Eroi e antieroi del cinema italiano tra gli anni Cinquanta e Settanta

Ph.D. in. "History, Cultures and Knowledge of Mediterranean Europe from Antiquity to the Contemporary Age." THESIS TITLE "Heroes and anti-heroes in Italian cinema between the 1950s and 1970s." PhD student: Angelo Iermano Cycle XXXV Summary of the thesis This doctoral thesis work has as its object of investigation the male character as it develops in Italian cinema between the 1950s and 1970s and, specifically, his characteristic lack of heroic drives. In the period in question, in fact, Italian cinematography offers a wide array of inept and anti-heroes who come to represent in an almost emblematic way the flaws, the turmoil, and, in essence, the psychological make-up of the average Italian. By bringing such problematic characters to the screen, the filmmakers of these years recount the changing Italy, its ambitions, desires, and failures, on the one hand avoiding portraying its uplifting figures, but also somehow excluding the female universe. In the films of the time, in fact, and especially in the genre films, we do not find characters who act moved by a spirit of community or sharing: in that Italian comedy (which so much luck and space will find in the cinematic landscape of the time), it is preferred, in fact, to pillory the flaws of the new Italian emerging in the years of the economic boom. In the Italian western, then, a real deconstruction of the hero of the American West is carried out so that the protagonist no longer embodies the founding ideals of a nation, but mere self-interest sublimated in the continuous and spasmodic search for money. The original question from which we started and which lies at the heart of the present research work concerns the relationship between Italian culture and the heroic narrative, between Italians and heroes, with a particular focus on the second half of the twentieth century. To address such a question properly, we have turned to the main scholars who in the modern era have investigated the figure of the hero and his narratives (to name a few, Carlyle, Emerson and Campbell). The purpose of this study is not to identify heroic personalities akin to canonical definitions, let alone to verify the adherence of Italian films to the model of the monomyth (Campbell) and the hero's journey (Vogler). The intention, rather, is to use these tools of analysis to shed new light on the antiheroes of comedy and spaghetti westerns. The ineptitude that marks the characters of our genre cinema is connoted in a concrete and material sense, and aims to reveal the inadequacy of the subject through comic language. The condition of the comically inept is not experienced in the sphere of inwardness, but rather is externalized and made explicit in his or her relationship with the world, in the specific situations in which he or she acts and in the social conditioning he or she undergoes3. Very often such ineptitude is enunciated through the involvement of the bodily and material sphere, and more specifically through the use in a metaphorical sense of all that pertains to the sphere of food and sex. The Italian, lost in front of new desires and unprecedented types of consumption, seems to find himself in particular in front of food, and through that relationship the condition of the country is expressed. Even in spaghetti westerns, food and everything related to the food sphere (drinks, the moment of the meal) are elements that are emblematic of a new model of the anti-hero. Such deconstruction will lead the genre to increasingly take on the tones of a low, corporeal materiality, leading ultimately to the true comedy western of the Bud Spencer and Terence Hill films. The thesis takes off from the question at the heart of Stefano Jossa's monograph A Country without Heroes. Italy from Jacopo Ortis to Montalbano (Laterza, Bari-Rome 2013). The author questions the reasons that have prevented Italy from producing a national heroic model. To this end, he identifies as exemplary the case of Robin Hood, whose literary myth provided England with a hero with uplifting and unifying power. To better understand the roots of that myth and grasp the dynamics that made it a reference for his nation, it was deemed necessary to draw on Eric Hobsbawm's celebrated study The Bandits. Social Banditry in the Modern Age (Einaudi, Turin 2002). Indeed, the literary roots of the figure of the anti-hero can be found in the criminal type constituted by Robin Hood, whose formula of "Stealing from the rich to give to the poor" makes the criminal action glorious and uplifting, and the breaking of the law is tolerable because it is restorative (righting wrongs), establishes a link with. The anti-heroic formula elaborated by Italian cinema in the period referred to succeeds in becoming an expression of the country's condition and is in close connection with the comic. This connection is often enunciated by the relationship with one's desires, particularly sexual and food desires. For this reason, this thesis work will focus more on aspects related to the food sphere, as it is believed that this marks moments of unveiling and mirroring that symbolically express the particular condition of Italy in the period under consideration. Hunger is, moreover, a typical element of parodic, farcical and popular comedy that finds its most emblematic examples in the atavistic appetite of Punchinello and Harlequin. Moreover, as demonstrated by Michail Michailovič Bachtin in his seminal The Work of Rabelais and Popular Culture, in carnivalesque literature the end of hunger is celebrated with an exaltation of the instincts underlying human living, such as sexual and alimentary. In cinema, food has often been employed in the comedy genre, if one thinks of the infamous pies in the faces of silent comedians. In these cases, its involvement is solely for the purpose of laughter, and there is no secondary intent. These are simply gags, empty acts solely motivated by the pursuit of laughter. In comedy, on the other hand, food can be used as a tool to understand certain broader and more complex social dynamics. This applies not only to food in the strict sense, thus understood as a vivanda, meal, or dish, but also to other aspects that pertain to the spaces and time of eating (such as trattorias, restaurants, professional or home kitchens, private dinners at home). These places are not simply definable as spaces of consumption (of the meal) and consumerism (as in the case of Ro.Go.Pa.G, Roberto Rossellini, Jean-Louis Godard, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ugo Gregoretti, 1963), but also determine a ritual dimension related to the time of eating (lunch after work, dinner, Sunday lunch, and so on). Moreover, the environment of the meal defines relationships and hierarchies of those involved, both in private (in the family, the head of the table reserved for the host or head of the household) and in public (in restaurants). In addition to food-related aspects, this thesis work makes use of some of the most important theoretical and historiographical contributions on Italian-style comedy (presented in chapter two) that allow us to grasp the founding structures and recurring features of the genre. Chapters three and four focus mainly on the filmic aspects of Italian-style comedy and westerns respectively, selecting those anti-heroes who are marked by a specifically problematic relationship with food. Already in the first film of the Italian-style comedy, examples abound to support this hypothesis. In Mario Monicelli's Soliti ignoti (1958), in fact, the pasta and chickpeas of the finale has a clear consolatory function, but above all it re-establishes the end of all criminal ambition and sanctions the return to a normal and ordinary condition for this improvised band of petty thieves. In Monicelli's La grande guerra (1959) there are many situations in which military customs are dismissed from food needs, transferring combat practices to the material plane (so a piece of bread is thrown as a grenade to lure a hen into the trench). The food sphere is reversed and confused with that of wartime combat, whereby a piece of bread can become a hand grenade and rifle shots are used not to kill but to create roasting pans. Around these small food-related events a unity of purpose is created and a sense of community is felt. In spite of this, the final sacrifice of the two protagonists does not imply a true heroic consciousness and does not bring about any process of heroic elevation, as it stems from a provocation by the Austrian officer who captured them. The heroism of the characters is recognized by the viewer outside the diegesis, but not by the community inside the film. According to the dictates of the heroic canon, sacrifice must be recognized by the hero's community. The fellow soldiers of Orestes and John do not know of their deaths, but their action is enough for the viewer to certify their heroism. Food in Italian comedies of the 1950s is employed to reflect the material and existential condition of the characters. In Un americano a Roma (1955), macaroni serves as a mirroring device to reveal the true and authentic nature of the character, the American food model undergoes a lowering in the Bachtinian sense that downsizes and directs food toward the low animal sphere. Entering the 1960s marks a cultural shift that is also echoed in cinema. The boom years produce a prosperity that is now measured in the nature of food, bringing new meaning to it. It is a cinema that no longer employs food as a means of recognition or peaceful reunion with its own nature, but makes it a sign of other processes that make it a metaphor for the country's changed socioeconomic conditions, making room for new desires and drawing new hierarchies. An analysis of food and material aspects allows us to better focus on the condition of the antiheroes of this cinema, as these elements define personal ambitions and power relations between characters. If in the Italy of the 1950s it was still possible to find oneself and reunite peacefully in the pleasures of food, and food desire was still separate from sexual desire, in the Italy of the 1960s the desire for food began to be undermined by erotic desire. This does not mean that for the characters in the play the desire for food is no longer there, but it is either put in the background or becomes alluded to by sexual desire. In Ro.Go.Pa.G. (1963), food desire can no longer unfold freely as it is imprisoned by the two menus at the truck stop. Food in this film performs its mirroring function since the man of consumerism is the farmed chicken, since he shares with it the condition of constraint and the illusory freedom of choice. The mirroring in this case is different from the previously illustrated cases, since it is neither a making peace with oneself (An American in Rome) nor the consolation for accepting one's true condition (The Soliti ignoti), but it expresses the conditioning of the consumer society that makes people lose the naturalness of desire and hinders its free expression behind an apparent freedom of choice. The industrial dishes of the autogrill make food lose any connection with our food tradition, contributing to the disorientation of the boom Italian. Moreover, while in the Italian comedy of the 1950s we see mostly poor and traditional folk dishes, the 1960s abound with status-symbol foods such as (lasagna, steak, lobster...). Italy is a country that is no longer hungry, and converts food into something else, turning it into a symbol of acquired social status and signifier of other forms of desire, beginning with sexual desire. As affluence grows, restaurants and trattorias begin to appear more on the silver screen, becoming the place where different parts of the country meet/clash. Examples are numerous, but the most emblematic is undoubtedly the trattoria "The King of the Half Portion" in C'eravamo tanto amati (1974), a place indicative as much of the beginning of postwar hope as of the end of all ambition. In this context, the most idealistic character endowed with a genuine heroic drive (the stretcher-bearer Antonio, played by Nino Manfredi) is the character who remains nailed to his social condition, but obtains in consolation the love of Luciana (Stefania Sandrelli), who can be read as an allegory of the country itself. Indeed, the 1970s were very hard times marked by deep social and political conflicts. In that period even the function of food in comedy changed and became a tool to express the violence of certain popular classes, their rough brutality and vulgarity (Brutti, sporchi e cattivi, 1976). Or, in the case of comedies with a bourgeois setting, it serves to pillory the cultural inconsistency of the wealthy class (The New Monsters, 1977). The fact that in Italian-style comedy often bourgeois or otherwise upper-class characters are found around simple foods of popular origin (pasta and chickpeas, pasta and beans, soups) stands precisely to underscore how Italy had lacked adequate cultural advancement. The bourgeoisie had been crushed by "an unresolved process of industrialization and urbanization without an adequate cultural transformation. Therefore, what should have been the driving class and leader of the country had actually remained anchored to a popular taste and culture. This is not to assume that food was connoted in a popular and derogatory sense, but only to speculate how the country's social industrial advancement was not necessarily matched by progress in its material culture. Food in Italian comedy serves as a means of unmasking the driving forces of society, to denounce how these forces had actually remained tied to a materiality that had not undergone evolution and remained fixed in itself and entrenched in traditional taste. The symbolism associated with food is also very emblematic of the condition of the heroes of the western genre. It is so in the original American western, but in the local reinterpretation of the genre it acquires new functions and symbolism, indicative of the anti-heroism of the new cowboys invented by Leone and his epigones, and which ultimately led to the creation of a true comic western. For example, the character of Tuco (Eli Wallach) in Sergio Leone's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966) is introduced to the viewer in the manner of the comedy genre (freeze-frame) as he smashes through a plate glass window holding a leg of roast beef. Such an introduction connotes Tuco as a short, corporeal gunslinger, who's survival instinct (which every gunslinger must have) also coexists with an eating instinct. In Leone's films, whiskey is also used in an ironic sense: the food aspect is used to ironically connote the antiheroes and give them a more human guise. On the inappetence of the heroes, Henri Bergson had already expressed himself on the subject, noting in his The Laughter how in tragedy scenes in which one eats were generally absent: "There is nothing better to interrupt a tragic scene; for, when, one sits down, one moves on to comedy." Taking up this very consideration, David Le Breton adds, "The appearance of the body downplays any emotion [...]. With finesse, Henri Bergson notes that tragedy is antinomian to the fact that the hero eats, drinks or manifests the existence of his body: he turns out to be almost ethereal, devoured by his own drama." The American hero does not eat, because he has no body: as a metaphysical personality, he embodies the values of a society in order to take them before History. Even the copious use of alcohol can be read in this light, as it never invalidates the hero's lucidity: in this way, the hero shows that he can control the alcohol and dominate the body. The anti-hero of the Italian western, on the other hand, is material, beginning with the fact that his actions are determined predominantly by money. He does not make himself the bearer of values to be imposed on the wilderness. That environment constitutes a habitat within which he lives and acts in a more material and corporeal dimension. For this reason he is a subject who has a more casual relationship with drinking and eating, sometimes revealing an explicitly comic potential. This is the case in the cinematography of Bud Spencere and Terence Hill, who brought carnivalesque comedy to the Western. buffoonery, gargantuan hunger, skill with guns bordering on juggling, as well as the harlequin echoes of Terence Hill's characters (tricksters who are always hungry, cunning and quick-witted, weaving the adventurous threads of the plot). On the other hand, the predilection for the materialistic antiheroes of the Italian-style Western ended up producing comic heroes with exuberant corporality. Moreover, Spencer and Hill recover the idealistic purpose of canonical heroes devoted to the good, since their adventures are often in defense of the weak (the elderly and children in particular). Their being witty, nonviolent, and good-spirited, coupled with their ability to do justice without challenging the status quo, make Spencer and Hill a comic pair whose transnational and transgenerational success can be seen, in its own way, as a return of the traditional hero's etos. The two heroes stand in the groove of Robin Hood, whose heroism is summed up in the formula "Steal from the rich to give to the poor." Beyond this, there are additional points of contact with the image of the legendary English thief, beginning with the fact that the enemies of both are often local squires who bully poor people. As Hobsbawm wrote, in his pages on the gentleman thief, "the bandit rights wrongs. He does not seek to establish a society founded on freedom and equality." The fact that Spencer and Hill right wrongs without upsetting the status quo or enacting any value profession other than good feelings toward the weakest (particularly children) is perhaps one of the reasons that has made the success of their films so cross-cutting and prolonged over time. The pair does not propose new models of society because there is no moral vindication in their actions, but rather a broader and more generic intention to redress injustices. In conclusion, the anti-heroism of Italian cinema characters between the 1950s and 1970s is very often unmasked or defined by the relationship between them and food. Italian comedy no longer refers to Italians as a community, identifying uplifting personalities who can give us a unified portrait of the country. Rather, it focuses on the monsters, that is, small individuals centered in their small world and their partial interests that return the fragmented portrait of a nation incapable of seeing itself united, except in ridiculing its own widespread malpractice. Therefore, they are no longer unitary and positive figures (if anything taken from the history of the Risorgimento), but rather individual characters characterized by their individualism. Such personalistic ambitions are often exposed by the dynamics of desire, which is frequently the cause of their downfall and eventual failure. Our cinematography of those years, with the inepts of comedy and the gunslingers of the western, finds an original way of narrative rewriting and reformulation, creating its own peculiar form of anti-heroism, characterized by the relationship between the subject and a desire that is always impossible to satisfy. It is generally a desire expressed in the sexual sphere or in social ascent. However, by opening the investigation to food desire, it was possible to ascertain how this aspect is equally relevant to grasp the originality of the antihero of the Italian comedy. The uniqueness of our antiheroes is even more validated if placed in the light of narrative archetypes, in particular that of the trickster, rewriting this archetype in an original way and making it dialogue with the tensions of the society of the time. The Italy of those years found no better figure to represent itself than that of a trickster updated to the language and customs of his time. It is therefore not surprising that Italian cinema did not have a heroic path, also because the archetype of the trickster allowed the recovery of other great comic masks such as that of Harlequin, to give shape to the new masks of the time. Our comic tradition, from the Commedia dell'Arte onwards, has shown a great appreciation for these masks of scammers, and this has happened not so much due to an alleged natural benevolence of Italians towards those who defraud others, but rather due to the narrative power of these characters and for the extraordinary ability of similar archetypal models to be permeated by tensions of different origins. In this way our authors were able to capture in comic types the defects, foibles, desires and ambitions of Italian society between the 1950s and 1970s. The authors did not intend to build a new society, and in fact there is nothing foundational in these comedies (hence the definition of skeptical comedy), but rather the intention of problematizing invisible issues, bringing out (also through the register grotesque) silenced defects, connivances, weaknesses, fragilities, practices, customs to be censored. Food, in fact, manages to frame aspects of society that reflect a specific social and/or existential condition. The character is often what you eat, as in the case of the consumer stuck like a farmed chicken in the Autogrill food model in Ro.Go.Pa.G. It is in particular in Scola's films that food denounces the condition of a character who is unable to change and abandon the old ordinary world to embrace new horizons (Will our heroes be able to find their friend who mysteriously disappeared in Africa?) and more in general of an immobile class that sees in old popular foods the specter of its own generational failure (We loved each other so much). Food, therefore, in light of all this, was certainly one of the tools to account for the changing situation of the country and to express the condition of certain subjects (who sometimes symbolize an entire social group) in the face of the difficult challenges of modernity. It is through the register of the comic as well as the low and the corporeal that food, through the numerous functions that we have just summarized, expressed the anti-heroic nature of the protagonists of this cinematography. We then investigated the western to understand what was the process that made the gunslingers of spaghetti westerns credible (to Italians and to the international public). In addition to the American appearance of the actors involved (even if not American), the winning formula guessed by the genre was based on elements of different nature: the comic, the cynical materialism and the low and corporeal one. The anti-hero of the Italian western, in fact, is completely free of any rhetoric and does not take on any enunciation of values. In addition to this, he becomes recognizable in his relationship with food, starting from Tuco and ending with Bud Spencer and Terence Hill. The laughter they arouse is linked to childish dynamics and subtext, but the adventurous spirit and the way in which eros is manifested (always alluded to in a playful way) have made the couple a global and cross-generational success.