7 - History, Genre, and the Italian Western

Summary

From biblical epics, costume dramas, Roman spectacles and biopics to the numerous films that have sought to unravel the nature and effects of the Fascist era and of World War II, historical concerns have animated Italian film forms and various historical genres and constituted a staple of the national cinema despite stylistic and political differences. The appearance of the Italian western in the 1960s on the heels of the resurgence of Roman and biblical spectacles is another manifestation of a return to past history and of the prevalence of genre production in the Italian cinema, despite brief attempts to move in a realist direction. The so-called spaghetti western shares some concerns with the “art cinema” identified with Fellini, Rossellini, Antonioni, Visconti, Pasolini, and Wertmüller.

In part, due to the cold war and the economic and political intervention of the United States, Europe was transformed from a devastated wartime country to what has been dubbed an “economic miracle.” In commenting on this time, Pierre Sorlin writes that filmmakers found “no necessity …to bring in social issues since neorealism had already introduced them to the cinema.” Nonetheless, the thematics addressed in films of the 1950s and 1960s, whether comic, melodramatic, or working in countercultural directions, do involve “social issues,” such as urban anomie, industrial (not wartime) blight, familial disintegration, divorce, marriage, and new sexual mores. This period was rich in films with historical settings drawing on such diverse contexts as ancient Rome, the Middle Ages, and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Italian modernist filmmakers, such as Fellini in Fellini Satyricon (1969), offered their versions of history in film.