carried out, to become a cause celebre for progressive elements in the US.
What Giuliano Montaldo’s film does is explore the background, in terms of the authorities’ paranoia about revolutionary elements and (the US as) a divided country where the elite were afraid of losing their power and would do anything to keep it, in ways that undoubtedly resonated for 1970s audiences.
Thus, he open with black and white scenes of a raid on an immigrant community, which filone fans may find curiously reminiscent of the sepia-toned opening to The Beyond; repeatedly cuts in the image of an anarchist falling to his death whilst in police custody, apparently referencing Dario Fo’s contemporaneous Accidental Death of an Anarchist; and contrasts the certitude of various eye witness testimonies – yes, those are the men I saw – with the far more ambiguous ‘reality’ revealed in the pseudo-documentary reconstructions.
While the investigation of the investigation reveals the fabrication and disappearance of evidence, along with the essentially show trial nature of events, where the verdict had essentially been decided in advance, this same dietrology (i.e. what lies beneath?) perhaps also exposes the implicit problems here.
Specifically, what we have is a film which is radical in content, but not in form – here we may note the constructed nature of the flashback reconstructions, against the unquestioned reality of their earlier counterparts and the found newsreel images – and which, as such, was necessarily complicit with the status quo, at least according to some theoreticians and practitioners.
Or, if we deny that there is truth, that everything is just a more or less self-interested discourse, then don’t we thereby accept that the reactionaries and racists who condemned Sacco and Vanzetti to death have just as (in)valid a perspective as they did, with their compassionate desire to emancipate the mass of humanity?
That the filmmakers did not support such self-defeating positions is evident.
While Gian Maria Volonte, who plays Vanzetti, may have appeared in the Dziga Vertov collective’s Wind from the East, with its radical form and content, he also appeared in more conventional politically committed films like Sollima’s western Face to Face and Petri’s giallo Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion both before and afterwards.
(Would anyone have gone to see Wind from the East had it not also had Godard’s name connected to it, albeit ‘under erasure’? I think not.)
Ennio Morricone and Joan Baez’s music, with the clear subject position we are to take in relation to the ballad of the two men in Baez's lyrics and the decidedly conventional approach in Morricone's music, in comparison to the experimental work he was undertaking with the new improvisation group or on soundtracks like Cold Eyes of Fear (genre) and The Working Class Goes to Heaven (art, with Volonte again), engages rather than alienates us.
Above all, however, it is the way everything – writing, direction, performances, design etc. – come together to really draw us in to the story to make us feel the injustice, rather than that all there is is just us...
Highly recommended, unless you’re one of them, whichever they this refers to...
Two Italian-born anarchists who had emigrated to the US, were arrested and charged with having committed murder during a robbery, tried, convicted and sentenced to death on dubious evidence. Despite appeals and various high profile figures of the time pleading for clemency, the sentences were eventually carried out, to become a cause celebre for progressive elements in the US.
What Giuliano Montaldo’s film does is explore the background, in terms of the authorities’ paranoia about revolutionary elements and (the US as) a divided country where the elite were afraid of losing their power and would do anything to keep it, in ways that undoubtedly resonated for 1970s audiences.
Thus, he open with black and white scenes of a raid on an immigrant community, which filone fans may find curiously reminiscent of the sepia-toned opening to The Beyond; repeatedly cuts in the image of an anarchist falling to his death whilst in police custody, apparently referencing Dario Fo’s contemporaneous Accidental Death of an Anarchist; and contrasts the certitude of various eye witness testimonies – yes, those are the men I saw – with the far more ambiguous ‘reality’ revealed in the pseudo-documentary reconstructions.
While the investigation of the investigation reveals the fabrication and disappearance of evidence, along with the essentially show trial nature of events, where the verdict had essentially been decided in advance, this same dietrology (i.e. what lies beneath?) perhaps also exposes the implicit problems here.
Specifically, what we have is a film which is radical in content, but not in form – here we may note the constructed nature of the flashback reconstructions, against the unquestioned reality of their earlier counterparts and the found newsreel images – and which, as such, was necessarily complicit with the status quo, at least according to some theoreticians and practitioners.
Or, if we deny that there is truth, that everything is just a more or less self-interested discourse, then don’t we thereby accept that the reactionaries and racists who condemned Sacco and Vanzetti to death have just as (in)valid a perspective as they did, with their compassionate desire to emancipate the mass of humanity?
That the filmmakers did not support such self-defeating positions is evident.
While Gian Maria Volonte, who plays Vanzetti, may have appeared in the Dziga Vertov collective’s Wind from the East, with its radical form and content, he also appeared in more conventional politically committed films like Sollima’s western Face to Face and Petri’s giallo Investigation of a Citizen Above Suspicion both before and afterwards.
(Would anyone have gone to see Wind from the East had it not also had Godard’s name connected to it, albeit ‘under erasure’? I think not.)
Ennio Morricone and Joan Baez’s music, with the clear subject position we are to take in relation to the ballad of the two men in Baez's lyrics and the decidedly conventional approach in Morricone's music, in comparison to the experimental work he was undertaking with the new improvisation group or on soundtracks like Cold Eyes of Fear (genre) and The Working Class Goes to Heaven (art, with Volonte again), engages rather than alienates us.
Above all, however, it is the way everything – writing, direction, performances, design etc. – come together to really draw us in to the story to make us feel the injustice, rather than that all there is is just us...
Highly recommended, unless you’re one of them, whichever they this refers to...
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