Political/Popular Cinema

Alan O’Leary

Political/Popular Cinema

Popular culture is a site where the construction of everyday life may be examined. The point of doing this is not only academic – that is, as an attempt to understand a process or practice – it is also political, to examine the power relations that constitute this form of everyday life and thus reveal the configurations of interests its construction serves. — Graeme Turner, British Cultural Studies, 20031

The political in cinema has variously been theorised as a question of legislation and economics (the circumstances and systems of production and exhibition), of legitimation and representation (who gets to ‘speak’ and for whom), of film form, and of content. Perhaps the last continues to preside in critical discussions of Italian cinema where there is a widespread understanding of politics as what is, or what was, or what should be ‘in the news’.2 Thus, a ‘political film’ might be concerned with the mafia, with the anti-democratic activities of Silvio Berlusconi, with the employment conditions of contract workers, with the plight of migrants to Italy, and so on. Such themes are of undoubted and often urgent importance; the problem lies in the fact that ‘politics’ in Italian cinema has typically been discussed in terms of film-makers’ engagement with issues that have been predefined as valuable or important, even as political per se. The adequacy

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Quoted in J. Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction (Harlow: Pearson, 2006), 12. M. Fantoni Minella, Non riconciliati: Politica e società nel cinema italiano dal neorealismo a oggi (Turin: UTET, 2004), vii.

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of the makers’ depiction of the issues is then assessed, using criteria more or less explicit, and the films judged successful or not. Such an approach is not mine in this chapter. I assume that politics is not something ‘out there’ which is then expressed with varying degrees of adequacy in films, ‘popular’ or otherwise. The forward slash in my title is intended to suggest that the relationship of the political and the popular is something that emerges in specific contexts, and that the manner in which the popular is political is not something that can usefully be prescribed by critics in advance. I make no attempt to be comprehensive in this chapter. I will deal here with the character of the politics in/of two popular filoni (sub-genres or cycles of films): the polizottesco or cop film of the 1970s, and the cinepanettoni or Christmas films produced between 1983 and 2011. I hope to show, with these two examples, different ways in which popular cinema does politics. I will close the essay by offering a definition of the popular that treats it in terms of address to ‘other people’, and an understanding of popular political cinema as a cinema that articulates the concerns of people in their ordinariness. The risk with the account of popular cinema I will articulate here is that of sliding into what Fredric Jameson characterises as an ‘essentially negative’ and anti-intellectual populism that opposes itself to elitism only to become elitism’s mirror-image.3 Such a populism would merely replicate the process, described below, by which popular culture is typically ‘othered’ – so I hope to have evaded it. But it is a risk I am prepared to run in order to treat the political relationships enabled by popular cinema in way that does not reduce them to mere false consciousness or ersatz tokens of ‘mainstream’ cinema’s conditions of production.4 3 4

F. Jameson, ‘Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture’, Social Text 1 (1979), 130–48; 130. Jameson himself called for the rethinking of ‘the opposition high culture/mass culture’ in order to ‘read high and mass culture as objectively related and dialectically interdependent phenomena, as twin and inseparable forms of the fission of aesthetic production under late capitalism’ ( Jameson, ‘Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture’, 133–4). Proposed more than three decades old, such an approach might be assumed to have become common sense, but it is remarkable how often popular

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Serial Poetics, Ritual Politics Maurizio Grande has written that political cinema is a kind of mirage.5 This is due in part to the fact that politics itself can be elusive of definition. By ‘politics’ do we mean, say, the workings of government and issues of public life, or should we have something broader in mind? Terry Eagleton suggests the latter when he writes of politics as ‘the way we organise our social life together, and the power-relations which this involves’.6 Some critics complain that such an expanded understanding of politics implies that all films are political, so that political cinema becomes a meaningless category. Actually, the problem is deeper still: criticism and theory are revealed in this expanded understanding to be themselves political, in that they deal with questions of value and of what constitutes meaning, and therefore of the allocation of intellectual and economic resources.7 The political character of film criticism and scholarship is clearest in its will to validate or render illegitimate certain registers and forms of film-making and the intellectual or affective investments that audiences might make in them. A totalising or dismissive account of great swathes of popular cinema is one version of this politics of criticism. Christian Uva has written of ‘la miopia e la superficialità con cui molta critica ha bollato in termini ideologici e spregiativi fenomeni rilevanti della produzione di genere […], finendo

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Italian cinema (be it praised or derided) is still treated in aesthetic terms derived from the appreciation of canonical films, while auteurs and art-house cinema are rarely treated in terms derived from the popular. My impression is that the project of treating Italian cinema as a unitary, or at least ‘twin and inseparable’, phenomenon has yet to be actualised. For the standard dismissive account of ‘mainstream’ cinema, popular comedy included, see William Hope’s introduction to L. d’Arcangeli, W. Hope and S. Serra, eds, Un nuovo cinema politico Italiano?, i: Lavoro, migrazione, relazioni di genere (Leicester: Troubadour, 2013), ix–xx. M. Grande, Eros e politica (Siena: Protagon Editori Toscani, 1995), 15. T. Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (2nd edn, Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 169. J. Champagne, ‘A View from the West: Italian Film Studies or Italian Film Studies’, The Italianist 33/2 (2013), 273–9; 276.

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per legittimare e reiterare nel tempo l’equazione: popolare = reazionario’.8 Uva notes that one particular victim of this critical habit has been the poliziottesco, the Italian cop film of the 1970s. The purpose of my discussion of the poliziottesco here is not, however to defend the filone from familiar accusations of exhibiting the ‘wrong’ sort of politics. Instead, I consider the films in terms of the kind of elaboration, or ‘working through’, the poliziottesco performs on behalf of its audiences. ‘Working through’ is the Freudian metaphor adopted by John Ellis in his work on the role of television in contemporary society.9 For Ellis, our sense of ‘impotent witness’ before traumatic events is elaborated and tackled (worked through) by the exhaustive and repetitive nature of television news reporting working in tandem with serial genres like soap opera, the plots of which tend to feature issues and concerns drawn from the contemporary public sphere. My argument is that, as a quasi-serial form, the poliziottesco performed a similar function. Typically, individual genre films are recuperated as artistically or politically valuable by identifying certain of their makers – usually a director – as exceptionally skilled, or particularly well endowed from a political perspective.10 The term used for commercial cinema that deals deliberately with issues defined as political is ‘cinema di consumo impegnato’;11 it is usually the director of the film who is ‘impegnato’, rather than the text itself, in this

C. Uva, ‘Appunti per una definizione del (nuovo) cinema politico’, The Italianist 33/2 (2013), 240–320; 241. For a history of critical attitudes to Italian popular cinema, see L. Bayman and S. Rigoletto, ‘The Fair and the Museum: Framing the Popular’, in L. Bayman and S. Rigoletto, eds, Popular Italian Cinema (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 1–28. 9 J. Ellis, Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty (London: I. B. Taurus, 2000), 102–29. 10 This is Peter Bondanella’s approach in a widely read study, in which the account of genre cinema is concerned especially to recognise the exceptional films. See P. Bondanella, A History of Italian Cinema (New York: Continuum, 2009). 11 G. De Vincenti, ‘Politica e corruzione nel cinema di consumo’, in L. Miccichè, ed., Il cinema del riflusso: Film e cineasti italiani degli anni ’70 (Venice: Marsilio, 1997), 265–82; 268. 8

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account.12 The problem with this auteur-in-the-genre-machine approach is that it fails to grasp the quasi-seriality of genre cycles, in which films must obey an ‘injunction to minimal difference’:13 they must recapitulate the pleasures provided in earlier films of the cycle even as they are obliged to be different enough to distinguish themselves as product. This condition of quasi-seriality equips (even obliges) filone cinema to acquit something like a ritual function, in which beliefs and values are articulated, challenged or reiterated,14 and engagement with social conditions occurs in something like ceremonial fashion. We can observe this process at work in the poliziottesco. As mentioned above, the 1970s cop film has been dismissed as ‘a manipulative, cliché-ridden, reactionary, proto-fascist genre’.15 Certainly, the filone thrived during a period in which Italian society witnessed many acts of political violence, often authoritarian in inspiration. The historian of Italian cinema Gian Piero Brunetta has argued that the Italian citizenry in this period exhibited a sterling faith in Italian democracy even as violent and perplexing events filled the daily news, but that the poliziottesco sought to undermine this faith with a crude ethical schema, purloined from Hollywood revenge fanstasy, of a face for an eye.16 In actual fact the poliziottesco tended to denounce the ideologies and activities of the far right

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I do not mean to suggest that a given director is necessarily associated with the Italian Left, but rather that s/he decides to make a critical intervention using a film. The ‘impegno’ precedes the text rather than being instantiated through it. The phrase is Evan Calder Williams’s, used in discussion during the CineRoma seminar at La Sapienza, Rome, June 2012. See K. B. Karnick and H. Jenkins, Classical Hollywood Comedy (London: Routledge, 1995), 11–12. This is Alex Marlow-Mann’s exasperated summary of typical criticisms (‘Strategies of Tension: Towards a Reinterpretation of Enzo G. Castellari’s The Big Racket and the Italian Crime Film’, in Bayman and Rigoletto, eds, Popular Italian Cinema, 133–46; 134). Marlow-Mann’s article is the best piece to date on the poliziottesco. G. P. Brunetta, Il cinema italiano contemporaneo: Da ‘La dolce vita’ a ‘Centochiodi’ (Rome: Laterza, 2007), 410–15.

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and the state’s covert support for neo-fascist activity.17 La polizia ringrazia (Stefano Vanzina 1972), the prototype of the cycle, already contains a critical representation of right-wing vigilantism and of the desire for an authoritarian takeover of the state.18 It is true that the ‘collateral’ death of the passer-by or kidnap victim, a topos in the films, stands for the sense of insecurity of the Italian urban dweller, and the violent cop protagonist is a compensatory surrogate who assuages or avenges that insecurity while ultimately confirming it with his death. Likewise, there is a sense in which the exaggerated violence projected onto the streets of Italy has a celebratory aspect. ‘Rome as Chicago’ is the title Brunetta gives to his short account of the cycle;19 in the films themselves such a comparison is intended to flatter: the metropolis envy which identifies the Italian urbs with the very exemplum of modernity, the American city, presents the degradation, criminality, and political terrorism of contemporary Italy as essential to its vitality. This operates as part of the films’ compensatory or consolatory function: the sense of insecurity, the danger of mugging, murder, massacres or coups d’état, seem a source of pride, not regret. As such, the poliziottesco evinces a fascination with the terrible events it portrays that may be said to be characteristic of how popular cinema deals with disturbing circumstances. It is conventional to deplore this, but perhaps more valuable to consider how the effort of elaboration is indistinguishable from the act of exploitation. In any case, the ritual function of the filone can be identified in its assumption of the task of mourning for the victims of violence in the period. This occurs through the reiterated death of the policeman protagonist. The tough cop, in his virility and vigour, is a fantasy projection of the spectator even as he is compromised Relevant films include La polizia sta a guardare (Roberto Infascelli 1973), La polizia accusa: Il servizio segreto uccide (Sergio Martino 1975), and Poliziotti violenti (Michele Massimo Tarantini 1976). 18 The film was imitated because of its box office success, and contains features that would be embellished and recombined in the more than one hundred films of the cycle. See R. Curti, Italia odia: Il cinema poliziesco italiano (Turin: Lindau, 2006), 7, 97. 19 Brunetta, Il cinema italiano contemporaneo, 413–14. 17

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by his honesty and essential purity – in this context a kind of naivety from which the spectator can take comfort by not sharing. Through his martyrdom the cop has witnessed the criminality, degradation, but also the vitality, of contemporary Italy on our behalf (the word ‘martyr’ comes from the Greek for ‘witness’). As a formulaic product, similar from film to film, the poliziottesco was able to perform something like a ritual function for its spectator. Its iterative and its exploitative character was proper to the working through of the experience of urban insecurity and violence. It provided opportunities for mourning and offered compensation for the sense of being cast adrift by processes greater than oneself. In that sense, it was to a lesser extent about politics – justly, Marlow-Mann argues that the poliziottesco ‘invokes social and political issues that are of concern to the viewer in order to create an affective experience’20 – than it was an articulation of the relationship of its audience to disturbing events in the public sphere.

The Politics of Evacuation I have argued above that the delimitation of political cinema is itself a political activity, predicated on the authority to say what pertains to a topic, what is worthy of study, and what constitutes a ‘model of legitimate cultural explanations’.21 This disciplinary ideology is expressed in the suspicion of popular cinema, and can be observed in the lack of attention paid to certain phenomena. My example in this section is the cinepanettone, the Italian Christmas film.22 The remarkable success of this filone over 20 Marlow-Mann, ‘Strategies of Tension’, 136. 21 M. Landy, Film, Politics and Gramsci (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 4. 22 The films, associated with the company Filmauro, were first produced in 1983, and then annually from 1990 until 2011. They achieved particular success in the first decade of the new century.

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a long period was not reflected in critical or academic attention. So it is that, in an authoritative but prescriptive overview of Italian film-making in the new millennium, William Hope can relegate any mention of the cinepanettone to a single footnote in which one of the series is referred to as a ‘vacuous comedy’.23 That ‘vacuous’ is revealing: it exposes the writer’s belief that the political inheres in a particular sort of content (actually the film deals vividly with the aging body, and with questions of status and desire), but it is precisely the cinepanettone itself that is being ‘evacuated’ as an object of study in Hope’s account – and not only his. On the other hand, another form of ‘evacuation’ – toilet humour if you like – is essential to the political character of the films themselves, best thought of in terms of the carnivalesque, as described by Mikhail Bakhtin.24 In Bakhtin’s celebratory account, carnival was a period of symbolic death and renewal in which the whole community participated in the inversion of hierarchies and the suspension of normal codes of behaviour, something which involved the indulgence of appetites and all the pleasures and needs of the body. The cinepanettone lends itself to analysis in terms of the carnivalesque because it is associated with a festive suspension of quotidian norms and priorities, and with the cycle of renewal marked by the death of the old year and birth of the new. Its employment of coarse language, of the ‘grotesque’ body, its ridiculing of cultural pretensions and its inversion of hierarchies and conventional moral priorities (or the revelation of their hypocrisy), are all perfectly consistent with Bakhtin’s account of carnivalesque humour. As Victor Turner writes: ‘simpler societies have ritual or sacred corroborees as their main meta-social performances; protofeudal and feudal societies have carnival or festival; early modern societies have carnival and theatre; and electronically advanced societies, film’.25

W. Hope, Italian Film Directors in the New Millennium (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 33n. 24 M. Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. H. Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). 25 V. Turner, ‘Frame, Flow and Reflection: Ritual and Drama as Public Liminality’, Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 6/4 (1979), 465–99; 468. 23

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It seems a particular characteristic of Italian culture that forms of taste are projected in political terms, so that the cinepanettone is perceived to be a reactionary form in both aesthetic and ideological senses. Bakhtin allows us to refute this deterministic equation when he argues that carnival and other ‘forms of protocol and ritual based on laughter’ offer an ‘extrapolitical’ dimension: ‘They belong to an entirely different sphere’. By this he means that the carnivalesque eludes officially ratified systems of value: ‘carnival is the people’s second life, organised on the basis of laughter’.26 To consider the cinepanettone as a version of the ‘people’s second life’ allows us to get beyond the impasse of ideological distaste; it allows us to find a utopian impulse at work in the escapist and transgressive pleasures offered by the comic form.

For Other People If the meaning of ‘politics’ is elusive, and so too the character of ‘political cinema’, our problem seems to be compounded when we add the notion of ‘popular’. The word ‘popular’ comes from the Latin popularis, from populous, that is ‘people’; at root, then, ‘popular’ simply means ‘of the people’, though to acknowledge as much is to beg the question: who are the ‘people’, exactly?27 For this reason, Christopher Wagstaff wonders (and doubts) if a useably restrictive definition of the category ‘of the people’ can be arrived at in relation to Italian ‘popular’ cinema.28 I want to suggest that such a definition can indeed be proposed, one that can help to locate both the political and the popular in Italian cinema.

26 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, 5–8. 27 H. N. Parker, ‘Toward a Definition of Popular Culture’, History and Theory 50 (2011), 147–70; 154–5. 28 C. Wagstaff, ‘Italian Cinema, Popular?’, in Bayman and Rigoletto, eds, Popular Italian Cinema, 29–51.

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What I have in mind relates to the understanding of popular culture as always oppositional, in the sense that ‘popular’ culture is necessarily distinguished from other forms of culture:29 ‘popular culture is always defined, implicitly or explicitly, in contrast to other conceptual categories: folk culture, mass culture, dominant culture, working-class culture, etc.’.30 This does not imply that popular culture is oppositional in a political sense, but it does begin to suggest its status as somehow secondary or supplementary: ‘popular culture carries within its definitional field connotations of inferiority; a second best culture for those unable to understand’.31 In a similar vein, John Caughie has observed that much writing on the theme assumes that ‘popular culture is what other people like’,32 and Tony Bennett notes how often it is considered to be culture for ‘other people’.33 When Bakhtin speaks of carnival as the ‘people’s second life’, we can read him as intending the ‘people’ precisely as this other: there are people and there are people, so to speak, and some people are more equal than others. This is suggested by Giorgio Agamben when he talks of the dual meaning in Italian of popolo,34 a word which can denote the sum of citizens as a unified political body (the upper case Popolo), but also and conversely, a marginalised part of the populace, those who belong to the lower classes, or any rate those who are excluded from the body of the nation (the lowercase popolo). Agamben points out that this dual sense persists in English: ‘Anche l’inglese people, che ha un senso più indifferenziato, conserva, però, il significato di ordinary people in opposizione ai ricchi e alla nobilità’.35 If the upper-case Popolo is the constituency from which the modern democratic

29 Parker, ‘Toward a Definition of Popular Culture’, 148. 30 Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, 1. 31 Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, 6. 32 J. Caughie, ‘Popular Culture: Notes and Revisions’, in C. MacCabe, High Theory/ Low Culture (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986), 156–71; 170. 33 T. Bennet, quoted in Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction, 26. 34 G. Agamben, Mezzi senza fine: Note sulla politica (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1996), 30–4. 35 Agamben, Mezzi senza fine, 30.

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state is understood to derive its legitimacy and which it exists to serve, then the lower-case popolo – ‘ordinary people’ – is the grouping within it most likely to be acted upon by that state, whether as an embarrassing deviation to be eliminated, ‘improved’ or punished, or even as the bearer of messages intended for the citizenry in its political aspect (Popolo). As Stuart Hall puts it: ‘One way or another, “the people” are frequently the object of “reform”: often for their own good, of course – “in their best interests”’.36 We might say that reform, like popular culture, is for other people. This lower case popolo, subject to improvement, disapproval, or paternalistic attention, is always ‘other’. And it is this understanding of popolo that may offer the usefully restricted meaning of ‘people’ that Wagstaff finds elusive in the article mentioned above: ‘a variety of social groups which, although differing from one another in other respects (their class position or the particular struggles in which they are most immediately engaged), are distinguished from the economically, politically and culturally powerful groups within society’.37 We can say that popular culture is culture for the lower case popolo; popular film is film for ‘ordinary people’ constructed as ‘other’. In short, then, the politics of popular cinema can refer to two things. The first is the process by which a cinema is constructed as other. ‘Political’ has often functioned as a value-laden genre label that is also a way of saying ‘better’.38 Secondly, though, it refers to a cinema that articulates the concerns of people in their ordinariness. Popular cinema is political, that is, in the paradoxical sense that it deals with the pre-political, that which has not yet entered into the realm of recognised political discourse.

S. Hall, ‘Notes on Deconstructing the Popular’, in J. Storey, ed., Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader (Harlow: Pearson, 2006), 442–53; 478. 37 T. Bennett, quoted in Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, 12. 38 P. Noto, ‘“Uno sceneggiato non è un programma di storia”: Appunti su politica, impegno e miniserie all’italiana’, The Italianist 33/2 (2013), 285–91. A. Fisher, ‘“Il braccio violento della legge”: Revelation, Conspiracy and the Politics of Violence in the Poliziottesco’, Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies 2/2 (2014), 167–81; 178. 36