Poliziotteschio Rules! Blood in the Streets: Histories of Violence in Italian Crime Cinema by Austin Fisher. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020.
Review by Tony Williams
Well known for his Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western: Violence and Popular Italian Cinema (2011), a decade later Austin Fisher publishes his second authored book on that other genre that replaced the declining Italian Western for a time before it, too, fell victim to the inevitable dissolution, fatigue, and parody that affected its predecessor. This informative study examines the appearance of a group of films depicting violent crime in contemporary Italy perhaps more effectively than its generic predecessor. What makes this book of interest is not just the author’s knowledge of Italian but also his important contextualization of this area, one indebted to a range of popular film cycles known as filoni (roughly translated “threads” that contributed to the genre featuring past anxieties concerning the Second World War and Mussolini’s brand of fascism that haunted the country several decades later. In this way, the films revealed a past guilty secret that also featured in more prestigious films by directors such as Elio Petri and Francesco Rosi but nonetheless complemented them in remarkable ways. The book is not intended as a comprehensive study on the lines of those written by Roberto Curti and others but rather a specific analysis and examination of key intersections. (p.3) Serial accumulation of particular repetitive threads reveal a particular interrelationship involving the relevance of the past to the present especially the presence of neo-fascist elements wishing to continue battle with their leftist opponents after the supposed victory of world War Two.
This 229 page study contains five key chapters outlining the diversity of this field and its implications for better understanding one type of generic Italian cinema: Italian Crime Films and the years of Lead; Corruption and Conspiracy in the Poliziotteschi and the Vigilante Filone; Nostalgic Gangsters and the Mafia Filone; Serial Killing and the Giallo; and Enter if You dare! The Cross Cultural reception of Crime Filoni. Introduction, Conclusion, Appendices, Bibliography, and Index complete this very concise study.
Like the term “spaghetti western” abhorred by directors such as Sergio Sollima (1921-2015) and composers like Ennio Morricone (1928-2020) , poliziottesco was originally a pejorative term usually applied to cop or crime films but also mafia, vigilante, and heist movies. Fisher uses it as a “more descriptive way of denoting the modes of production and consumption that characterized the filone system of the 1960s and 1970s: rapid production schedules and concerned exploitation of markets, as distinct from the more celebrated ‘political’ crime films of (among others) Francesco Rosi, Damiano Damiani, or Elio Petri” (p.43).While the first chapter deals with the appearance of those films in the turbulent decade known as the “years of lead” and the influence of American crime films that were reworked to fit in the Italian context in the same way the innovative Italian Westerns were, Fisher takes a different approach in his next chapter. Rather than confine a diverse number of films to the limited dimension of “political conspiracy” following the success of La polizia ringrazia (1972) starring Enrico Maria Salerno, Mario Adorf, and Cyril Cusack (one of many British and American actors who would appear in these films) Fisher attempts to define a particular filone strand that “demonstrates a divergent register of political address: one that seeks, not to explain or `make sense’ of the era’s intrigues, but instead to enact a ritual recognition of innate suspicion, pervasive corruption and assumed distrust.” (p.44) His second chapter “appraises these films for their immediacy rather than their coherence, as documents of confusion rather than of investigative rigour.” (p.44)
Like The Godfather (1972), Fernando di Leo’s Milano Calibro 9 (1972), and Il Boss (1973) featuring Richard Conte cast for his Godfather associations, certain Mafia films lament the loss of old traditions and the debasement of modern criminality forming central parts of Fisher’s filone “network of allusions” (p. 103) Even the serial killings of giallo, usually thought separate from the years of lead crime films relate to the violent turmoil of this era as Fisher argues in his fascinating fourth chapter. Outsiders such as Tony Musante in Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) David Hemmings in Argento’s Deep Red (1975) witness violent incidents that they have to fill in pieces of fragmented memory jigsaws to make sense of and then discover that the incidents themselves originate from past trauma. The brief Italian economic miracle and its economic downtown caused financial as well as psychological consequences as many films of this era, not just poliziotesschi, reveal. The final chapter deals with cross-cultural reception from Italy to other Western markets utilizing reception studies methodology.
This is a fascinating study with the author emphasizing how Italian filmmakers operated not deterministically but according to a particular decision making structure of “economic, intertextual and cross-cultural relationships” enabling them to actively make particular films within a localized industrial context. Fisher wishes his readers to understand this context and quotes Michael Ignatieff on Isaiah Berlin for a certain definition of active agency that he sees within this special context.
“The function of historical understanding was to identify the precise range within which historical actors enjoyed room for maneuver, to understand how and why they used their freedom, and to evaluate their actions by the standard of what real alternatives were possible to them at the time.” (p. 191)
According to the title of an essay by Andrew Britton we all live historically but often find our agencies restricted by the circumstances that surround us. This does not mean that we are subjected to the deterministic rules imposed on us from above. 1 Although a vast difference exists between a high level film like Godard’s Tout va Bien (1972) and other works canonized by literary and cinematic “Great Tradition” norms this does not mean we cannot act historically in oppositional ways within what is often termed exploitation cinema and use the system to express alternatives. Despite issues of evaluation affecting the films within Fisher’s study, they all attempted in one way or another to express the purgative aspects of frustration within a traumatic period of post-war Italian history. Although no artistic works, they did all suggest that something was wrong and the system needed change. Lesser breeds outside the Canonical Law have as much a role to play as their worthy peers and Fisher’s book should stimulate everyone to discover the better examples as well as understand those lesser achievements within the area..
Notes
1. Andrew Britton, “Living Historically: Two Films by Jean-Luc Godard.” Framework 3 (1976): 4-15.
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