Learning on ScreenNew Frontiers in the Spaghetti West
Dr Lee Broughton is a Leverhulme Trust Early Career Fellow in the Centre for World Cinemas at the University of Leeds. His fellowship’s three-year research project, ‘Interpreting Representations of ‘North’ and ‘South’ in the Spaghetti West’, seeks to critically examine, interpret and evaluate the symbolic representations of North and South that are found in Italian Westerns.
About the Author: Dr Lee Broughton is a lecturer in Film Studies at the University of Leeds. He has written extensively on both national and international European Westerns, contributing to publications such as The Directory of World Cinema: Germany volume 2 (2013), International Westerns: Re-Locating the Frontier (2014) and Impure Cinema: Intermedial and Intercultural Approaches to Film (2014). His current research is concerned with investigating the representations of ‘North’ and ‘South’ found in Italian Westerns.
The symbolic representations of North and South found in Hollywood Westerns carry clear historical, cultural and ideological meanings that prompt preferred understandings of America’s past and present. These meanings are typically generated when the long-established interpretive traditions that Americans have employed to make sense of the US Civil War are used to read the films. Determining which of these interpretive traditions are at play in Hollywood’s Civil War Westerns grants us an insight into how Hollywood sought to impose an ongoing sense of national consensus about the war that was also ideologically relevant to the lives of contemporary American cinemagoers. Thus during the 1960s, when American citizens were being urged to pull together in the face of Cold War threats, we find Hollywood producing Westerns that are best read with the ‘reconciliation cause’ interpretive tradition in mind. Sam Peckinpah’s Major Dundee (1965) is a prime example of this trend. Here Union and Confederate troops make their peace and become part of a multicultural fighting force that faces a common external enemy in the form of renegade Indians who have crossed the border into Mexico.
However, as research carried out for my recent monograph The Euro-Western: Reframing Gender, Race and the ‘Other’ in Film (I.B. Tauris, 2016) indicates, when Westerns are produced outside of the USA, local social, cultural and political circumstances – along with regional filmmaking practices and traditions – often work to transform the genre’s key symbols and assign them with new meanings that speak primarily to the local audience. For example, The Euro-Western reveals that significant numbers of West German, Italian and British Westerns from the 1960s/1970s featured groundbreaking representations of the ‘Other’ out West (Native Americans, African Americans and strong women respectively) when compared to the Hollywood Western’s own contemporaneous representations of these ‘Others’. Indeed, I argue that the progressive representations of ‘Others’ that have appeared in recent American Westerns such as Gore Verbinski’s The Lone Ranger (2013), Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained (2012) and Logan and Noah Miller’s Sweetwater (2013) were prefigured by those that were seen in earlier European Westerns such as Harald Reinl’s The Treasure of Silver Lake (West Germany, 1962), Giuseppe Colizzi’s Boot Hill (Italy, 1969) and Burt Kennedy’s Hannie Caulder (UK, 1971).
I thus began asking myself how we might make sense of the geographic symbolism found in US Civil War Westerns that were produced in a country such as Italy, which has its own history of North-South antagonisms. Certainly American interpretive traditions such as the “reconciliation cause” tradition offer little assistance when we try to understand the possible functions – and the deeper meanings – of Italian-made US Civil War Westerns from the 1960s/1970s. Hence, the central research question of my project is ‘how should we interpret the symbolic representations of North and South that are found in Italian Westerns?’
