Some 500 such westerns were made at the height of the influence of Italian filmmaking, and Fisher notes a number of reasons for this. The Italian government was more liberal in its attititudes to violence on screen, costs were lower, there was also huge investment and involvement from US film companies that saw in Italian cinema an opportunity to make a lot of money. In addition US cinema was waning slightly under pressure from television, while in poorer Italy it was still massively popular. Fisher repeatedly warns however, that understanding Italian cinema in general, and the western's in particular, means placing them in their wider context. Discussing the 1969 film Sono Sartana, il vostro becchino (I Am Sartana, Your Angel of Death) Fisher describes it's "comic-book facade... a sinister film with assassins hiding in every shadow, working for a conspiracy run by society's guardians and using the law as cover."
However Fisher continues:
It is true that many of the films cited here... use this moral universe as a backdrop for eccentric action and physical comedy, and should not be mistaken for committed Marxist expositions. Nevertheless, narratives which unambigulously assert that the forces of law and order in an outwardly liberal society amount to an authoritarian conspiracy must, in the volatile political arena of the late 1960s, be appraised in their full historical context. This trend of Westerns spans the very period during which the international student movement and some of its attendant extra-parliamentary groupings emerged, flourished, and descended into armed insurgency.
There are several important issues that Fisher brings to the fore here, and in the book. The first is the wider context if radicalism of the late 1960s, the anti-Vietnam war movement, US imperialism, the Cold War and so on. The other is the limited politics of the Italian left which saw some groups descending into terrorist and violent actions. Another issue for Fisher is a key strategy of the Italian Communist Party to develop (and highlight) Italian culture as contrary to the spread of capitalist ideas and culture from the US and US cinema. As an aside I think Fisher under develops this interesting point, failing to see the Italian CP as tied to the Soviet Union, and thus part of a global strategy against the US.
The involvement of Marxists and revolutionaries in filmmaking and many (but by no means all) Spaghetti Westerns is striking. How successful was it in spreading radical ideas. It would seem that it was limited. Fisher argues:
Italian Westerns oer se were by no means received in mainstream circles - countercultural or otherwise - as films with a capacity for radicalism at all. The amoral nihilism of Leone (and of the majority of Spaghettis) most certainly resonated with the zeitgest at a time when Vietnam was dismantlying what Engelhardt dubs 'victory culture;' and a perceived social breakdown was devilling conceptions of the American Draeam. Such a representation of a broken society... was by no means one with appeal exlusively to the radical Left. Possible the single most visible influence from the filone in mainstream Hollywood cinema of the arly 1970s... advocated nopt a countercultural but a reactionary response.
Indeed it would seem that ahistorically, Westerns do not lend themselves to radical ideas of mass collective action, strikes, protests and anti-war action. Their heroes are usually individuals, their violent revenge is usually outside the law etc. Nonetheless at the time of My Lai, killings of students, the Civil Rights movement and Nixon, as Fisher points out, "films depicting corrupt corporations, sadistic military institutiosn and deceitful governments" were "inextricably tied to the parochial concerns of the Nixon era".
They were also, sometimes, overtly political and revolutionary. Two stand out for me: Bullet for the General and A Fistful of Dynamite. Both of which centre on the radical politics of the Mexican Revolution (the later also involving Irish liberation struggles). Others, such as Faccia a faccia (1967) chart how individuals politics change in the context of wider struggles. For Fisher's "pivotal" year of 1968, when insurrectionary resistance in the Global South, was combining with the explosive development of radical politics in the US and Western, these were powerful themes.
But perhaps the most important point that Fisher is making is that the political westerns he celebrates develop in three way tension with European left politics, the global political situation, and also a "fascination with US culture" and film. For every explicitly radical film such as A Fistful of Dynamite, there is also a highly political, but less obviously one such as, The Great Silence, and countless films that aren't political in an overt sense at all, even if they reflect wider contexts admirably. It is, as he says, viewers who "create 'meanings' through the artefacts of popular culture" and in the political Western, it is "one such audience" that engages with such a process of "negotiation, appropriation and reformulation".
Radical Frontiers is required reading for every left fan of the genre. I am sad I didn't get round to this earlier, though my to watch list is now three times its old length. Other films are getting a rewatch.
No comments:
Post a Comment