New Frontiers in the Spaghetti West

Posted on: 2 June 2016

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?’

Objectives

By critically applying comparative analysis techniques to a representative selection of American and Italian Westerns that deal with the Civil War, it has been possible to discern and tag different patterns in the representational strategies that both national cinemas routinely employed when foregrounding symbols that relate to the North and South. Furthermore, the patterns of divergent representation found in the Italian Westerns serve to contest earlier critics’ assertions, which suggested that Italian filmmakers employed northern and southern symbolism out West in wholly indiscriminate ways. Instead my findings indicate that these geographic symbols may possess purposefully sectional and/or allegorical dimensions and functions. Having tagged these numerous patterns of divergent representation, I am currently finishing work on a strand of enquiry that seeks to situate them within Italian cultural, historical and political contexts which in turn will allow new local meanings to be assigned to them. This will lead to the creation of a set of interpretive tools that will facilitate new and original readings of the Italian Westerns, thus achieving my primary research objective. Other objectives built into my research activities include the encouragement of further research into the Western more generally and the dissemination of research findings via public engagement events that are run in conjunction with local cultural organizations. To this end, the kind support of the Leverhulme Trust has enabled me to organize a series of Westerns-related research events and film screenings.

Outputs So Far

The diverse natures of the American and Italian Westerns that are central to my research have enabled me to have papers placed at a good number of conferences over the past two years. While the content of these papers and my wider research will ultimately feed into a monograph, I have chapters based on some of my papers poised for publication in a number of forthcoming edited collections.

During 2013/14 I organized a research seminar series titled ‘Film and History: the Western’. Professor Sir Christopher Frayling’s paper in this series, ‘Once Upon a Time, the Western’, was delivered as a public lecture at Leeds Town Hall on 20 November 2013. The lecture was followed by a screening of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in The West (Italy/USA, 1968) that was presented in collaboration with the Leeds International Film Festival. On 18 June 2014 I convened the international workshop ‘Current Thinking on the Western’. Although officially retired, Professor Edward Buscombe kindly agreed to deliver the workshop’s keynote talk ‘Westerns Today: the Same Difference?’ The workshop brought together a hitherto invisible and unconnected group of UK scholars who are currently actively working on the Western, which bodes well for future research on the genre and possible collaborative ventures.

During 2014/15 I organised an international research seminar series titled ‘Revisiting Cult Westerns’. One particular highlight of this series was Professor Dimitris Eleftheriotis’ paper ‘Ringo, Django and the Italian Western’, in which he used recent cult movie theories to reappraise films that he had originally discussed in his groundbreaking essay Genre Criticism and the Spaghetti Western (2002). On 24 March 2015, I convened the international symposium ‘Current Thinking on the Western II’ for which a leading American scholar, Professor Cynthia J. Miller, kindly provided the keynote talk.

I have compiled an edited volume that features thirteen chapters that have their origins in the events that I have organised or attended over the past two years and this collection is currently being readied for publication with Rowman & Littlefield. Publicity surrounding my research and events resulted in me being interviewed for a BBC Radio 5 feature about Ennio Morricone’s working relationship with Sergio Leone, which was broadcast on 19 December 2014.

I have also run a series of Western film screenings and mini-seasons with the Leeds International Film Festival, the Holmfirth Film Festival and Screen Seven in Leeds. I introduced these screenings with a variety of talks and public papers. These events have been very effective research dissemination and public engagement exercises, drawing good audience numbers and sparking questions and discussions that were often restarted and continued after the screenings had ended. The enthusiasm with which the Western screenings have been received runs counter to the idea that Westerns no longer possess popular appeal and this has also been evident in the classroom. In 2014/15 I designed, wrote and taught in full the Level 2 module ‘Psychotronic Cinemas: The Cult Movie World Wide’ and its research-led sessions on cult Westerns proved to be extremely popular with the students.

Future Activities

I am convening a further research seminar series in 2015/16 and the final major event relating to my research project will be the international conference ‘Current Thinking on the Western III’ that will take place in 2016.

Dr Lee Broughton

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