The Political Films of France, Italy, and the United States, 1960-1976

Home , Anatole Dauman, Anny Duperey, Hands over the City, Lou Castel, Salvatore Giuliano, Warren Beatty

Visualizing State and Society: The Political Films of France, Italy, and the United States, 1960-1976

Master's Thesis

Presented to

The Faculty of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Brandeis University Department of Comparative History Alice Kelikian, Advisor

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for

Master's Degree

by Peter Andrew Novick

May 2010

Peter Andrew Novick

2010

ABSTRACT

Visualizing State and Society: The Political Films of France, Italy, and the United States, 1960-1976

A thesis presented to the Comparative History Department

Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Brandeis University Waltham, Massachusetts

By Peter Andrew Novick

While much study has been devoted to the respective revolutionary film movements of France, Italy, and the United State between the years 1960 and 1976, few have attempted a comparative analysis. Even fewer authors and critics have attempted to

link each movement's omnipresent themes with their respective political and social

superstructures. By looking at a select sample of films from several countries in the designated period, however, one ultimately find similar thematic approaches inextricably linked to those nations' social and political idiosyncrasies. The following essay, in turn,

seeks to investigate the relationship between three national cinemas in a sixteen year period, with an eye towards two specific themes—images of corruption and bureaucracy

and changing sexual and familial norms.

Table of Contents

I. Introduction……………………………………………………1

II. Political Films in the Postwar Era……………………………..2

III. Historiography…………………………………………………7

IV. Contrasting Visions: Bureaucracy and Corruption……………………………………………...... 11

V. Contrasting Visions: Sexual and Familial Norms……………32

VI. Conclusion……………………………………………………51

INTRODUCTION

While film historian William J. Palmer’s pronouncement in 1987, “…that movies both reflect and comment upon the society in which they are made"1 now seems apparent, it might come as a surprise to historians and film-buffs alike that this aesthetic viewpoint had only come into vogue in the latter quarter of the twentieth century. This is not to suggest that film has not long provoked debate concerning its social and political implications. American film in the Golden Age of Hollywood long portrayed an ideological conservative fantasyland while film’s initial introduction into Europe provoked a due amount of anxiety with regards to its “mass” appeal and as a threat to the traditional political and aesthetic status quo. While politics, thus, have long been invoked by industry and auteur alike as an ideological weapon however, the political film has rarely garnered attention as a topic deserving research, despite the slow recognition of its importance as “vital component in the network of cultural communication and the nature of their content.”2

In this respect, the twenty year period from 1960 to 1976 represents a cultural watershed not only in the political content of film on both sides of the Atlantic, but in newfound critical assumptions regarding the inherent nature of the art form as a political commodity—the “…ways in which films reflect ‘dominant ideologies’ but also challenge values'—3 in addition to film’s role as a catalyst in breaking down aesthetic “geographic

1 Palmer, 2 2 Sklar, Robert. 1994. Movie-made America: A Cultural History of American Movies. New York: Vintage Books, 3. 3 Ibid., 310.

exclusivity.”4 This is not surprising considering the aforementioned sixteen years bore witness to cinematic trans-Atlantic dialogue the likes of which had never before been witnessed. Whole cinematic movements—New Hollywood, the French New Wave, New

German Cinema—were inspired and launched under the influence of moving images created by people in countries of vast distances and cultures of disparate origins.

The following essay accepts the above premises regarding the nature and influence of film. There’s no questions films of this designated period are “talking to us,”5 often concerning topics which transcend traditional, political boundaries and social milieu. Few would argue otherwise. In broaching explicitly political films of the era in question, however, one should not forget the extent to which films also remain inextricably linked to national contexts and reflections of cultural variegations in addition to their representation of collective wishes and myths.6 After all, it is these national idiosyncrasies which ultimately defined the political films of the era.

Given the sheer volume of politically-themed films created in two continents spanning more then a decade, this essay uses this notion of cultural distinctiveness to investigate the political films of three countries—France, Italy, and America. Ultimately, the themes to be investigated—visions of state and bureaucracy and shifting sexual and familial norms—will broadly serve to illustrate the ways in which comparable political and social structures of the nations in question rendered transnational themes unique.

POLITICAL FILMS IN THE POSTWAR ERA

4 Palmer, William J. 1987. The Films of the Seventies: A Social History. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press., 8. 5 Monaco, James. 1979. American Film Now: The People, the Power, the Money, the movies. New York: Oxford University Press, 6 Monaco, Paul. 1976. Cinema and Society: France and Germany during the Twenties. New York: Elsevier, 20.

Before looking at the specific themes and the corollary films in question, it is important to have a brief overview of the respective countries’ histories with regards to political films in the given period, all of which had enormous influences on each other leading up to the Sixties and throughout the subsequent decades. In this manner the aesthetic links will provide the underlying current by which each respective national film culture painted different images on what often appeared as a common palette.

Following World War II, both Italy and France were forced to rebuild their cultural institutions not only in the shadow of political division and defeat but against the new, massive influence of the United States. In Italy, the neo-realist movement in film entertained both these issues, emphasizing realistic treatment, popular setting, social content, historical actuality, and political commitment.”7 This can be seen a number

Rossellini classics, including Rome, Open City, which commenced filming as the German tanks were abandoning the Italian capital and Paisan, a film of multiple vignettes chronicling the struggles of communication between Italians and Americans during the war and its aftermath.

As a legacy of the anti-fascist resistance, Rossellini and the other neo-Realists were undoubtedly conscious of their own aesthetic engagement—the need to not only tell a story about politics, but express it in an overtly political manner. As the immediate postwar era gave way to the Fifties, however, obedience to the neo-Realist doctrine waned, even among its greatest practitioners who never fully identified with the all- encompassing label. Italian directors “…moved closer to traditional commercial

7 Bondanella, Peter E. 1983. Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present. Ungar film library. New York: F. Ungar Pub. Co., 31.

Hollywood genres and away from the close connection between documentary and fiction that was at least partially responsible for the appeal of the early classic [neorealist] films.” Furthermore, economic issues insisted on new “commercial considerations” as

American capital became the primary financier of Italian films.8

Italy was not an exception, however, to the high-brow/low-brow disparity.

France, too, was party to this cultural bifurcation, even during the famed golden age of the Thirties when heavily political Poetic Realist films like Renoir's Grand Illusion coexisted with more popular fare.9 Following Vichy, though, when Poetic Realism was all but banned, films truly embraced artistic compromise, initially as a means to stem the new Hollywood juggernaut. Hence, the Blum-Byrnes Agreement (1946), which guaranteed a cancellation of French war debts to America in return for the latter's unrestricted access to the filmmaking market.10 Not surprisingly, French political films languished throughout the following decades, with le cinema de papa11 becoming a prime target for the brash young writers of Cahier du Cinema.12

Times were changing, though, and it was not long before the new guard replaced that of the old. The Fifties, after all, witnessed a trans-Atlantic prosperity boom, the likes of which had yet to be seen. Additionally, by the end of the decade, a new generation with more leisure time was approaching adolescence. Thus, the baby boomers had the duel advantage of more money to spend and more time to think, the inevitable result being a shift in political and social mores. Furthermore, “By 1965 there were radio and

8 Ibid., 100. 9 Chapman, James. 2003. Cinemas of the World: Film and Society from 1895 to the Present. Globalities. London: Reaktion, 213. 10 Ibid., 228. 11 "Dad's cinema" – the derogatory label fashioned by the Cahier generation of filmmakers towards French cinema of the Fifties, which they deemed bland, tame, and cliché 12 Giannetti, Louis D. 1991. Flashback: A Brief History of Film. Englewood, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 340-341

television programs, magazines, shops, products and whole industries that existed exlusively for the young and depended upon their patronage.”13 Film, though, remained a prime locus of such changes.

France, having been a pioneer throughout the history of cinema, naturally became a center for this collision of new values and art. Contrary to popular opinion, however, the French Nouvelle Vague was the product not of a handful of close friends but rather several disparate filmmaking groups, each of whom came to prominence from varying film backgrounds (documentaries, critical writing, etc.).14 What united them, however, was a commitment to a new aesthetic language which conscientiously sought to address previously unexplored topics and taboos.

Politics, though not the dominant theme among early new wave films, certainly lurked in the background. A film like Alain Resnais' Hiroshima, mon Amour, for example, while addressing issues of memory and love in a lyrical, dreamlike style, nonetheless invoked the pain of past conflict as a warning for the future. Similarly

Francois Truffaut's, Les Quatre Cent Coups, constructed in a style quite different from those of Resnais, also pointed to the consequences of a society without values. For

Truffaut, these corrupt values were endemic to the adult world, full of hypocrisy, violence, and illegitimate authority. Only the young—à la Antoine Doinel—could reshape the world in a just manner.

The individual, floating through a cold, meaningless void certainly wasn't a monopoly of the French. While not overtly political, the great Italian films of the early

Sixties expressed a similar disgust towards the world crafted in the debris of World War

13 Judt, Tony. 2005. Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. New York: Penguin Press, 395. 14 Chapman, James. 2003. Cinemas of the world: film and society from 1895 to the present. Globalities. London: Reaktion, 250.

II. La Dolce Vita, perhaps the most notorious example, portrayed the aimless wanderings of the character of Marcello across a spiritually decaying Rome, full of decadent aristocrats and depressing landscapes. The connection between Marcello Mastrioanni's futile quest for meaning was not lost on a younger Italian generation, bored and frustrated with the values of the past. In this manner La Dolce Vita reflected changing mores in

Italian society—the growth of public culture, the decline of Church authority, and the rise of conspicuous consumption. These values, though, neither created nor communicated in a vacuum had great appeal beyond Italy's boarders, America being fertile ground for the new filmmaking language.

Just as Fellini and Truffaut were raised on the works of Hitchcock and Hawks, the men who would craft the films of the post-studio age in Hollywood were great admirers of the auteurs in France and Italy. In this manner, the American political films of the waning years of the Sixties and throughout the Seventies owed a large debt to the same engagement practiced by European film directors in the postwar years. Without crucial change in the American system of moviemaking, however, it's unlikely the great political American political films of the late-Sixties and Seventies would have ever been made.

Following World War II, the American film industry, in contrast to Italy or

France, could relish a trans-Atlantic cultural and economic dominance. As has been told many times before, however, Hollywood's monopoly would start to give way less than two decades later, not to foreign moviemaking, but to developments in America, itself.

Television, a landmark Supreme Court case, and changing generational tastes ultimately

doomed the moribund studio system, leaving a massive vacuum in the film industry, which would be filled by a new generation of politically conscious "movie brats."

As the great Italian auteurs output began to wane and the heroes of the French

New Wave faded out, "New Hollywood" was just getting started. Not surprisingly, the film which broke this renaissance—Bonnie and Clyde—was decidedly political—a rebellious anti-establishment shoot-em-up, while The Graduate, another landmark film of

'68, played upon the connection between sexuality and political hypocrisy. Most importantly, however, these films addressed trans-Continental themes with European- borrowed styles, albeit in a distinct, American manner.

HISTORIOGRAPHY

The mid-Sixties, then, represented the nexus of a number of important film movements and the apex in the careers of a number of important filmmakers.

Unfortunately, the political films of this era, themselves, rarely undergo a comparative historical treatment, apart from general historical narratives or part of larger technical filmmaking textbooks. While few and far between, several works have, nonetheless, attempted a broader, transnational analysis in recent decades. These works, in addition to key works of film theory and histories of political film in this crucial era proved extremely fruitful in mapping out this essay's methodological and topic basis.

In terms of comparative film analysis, Paul Monaco's 1974 Brandeis dissertation,

Cinema and Society in France and Germany, 1919-1929 proved an excellent starting point. Monaco, after all, recognized how, "Most films histories are 'internal' histories of the cinema, tracing the evolution of filmic techniques and devices, citing this or that

movie as a masterpiece, and concentrating on chronology rather than analysis and interpretation."15 In response, Monaco first attempted to, "…consider the relationship of government to the cinema in both [France and Germany], and, "…to offer analyses and interpretations of the sources and meanings of the difference between the two cinemas."16

Using Freudian theory, in addition the works of Jung and Levi-Strauss, Monaco concluded that "Studies of cinema and society can neither avoid the issue of group psychology nor the hypothesis of a group psyche."17 Monaco expounds on this idea in his conclusion:

French films of the 1920's portrayed the major themes of the orphan, the individual abandoned in the world, the hero, the presence of children, blood seen, and were disposed to landscape and seascape cinematography. The German popular cinema of the same decade produced movies presenting the themes of betrayal, the foreigner as evil-doer, unseen blood, the street and the city as ugly and dangerous, clock imagery, and suicide. The themes which are repeatedly developed and elaborated in French popular films are not to be found in their German counterparts of the same decade. The reverse is true as well; French films of the 1920's in no way develop the same or similar themes as German movies did.18

Undoubtedly for Monaco, then, "The Business of cinema is to express in disguise latent group tensions and wishes."19

Monaco, thus, provided a psycho-historical and comparative basis with which to pursue historical studies of film. While the former may have lost favor in general film writing, however, the latter lives on, almost approaching the level of orthodoxy. Hence, in the AFI Film Readers' sponsored compilation work, World Cinemas, Transnational

15 Monaco, Paul. 1976. Cinema and Society: France and Germany during the Twenties. New York: Elsevier., 1. 16 Ibid., 20. 17 Ibid., 20. 18 Ibid., 291. 19 Ibid., 45.

Perspectives, authors Natasa Durovicová and Kathleen Newman feel quite confident with the following statement:

The transnational is thus not a ‘supplement’ or a correction to the aggregate of national film histories but rather the historical condition present throughout within a grid of comparison allowing the analyst, and, much more properly, a team of analysts specializing in film from an assortment of periods and provenances to parse and compare.”20

Transnational, however, need not be the only basis for comparative films studies.

In the last thirty years, numerous works on political film have focused on individual countries, comparing films across time and by genres.21 In general, all of these take the approach that film, and political films in particular, "socialize the moviegoer to political ideas, values and behavior."22 Few of them, however, attempt to tackle in particularly novel or revolutionary ways.

Ray Pratt's Projecting Paranoia: Conspiratorial Visions in American Film represents one of the more interesting approaches, comparing images of fear and anxiety through most of American film history, contributing much, in turn, to the development of this essay. For Pratt, American conspiracy films reflect a "political unconscious," and bring "…attention to all the unknown, hidden, repressed, and denied dimension of human history."23 Thus combining psychohistory with a political bent, Pratt successfully melds together theory with popular culture.

20 Durovicová, Natasa, and Kathleen Newman. 2010. World Cinemas, Transnational Perspectives. New York: Routledge., xiv. 21 Booker, M. Keith. 2007. From Box Office to Ballot Box: The American Political Film. Westport, Conn: Praeger.; Christensen, Terry, Peter J. Haas, and Terry Christensen. 2005. Projecting Politics: Political Messages in American Film. Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe; Sarris, Andrew. 1978. Politics and Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press. 22 Christensen, Terry. 1987. Reel Politics: American Political Movies from Birth of a Nation to Platoon. Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 23 Pratt, Ray. 2001. Projecting Paranoia: Conspiratorial Visions in American Film. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 253.

James E Combs' Movies and Politics – The Dynamic Relationship approaches the topic with the assumption that movies unto themselves, are “political,”—in other, words, active “participants” in social and political change. Moreover, like the aforementioned authors, Combs believes, “Moviemakers…may not have the slightest intention or interest in communicating a political message, but they might do so simply by virtue of the inclusion of social messages which resonate with audiences, and offer intentionally valid statements of use to the political inquirer.”24

In terms of general post war cultural histories, Andreas Killen's 1973: Nervous

Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol and the Birth of Post-Sixties America and Kristin Ross'

Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture have proven helpful for modern film historians. Killen's work successfully integrates film into a larger post '68 cultural history, itself a representation of an American culture imbued with "deeply neurotic undercurrents." Moreover, Killen, like the authors already catalogued, seeks out the national "collective sensibility" through the representative samples of art, literature, film, and television, weaving them together with the national narrative.25 In both style and substance, Killen's work offers an excellent model for the new cultural history.

Kristen Ross' Fast-Cars, Clean Bodies, while painting her cultural history with a broader brush, similarly uses film and popular culture as a means to explore changing collective attributes, in this case, the postwar shift to modernity. Ross's chapters on cars, for example, elucidates the perils and promises of modern technology, but more importantly, the ways in which French films of the era reflected the fear that came with

24 Combs, James E. 1993. Movies and Politics: The Dynamic Relationship. New York: Garland, 7. 25 Killen, Andreas. 2006. 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America. New York: Bloomsbury, 11.

Americanization, Taylorization, and Fordism. Film, thus, is released from the straight- jacket of cinema studies and effortlessly incorporated into a larger social and cultural history.

All these works, then, be they of the comparative variety, or investigating specifically political themes, have laid the groundwork for future scholarship that seeks to find deeper, encoded messages in select groups of films of differing national origin.

How these messages relate to the political and social superstructures inherent in each nation during a specific period of time, however, remains the task to be explored in the following sections

CONTRASTING VISIONS: BUREAUCRACY AND CORRUPTION

Over one-hundred years ago in his Theory of Social and Economic Organization,

Max Weber wrote, "The scope of determination of social relationships and cultural phenomena by authority and imperative co-ordination is considerably broader than appears at first sight.”26 This view proved particularly prescient regarding the growth of government and bureaucracy in many Western democracies leading up to and following the Second World War. Film, as perhaps the most influential cultural artifact of the

Twentieth Century, duly reflected these new relationships between bureaucracy and states, albeit in fashions particular to the different nations in question. A comparative analysis of American, French, and Italian political films of this era, then, presents

26Max , Weber. 1947. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. New York: Oxford, 327.

interesting contrasts regarding the relationship between "administrative organs"27 and their corollary representations in cinematic form.

ROSI'S WEAK STATE

In looking at European, postwar bureaucratic structures, Italy stands apart.

Nowhere else did the bureaucracy’s relationship to the individual take on such a diverse, and in many cases, “deformed” status.28 Italian political films of the Sixties and

Seventies duly reflected such variety, though always highlighting the fractured character of a perennial weak and de-centralized state.

Analysis of the postwar Italian state and the cultural artifacts to which it gave birth ultimately find their roots in the pre-war era. It was under Fascism, in fact, that

Italy first saw the rise of the notorious “parallel bureaucracies,” that insipient product of,

“…The need to avoid the dead hand of the traditional bureaucracy…[and] to create separate enclaves of power within the state.”29 Paul Ginsborg goes on to describe these distinct power centers as, “…formidable elements in the baroque structure of the Italian state.”30 In this matter, Italy, in contrast to its Western European counterparts, never developed a strong, centralized bureaucracy, instead venturing upon a rocky path full of

“distortions and imbalances.”31

Given the tumultuous political situation Italy continued to struggle with even into the Sixties, it should come as no surprise that new political auteurs continued to produce films which specifically addressed their nations' political struggles. Francesco Rosi's

27 Ibid., 15 28 Ginsborg, Paul. 2003. A History of Contemporary Italy, 1980-2001. London: Penguin, 149. 29 Ibid., 147 30 Ibid., 147. 31 Bull, Martin J., and James L. Newell. 2005. Italian Politics Adjustment under Duress. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 22.

classic 1961 film, Salvatore Giuliano, is indicative of this trend, representing the director's first attempt to tackle Italy's weak bureaucracy and failure to centralize. More importantly, Salvatore Giuliano, like so many other political films of the era, makes use of the inchiesta motif to express this state fallibility where, "…Facts do not explain themselves [but] are often only…superficial aspects of a far darker political reality."32

Salvatore Giuliano, not surprisingly, opens with a crime at the heart of the dark underbelly of Italy. Unfortunately for the viewer, though, the facts surrounding the murder of the titular character are initially deliberately shrouded in darkness. How did this Italian Robin Hood end up dead in the gutter? Why was there no blood on the ground? The investigative officials surrounding the body are naturally eager to disperse the crowd, though we are not quite sure why.

Rosi proceeds to then transfer the story back in time to the disorder in Sicily following the Second World War. It is in this crucial period in which the origins of the mystery of Salvatore Giuliano's life and death find their origins. Sicily's leader, eager to take advantage of their newfound independence from Rome agree to use banditti rebels—

Salvatore Giuliano among them—to make the break permanent. Italian Carabinieri soldiers stationed in Sicily, though, soon find themselves ambushed by ragtag platoons of peasants and mountain guerillas, leading one Italian soldier to ask, "Why did they send us to this godforsaken land?"

As is often the case, in Italy, however, stories don't neatly fit into a good and bad dichotomy. Giuliano, originally hailed as a Southern folk hero, soon becomes a burden to powerful forces not only in Rome but in Sicily, itself. This is especially the case

32 Bondanella, Peter E. 1983. Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present. Ungar film library. New York: F. Ungar Pub. Co., 168.

following the massacre of peasants and workers at a communist rally at Portella della

Ginestra. Once again, however, Rosi chooses not to directly portray Giuliano in the notorious events, instead focusing on the complexities underlying Italy's weak state structure through the poor case of a local peasant who finds himself strong-armed into carrying a rifle and firing on the crowd during the incident. Events, thus, remain foggy, inexplicable and beyond the reach of the viewer's full comprehension.

Ultimately, the Italian government—with a little help from underworld forces— lures Giuliano's co-conspirators in the massacre from their mountain hideaway, shipping them—literally in the back of a van—to trial under national jurisdiction. It quickly becomes apparent, however, that all the defendants have been coaxed by outside forces to remain silent and the trial ultimately descends into a sensational farce. When Giuliano's closest lieutenant, however—Gaspar Pisciotta—breaks with his the script, threatening to reveal the truth of the conspiracy between the government, the banditti, and the mafia, his fate is sealed. Salvatore Giuliano ends with Pisciotta’s poisoning in prison—the truth at the heart of the film buried with him.

Rosi’s follow-up feature, Hands Over the City (Le mani sulla città) also uses the inchiesta narrative device. In contrast to the sprawling historical epic that is Salvatore

Giuliano, though, Hands Over the City instead addresses corruption on the microcosmic scale as a means to reflect the broken relationship between individual and state—in this case, the dark underbelly of a major urban metropolis.

In a deliberate ironic fashion, then, the film opens with the physical model of ‘the city of the future,’ surrounded by the developers and politicians who have come together to forge utopia into reality. As one of the bureaucrats puts it, “That’s today’s gold…the

industrial Renaissance of the South.” Immediately following, this, however, we see white credits rolling against birds-eye vistas of the real Naples—a sprawling, chaotic conglomeration in which old and new are sandwiched together without any regard for health and safety. The ominous music only further unsettles the viewer and foreshadows the impending disaster.

As is the case with Salvatore Giuliano, Rosi presents the subsequent critical incident as a mere prelude to the investigation that will take place. Unlike Salvatore

Giuliano, though, in which the titular character is already dead on screen, the scene of disorder and violence in Hands Over the City—a building collapse—is shown in its entirety with mothers screaming for their children, and emergency workers desperately seeking to extricate the dead and wounded. When the issue of the collapse is brought up at the city assembly’s, however, the calamity becomes a political football in the hands of the opposing political parties, as evidenced in a city council speech by De Vita, a prominent Leftist politician:

This is not an isolated event…yesterday’s casualties and others before them, are victims of the shameful private speculation transforming the face of our city more and more as it finds allies among the very men sitting in this room… we want an inquiry board comprised of every political group, to investigate real estate speculation!

In the offices of Eduardo Nottola, high up in a commercial skyscraper, the powerful real estate baron looks for ways to limit such an investigative inquiry, and preserve his reputation to assure his candidacy in the upcoming election as city commissioner. In this facet he's initially extremely successful. As time goes on, however, Nottola's position becomes less secure. With his name portrayed in a continuous negative light in the papers in relation to the building collapse and the Left cozying up to the Center, Nottolo's

claim to the leader of the Right that, "your interests and mine are identical" begins to hold less weight.

Like any Machiavellian politician, though, Nottola recognizes, "In politics, friendship is a matter of convenience." Forcing his son to take the blame for the collapse, and switching his alliance from the Right to the Center, Nottola effectively marginalizes his old allies on the Right, and those on the Left who keep pushing for answers on the investigative committee. His maneuverings, in turn, allow for a continuation of the building expansion plans into traditionally working-class neighborhoods while effectively guaranteeing election victory on the coattails of a centrist platform.

The end of Hands Over the City returns to the city council where the new centrist plurality has now replaced that of the Right. The power of Eduardo Nottola, however, remains a constant, particularly when the new mayor, Luigi de Angeles, follows through on the corrupt bargain to make Nottola the new building commissioner. Maglione (leader of the Right), however, furious of being used, refuses to support Nottola's nomination, along with the Left and many centrists who are repugnated by Nottola's role in the deaths in the aforementioned building scandal.

As politicians rail against the nomination, backroom deals continue. When the mayor threatens the Right with dissolving Parliament (hence, marginalizing them even more in a new election), the portly head of the conservatives realizing his checkmate, backs down. In a portico of the building, away from the debates—and more importantly—the public eye, Mayor de Angeles brings together Nottola and the leader of the Right, cynically exclaiming, “Our city needs a stable and efficient administrative body…the love we feel for out city can and must unite us all.” With these words, Nottola

and Maglione embrace, the corrupt bargain, sealed, the investigation derailed, and

Nottola's power secured in perpetuity.

Hands Over the City concludes with the politically-staged breaking-of-ground for the new, "modern," housing complex originally envisioned in the beginning of the film.

While Nottola indulges his newfound position of influence with a self-deprecating speech—"I am a simple man…"—de Vita of the Left delivers his own harangue against the press, posing for photographs afterwards. Shortly, thereafter, the camera cuts to the image of a pile driver laying the new foundation, the same instrument which had destabilized the public housing which led to the initial collapse in the beginning of the film.

While the plot, then, of both Rosi's films hint at the fragmented and corrupt bureaucratic structure emanating from a weak central government, it remains to be seen what thematic unity underlay both films, ultimately supporting the relationship between weak state government and its corollary cinematic representation. It is here that further investigation is warranted, which will ultimately reveal the Italian governmental idiosyncrasies at the heart of both films.

Foremost among these traits are the concepts of parallel bureaucracies, "…the need to avoid the dead hand of the traditional bureaucracy…but so too…the desire to create separate enclaves of power within the state."33 Power, in other words, found itself drained from a central core and dispersed to peripheral institutions, including the judiciary, civil service, and corporations. In Salvatore Giuliano, however, it is the army where such independent power first makes its appearance, the "repressive apparatus" of the Carabinieri being sent to Sicily in order to quash then-burgeoning independence

33 Ginsborg, Paul. 2003. A History of Contemporary Italy, 1980-2001. London: Penguin, 147.

movement. Certainly not content with their circumstances, and goaded to violence by local terrorist acts, the Carabinieri in Salvatore Giuliano, nonetheless, present an accurate picture of an extra-institutional agency run amuck. Squadron break into local houses, quarter troops overnight, and arrest innocents at will. Rosi captures the latter in a particularly famous scene. The Carabinieri, frustrated with Giuliano's ability to avoid capture, arrest all the young, adult men of his village, with plans to send them to Rome for interrogation. Rumors of the arrests among the locals, however, provoke a full-scale riot among the village mothers, who proceed to simultaneously exit their homes and run screaming through the streets towards the central plaza to save their sons.

While not quite as dramatic, Hands Over the City also contains numerous other instances of the invidious nature of parallel bureaucracies. Foremost among, these of course, is Eduardo Nottola, himself, perched in his company headquarters in a skyscraper overlooking the bay of Naples (his campaign poster ironically claim, Nottola—"A View of the Bay for All!") It's not lost on the viewer, though, that the portrayal of Nottola looks remarkably similar to that of Eugenio Cefis, the head of ENI, or any number of other "cynical, unprincipled, and extremely ambitious" business magnates of the postwar era.34 These were the men, after all, who formed the basis of the 'state bourgeoisie,' who very raison d'etre was the less than subtle application of peripheral power as a means to wield influence and increase profit.35

In addition to the armed forces and land speculators, the nature of Italian politics can be considered another realm in Rosi's films which address a broken central government riven by parallel bureaucracies. Politics in postwar Italy, of course, took on

34 Ibid., 284 35 Ibid., 285

a nature wholly different from that in the U.S. or even other Western European nations like France and Germany. As Paul Ginsborg writes, “The character of the Christian

Democrats and their longevity in power thus served to accentuate what was in any case a basic feature of modern states, the diffused nature of power within them, and the struggle between their component parts.36 The Rightist politicians in Hands Over the City—a not so subtle reference to the DC—also fits neatly into this designation. At every turn one finds them colluding with Nottola or members of the Center to prevent an inquiry into the building collapse and pursue the new building developments, ostensibly as a means to stay in power indefinitely. Furthermore, the true policy decisions of the Rightist party take place not in the general domain (where shouting and last-minute bargaining predominates), but rather in the backrooms and mansions of party movers and shakers.

Nottola's calling on Maglione for political discussion, for example, are preceded in the first instance by Maglione's rowing practice in the environs of his lavish backyard, and in the second instance, in the middle of gambling party of political elites. Similarly, when

Nottola consults for political strategy that will ultimately determine the fate of vast numbers of working class Neapolitans, it’s discussed with cronies over a spaghetti dinner like any meeting of local mafia thugs.

Rosi’s films, then, in their portrayal of multiplicity of parallel bureaucracies only serves to highlight the obsession which permeated Italian political films in this crucial epoch of cinematic development—an obsession which was a direct reflection of the idiosyncrasies of state and society. Moving across the Atlantic less than a decade later, however, the peculiarities of the political filmmaking take on a wholly different dimension.

36 Ibid., 154.

"I WANT THE ORGANIZATION"

By the time New Hollywood premiered as a cohesive film movement with common themes and key directors, the political situation in America had already begun to deteriorate. 1968, in addition to witnessing a string of political assassination, also bore witness to the futility of America's military venture in Vietnam, the Tet Offensive dashing the optimism of even the most strident Hawks.

The period between Johnson's declaration that he would not be seeking a second terms and the election of Richard Nixon the White House, however, can also be considered a watershed in history of American bureaucracy. It was, after all, the early years of the Johnson administration that marked the historical height of "…‘presidential government.’…[when] political and policy responsibility was concentrated in the presidency to an unprecedented extent.”37 Despite the shift to a Republican presidency, however, Sidney M. Milkis also points to the fact that “The personalization of presidential policy making was not only extended during the Johnson years, it was institutionalized.”38 Hence, even before the calamities of 1968, the creation of an executive-centered authority and its corollary Weberian bureaucratic labyrinth was already in place, ready to become the tool of any President bold enough to implement its power on a wide-enough scale.39

John Boorman's Point Blank (1967) in many ways reflects this shift in power at the highest levels of the American political system. Coming long before Watergate,

37 Milkis, 311. 38 Ibid., 311. 39 Ibid., 312.

however, few critics approached the film as an allegory for strong government, instead focusing on the then-shocking explicit violence or cold, unemotional dialogue. Richard

Schickel's less-than-subtle review—"Knees in Our Groin"—aptly captures that critical spirit of the time:

Point Blank is a completely familiar tale of a good-bad man's revenge complicated by a dramatically satisfactory number of betrayals, mysteries, and affairs of the heart. Straightforwardly set forth it would be unworthy of extended critical comment but possibly worthy of your attention some restless night when the escapist mood is upon you. As the film stands, however, I think you will be irritated—even offended—more of than you are entertained.40

A retrospective critical reevaluation of Point's Blank's plot, in addition to questions of style and substance, reveal far more than initially detected, however.

Point Blank opens auspiciously on Alcatraz—that notorious relic of an earlier, darker period of American justice. Walker, the protagonist, in cahoots with his wife and criminal partner Reese, however, land on the island not as servants of the law, but as criminals seeking to break it. Circumstances stand in their favor—the criminal plot has been fetched long before (as seen in flashback) and the nature of the Rock gives the conspirators the advantage of immunity from law enforcement or anyone else attempting to interfere with their plans. One plan Walker cannot conceive of, though, is betrayal in his own ranks. After stealing the money from an unidentified group arriving on Alcatraz,

Walker is shot in the chest, his share of the money—and his wife—requisitioned by

Reese, his supposed partner in crime. Left to die on the sullen mass of granite, Walker ultimately recovers enough to swim across the bay where his quest for revenge begins anew.

It is here that the "…forward momentum of Lee Marvin's mysterious vendetta against the skyscraper underworld" begins to take shape."41 Standing on a tourist boat in the same waters where he nearly lost his life, Walker asks his mysterious companion

(appearing in the film for the first time) what the man wants in return for providing him with the necessary information to take revenge and recoup his money. In response, the mysterious man only replies, "I want the Organization."

Cut to a long, empty, colorful hallway. In one of the most distinctive images of

American political filmmaking in the New Hollywood era, Walker walks with a mix of stoicism, decisiveness, and even a slight indication of enthusiasm, his feet stomping on the white-tiled ground, a disarming sound in an otherwise mundane, modernist apartment complex. While the audience knows neither where he is going nor who he is seeking, one gets the impression of a steely-eyed warrior on the cusp of penetrating something much larger and threatening than anything which exists on the individual level.

But who are Walker's antagonists? Boorman doesn't see it fit, apparently, to describe "The Organization" in detail. From the viewer's perspective, therefore, The

Organization appears inchoate and ideologically bereft. That is just the way, however, that Boorman intended it to be. The Organization as a functioning conglomerate with names and beliefs would be superfluous to the thematic task at hand. Instead, Boorman desires only to portray a shadowy organization in which "…there should be a relatively high probability that the action of a definite, supposedly reliable group of persons will be primarily oriented to the execution of the supreme authority's general policy and specific

41 Schickel, Richard, and John Simon. 1968. Film 67/68: An Anthology by the National Society of Film Critics. New York: Simon and Schuster, 61.

commands.”42 The portrayal of "The Organization" in Point Blank follows this mantra, which allows for the remaining structure of the film to revolve wholly around Walker's pursuit up The Organization's chain of command, like a predator stalking his prey one by one, slicing away at the dense infrastructure.

Tracing Reese back to his ex-wife's apartment complex, then, sets of a chain of confrontations with different members of the Organization, from a lowly used-car salesman all the way up to Reese, himself. In one particularly brutal encounter at a night club, Walker assaults two members of The Organization backstage while a raucous soul singer scream into the camera. Clearly Boorman purposely seeks to give the impression of unrestrained violence as a necessary precursor to penetrating the inner den of this secretive bureaucracy.

Violence and a organizational secrecy also form the basis for Alan J. Pakula's

1974 political thriller, The Parallax View. Pakula, widely recognized for his bicentennial classic, All the President's Men, actually inaugurated his themes of paranoia half a decade earlier with Klute (1971). These three films—dubiously titled, "The Paranoia Trilogy," point to a director preoccupied with real political events as an inspiration for his dark cinematic visions.

1974, after all, witnessed the shocking culmination of Watergate, with all its accompanying drama and disgrace. Apart from the histrionics, however, Nixon's downfall can also be interpreted as the bureaucratic dénouement of a story whose origins, while going back the Johnson, really changed shape in 1971. It was at this time that the

Nixon White House, frustrated by a lack of legislative victories and an independent party

42 Weber, 230.

organization, decided "operations was policy."43 At this point a "supercabinet" was created with "supersecretaries" who would now be responsible for multiple functions.44

In addition, The Office of Budget and Management (OMB) was made more subservient to the executive.45 While, “[Nixon] was convinced that the federal government and its special interests had grown so powerful that only a strong president could ‘reverse the flow of power and resources fro the states and communities to Washington," however,

"with size came power."46

The devastating effects of this unrestrained growth appeared not only on

Americans' television screens, but also in the cinema, the The Parallax View being a prime example. Combining Watergate-inspired fear and post-'68 assassination trauma,

The Parallax View opens with the killing of a U.S. Senator at the top of the Space

Needle. Despite the apparent presence of a second gunman—the true gunman—the crowd wrestles a weapon from a different man, who secret service agents pursue until the designated assassin falls from atop the structure to his death. A subsequent Warren-

Commission-like investigative committee reports their findings concerning the assassination:

After nearly four months of investigation and nine months of hearings, it is the conclusion of this hearing that Senator Carrol was assassinated by Thomas Richard Linder…it is our further conclusion that he acted entirely alone, motivated by a misguided sense of patriotism and a psychotic desire for public recognition. The committee wishes to emphasize that there is no evidence of wider conspiracy...no evidence whatsoever.

43 Nathan, Richard P. 1975. The Plot that Failed: Nixon and the Administrative Presidency. New York: Wiley, 62. 44 Milkis, Sidney M., and Michael Nelson. 1999. The American Presidency: Origins and Development, 1776-1998. Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 322. 45 Ibid., 321 46 Ibid., 319, 321

For Joe—one of the reporters who witnessed the assassination first-hand, such conclusions prove sufficient—that is until an ex-girlfriend—and fellow reporter atop the

Space Needle that fateful afternoon—pays him a visit. Apparently, witnesses to the

Senator's assassination are dying untimely deaths, for which she believes herself to be the next victim. Initially discounting her fanciful conspiracy theories, Joe ultimately becomes convinced of a foul play when she, herself, is found dead from an "overdose."

Following a visit to the small, rural community of Salmonlake in search of answers regarding one of the murdered witnesses to the assassination, the local sheriff attempts to murder Joe at nearby dam. Barely, escaping, he manages to kill the sheriff, steal his car, and search his house for clues. It is here while searching through the dead sheriff's drawers that Joe finds a pamphlet for The Parallax Corporation, the first indication of a secret organization behind the Senator’s murder.

Like his girlfriend before, him, though, Joe’s theories concerning a mass conspiracy receives little support from those close to him. Joe’s boss, the cantankerous

Hugh Cronin, cynically questions his ability to discover anything novel—"You’re telling me you alone can uncover what all these agencies can’t?” His quote indicates the general faith most Americans had towards their massive governmental infrastructure. Joe, however, refuses to take “no” for an answer, and goes underground to further penetrate the depths of the mysterious organization. Filling in one of The Parallax Organization’s application forms stolen from the sheriff, Joe is contacted not long thereafter by one of the organization’s representatives, who informs him, “…You’re tests suggest that you have remarkable talents.”

For Joe, however, subsequent events reveal a truth much darker and unsettling than he, or anyone else could have imagined. Initially believing the Parallax Corporation to be some sort of shadowy quasi-governmental organization which trains political assassins, Joe fails to realize the other half of the story—that he, like the second waiter atop the Space Needle—is to be the “patsy” for the crime. In the end, Joe realizes he has been framed by The Parallax Organization. Before he can find a way out, however, he, is murdered, the last link between the assassination and the shocking the truth rudely snuffed out by forces at the top of the bureaucratic chain. The film concludes with the same “Warren” commission from the beginning of the film—"An overwhelming body of evidence suggest that Joseph Frady was obsessed with the Carol assassination…there is no evidence of a conspiracy in the assassination of George Hammond…this is an announcement gentlemen…there will be no questions."

In the end, though, The Parallax View represents more than a story of typical New

Hollywood pessimism, just as one may interpret Point Blank apart from its New-Wave- inspired violence. What critics and film scholars, alike, in fact, have failed to see is the unique relationship between both films and the state of American bureaucracy—a bureaucracy, as mentioned earlier, which experienced a massive shift towards executive- centered authority in immediate years preceding both films’ release.

Not surprisingly, then, fear of authority and its physical representation is replete in both films. One sees this manifestation in the very structures inhabited by both organizations. In Point Blank, Walker’s search for Reese is hampered by the latter’s secure location—a penthouse room at the top of a luxury hotel called “Huntley House.”

When Walker inquires to Angie Dickinson, “What’s it like?,” she responds, “Fort

Knox…men everywhere...you’re gonna have a lot of trouble getting in…but you’ll never get out.” Never getting out is also the unfortunate fate of Joe when he ventures into The

Parallax Corporation’s modern glass skyscraper, peppered as it is with employees of the organization, watching Joe’s every move through the labyrinth-like interior. These buildings, almost acting as characters in their own right, express the less-than-subtle expression of fortified bureaucratic power where, “The type of rational, legal administrative staff is capable of application in all kinds of situations and contexts.”47

Certainly, the way in which one responds to such entrenched forms of authority is rooted in specific cultural idiosyncrasies. In the case of the United States, the political exigencies in which the country found itself in the late Sixties and Seventies gave rise to an exaggerated feeling of powerlessness, which manifested itself in paranoia and fear.48

This can be seen in Point Blank, in the nightclub between Walker and members of The

Organization. Here, the punches and kicks backstage blend with the plaintive cries of the singer performing against a green-screen of psychedelic images—unrestrained emotion accompanying unrestrained physical violence. Similarly in The Parallax View, Pakula deliberately chooses a dam as the background for the physical confrontation between Joe and the sheriff. A the moment Joe realizes he has been setup, the sirens blare a cacophony of sounds, and the dam—like Joe’s aforementioned optimism in discovering the truth The Parallax Corporation—gives way.

In Projecting Paranoia, Ray Pratt discusses the way in which American may actually be more prone to anxiety due to their individualist ideology rooted deep in the

47 Max , Weber. 1947. The Theory of Social and Economic Organization. New York: Oxford, 333. 48 Pratt, Ray. 2001. Projecting Paranoia: Conspiratorial Visions in American Film. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 12.

national subconscious.49 It should come as no surprise, then, that the two main protagonists of each film, respectively, bear the hallmark of this tradition. Walker, portrayed in flashbacks as an honorable husband, transforms into testosterone-infused bounty hunter, equally impervious to a women’s love as he is to the endless parade of thugs and bullets with which The Organization attempts to stifle his mission. Knocking off his enemies in glass buildings like frontiersman killing Indians on the range, Walker represents the promise and peril of American individualist identity in the age of mass control and manipulation.

Warren Beatty’s character, too, in The Parallax View, can be seen as representational of the predicament facing the individual in a progressively repressive, centralized power structure. “Joe” (normal, average) after all, begins the film as an optimistic "all-American guy", struggling to get ahead at work, distracting himself with women, even hitting the bottle a little more than he should. Only when his innocent curiosity leads him to investigate the string of murders, however, does he find himself face to face with the dark, bitter reality at the core of America. By this point, however,

Joe is trapped, his dream of getting the next big scoop buried asunder by the forces that be.

In the end, then, both The Parallax View and Point Blank point to the manner in which the peculiarities of the American state filtered down to its cultural artifacts, particularly film, the most influential artistic medium in the Sixties and Seventies. This was a period, after all, in which a significant handful of Americans lost faith in the system, seeing in the centralization of bureaucratic power a “terroristic political coordination of society…which operates through the manipulation of needs by vested

49 Ibid., 1.

interests.”50 For the average American, the lack of knowledge for whom or what such interests represented ultimately led to speculation and even fear, such paranoia reaching full expression on film screens across the country.

BAD PRESIDENT, GOOD CADRE

America was not alone, of course, in its peculiar cinematic expression of entrenched bureaucratic power and a threatening bureaucracy. France, with a similarly powerful state system in later postwar era, saw the same preoccupations manifested in films of the given period. Whereas in America, however, the focus lay on the structure and organization, however, in France these films focused in the leader, himself—the individual as a threat the democratic, republican tradition.

Unlike the American presidential system in the late Sixties, the French Fifth

Republic, born from crisis, always represented a curious amalgam of the three strains of

French political culture: “rationalism, historicism, and hero worship.”51 Thus, De Gaulle has been interpreted in some circles as political continuum stretching back to Napoleon and Louis XIV.52 Other, in turns, have even pointed to the ways in which the coup that brought about the Fifth Republic seemed like a curious restaging of that which brought down the Third, De Gaulle playing the role of Petain.53 Taking these views into account, it's little surprise that French films of the era expressed their own preoccupation with centralized political authority—an authority ever quick to slide into despotism and oppression.

50 Marcuse, Herbert. 1964. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Beacon Press: Boston, 3. 51 Safran, William. 2008. The French Polity. New York: Pearson Longman, 6. 52 Bell, David Scott. 2000. Presidential Power in Fifth Republic France. Oxford: Berg., 140. 53 Binion, Rudolph. "De Gaulle as Petain", Clio's Psyche, 12:2, pp. 74-76.

Released in 1969 at the height of student protest in France, Costa Gavras’ Z, despite its Greek contextualization, can also be interpreted at a subtle slight towards the then-departed leader of the Fifth Republic, and the vindication of the powerless man against the oppressive, omnipotent executive-based system.54 The first scene, after all, duly portrays the nature of the corrupt, ruling elite. The director-general who addresses his military and civilian colleagues—a motley collection of cigar-smoking, mustached thugs decked out with dark sunglasses—speaks a fascist message couched in the language of legitimate democracy. There is talk of cleaning the “mildew ideologique” from the schools, universities, and factories as a means to save the tree of liberty, in addition to halting the growth of the prevalence of the omnipresent “-ismes” (...."nous nous sommes pas un system un 'isme'...nous vivons un democracie!") which threatens to destabilize Church and society. As the general says, “Dieu refuse declarer la rouge!”

Opposing the general and his cronies, of course, are the young politicos of the left, led by their dynamic leader, a former Olympian and doctor, played by Yves

Montand. Montand (known as only “The Deputy”) is set to give a speech of pacifism and neutrality. Unfortunately for the idealists on the left, the junta has already set them up so the Deputy will be forced to give his oration right in the midst of a hostile public crowd. Naturally, the Deputy's fate is sealed, and it is only a short while later that he is killed by an anonymous thug.

Enter Jean-Louis Trintignant as the young, fresh-faced investigator, commissioned by the government to find the “truth” behind the assassination.

Trintignant, however, refuses to play the part of the government's stooge, instead slowly and meticulously uncovering the relationship between the ruling regime and CROC, a

right-wing fascist organization from whom the government commissioned The Deputy's assassination. Just as the investigator seems on the cusp of uncovering the conspiracy, however, it is revealed in the end that all these gains are for naught. The investigator has been dismissed, the leftist opposition quashed, its representatives thrown in prison or killed, and a whole host of high and low culture banned.

Given thus, the extreme ending in Z, can it be said with confidence that Gavras’ regime speaks only to the situation in Greece and nothing to that of France?55 While this might seem a likely observation on a literal level, closer analysis reveals the common connections between Z and the host of American politically-themed conspiracy films.

France and America, after all, both shared the common experience of strong postwar states led by powerful executives, who did a fair amount to both inspire and polarize their respective populations. It is little wonder, then, that French films, like their American counterparts, exhibited the same preoccupation with government run amuck, and the threat this posed to liberty and justice.

In discussing de Gaulle, David Scott Bell writes, “It was strictly a one way communication: from the president down.”56 De Gaulle and his allies in power, like those in the Nixon White House, became progressively more removed from the concerns and frustrations of a notable segment of society. In response, both resorted to quasi extra-constitutional means, Nixon with his violations of checks and balances and de

Gaulle with his referendums. Film, in turn, responded with the idealized version of the independent investigator—the Woodwards, Burnsteins, and Trintignants—the “little

55 Smith, Alison. 2005. French Cinema in the 1970s: The Echoes of May. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 35. 56 Bell, David Scott. 2000. Presidential Power in Fifth Republic France. Oxford: Berg., 89.

men,”57 who through dogged persistence revealed the ugly truth at the heart of the omnipotent state.

This emphasis on the power of the individual in the face of the immoral, mass state, is particularly evident during the interrogation scenes. Trintignant, like his later

Washington Post counterparts, relies on the typewriter, and Gavras, like Pakula, specifically focuses in on the machine during the drawing up of indicements, emphasizing the power of words over rifles and truncheons. Trintignant, the good cadre that he is, cannot be swayed by political pressure from either side—he remains

“politically neutral…politically ambiguous…an incorruptible investigator.”58

In the end, Z can be considered an “American” film, not only in terms of its fast paced plot, but as a representation of a centralized system in which the individual is reduced to a spectator. It’s ultimately up to the lowly public official, rebel bureaucrat, or

"average Joe" to undo the unjust system. In this sense French and American cinema can be considered to have an inverse relationship with that of Italy, where images of state failure and endemic localism ultimately prevailed.

CONTRASTING VISIONS: SEXUAL AND FAMILIAL NORMS

In Postwar, Tony Judt writes, “…The ‘sexual revolution’ of the Sixties was almost certainly a mirage for the overwhelming majority of people, young and old alike.

So far as we can know, the sexual interests and practices of most young European did not

57 Smith, Alison. 2005. French Cinema in the 1970s: The Echoes of May. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 50. 58 Ibid., 67.

change nearly as rapidly or as radically as contemporaries like to claim.”59 While such an observation may ring true regarding the actual lives of young people, it holds little weight in terms of cinematic representations in sexuality, politics, and traditional social mores in the case of American, French, and Italian films between 1960 and 1976. After, this was a period of declining censorship in this cinema. In both Europe and America, conservative values “…were giving way to a legal culture that began to scrutinize societal controls that infringed individual liberties in a popular culture that valued individual expression and self fulfillment…”60 Thus, for the first time in history, film expressed images of changing social values never before seen in the general public sphere, no less discussed.

Whereas numerous film histories have broached the issues of the revolutionary impact of film on changing social mores, however, few have attempted a comparative project, with fewer still seeking the relationship between state structure and its resultant impact on the themes of changing social values in trans-Atlantic films. Like the relationship between state and film on the subject of bureaucracy and corruption, however, such ties are crucial in interpreting the films of this era, particularly the way in which France, Italy, and the U.S. diverge in their thematic approach.

AGAINST FAMILY & CHURCH

Marcho Beloochio's Fists in the Pocket, among other films, epitomizes the distinct rebellious Italian cinema of the Sixties. Unlike many of the American films which followed in the next decade, Fists in the Pocket has little to say concerning the relationship of sexual rebellion to state authority, however. Instead, Belocchio targets

59 Judt, Tony. 2005. Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. New York: Penguin Press, 60 Wittern-Keller, Laura. 2008. Freedom of the screen: legal challenges to state film censorship, 1915- 1981. Lexington, Ky: University Press of Kentucky., 248.

those traditional bastions of morality particularly prominent in Italy—Church and, family, and the idealized female—the result being a markedly unique preoccupation with deviancy and despair. .

On initial viewing, it is evident that the household at the center of Fists in the

Pocket, hardly fits the stereotype of turmoil and decadence. Living in luxurious North

Italian villa with a stunning view of the mountains, four children, in what appear to be their Twenties to early Thirties, live with their frail, blind, but wholly caring mother.

What quickly becomes apparent, though, is how modernity and wealth have subverted what should be a caring and functioning family unit, rendering the traditional bourgeois family an Italian version of the Compsons—spiritually doomed and destined for tragedy.

Sandrino, the oldest son, while playing the part of patriarch (it is assumed the father has already passed), in reality lives the life of a dissolute rake. His sister, Giulia, a narcissistic beauty with a penchance for excitement, initially gravitates to his role as father-figure, going so far as to secretly subvert his relationship with his current girlfriend, Julia, to preserve their quasi-incestual bond. Giulia and Sandrino's narcissism and desire for attention, however, pale in comparison the personal attributes of their brother, Ale, a mean-spirited social outcast with epilepsy. This last trait Ale shares with the final sibling, a mentally-retarded mute who watches events with a disinterested apathy. Around the broken shell of a mother on the precipice of death, these four siblings live a life of frustration and inactivity.

When the films opens, Sandrino has finally spurred Giulia's advances, shifting her attention, in turn, to Ale. Ale, however, while enjoying their light flirting, has more malevolent plans—namely, to rid the family of the dead weight (his blind mother and

mentally incompetent brother)—so as to inherent his share of the money. After lying to

Sandrino about passing his driving test, he convinces his brother to let him chauffeur their mother to their dead father's gravestone, tempting him that he might finally "have afternoons off." Ale uses this opportunity; however, to commit his long planned matricide, pushing his mother off a cliff, high in the Italian Alps.

Back at home the funeral passes with little consequence, save for the benefit each child knows they might know enjoy. Sandrino can finally escape the prison-like villa and move to the city with his fiancée, while Ale and Giulia can indulge a life of complete freedom and ill repute, free from all authority and moral disapprobation. It is only when

Ale continues with his malevolent plans—the murder of his young brother—however, that the consequences of a completely free existence come to fruition. Giulia, as horrified by her brother's death as she was complacent in her mother's murder, shuts off her personality to the world, thereby enclosing Ale in his own, dark universe. Ale, now devoid of all emotional support, ultimately succumbs to a violent epileptic attack, screaming for his sister ("Giulia, hold my head!") who now ignores his cries for help.

Fists in the Pocket, then, clearly represents a more extreme and nightmarish vision of the decline of the traditional institution of the family and its corollary subversion of traditional conceptions of sexuality and moral uprightness. Bernardo

Bertolucci's Before the Revolution, while not quite as explicit in its assault on Italian values, nonetheless attempts a similar reevaluation, albeit in a more lyrical and romantic manner.

From the very beginning, Before the Revolution takes an abstract approach. Even before Bertolucci introduces the protagonist, the viewer hears only his words against a

black screen—"Many things had to happen…I had to suffer, you had to suffer very much,

I existed because you existed, now I am at rest, attached to my roots, I don't seem to exist anymore." We then come face to face with a young Italian man running through the streets of Parma, his thoughts continuing in overvoice. He is clearly agitated, though it remains to be seen why, and the ambiguity of whether he is running towards or away from something is duly noted. Only when he reaches his destination—the Parma cathedral—and the object for which he was both seeking and avoiding—his future fiancée—do we realize this is a story of both love, religion, and as the viewer shall come to see—politics.

Fabrizio, the young man in question, finds himself essentially torn between the bourgeois values inculcated to him at an early age and the social and political revolution he believes will soon sweep society. Hence, while he parades in around in the standard bourgeois fare of a suit and tie, he pals around with an equally forlorn friend and seeks out a mentor in a local Communist who works as an elementary school teacher. Fabrizio, like any modern day Werther, however, wouldn't be much without a doomed relationship, for which Bertolucci introduces the character of Gina, Fabrizio's neurotic and sexually alluring aunt. Gina, equally unsatisfied with her pampered, mundane existence in Milan, finds in Parma and in Fabrizio all the trapping of romantic youth, while Fabrizio sees in

Gina a soul mate with who he might escape his ultimate bourgeois fate.

As the film progresses, however, Fabrizio becomes less tolerant of the hypocrisy he sees in the society around him. In the boredom he feels with other intellectuals and the frustration he has with his mentor regarding the masses' apolitical consciousness,

Fabrizio essentially projects his own self-doubt. After seeing Gina walking the streets of

Parma followed by a male hanger-on, Fabrizio even starts doubting the emotional commitment he has invested in his Aunt. In the end, then, Fabrizio ultimately wavers on his radical social and political commitment, recognizing, "My bourgeois future...is in my bourgeois past…and so for me the ideology has been a vacation…a holiday. I believed in the revolution and instead I lived the years before the revolution, because it's always before the revolution when you're like me."

In the film's finale, one finds Fabrizio following through on these thoughts, doting over his new fiancée at the opera, while figuratively and literally (he abandons Gina to open the door to his luxury box where his new wife and mother-in-law are waiting) turning the key to his new life. Fabrizio has chosen the safe route, leaving Gina crying over another lost youth who has now sold out to “adult” society.

While, thus, very different in their approach and thematic dimension, both Fists in the Pocket and Before the Revolution express, nonetheless, a common preoccupation with changing sexual, familial, and gender norms, peculiar to the postwar Italian Republic.

After all, contrary to her French and American brethren, the Italian state remained perennially weak and de-centralized, its local cultures finding unity in the familial unit and the common language of the Church as opposed to any overarching state authority.

Ginsborg aptly expresses this Italian idiosyncrasy, writing, “…No social message was preached with more fervor than that of the sanctity of the Christian family. Of all social institutions, it was the family that most aroused the passion and piety of Italian

Catholics.”61

The state, furthermore, was conceived as a “servant” to the family, with many integralist Catholics wishing, “…to make all the institutions of civil society conform to

61 Ginsborg, Paul. 2003. A history of Contemporary Italy, 1980-2001. London: Penguin, 173.

reflect Catholic values.”62 In this respect, Christian Democrats and the state were the weaker partners in the political alliance of Church and government, the former, in large part, driving the agenda throughout the subsequent postwar decades. The effect, of course, was a stranglehold of traditionalism around sexuality, particularly in light of the continuities that persisted from the fascist era.63 “…Sex long remained a taboo argument for most Italians, hidden away in the scientific language of medical text books or talk.”64

Given the sheer power of Church and family in Italian society, then, both films’ association with sexual rebellion in the face of traditionalism in the private, as opposed to the public sphere, comes as no surprise. That both films use incest, however, as the primary vehicle with which to drive a story concerning the decline of traditional familiar relationships, proves the extent to which films of this era were quite revolutionary in responding to changing values. Fists in the Pocket, as the foremost example, wastes little time in hinting at intra-familial sexual attraction. From the first scene Giulia desperately attempts to garner the attention of Augustino, albeit to no avail. Nonetheless, her continued flirting at the dinner table (that ?denin? which epitomizes traditional and wholesome familial interaction) incurs the jealous wrath of another brother Ale, who proceeds to throw a glass of water in her face.

Hints of incest in the film, though, also extend pass the more obvious interactions and into the realm of the symbolic. In the scene where Ale finds himself passed on a mountains road by a sports car, his sister goads him into catching up, despite the obvious dangers. Grabbing on to the dashboard with a devilish green (Faster Ale! Faster!), Giulia

62 Ibid., 174-175. 63 Sauerteig, Lutz, and Roger Davidson. 2009. Shaping Sexual Knowledge: A Cultural History of Sex Education in Twentieth Century Europe. New York: Routledge. 110. 64 Ibid., 111

and Ale reach a moment of quasi-erotic bliss as their car regains the lead right at the precipice of potential death. Following this incident, their sexual attraction only brings them close together, particularly following their mother’s murder and Augustino’s departure for town. When not engaging in the orgasmic pleasure of burning their mother’s clothes in a massive bonfire, Ale, on his sister’s suggestion, takes her on a ride to see the prostitute with whom he has lost his virginity, Giulia’s gleefully plastered against the car window.

Incest also underlay the relationship between aunt and nephew in Before the

Revolution, though less as a pessimistic rendering of the decline of traditional values.

Fabrizio and Gina's relationship, after all, points the ways towards a truer, deeper under understanding—the complete counterpoint to the artificial relationships of the traditional bourgeoisie, pursued out of comfort, safety, and even social advancement. Incest, thus, works as shock therapy to awaken the lovers from the doldrums of a meaningless and empty existence. Hence, Fabrizio's regret following his entry into "proper" society—"

"Many things had to happen…I had to suffer, you had to suffer very much, I existed because you existed, now I am at rest, attached to my roots, I don't seem to exist anymore."

Ironically then, incest, thus comes to represent the legitimacy of real love versus the socially sanctioned artificiality of the acceptable relationship. These two contrasting value systems find representation in the characters of Gina and Clelia (Fabrizio's future wife). Gina, emotional and neurotic, stands in stark contrast to Clelia who speaks not a single word in either of her scenes. Instead, she sits dutifully beside her mother, in the beginning of the film at mass, and in the last scene, at the opera. The pairing of Clelia

and her mother express not only the girl's young age, but the extent to which both generations' values fuse seamlessly together. Fabrizio thus, is marrying not only the young beautiful girl, but the institution of marriage as understood in Italian society.

Hence, Fabrizio's own mother's appreciation of her son's decision—"He accepts everything now…he's so changed."

Even apart from male-female relationships, however, women themselves are subjected to a revolutionary interpretation in both films. This is not surprising, given the high state placed upon traditional femininity, both under fascism and in the immediate years following the war. Apart from the flirting and lovemaking with males in their own family, Giulia and Gina stand in marked contrast to the traditional Italian women— strong, confident, yet demur. Both characters, in fact, express emotional weakness, manifesting itself in an overabundance of narcissism and self-reflection. Giulia, for example, constantly looks at herself in the mirror, doting over her appearance, while Gina chastises Fabrizio in the car—"you don't even look at me!" Gina likewise expresses a fair amount of insecurity, in one instance exclaiming, "I don't like grown up people— they're not attractive," while in another shouting down a young girl (Basta! Basta!) merely for singing children's songs. Clearly both characters recognize the thin line dividing youth from adulthood, though unlike their feminine counterparts from an idealized Italian past, feel neither confident in or comfortable with the traditional female life cycle.

In addition to the traditional romantic relationship, the traditional family also comes in for a blistering critique in both films, given its aforementioned prominence in

Italian society, far above that of the state. In Fists in the Pocket, it is quite evident from

the very beginning that the familial unit projects an image of impotence and deformity, particularly regarding parental authority. After all, the father, apart from an old daguerreotype that hangs on the well, is never seen from or heard from, and assumed to be dead died. Meanwhile, the mother—the traditional caretaker and eyes of the family— is blind. Throughout the first half of the film she can only beg her children to inform her of where they are at or what is taking place. Her ability to care and coddle and children thus robbed from her, she is transformed into an object of contempt within the family and a burden to all their future plans. Hence, when she asks the simple request that Ale read the headlines of the daily paper to her, he mockingly invents morbid stories of suicide and murder, concluding with an article on matricide. When, later in the film, Ale follows up on these dark obsessions, the hatred and loathing the children felt for their mothers are now transferred to her objects. Ale opens her closet, tossing in the air all the newspapers which she couldn’t read, while both he and Giulia throw all her clothes and mementos off the balcony of the villa, subsequently burning them and dancing around the bonfire (the pagan connotation not lost on the viewer). Even at her funeral, the children despoil her memory, Ale placing resting his feet upon her coffin and consulting with Giulia about keeping their share of the money from Augustino.

Whereas parental authority is crippled and powerless in Fists in the Pocket, in

Before the Revolution, it’s simply absent. This is not to suggest, however, that Bertolucci wholly disregards the issue. Its very absence, after all, denotes a type of failure. There are, however, key discussions among the primary characters concerning parental authority, in addition to several, short scenes which add to our understanding of how

Italian films of the era attacked the family as the primary bastion of authority. Foremost

among these revolve around the character of Fabrizio's depressed, childlike companion.

Young and alienated like Fabrizio (though the latter still has faith in politics as a means out), Fabrizio's friend continuously runs away from home as a means of liberation, though Fabrizio recognizes this is only a temporary solution ("there's another way").

When Fabrizio attacks his young friend's family, however, this ignites a strong emotional reaction from the young man, clearly touching on a sensitive issue. His, response, though, is curious in its defense and indictment—"My father may be a thief, my mother may be so stupid she can't do anything…but you shut up! Do you see? Shut up! You have no right to judge!" Not long thereafter, though, while riding carelessly on his bicycle, Fabrizio's friend falls, he screams, "That's for my father!" A second fall prompts the cry, "That's for my mother!" On falling for a third time, he can only mutter, "And that's for me." Bertolucci, thus, clearly means to show the ways in which parental hypocrisy and oppression were enough to transform the once, bright eyed adolescent into a bitter, depressed adult.

Clearly the likes of Before the Revolution, with its portrayal of rebellious sexual authority striking out against a prude, moribund Italian adulthood struck a chord. Pauline

Kael even wrote how, "The greatest achievement is that come out of the theater, not dull and depressed…but elated—restored to that youthful ardor when all hopes are raised at once."65 Critics even beyond Italy's shores, thus, could relate to the message of sexual rebellion against the private bastions of traditionalism. In America, itself, filmmakers would push sexual rebellion beyond the private sphere, however, ultimately taking the fight to those extra-familial institutions which progressively dominated a highly- structured industrialized society.

65 Kael, Pauline, 1968. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, Little Brown & Company, Boston, 62.

"IF YOU DON'T SEE THEM AS VILLAINS, YOU CAN'T GET RID OF THEM"

Zabriskie Point, Antonioni's hippy adventure story, sheds some light on the link between American cinema culture in the late Sixties and the obsession with rebellion against authority. So obsessed is the film with the disparity between wise youth and hypocritical authority, in fact, that audiences, for the most part stayed away. One could argue, today, however, that Zabriskie Point deserves a retrospective treatment, precisely because its clichés, or rather, the ways in which commonly accepted notions of changing norms of sexuality and their relationship to authoritarian structure had filtered down to the mass public.

Zabriskie Point opens with a student campus committee, in the vein of SNIC.

Students debate over whether to shut the school down, while black students criticize white students for lacking the necessary revolutionary fervor—"White radicalism is a mixture of bullshit and jive!" For the Mark, however, the organization meeting represents the ultimate in bourgeois passivity—"I'm willing to die, but not of boredom"— leading him to leave the meeting in search of more creative solutions in the fight against

"the man."

During a verbal disagreement with another student, Mark continues his frustration with the slow pace of the revolution—"I'm tired of it man, kids rappin' 'bout violence, and cops doin' it. That chick at the meeting said people only act when they need to, but I need to sooner than that." After trying not that long thereafter to bail out the same friend from the local jail, the titular protagonist soon finds himself unjustly behind bars. This

only catalyzes him to resort to more serious measures, including buying a firearm and making his way to campus during the height of student-police confrontations.

Perhaps not surpsingly—though certainly not novel—Mark ultimately finds himself in the vicinity of a cop's murder (a cop, however, who had seconds before killed an unarmed African-American student). While he didn't commit the crime, Mark's soon tagged with the murder, his image plastered on television screen across Southern

California. On the run throughout the afternoon, Mark finds himself desperate and hungry. After begging a local deli owner for a some food and getting rejected, Mark literally follows the mantra on a local billboard advertisement—"Let's get away from it all"—and proceeds to commandeer a small jet plan to escape the adult world, dominated as it is by hypocrisy, lawlessness, and injustice.

Meanwhile, back in Los Angeles, a young girl has also left Los Angeles to meet her new boss in the deserts of Arizona. Along the way, however, she stops, seeking the whereabouts of a mediation guru, though instead finding a lawless band of young males who pester her with bizarre sexual advances. Shortly, thereafter, Mark (now comfortably flying around in the stolen plane) nosedives her car, leading to an encounter between the two young, outsiders. Their bond is subsequently forged both physically and emotionally at Zabriskie Point in the desert, where they make love among the dunes and rocky crags amongst other anonymous couples.

Like all youthful adventures, though—particularly in the American films of the

Sixties and Seventies—the fun must come to a tragic end. Returning the plane to Los

Angeles against the advice of Daria, the protagonist is immediately killed by the police.

Daria hears the new on the radio with a stoic resignation. Word of Mark's death,

however, changes the nature of her voyage to Arizona to meet her middle-ages, flirtatious boss. Instead of embracing him and settling down comfortably, with the older, middle- ages man, she leaves shortly after arriving, imagining his desert mansion exploding into oblivion.

Shampoo (1975), albeit filmed nearly five years after Zabriskie Point, also proves a helpful cultural artifact in relating changing sexual norms of the period in question to the growth of American institutional authority. Shampoo, after all, released leading up to the Bicentennial, portrays events on election even in 1968. In this manner, it proves an excellent counterpoint to Antonioni's late-Sixties optimistic take on sexuality's ability to challenge the entrenched powers that be.

At the heart of Shampoo is George Roundy (Warren Beatty), a libertine in the vain of Fists in the Pocket's Augustino, albeit in that distinctly, American counterculture image. Wearing a perfect Sevenites coif and rockstar clothes, George, when not doing women's hair, idles away his time riding his motorcycle to and from his multiple girlfriends' house for causal sexual liasons. The mistresses integral to the love triangle at the heart of the film include Felisha, the middle-aged wife of Lester, a rich businessman,

Jackie, Lester's mistress, and Jill, a young, fresh-faced actress who wants George to settle down. At the opening of the film one finds George balancing these affairs with acumen.

Furstrations at work, however, leave him unsatisfied, pushing George to open up his own hair salon. After failing to commandeer a bank loan, George ultimately finds in Lester a powerful patron who will support his new venture, Lester being unaware of the dalliance between his new client and his own mistress.

All George’s well-designed plans began to unravel, however, on election eve, as

George, Lester, and the women at the heart of the plot find themselves together at a

Nixon-Agnew political fundraiser. As the long-contained jealousies finally come to the surface, both men find their well-constructed sexual fantasy worlds undone. Things only go more haywire as the plot shifts to a drug-infused, counterculture after party, when

Lester is literally caught with his pants down and George is discovered by Jill and Lester making love to Jackie on a kitchen floor. George ultimately finds himself abandoned at the party, having alienated all his girlfriends, and the man who held the keys to his financial future. Despite a last desperate attempt to win back the favor of Jackie, she instead chooses the stability and comfortable lifestyle that Lester can provide over

George's passion and sexual prowess.

While both films, thus, present starkly different interpretations concerning the optimism of sexuality, their view of authority, nonetheless remains the same— hypocritical, morally bankrupt, and quick to violence. In Shampoo, these traits come together in the character of Lester. Unlike George who cheats because he just “wants to have sex with all of them,” Lester cheats out of his own smugness and recognition of his power and status in society. His self-delusion of his control, however, manifests most obviously in the fact that his wife is sleeping with George, who Lester believes to be a

“queer.” This sexual self-delusion extends to the sphere of politics, where, like so many author Sunbelt conservatives, Lester believes he is a catalyst for change. During the

Nixon-Agnew event, Lester tells his wife, "this party involves more than you and me…these people are concerned about more than each other…some of us are trying to make this country a better place to live, believe it or not.” His wife, however, now

conscious of his marital infidelity, responds, “Oh god Lester, you are a miserable human being. You're not helping anybody. You're just twisting arms here to help raise money for a lot of sons of bitches who are only out for themselves."

While not nearly as developed a character, Daria’s boss in Zabriskie Point can also be interpreted as the epitome of the sexually and politically hypocritical figure of authority. Concerning the former, it’s more than apparent that from their initial meeting, the older man clearly has sexual feelings for the young woman. Rather than pursue these feelings, directly, however, like so many men of his era, he “hires” her as his secretary, using his position as a powerful executive at Sunny Dunes Corporation to secure her as his lover. His sexual preoccupation with Daria almost reaches obsession level through the film, however, as he telephones her friends concerning her whereabouts and skips meeting to take her calls. His behavior can be seen as more generally indicative, though, of his general attitude in business. As a powerful land developer, he makes a sport in closing deals with powerful investors, and to his customers, he offers an imaginary suburban world in which one can "become an independent man and forge a life…like the pioneers who founded the West." The hypocrisy at the heart of his business venture, however, is not lost on Daria. After arriving at his desert mansion, seeing the physical and emotional artificiality of the abode, and his Native American servant, she ultimately realizes his sexual and moral hypocrisy.

Aside from the characters, both films also contain an abundance of symbolism concerning the sexual revolt against extra-familial authority. Often time these take the form of subtle inversions of previously understood and accepted norms. In Zabriskie

Point, for instance, weaponry functions as a common mode of communication.

Everywhere the police carry arms and truncheons, ready to bust student skulls at the smallest provocation. The students, in turn, wrestle with the question of responding to fire with fire, a young African-American organizer at the beginning exclaiming, "There's only one way to talk to the man—and that's in his own language…if the man's language is gun, you talk to him with a gun." Mark, too, finds himself wrestling with the question of armed response throughout the film, buying a weapon at a local gun shop early in the film. By the end of the film, however—and certainly under the influence of Daria's non- violent attitude, Mark abandons the armed struggle. Together with Daria he paints the stolen plane (another traditional weapon of violence) with psychedelic images, including a breast on each wing. Mark, in turn, transforms the machine (a masculine image of power) into a winged symbol of feminine sexual liberation.

Shampoo, too, is replete with coded images of gendered revolt against extra- familiar authority. George, like the police in Zabriskie Point, rides around on a motorcycle—the epitome of machismo. Unlike his authoritarian counterparts, however,

George's "gun"—the phallic symbol of domination and authority—is a hair dryer, tucked away under his front belt like any Smith and Wesson. George, thus, seduces and dominates woman not through traditional modes of masculine domination, but rather through the very feminine act of making them "look pretty." The running gag of "doing one's hair," in turn, becomes a thinly veiled cover for intercourse, while "never having been to a beauty salon," the equivalency of virginity. Gender subversion in turn, becomes the weak man's weapon in a world dominated by conservative, masculine brutes.

In Zabriskie Point, when questioned by Daria over his bipolar view of youth versus social and governmental authority, Mark confidently states, "If you don't see them as villains, you can't get rid of them." Such was the view of American films of the

Sixties and early Seventies towards extra-familial authority. Entrenched figures at the heart of the American state were ruthlessly imposing an illogical and oppressive sexual status quo, to which rebellion was the only alternative. While films like Shampoo and

Zabriskie Point may have ultimately diverged on the cohesion of this sexual rebellion, both films, nonetheless, perceived the anachronism of the old system

GODARD'S CLASS WAR

When moving to France in the Sixties, the relationship between sexuality and rebellion becomes more complex. On one hand, France, like, America, after all, had long made progress in the realm of sexual progressivism, the French pattern of modernization progressively aping that of America following the Second World War.66 A dialogue of sexual liberation had thus been an omnipresent strain in mass culture, though certainly not the dominant one. On the other hand, France's unique political history—class conflict, violent political upheaval, and endless parade of regimes—was bound to render the sexual protest, both on the streets and on the screen, a wholly unique phenomenon.

In discussing French sexual revolt from the late Sixties, Julian Bourg recognizes that while "…it was true sex that was viewed as some kind of challenge to repressive bourgeois society…critical energies were directed toward work and speech and generally

66 Ross, Kristin. 1995. Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

not focused on sexuality."67 Jean-Luc Godard's 1967 films, 2 ou 3 chose que je sais d'elle can be considered representative of this observation. Godard's film, after all, nominally appears to tell a "woman's story." Marina Vlady plays Juliette Jeanson, a bored, Parisian housewife who moonlights as a prostitute. That, however, is the extent of a plot. Instead, Godard indulges in breaking every traditional conception of filmmaking, including character development and normal cutting. What he proposes instead is a two hour diatribe couched in overly Marxist language.

Godard does much too show, in fact, that Juliette’s sexual rebellion is integrally tied into the world and landscape around her. Paris is portrayed as a world devoid of humans, its landscape a technological wasteland, its colors aberrantly bright. So artificial are and mind-numbingly dull are the appearances of things that the narrator (whose face we never see) even laments that, “One might say that living in a society today is almost like living a vast comic strip.” It is thus in the face of this postmodern nightmare that

Juliette longs for her previous existence—“I was the world, the world was me.” Instead, society has forced the bourgeois mother of yore into a fractured reality where she sells her body out boredom, desperation, or both.

Sexual acquiescence in the face of immoral, American-inspired consumption also dominates Juliett’s experience. When shopping for shoes, Juliette asks the patron what brand they are, to which he responds, “They’re American shoes.” Another woman then comments, “…to trample Vietnamese with.” Similarly, another scene finds one of the eccentric Johns procured by Juliette wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a large American flag. Finally, Godard chooses to end the film with a shot of numerous household

67 Bourg, Julian. 2007. From Revolution to Ethics: May 1968 and Contemporary French Thought. Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 182.

products placed on the grass followed by the following dialogue—“Listening to the commercials on my transistor and thanks to Esso, I drive off without a care on the road to dreams. I forget Hiroshima, Auschwitz, Budapest. I forget Vietnam, the housing problem, the famine in India. I forget everything, except that I’m back at zero, and have to start from there.”

2 ou 3 choses thus fits in with other New Wave films of the era which couched its sexual rebellion in terms of class and anti-Americanism, it’s portrayal of women

“…elaborated within a ‘sociological’ register that allowed the New Wave auteur to describe his female subject from the outside, constructing her not as a consciousness but rather as an instance of a social condition or type.”68 Given the profound state of overwhelming foreign influence on the French state, it’s not surprising that their vision of sexual rebellion differed sharply with their American and Italian counterparts.

CONCLUSION

In reviewing a selection of Italian, American, and French films from the era in question, it thus becomes readily apparent that the cultural variations inherent the respective nations’ social and political structures ultimately resulted in films of vastly different themes and viewpoints. In terms of corruption and bureaucracy, both American and French films found themselves preoccupied with issues relating to strong states and dominant executive personalities, whereas their Italian counterparts struggled with issues of fractured governments and centers of peripheral power. On the question of changing sexual and familial norms, American filmmakers found themselves targeting extra- familial centers of authority, whereas the Italian films focused on more traditional centers

68 Hugh & Williams, 129.

of rule—namely, Church and family. Finally, France, despite its status as full-fledged modern society, found itself overwhelmed with American influence. Images of sexual rebellion, in turn, focused as much on resistance to the U.S. state and its support of unbridled capitalism.

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