Radical Frontiers In The Spaghetti Western: Politics, Violence And Popular Italian Cinema (international Library Of Visual Culture)

Though 1960s European cinema frequently reflected the shifting ideological tides which now characterise the era in the popular imagination, the complex and extensive relationship of the Italian – or ‘Spaghetti’ – Western to these political ferments has gone almost entirely unnoticed. Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western fills this gap as the first in-depth analysis of militant political trends in the Italian Western. Providing a detailed, historically-grounded examination of the films of Damiano Damiani, Sergio Sollima and Sergio Corbucci, Austin Fisher reveals how and why these filmmakers responded to international and national events by inscribing Italian Far Left revolutionary doctrine, and a legitimacy of violence, into the genre. Offering fresh perspectives across the Western genre while recasting the Spaghetti’s influential position in exploitation cinema, Fisher brings the genre more firmly into the tradition of European political filmmaking. Ever more popular in the age of DVDs, eBay and online fandom, the Spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s have undergone a mainstream renaissance which has nevertheless left their intimate relationship to the troubled politics of 1960s Italy unexamined. Radical Frontiers reappraises the genre in relation to the revolutionary New Left and the events of 1968 to uncover the complexities of a cinematic milieu too often dismissed as formulaic and homogeneous. Establishing the backdrop of post-war Italy in which the Roman studio system actively blended Italian and American culture, Austin Fisher looks in detail at the works of Damiano Damiani, Sergio Sollima, Sergio Corbucci, Giulio Questi and Giulio Petroni and how these directors reformatted the Hollywood Western to yield new resonance for militant constituencies and radical groups. Radical Frontiers identifies the main variants of these militant Westerns, which brazenly endorsed violent peasant insurrection in the'Mexico'of the popular imagination, turning the camera on the hitherto heroic colonialists of the West and exposing the brutal mechanisms of a society infested with latent fascism.The ways in which the films'artistic failures reflect the ideological confusions of the radical groups is examined and the genre's legacy is reappraised, as the revolutionary energy of Italy's New Left becomes subsumed amidst the conflicting agendas of New Hollywood, blaxploitation and the'grindhouse'revival of Tarantino, Rodriguez and Raimi. Reclaiming the Spaghetti Western from the domain of the merely cool and repositioning it within the spectrum of late-1960s radical cinema, Radical Frontiers analyses the genre's narrative and cinematographic inscriptions in their political context to uncover Far Left doctrines in these tales of outlaws and sheriffs, banditry and redemptive violence. Cover 1 Contents 6 List of Illustrations 8 Acknowledgements 10 Introduction 12 PART I - THE BACKDROP 20 1. Imagining America: US Influence and American Mythology in Post-War Italy 22 2. A Marxist’s Gotta Do What a Marxist’s Gotta Do: National Identity and Political Violence on the Italian Frontier 54 PART II - THE FILMS 86 3. Go West, Comrade! Defining the Absolute Enemy 88 4. Violent Mexico: ‘Crossing the Border’ into Armed Insurgency 128 PART III - THE LEGACY 172 5. Revolutionising Violence: Radical Translation and Postmodern Residues in US Cinema 174 6. Along the Radical Spectrum 214 APPENDICES 228 APPENDIX A: Highest Grossing Italian Westerns, 1962-1980 (Domestic Prima Visione Box-office Returns) 230 APPENDIX B: Italian Western Releases in Italy, 1962-1980 234 APPENDIX C: Italian Western Releases in the USA, 1962-1980 236 APPENDIX D: Corpus of US and UK Reviews of Fifty Italian Westerns, 1965-1977 238 Notes 246 Bibliography 270 Index 300 This is an analysis of miltant political trends in the the 1960s Italian -- "Spaghetti" -- Westerns. It examines the films of Damiano Damiani, Sergio Sollima and Sergio Corbucci, and shows how and why these filmmakers responded to international and national events by inscribing Italian Far Left revolutionary doctrine, and a legitimacy of violence, into the genre Analysis the militant political trends in the Italian western, and provides a detailed, historically-grounded examination of the films of Damiano Damiani, Sergio Sollima and Sergio Corbucci