The obvious question that comes to mind with this 2009 collection is what is within it for the fan of European exploitation cinema here?
Well, for one thing you may also be interested in the likes of José Mojica Marins, Alejandro Jodorowsky, Rene Cardona Jr., Emilio Vieyra, Isabel Sarli, and the Brazilian pornochanchada, each being the subject of one of the essays contained herein.
For another, some of the other essays more directly address European exploitation cinema and its relationships with its Latin American counterpart.
Perhaps most important, however, some of the essays are exemplary in the ways they investigate aspects of exploitation cinema in general, whilst remaining attuned to national and cultural specifics. Indeed, as the volume’s editors Victoria Ruétalo and Dolores Tierney explain in their introduction, their coining the term Latsploitation is a conscious decision intended to convey that Latin American exploitation cinema cannot and should not merely be subsumed within more familiar US and European frameworks.
Taking Mexico as a case study, Ana M. López highlights how the framework provided by Eric Schaefer with reference to the US does not apply, as Mexican cinema lacked the industrial infrastructure required. This said, however, the reader will likely also identify their own points of connection to their own particular areas.
The first of the essays with a stronger European dimension is by Antonio Lázaro-Reboll and looks at the reception of Latin American exploitation cinemas by Spanish fans, with specific reference to the fanzine 2000 Maniacos and the San Sebastian Festival of Fantasy and Horror films. Lázaro-Reboll emphasises the benefits of a crossover between fans and academics and their respective areas of knowledge.
The second is by Andrew Syder and examines the use of Latin American locations in Italian cannibal and zombie films, with particular but not exclusive reference to Cannibal Holocaust, Cannibal Ferox, Zombie and Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals. Syder identifies that there are two curious absences in these and other films. First, cannibalism is always situated in Latin America or Asia, but never Africa. Second, the characters within the films are never Italians, instead usually being Americans. Indeed, each of Syder’s four key films begins and ends in Manhattan, in addition to presenting images of it and New York that are recognisably distinctive when compared to US films using these same locations. Syder posits that these two structuring absences relate to Italy’s particular colonial history and allow its discussion to be elided and displaced. Here Snyder also makes reference to some earlier films, including Africa Addio and Grand Slam. Prosperi and Jacopetti’s mondo film is critical of British and French colonialism but also adopts a paternalistic attitude towards the colonised Africans, by suggesting that they were not ready for independence. Giulio Montaldo's film characterises the Italian approach to Latin America in 1960s films, one that contrasts point by point with those of the 1970s. In the earlier decade Latin America was a dynamic, modern, fun place. In the latter decade it was backwards, atavistic and deadly.
The third of the essays with European connections is by Andrew Willis and looks at the career of Leon Klimovsky in both his native Argentina and in Spain. He suggests that Klimovsky may have left Argentina for political reasons. Having been associated with the Peron regime, it was possible that Klimovsky feared a backlash from the new regime. Willis contends that Klimovsky found Franco-era Spain to be more in accord with his reactionary world view. As support of this Willis notes, for example, how The Devil’s Possessed presents an evil nobleman but then has him defeated by a good nobleman espousing Christian values rather than by the oppressed peasantry themselves. At the end of the film, that is, the peasantry have not been liberated nor liberated themselves, as these alternatives would have been too radical and subversive. All that has changed is that they now have a more benign aristocratic ruler.
While I would agree with Willis’s central point, that we should not automatically assume exploitation films are progressive, I felt that his reading of Klimovsky’s career failed to address one major biographical factor. This is the fact that Klimovsky’s own religious background was not Catholic but Jewish. It seems an important omission given the importance of Catholicism to Francoism.
Of the other essays in the collection, the one on José Mojica Marins is also worth noting. Author Tierney identifies a central contradiction in the canonised Cinema Novo movement that dominated discussions of Brazilian Cinema in the 1960s. This is that the movement’s theorists were nominally in support of filmmakers from marginal backgrounds, but were themselves often from privileged ones. Whereas, for example, Nelson Periera Do Santos undertook formal studies at the Italian state film school Centro sperimentale, Marins left school at 13 and was an entirely self-taught filmmaker. Despite these proletarian origins, the considerable aesthetic challenges posed by his films, and the blasphemous qualities of his Coffin Joe character, he was not championed by the critics.
Here I would also make a couple of personal points. First, I remember seeing in a documentary about Marins how he ran an acting school and as one of his teaching methods had a series of numbered photographs of himself performing particular facial expressions. He would use these in drilling his students and when working with them on his films, asking them to give him a number seven, a number thirty-one, or whatever. It seemed like a technique that had unconscious affinities with Soviet and Brechtian avant-garde practices, and thus something that a filmmaker with more cultural capital could have represented as directly political. Second, when doing a MSc in European Film Studies just under a decade ago, one of my fellow students was from Brazil. One time we got talking about the then topical City of God, a film which he characterised as a somewhat touristic exploitation of the underclass by privileged filmmakers.
Overall an impressive, stimulating and wide-ranging collection that is well worth a look for fans and scholars of exploitation cinema whether specifically interested in Latin America or not.
Monday, 15 April 2013
Sunday, 31 March 2013
Aenigma Fanzine
Two things:
First, Aenigma #2 is out.
Second, Aenigma now has a web page: http://eurocultzine.blogspot.co.uk/
First, Aenigma #2 is out.
Second, Aenigma now has a web page: http://eurocultzine.blogspot.co.uk/
I Bastardi / The Bastard
The first thing to note about this film is the implications of its Italian and English titles. The Italian title translates as The Bastards, whereas the English title and the English lyrics to the theme song (“he’s a bastard”) refer to The Bastard. This plural/singular distinction is an important one, since the English version is likely to make the viewer think that the titular bastard is Jason (Giuliano Gemma) whereas the Italian is likely to make the viewer also think of Jason's older, hypochondriac, half-brother Adam (Klaus Kinski) and perhaps also Jason’s girlfriend Karen (Margaret Lee) and the rest of their gang.
The narrative begins in medias res as Jason flees with a bright yellow bag filled with jewels into the waiting getaway car. Having got out of town, Jason and his two accomplices find their way blocked by a police car. Jason encourages his driver to slowly go forwards and then suddenly accelerate. The stratagem works, but the police car pursues and eventually traps the robbers. The three men get out and the two accomplices are then summarily gunned down by the two cops, who prove to be other associates of Jason’s in disguise.
Jason is the bastard.
Then, however, the cops in turn seek to betray Jason.
Everyone is a bastard.
Jason, however, had predicted as much and, having chained the bag to the floor of the car, manages to take them out.
Having disposed of the getaway car and removed the false fittings from the ‘police’ car, Jason arrives in the next town, stops off for a glass of milk – this an apparent nod to Gemma and co-writer/director Duccio Tessari’s earlier collaborations on the Ringo spaghetti westerns – and then meets up with the waiting Karen.
After dealing with another attempted betrayal in a night club – Karen turning the music up so Jason’s shots will not be heard – the duo rendezvous with Adam, their mother, and the other members of the gang.
At this point also we get a more diegetic explanation for Jason’s avoidance of alcohol, his mother being an alcoholic. This said, he later sends his mother a crate of whiskey as a gift; Adam, whether out of concern for his mother and/or a desire to discredit his half-brother, has the bottles watered down. When Jason learns of this, he gifts his mother another lot of the proper, good stuff. Amusingly, this time we see the bottles, complete with telltale J&B labels.
Rather more important in relation to the narrative, however, is that Jason announces he is not going to share the loot with his brother and the others, instead intending to use the $100,000 to bankroll setting up his own gang. To this end, he has hidden the loot; it may be significant that we do not see him do this.
Jason is the bastard.
What Jason proves not to have foreseen, however, is Karen’s betraying him to Adam. Worse, Adam has his surgeon associate (an unrecognisable Umberto Raho) shoot Jason up with drugs and sever the tendons in the wrist of his gun hand.
Jason is taken in by ranch-owner Barbara (Claudine Auger) who helps him to recover (Gemma here displays his athletic prowess by jumping backwards and somersaulting into the swimming pool, apparently on the first take). Barbara’s kindness makes Jason begin to question his previous life, but not to the extent of foregoing revenge.
Jason may not be the bastard, but he is still one of the bastards.
It is somewhat ironic that, having made some comparably Hollywood-style westerns in Spain, Tessari and Gemma should go to New Mexico to do a crime film with a contemporary setting. This said, the trope of the gunman with a maimed hand is a common one in the Italian western (cf. Django, The Great Silence) and a scene of Jason practising by shooting out the strings of a harp and his donning of a leather wrist-guard seem inspired by A Fistful of Dollars.
Tessari makes good use of the landscape, contrasting its brown and green exteriors with some yellow, blue and red interiors (Dante Ferretti has an early design credit here). Tessari's direction is similar, the obvious stylistic flourishes in some scenes (e.g. Jason’s flashbacks/hallucinations as he stumbles deliriously through the near desert landscape) forming a nice contrast with the less emphatic functional approach elsewhere.
Gemma, Kinski and Lee each acquit themselves well, even if none is being called upon to deliver anything outside of their comfort zone. Hayworth's performance is harder to judge, on the grounds that she was afflicted by undiagnosed Alzheimer’s disease at the time. Without seeing the original script, it is thus difficult to know the extent to which her character's drunkenness was there from the outset or was improvised during filming as a response to difficulties.
One aspect of the script, as written or rewritten, that comes across as rather unsatisfactory is the somewhat deus ex machina ending with its rather too-neat settling of accounts (this term, referenced within the dialogue, is yet another spaghetti westernism).
In sum, a film that starts off well, but loses its way a bit towards the end – much like its lead character, admittedly.
The narrative begins in medias res as Jason flees with a bright yellow bag filled with jewels into the waiting getaway car. Having got out of town, Jason and his two accomplices find their way blocked by a police car. Jason encourages his driver to slowly go forwards and then suddenly accelerate. The stratagem works, but the police car pursues and eventually traps the robbers. The three men get out and the two accomplices are then summarily gunned down by the two cops, who prove to be other associates of Jason’s in disguise.
Jason is the bastard.
Then, however, the cops in turn seek to betray Jason.
Everyone is a bastard.
Jason, however, had predicted as much and, having chained the bag to the floor of the car, manages to take them out.
Having disposed of the getaway car and removed the false fittings from the ‘police’ car, Jason arrives in the next town, stops off for a glass of milk – this an apparent nod to Gemma and co-writer/director Duccio Tessari’s earlier collaborations on the Ringo spaghetti westerns – and then meets up with the waiting Karen.
After dealing with another attempted betrayal in a night club – Karen turning the music up so Jason’s shots will not be heard – the duo rendezvous with Adam, their mother, and the other members of the gang.
At this point also we get a more diegetic explanation for Jason’s avoidance of alcohol, his mother being an alcoholic. This said, he later sends his mother a crate of whiskey as a gift; Adam, whether out of concern for his mother and/or a desire to discredit his half-brother, has the bottles watered down. When Jason learns of this, he gifts his mother another lot of the proper, good stuff. Amusingly, this time we see the bottles, complete with telltale J&B labels.
Rather more important in relation to the narrative, however, is that Jason announces he is not going to share the loot with his brother and the others, instead intending to use the $100,000 to bankroll setting up his own gang. To this end, he has hidden the loot; it may be significant that we do not see him do this.
Jason is the bastard.
What Jason proves not to have foreseen, however, is Karen’s betraying him to Adam. Worse, Adam has his surgeon associate (an unrecognisable Umberto Raho) shoot Jason up with drugs and sever the tendons in the wrist of his gun hand.
Jason is taken in by ranch-owner Barbara (Claudine Auger) who helps him to recover (Gemma here displays his athletic prowess by jumping backwards and somersaulting into the swimming pool, apparently on the first take). Barbara’s kindness makes Jason begin to question his previous life, but not to the extent of foregoing revenge.
Jason may not be the bastard, but he is still one of the bastards.
It is somewhat ironic that, having made some comparably Hollywood-style westerns in Spain, Tessari and Gemma should go to New Mexico to do a crime film with a contemporary setting. This said, the trope of the gunman with a maimed hand is a common one in the Italian western (cf. Django, The Great Silence) and a scene of Jason practising by shooting out the strings of a harp and his donning of a leather wrist-guard seem inspired by A Fistful of Dollars.
Tessari makes good use of the landscape, contrasting its brown and green exteriors with some yellow, blue and red interiors (Dante Ferretti has an early design credit here). Tessari's direction is similar, the obvious stylistic flourishes in some scenes (e.g. Jason’s flashbacks/hallucinations as he stumbles deliriously through the near desert landscape) forming a nice contrast with the less emphatic functional approach elsewhere.
Gemma, Kinski and Lee each acquit themselves well, even if none is being called upon to deliver anything outside of their comfort zone. Hayworth's performance is harder to judge, on the grounds that she was afflicted by undiagnosed Alzheimer’s disease at the time. Without seeing the original script, it is thus difficult to know the extent to which her character's drunkenness was there from the outset or was improvised during filming as a response to difficulties.
One aspect of the script, as written or rewritten, that comes across as rather unsatisfactory is the somewhat deus ex machina ending with its rather too-neat settling of accounts (this term, referenced within the dialogue, is yet another spaghetti westernism).
In sum, a film that starts off well, but loses its way a bit towards the end – much like its lead character, admittedly.
Thursday, 21 March 2013
Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western: Politics, Violence and Popular Italian Cinema
This 2011 volume published by I B Tauris presents an analysis of a number of films that may be identified as a sub-genre of a sub-genre, namely Italian or Spaghetti Westerns that have an explicit political (read left) orientation.
Whilst adapted from author Austin Fisher's PhD thesis and thus possibly more theoretically oriented than some fans would like, the author's use of the likes of Louis Althusser and Franz Fanon does not come across as gratuitous name dropping or shoe-horning of the theory into the text, coming across as more bottom-up than top-down.
Fisher begins by establishing the broader context in which his corpus of films emerged, most notably that of the post-war settlement where the anti-Fascist alliance of the resistance (a resistance which was a formative experience for some of the key filmmakers) was represented, with overt and covert US support, benefitting the Christian Democrats party and marginalising the communists.
Turning to the films themselves, the key distinction Fisher makes, responding to the taxonomies of Will Wright, Christopher Frayling, and Bert Fridlund, is that between RSA and insurgency narratives.
The RSA narrative is derived from Althusser's distinction between the Ideological State Apparatus, or ISA, as represented by the education system and the mass media, and the Repressive State Apparatus, as represented by the law. Put crudely the ISA tells you what to think and do, while the RSA then comes into play if you fail to follow the ISA.
The key characteristic of the RSA film, as epitomised by Sergio Sollima's The Big Gundown and Sergio Corbucci's The Great Silence, is the power of the law, or the RSA, being (ab)used by the powerful against the weak.
In Sollima's film it is how land baron Brokston sends Corbett off to bring back Cuchillo dead or alive (preferably the former), for the peon's supposed rape and murder of a 12-year-old girl to divert attention from the real perpetrator, his son.
In Corbucci's it is how businessman Policott contrives to have those who refuse to surrender to him outlaws, such that they may be legally murdered by bounty hunters/killers.
For Fisher the key point about The Big Gundown is its ultimate incoherence. Here it is germane to remember a fundamental difference between Sollima's film and Corbucci's. In The Big Gundown the ending of Franco Solinas's screenplay was dropped, so that Corbett did not kill Cuchillo and the real villain was punished -- i.e. an unhappy ending. In The Great Silence Corbucci was asked to provide a happy ending for some territories, one in which Silence triumphed. Corbucci subverted this request by presenting a happy ending that it was difficult to take seriously, reminiscent of the self-consciously ironic coda to Murnau's The Last Laugh.
The insurgency narrative is drawn from Fanon, and is exemplified by Damiano Damiani's A Bullet for the General and Corbucci's Companeros. These are narratives where a US or Anglo character heads south from the US into Mexico and thereby becomes involved with the revolution, whether supporting or subverting it.
The key question these narratives raise, to Fisher, is the place of violence and its justification/rationalisation: how do we distinguish between legitimate violence against an oppressor and illegitimate violence whereby the formerly oppressed becomes the oppressor?
The most important film in this regard is Sollima's Face to Face, with its civilised eastern academic going west for the sake of his health and then becoming a ruthless bandit leader.
Sollima's film is also important for featuring the two key actors within the Italian political western, namely Gian-Maria Volonte and Tomas Milian.
There are perhaps two notable areas of omission in Fisher's discussion. Both are, however, perfectly understandable given the origins of the book in a PhD thesis where (as I was advised) it is better to accentuate the positive by looking for confirmation rather than refutation of one's ideas.
The first of these is where these films fit in relation to the taxonomy proposed by the editors of Cahiers du cinema around the time of May 1968 (and all that). They suggested that films could be divided into five main categories in relation to form and content and whether these were conservative or radical in approach.
Category A encompassed the bulk of films, especially those produced by Hollywood. These films were conservative on both the form and content axes. As such they were condemned by Cahiers. The far rarer category B encompassed films which were radical in both form and content, such as Godard's Wind from the East. Category C encompassed films which were formally radical but conservative in their content. The Cahiers critics felt such films preferable to those in category D, which were formally conservative but politically radical. Finally, category E encompassed films which did not fit into this schema, in that they might initially be taken as conservative texts but then proved to question this through their contradictions.
With this taxonomy Italian political westerns would seem to be closest to category D. But a problem perhaps then arises when it comes to identifying what conservative form means. A key characteristic of the films of Leone and, more pertinently, those who he influenced is, after all, their comparative lack of regard for David Bordwell classical Hollywood style or Noel Burch's Institutional Mode of Representation.
To give one example, in Django Kill there are rapid-fire montage type flashbacks which are tinted and at times appear to be in reverse motion, with bodies rolling uphill rather than downhill. Rather than seeking to conceal his interventions Questi makes them obvious.
What thus arguably emerges is a situation where formal radicalism becomes less clear cut. Django Kill is radical in relation to The Searchers, but conservative in relation to Wind from the East.
The second area where I felt that Fisher might have commented is with regard to Pier-Paolo Pasolini's broadly contemporaneous notion of an “unpopular cinema”. Pasolini identified three approaches to cinema and politics, the first two of which broadly correspond to Cahiers' categories A and B. For Pasolini the popular cinema, as represented by Hollywood, lacked political bite. The avant-garde cinema, as represented by Godard, was critical, but was also self-defeating as it could only ever reach a minority audience and even then implied a fundamentally sado-masochistic relationship between the sadist filmmaker and the masochist spectator. Pasolini's alternative, the unpopular cinema, was political, yet accessible to wider audiences. As such it could be considered as having affinities with Cahiers' category D.
Pasolini himself took an unpopular cinema line with his Trilogy of Life, of The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and The Thousand and One Nights, the wider accessibility of which could be directly compared to the films that preceded them, Oedipus Rex, Pigsty and Medea. Pasolini also, however, subsequently repudiated the Trilogy of Life and made Salo as a film which he hoped would be deliberately unwatchable and impossible to recuperate.
Italian political westerns would appear to clearly fit into Pasolini's framework as instances of an unpopular cinema. As such, Fisher's failure to provide a detailed discussion of Carlo Lizzani's Requiescant/Kill and Pray arguably emerges as another structuring absence. Lizzani was, after all, avowedly leftist, as were the actor playing the film's protagonist, Lou Castel, and a performer playing an important supporting role -- none other than Pasolini.
Whilst adapted from author Austin Fisher's PhD thesis and thus possibly more theoretically oriented than some fans would like, the author's use of the likes of Louis Althusser and Franz Fanon does not come across as gratuitous name dropping or shoe-horning of the theory into the text, coming across as more bottom-up than top-down.
Fisher begins by establishing the broader context in which his corpus of films emerged, most notably that of the post-war settlement where the anti-Fascist alliance of the resistance (a resistance which was a formative experience for some of the key filmmakers) was represented, with overt and covert US support, benefitting the Christian Democrats party and marginalising the communists.
Turning to the films themselves, the key distinction Fisher makes, responding to the taxonomies of Will Wright, Christopher Frayling, and Bert Fridlund, is that between RSA and insurgency narratives.
The RSA narrative is derived from Althusser's distinction between the Ideological State Apparatus, or ISA, as represented by the education system and the mass media, and the Repressive State Apparatus, as represented by the law. Put crudely the ISA tells you what to think and do, while the RSA then comes into play if you fail to follow the ISA.
The key characteristic of the RSA film, as epitomised by Sergio Sollima's The Big Gundown and Sergio Corbucci's The Great Silence, is the power of the law, or the RSA, being (ab)used by the powerful against the weak.
In Sollima's film it is how land baron Brokston sends Corbett off to bring back Cuchillo dead or alive (preferably the former), for the peon's supposed rape and murder of a 12-year-old girl to divert attention from the real perpetrator, his son.
In Corbucci's it is how businessman Policott contrives to have those who refuse to surrender to him outlaws, such that they may be legally murdered by bounty hunters/killers.
For Fisher the key point about The Big Gundown is its ultimate incoherence. Here it is germane to remember a fundamental difference between Sollima's film and Corbucci's. In The Big Gundown the ending of Franco Solinas's screenplay was dropped, so that Corbett did not kill Cuchillo and the real villain was punished -- i.e. an unhappy ending. In The Great Silence Corbucci was asked to provide a happy ending for some territories, one in which Silence triumphed. Corbucci subverted this request by presenting a happy ending that it was difficult to take seriously, reminiscent of the self-consciously ironic coda to Murnau's The Last Laugh.
The insurgency narrative is drawn from Fanon, and is exemplified by Damiano Damiani's A Bullet for the General and Corbucci's Companeros. These are narratives where a US or Anglo character heads south from the US into Mexico and thereby becomes involved with the revolution, whether supporting or subverting it.
The key question these narratives raise, to Fisher, is the place of violence and its justification/rationalisation: how do we distinguish between legitimate violence against an oppressor and illegitimate violence whereby the formerly oppressed becomes the oppressor?
The most important film in this regard is Sollima's Face to Face, with its civilised eastern academic going west for the sake of his health and then becoming a ruthless bandit leader.
Sollima's film is also important for featuring the two key actors within the Italian political western, namely Gian-Maria Volonte and Tomas Milian.
There are perhaps two notable areas of omission in Fisher's discussion. Both are, however, perfectly understandable given the origins of the book in a PhD thesis where (as I was advised) it is better to accentuate the positive by looking for confirmation rather than refutation of one's ideas.
The first of these is where these films fit in relation to the taxonomy proposed by the editors of Cahiers du cinema around the time of May 1968 (and all that). They suggested that films could be divided into five main categories in relation to form and content and whether these were conservative or radical in approach.
Category A encompassed the bulk of films, especially those produced by Hollywood. These films were conservative on both the form and content axes. As such they were condemned by Cahiers. The far rarer category B encompassed films which were radical in both form and content, such as Godard's Wind from the East. Category C encompassed films which were formally radical but conservative in their content. The Cahiers critics felt such films preferable to those in category D, which were formally conservative but politically radical. Finally, category E encompassed films which did not fit into this schema, in that they might initially be taken as conservative texts but then proved to question this through their contradictions.
With this taxonomy Italian political westerns would seem to be closest to category D. But a problem perhaps then arises when it comes to identifying what conservative form means. A key characteristic of the films of Leone and, more pertinently, those who he influenced is, after all, their comparative lack of regard for David Bordwell classical Hollywood style or Noel Burch's Institutional Mode of Representation.
To give one example, in Django Kill there are rapid-fire montage type flashbacks which are tinted and at times appear to be in reverse motion, with bodies rolling uphill rather than downhill. Rather than seeking to conceal his interventions Questi makes them obvious.
What thus arguably emerges is a situation where formal radicalism becomes less clear cut. Django Kill is radical in relation to The Searchers, but conservative in relation to Wind from the East.
The second area where I felt that Fisher might have commented is with regard to Pier-Paolo Pasolini's broadly contemporaneous notion of an “unpopular cinema”. Pasolini identified three approaches to cinema and politics, the first two of which broadly correspond to Cahiers' categories A and B. For Pasolini the popular cinema, as represented by Hollywood, lacked political bite. The avant-garde cinema, as represented by Godard, was critical, but was also self-defeating as it could only ever reach a minority audience and even then implied a fundamentally sado-masochistic relationship between the sadist filmmaker and the masochist spectator. Pasolini's alternative, the unpopular cinema, was political, yet accessible to wider audiences. As such it could be considered as having affinities with Cahiers' category D.
Pasolini himself took an unpopular cinema line with his Trilogy of Life, of The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and The Thousand and One Nights, the wider accessibility of which could be directly compared to the films that preceded them, Oedipus Rex, Pigsty and Medea. Pasolini also, however, subsequently repudiated the Trilogy of Life and made Salo as a film which he hoped would be deliberately unwatchable and impossible to recuperate.
Italian political westerns would appear to clearly fit into Pasolini's framework as instances of an unpopular cinema. As such, Fisher's failure to provide a detailed discussion of Carlo Lizzani's Requiescant/Kill and Pray arguably emerges as another structuring absence. Lizzani was, after all, avowedly leftist, as were the actor playing the film's protagonist, Lou Castel, and a performer playing an important supporting role -- none other than Pasolini.
Deleuzean Hybridity in the Films of Leone and Argento
As the corrections to my PhD thesis, on Deleuzean Hybridity in the Films of Leone and Argento, have now been approved, here it is for those who wish to read it.
Basically what I say is that Deleuze formulates his concepts of the movement-image and the time-image primarily in relation to classical Hollywood genre cinema and modern European art cinema respectively. As such, the films of Leone and Argento raise questions regarding this framework, in being post-WWII European films, but also being genre films (westerns, thrillers, fantasy-horror, and a gangster film). I then try to bring out how these films have hybrid characteristics, and relate this to certain earlier and later films to place the two directors within a broader tradition.
Basically what I say is that Deleuze formulates his concepts of the movement-image and the time-image primarily in relation to classical Hollywood genre cinema and modern European art cinema respectively. As such, the films of Leone and Argento raise questions regarding this framework, in being post-WWII European films, but also being genre films (westerns, thrillers, fantasy-horror, and a gangster film). I then try to bring out how these films have hybrid characteristics, and relate this to certain earlier and later films to place the two directors within a broader tradition.
Saturday, 16 March 2013
Popular Italian Cinema: Culture and Politics in a Postwar Society
This 2012 academic essay collection has two main sections.
The first features five chapters on specific post-war cycles. These are, in order of presentation, the peplum; horror, this including the giallo; the western; comedy, more specifically the Comedy Italian Style predominant in the 1960s but not Franco and Ciccio nor the Sex Comedies and Decamerotics of the 1970s; and a group of films dealing with the Tarantela.
The second features two chapters on violence in relation to the western and treatments of rape.
Taken as a whole the volume serves to consolidate some established understandings whilst challenging or extending others in useful directions and, as such, can be recommended for readers of this blog – although you may want to wait and see if there is a paperback edition, given its somewhat prohibitive price
In her introduction editor Flavia Brizio-Skov establishes a few guiding principles taken by the four contributors to the volume.
They are more interested in the consumption of the texts rather than their production. In other words, they are more concerned with what people (audiences) do with these films than what filmmakers intended them to do. They assume that all texts are ideological, with a text that purports not to be ideological likely being one that is implicitly conservative.
In his chapter on the peplum Frank Burke begins by looking at three early post-war examples of the form, each preceding the boom that followed Hercules (1959). He highlights their increasing conservativism, relating this to the consolidation of Christian Democrat regimes backed by the US.
Burke then looks at Leone’s The Colossus of Rhodes (1961) and foregrounds how it works as a parody, with nominal hero Dario being inept and ineffective. Burke thus suggests that the film was perhaps more successful in Leone’s terms, as an intentional parody, that Christopher Frayling would appear to indicate in his discussion of the film. For Burke the problem with The Colossus of Rhodes is that its critique of the peplum is too subtle, generally only becoming apparent on a second viewing. Burke nevertheless tacitly agrees with Frayling that The Colossus of Rhodes is an important predecessor of the Italian western, where the parody would be more obvious.
Burke then examines another ironic peplum, Cottafavi’s Hercules and the Captive Women. He emphasises how its Hercules is an indolent figure whose motivation to act against the Atlantean Aryan/Nazi-coded villains stems not through commitment to more abstract notions of morality or a wider concern for the people but rather friendship, and that the eventual destruction of Atlantis that Hercules precipitates is one that has both allusions to nuclear weapons and that is indiscriminate.
Burke’s chapter arguably also raises a question which recurs throughout the book: by what means and how adequately can the film scholar looking at the meanings audiences attached to these films be verified, given the general infancy of cultural studies at the time and the distance of several decades?
Andrea Bini’s chapter addresses the Italian horror film. He argues that it comprises of three broad periods, each spanning approximately ten years. In this he both confirms and extends the work of previous scholars (such as Maggie Günsberg) by suggesting a slightly different breakdown of the first two periods and introducing the third one. For Bini, as Günsberg, the first period spans the years 1956-66 and can be characterised as Gothic. For Bini, as Günsberg, the second period is characterised as giallo, but begins in 1967 rather than 1969/70. For both critics, however, the key film heralding the Gothic to Giallo shift (can we say epistemological break? or paradigm shift?) is Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. Bini’s third period, that of excess and gore, begins in 1977 and lasts until 1986.
Bini says that the Gothic-Giallo-Gore progression sees horror move from being marginal to mainstream and back to marginal. Here he foregrounds that Suspiria and Inferno were less successful within Italy than Argento’s earlier films, alongside the increasing importance of producing films for export. This gives an interesting angle on Suspiria in particular: according to the figures in Maurizio Baroni’s Platea in piedi, Suspiria was more successful than any of the Animal Trilogy and Deep Red in terms of its absolute ranking in box-office take for the year, as 4th most successful film of 1976/77. However, this success can also be measured in relation to a decline in absolute cinema attendances and, concomitantly, the amount of Lire taken, over the 1970-77 timespan.
Bini also notes the absence of the vampire in Italian culture and how they are replaced by the powerful witch. This helps explain the commercial failure of Freda’s I Vampiri, the figure of Asa in Bava’s Black Sabbath and, indeed, the non-Italian settings of both films alongside the Wurdalak episode of Black Sabbath.
Bini further emphasises how horror was a specifically adult genre in Italy, with reference to the sex-horror films of Renato Polselli. This also explicates their often problematic position in the US marketplace, where horror tended to be seen more as something for children.
For Bini the reason why The Bird with the Crystal Plumage achieved the breakthrough that previous gialli had not seems to have been partially down to making the right film at the right time. Whilst denying that Argento’s films are explicitly political, he suggests that the director managed to tap into the fears and uncertainties that emerged in the Years of Lead, generally taken as beginning in 1969.
Bini, finally, puts forward that Argento’s films along with the genres or cycles as a whole express and ambivalence toward the feminine. This can be seen as being in accord with Mikel Koven’s reading of the giallo as a form which is ambivalent towards modernity more generally.
In her chapter on the Western Brizio-Skov posits that a fundamental difference between the Hollywood Western and the Italian Western is the remove at which they operate: US Westerns dealt with the myth of the West. They were Westerns about the West. Italian Westerns dealt with the myth of the myth of the West. They were Westerns about the Western. One expression of this distinction is that the US Western, as epitomised by Shane, has a hero, whereas the Italian Western, as epitomised by A Fistful of Dollars, has an anti-hero.
Brizio-Skov contents that in social terms the likes Clint Eastwood’s Joe/The Man with No Name worked for those Italians who were winners and losers in the new economic system of individualism. Those who were winners could see themselves reflected on screen, those who were losers could enjoy a wish fulfilment of what they would like to be on screen.
Individualism also manifested in the way in which the Italian Western anti-hero would destroy a corrupt system, but decline to stay around or settle down to construct a better one in its place.
Above all, in Brizio-Skov’s analysis, the Italian Western was a sub-genre marked by contradictions in how it could be read, this leading to its being criticised by the left and the right on the one hand, and being enormously successful with audiences on the other.
Finally, Brizio-Skov suggests that the Leone Western ushered in the post-Western, as inaugurated and exemplified by Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch.
In this regard, a crucial distinction between the Western Italian Style and Comedy Italian Style was that the former could readily be exported internationally, whereas the latter was too close to home to be successfully exported widely.
In his chapter on Comedy Italian Style, Bini suggests that three distinct periods of films could be identified, thus repeating the magic number as already seen in Italian horror and in the Western (US-Italy-US). In general the success of a film depended upon how well Italian audiences were able to see and recognise themselves as the subjects of the comedy whilst not feeling insulted or threatened. Unsurprisingly the boundaries here shifted considerably between the late 1950s and mid 1970s.
Though Comedy Italian Style is perhaps less interesting to readers of this blog, it is worth remembering that Leone employed writers Age and Scarpelli for The Good, The Bad and the Ugly on the basis of their work within the form. That is to say, the connections are there if one seeks them out.
This also applies to Flavia Laviosa’s examination of films featuring the tarantela, which emerges as a more specialised topic with several films about the phenomenon being documentaries and/or not exported. She does, however, mention tarantism in Flavia the Heretic Nun, whilst references to appearances of spiders in other European and North American horror films might lead back to the likes of Canevara’s The Black Belly of the Tarantula or Fulci’s The Beyond.
The second section of the book begins with Brizio-Skov’s chapter on violence in relation to the three periods of the Western established in her earlier discussion: classical-, Italian-, and Post-Western. The last of these, inaugurated by The Wild Bunch, continues through various 1970s Westerns before reaching its high point in Eastwood’s Unforgiven. Drawing on Murray Slotkin in particular, Brizio-Skov suggests that the classical Hollywood Western presents a situation of regeneration through violence, accompanied by a clear-cut positioning of the good and the bad and their respective relations to the community. The Italian Western sees an initial breakdown of these frameworks. The post-Western then presents spirals of violence, where one excessive retaliation spawns another excessive retaliation. Tantalisingly the author then raises the issue of where in contemporary cinema a regenerative violence might still be found and mentions the cop film. Accordingly one is left wanting more, in the form of a discussion of the 1970s cop and gangster film cycle in Italy.
The second chapter in this section, and the last in the book – there is no conclusion – is by Lavioso and addresses how rape has been dealt within in Italian cinema. Lavioso foregrounds a discursive change from texts which discuss rape in the context of sex to texts which discuss rape in the context of (abuse of) power. One issue here, perhaps, is that the popular status of some of the texts/films discussed is less clear; though my own understanding of Damiani’s The Most Beautiful Wife was certainly enhanced by learning about its real-life background and inspiration. Likewise, I wondered whether another case mentioned had any relationship to Di Leo’s To Be Twenty – especially given that Di Leo’s films often have a realist/sociological bent – whilst the deployment of Trauma Theory might suggest a new way of looking at Argento’s The Stendhal Syndrome.
All in all, a very fecund collection where even the least obviously relevant chapter – the tarantela – suggests new lines of inquiry.
The first features five chapters on specific post-war cycles. These are, in order of presentation, the peplum; horror, this including the giallo; the western; comedy, more specifically the Comedy Italian Style predominant in the 1960s but not Franco and Ciccio nor the Sex Comedies and Decamerotics of the 1970s; and a group of films dealing with the Tarantela.
The second features two chapters on violence in relation to the western and treatments of rape.
Taken as a whole the volume serves to consolidate some established understandings whilst challenging or extending others in useful directions and, as such, can be recommended for readers of this blog – although you may want to wait and see if there is a paperback edition, given its somewhat prohibitive price
In her introduction editor Flavia Brizio-Skov establishes a few guiding principles taken by the four contributors to the volume.
They are more interested in the consumption of the texts rather than their production. In other words, they are more concerned with what people (audiences) do with these films than what filmmakers intended them to do. They assume that all texts are ideological, with a text that purports not to be ideological likely being one that is implicitly conservative.
In his chapter on the peplum Frank Burke begins by looking at three early post-war examples of the form, each preceding the boom that followed Hercules (1959). He highlights their increasing conservativism, relating this to the consolidation of Christian Democrat regimes backed by the US.
Burke then looks at Leone’s The Colossus of Rhodes (1961) and foregrounds how it works as a parody, with nominal hero Dario being inept and ineffective. Burke thus suggests that the film was perhaps more successful in Leone’s terms, as an intentional parody, that Christopher Frayling would appear to indicate in his discussion of the film. For Burke the problem with The Colossus of Rhodes is that its critique of the peplum is too subtle, generally only becoming apparent on a second viewing. Burke nevertheless tacitly agrees with Frayling that The Colossus of Rhodes is an important predecessor of the Italian western, where the parody would be more obvious.
Burke then examines another ironic peplum, Cottafavi’s Hercules and the Captive Women. He emphasises how its Hercules is an indolent figure whose motivation to act against the Atlantean Aryan/Nazi-coded villains stems not through commitment to more abstract notions of morality or a wider concern for the people but rather friendship, and that the eventual destruction of Atlantis that Hercules precipitates is one that has both allusions to nuclear weapons and that is indiscriminate.
Burke’s chapter arguably also raises a question which recurs throughout the book: by what means and how adequately can the film scholar looking at the meanings audiences attached to these films be verified, given the general infancy of cultural studies at the time and the distance of several decades?
Andrea Bini’s chapter addresses the Italian horror film. He argues that it comprises of three broad periods, each spanning approximately ten years. In this he both confirms and extends the work of previous scholars (such as Maggie Günsberg) by suggesting a slightly different breakdown of the first two periods and introducing the third one. For Bini, as Günsberg, the first period spans the years 1956-66 and can be characterised as Gothic. For Bini, as Günsberg, the second period is characterised as giallo, but begins in 1967 rather than 1969/70. For both critics, however, the key film heralding the Gothic to Giallo shift (can we say epistemological break? or paradigm shift?) is Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. Bini’s third period, that of excess and gore, begins in 1977 and lasts until 1986.
Bini says that the Gothic-Giallo-Gore progression sees horror move from being marginal to mainstream and back to marginal. Here he foregrounds that Suspiria and Inferno were less successful within Italy than Argento’s earlier films, alongside the increasing importance of producing films for export. This gives an interesting angle on Suspiria in particular: according to the figures in Maurizio Baroni’s Platea in piedi, Suspiria was more successful than any of the Animal Trilogy and Deep Red in terms of its absolute ranking in box-office take for the year, as 4th most successful film of 1976/77. However, this success can also be measured in relation to a decline in absolute cinema attendances and, concomitantly, the amount of Lire taken, over the 1970-77 timespan.
Bini also notes the absence of the vampire in Italian culture and how they are replaced by the powerful witch. This helps explain the commercial failure of Freda’s I Vampiri, the figure of Asa in Bava’s Black Sabbath and, indeed, the non-Italian settings of both films alongside the Wurdalak episode of Black Sabbath.
Bini further emphasises how horror was a specifically adult genre in Italy, with reference to the sex-horror films of Renato Polselli. This also explicates their often problematic position in the US marketplace, where horror tended to be seen more as something for children.
For Bini the reason why The Bird with the Crystal Plumage achieved the breakthrough that previous gialli had not seems to have been partially down to making the right film at the right time. Whilst denying that Argento’s films are explicitly political, he suggests that the director managed to tap into the fears and uncertainties that emerged in the Years of Lead, generally taken as beginning in 1969.
Bini, finally, puts forward that Argento’s films along with the genres or cycles as a whole express and ambivalence toward the feminine. This can be seen as being in accord with Mikel Koven’s reading of the giallo as a form which is ambivalent towards modernity more generally.
In her chapter on the Western Brizio-Skov posits that a fundamental difference between the Hollywood Western and the Italian Western is the remove at which they operate: US Westerns dealt with the myth of the West. They were Westerns about the West. Italian Westerns dealt with the myth of the myth of the West. They were Westerns about the Western. One expression of this distinction is that the US Western, as epitomised by Shane, has a hero, whereas the Italian Western, as epitomised by A Fistful of Dollars, has an anti-hero.
Brizio-Skov contents that in social terms the likes Clint Eastwood’s Joe/The Man with No Name worked for those Italians who were winners and losers in the new economic system of individualism. Those who were winners could see themselves reflected on screen, those who were losers could enjoy a wish fulfilment of what they would like to be on screen.
Individualism also manifested in the way in which the Italian Western anti-hero would destroy a corrupt system, but decline to stay around or settle down to construct a better one in its place.
Above all, in Brizio-Skov’s analysis, the Italian Western was a sub-genre marked by contradictions in how it could be read, this leading to its being criticised by the left and the right on the one hand, and being enormously successful with audiences on the other.
Finally, Brizio-Skov suggests that the Leone Western ushered in the post-Western, as inaugurated and exemplified by Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch.
In this regard, a crucial distinction between the Western Italian Style and Comedy Italian Style was that the former could readily be exported internationally, whereas the latter was too close to home to be successfully exported widely.
In his chapter on Comedy Italian Style, Bini suggests that three distinct periods of films could be identified, thus repeating the magic number as already seen in Italian horror and in the Western (US-Italy-US). In general the success of a film depended upon how well Italian audiences were able to see and recognise themselves as the subjects of the comedy whilst not feeling insulted or threatened. Unsurprisingly the boundaries here shifted considerably between the late 1950s and mid 1970s.
Though Comedy Italian Style is perhaps less interesting to readers of this blog, it is worth remembering that Leone employed writers Age and Scarpelli for The Good, The Bad and the Ugly on the basis of their work within the form. That is to say, the connections are there if one seeks them out.
This also applies to Flavia Laviosa’s examination of films featuring the tarantela, which emerges as a more specialised topic with several films about the phenomenon being documentaries and/or not exported. She does, however, mention tarantism in Flavia the Heretic Nun, whilst references to appearances of spiders in other European and North American horror films might lead back to the likes of Canevara’s The Black Belly of the Tarantula or Fulci’s The Beyond.
The second section of the book begins with Brizio-Skov’s chapter on violence in relation to the three periods of the Western established in her earlier discussion: classical-, Italian-, and Post-Western. The last of these, inaugurated by The Wild Bunch, continues through various 1970s Westerns before reaching its high point in Eastwood’s Unforgiven. Drawing on Murray Slotkin in particular, Brizio-Skov suggests that the classical Hollywood Western presents a situation of regeneration through violence, accompanied by a clear-cut positioning of the good and the bad and their respective relations to the community. The Italian Western sees an initial breakdown of these frameworks. The post-Western then presents spirals of violence, where one excessive retaliation spawns another excessive retaliation. Tantalisingly the author then raises the issue of where in contemporary cinema a regenerative violence might still be found and mentions the cop film. Accordingly one is left wanting more, in the form of a discussion of the 1970s cop and gangster film cycle in Italy.
The second chapter in this section, and the last in the book – there is no conclusion – is by Lavioso and addresses how rape has been dealt within in Italian cinema. Lavioso foregrounds a discursive change from texts which discuss rape in the context of sex to texts which discuss rape in the context of (abuse of) power. One issue here, perhaps, is that the popular status of some of the texts/films discussed is less clear; though my own understanding of Damiani’s The Most Beautiful Wife was certainly enhanced by learning about its real-life background and inspiration. Likewise, I wondered whether another case mentioned had any relationship to Di Leo’s To Be Twenty – especially given that Di Leo’s films often have a realist/sociological bent – whilst the deployment of Trauma Theory might suggest a new way of looking at Argento’s The Stendhal Syndrome.
All in all, a very fecund collection where even the least obviously relevant chapter – the tarantela – suggests new lines of inquiry.
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