I Could Have Been a Contender a Semiotic Analysis Of
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I Could Have Been a Contender A Semiotic Analysis of Representative Films on Italians Outside Italy by Antonio D’Alfonso A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirement for the degree of PhD Graduate Department of Italian Studies University of Toronto © Copyright by Antonio D’Alfonso 2012 D’Alfonso ii I Could Have Been a Contender A Semiotic Analysis of Representative Films on Italians Outside Italy PhD 2012 Antonio D’Alfonso Graduate Department of Italian Studies University of Toronto This thesis offers an in-depth analysis of five films (Pane e cioccolata, Queen of Hearts, L’Emmerdeur, Mediterraneo sempre, Raging Bull) which deal with the Italian reality outside of Italy. The segment-by-segment study of these works reveals overlapping themes that define parameters that can be used to define a deterritorialized culture which the author of this study names the Italic culture. The analytical system produced can help scholars and students to understand what constitutes the filmic narrative of ethnic films. The title of the thesis derives from a monologue spoken by Jake LaMotta in Raging Bull by Martin Scorsese, which is a paraphrase of another monologue said by Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront by Elia Kazan. Though the words of the speeches are similar, their meaning is different. What for Malloy was a need for success becomes for LaMotta a criticism of this success. Presented at once as a study of forms and a survey of cultural connotations, this investigation proposes a journey into the representative world created by immigrants and children of immigrants who, by refusing to disappear into sameness, question what it means to be Italian in the world today. D’Alfonso iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I wish to express my gratitude to the University of Toronto and the Graduate Department of Italian Studies for the fellowship that made it possible for me to write this thesis in complete economic freedom. I would also like to acknowledge my appreciation to Dr. Salvatore Bancheri who, first, encouraged me to do a PhD. I thank Dr. Rocco Capozzi who read and commented the work throughout its various phases. I also would like to stress my thankfulness to Dr. Michael Lettieri and Dr. Francesco Guardiani for guiding me in my research on a so rich a topic; the courses and the insight of these professors made it possible for me to carry to a different dimension the ideas and hypotheses I have been writing about for the past forty years. Every professor teaching at the Department of Italian Studies provided me with the apparatus which enabled me to connect the various facets of the many peoples that have come to be known as Italians. I dedicate this thesis to Elisabeth Pouyfaucon with whom I spent years discussing and refining the ideas and methodology that became the backbone of my research. D’Alfonso iv TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Introduction page 2 2. Pane e cioccolata (1974), by Franco Brusati page 46 3. L’Emmerdeur (1973), by Édouard Molinaro page 135 4. Queen of Hearts (1989), by Jon Amiel page 191 5. Mediterraneo sempre (2000), by Nicola Zavaglia page 298 6. Raging Bull (1980), by Martin Scorsese page 377 7. Conclusion page 462 Films Cited page 476 Works Cited page 484 D’Alfonso 1 Cinema is a weird profession. They discover you once you are dead. So, Manfredi, don’t worry. Just wait and see all the films they’ll want you to do when you’re dead and gone. Every director will be asking for you. Totò to Nino Manfredi, Jean A. Gili, Le cinéma italien (253) What we emphatically do not want is that these distinctive qualities should be washed out into a tasteless, colorless fluid of uniformity. Randolph Bourne, “Trans-national America” (1916) D’Alfonso 2 1 INTRODUCTION Grouping five disparate films directed by five unrelated artists, produced in five different countries, at various times, can, in many ways, be questionable on the artistic, social and political levels. Yet, as we attempt to demonstrate, despite the dissimilarities, there are thematic, stylistic, semantic blocks that seem to overlap, both on the specific as well as on the global planes. What is vague on the individualistic sphere often, when viewed collectively, reveals synonymity, parallelism, and kinship. Cinema has never been a precise art form. Filmmakers can have no preconceptions of any kind when embarking on a project. What is genre, what is fiction, what is nonfiction, what distinguishes one technical instrument from another are, as Christian Metz warns, formules de cinéma (cinematic formulae). Films insist on remaining “evanescent and uncertain about their own boundaries” (Le signifiant 53). According to Metz, film belongs essentially to a “mixed space (lieu mixte) where specific codes (that more or less make up the proper of cinema) converge and blend with the non-specific codes (more or less ‘shared’ by different ‘languages’ and by cultural systems)” (Le signifiant 50). The films which we propose to analyse – L’Emmerdeur (Édouard Molinaro, 1973), Pane e cioccolata (Franco Brusati, 1974), Raging Bull (Martin Scorsese, 1981), Queen of Hearts (Jon Amiel, 1989), and Mediterraneo sempre (Nicola Zavaglia, 2000) – belong to distinct moments in the history of cinema and are not part of a single, D’Alfonso 3 well-defined, stylistic tradition. To dare place these disparate films one beside the other, we are aware, is somewhat contrary to the practice of studying films grouped by dominant artistic canons. There is no mention at all of any of Molinaro, Scorsese, Zavaglia, Amiel or Tony Grisoni in the latest book on Italian film by Millicent Marcus, After Fellini, a study which presents itself as a witness to the Italian “national story” (After Fellini 6).1 Why should there be? Except for Brusati, the rest are not Italian filmmakers. At least, not legally speaking. And yet they are somehow “Italian.” They are Italian outside Italy filmmakers. They are Italic. If anything can be said about the films studied in this work, it is that, like any work of art, they are brazenly, indomitably, defiantly singular and resemble the fingerprints of their Italic creators. They reach out beyond their national, territorial confines. These films, as diverse as they are from one another, can however form a single category that is more cultural than generic, more sociological than psychological, more communal than individualistic. Viewing films such as Green Pastures (Marc Connelly and William Keighley, 1936), Le Casque d’or (Jacques Becker, 1952), Marty (Delbert Mann, 1955), The Garden of the Finzi-Continis (Vittorio De Sica, 1971), The Godfather Trilogy (Francis Ford Coppola, 1972, 1974, 1990), Italianamerican (Martin Scorsese, 1974-1975), Rabbi Jacob (Gérard Oury, 1973), Concrete Angels (Carlo Liconti, 1987), or La Sarrasine (Paul Tana, 1992), even the non-film expert can notice that despite the diverging technologies, styles, plots of these films there is a common denominator to them all. We call this element the Italic. It is a non-territorial cultural pursuit for men and women interested in the Italian peoples scattered across the world. This special trait, like the stroke of the soiled finger, leaves an indelible mark not only on the individual D’Alfonso 4 spectator’s mind but on the canvas of global artistic movements. This mark, often “unnoticed” by the newspaper film reviewer, has become more and more relevant across the globe. Because it is not a popular movement it is silenced by politics. Though this crossover of the psychological, moral, social, and cultural experiences is universal we will dedicate our work to the Italian outside Italy filmmakers. This quest, this presence, this artistic gauge, this inescapable factor, the parameter is powerful enough to be assigned a name: the ethnic. In his indispensable book, Beyond Ethnicity, Werner Sollors offers an in-depth exploration of the origins of this most controversial concept, ethnicity. Sollors mentions W. Lloyd Warner who, in a study dedicated to cultural communities in Newburyport, Massachusetts, first advanced the possibility of dissociating ethnicity and territory and freeing ethnicity from one’s place “of birth.” One could be, say, Italian, without being born in Italy. Later, David Reisman pushed ethnicity further away from territory in a 1953 essay, “Some Observations on Intellectual Freedom,” and let it to encompass class struggle. The term “ethnic” gradually began to include connotations of pluralism. Placing ethnicity alongside pluralism had already been intelligently developed throughout the early twentieth century by radical United Statian pluralists, such as Horace Kallen, Randolph Bourne and W.E.B. DuBois. These thinkers proposed an anti-assimilationalist world view which they opposed to the prevalent assumptions based on the “melting pot.” In the 1970s, Sollors defended “cultural pluralism” (Kallen’s concept) that stood against an unified Anglo-Saxon country. Interestingly enough, such radical perspectives, for the most part, have been dismissed in Europe where cultural and national identities continue to be found on the principles of jus solis and jus sanguinis. D’Alfonso 5 What we propose to do in this study is to move away from these legal concepts, whereby identity is based on either territory and blood links, and step toward the cultural realm of what we call conscience identity.2 Etymologically, “ethnic” is a noun derived from the Ecclesiastical Latin (of the thirteen century) noun ethnici and adjective ethnicus, meaning, “heathen,” “pagan,” “Gentile” (as opposed to the Hebrew). The Latin term is itself derived from the Greek words ethnikos and ethnos, meaning “group,” “nation” and “people.” An interesting point to mention is that terms “ethnic” and “ethic” (mores, character, manner of being on a daily basis) share the same Indo-European root: swedh-, swe, se (referring to “self” (selfhood) as in the Italian se and sui).