Austin Fisher

Books

Blood in the Streets: Histories of Violence in Italian Crime Cinema

Edinburgh University Press 2019.

Blood in the Streets investigates the various ways in which 1970s Italian crime films were embedded in their immediate cultural and political contexts. The book analyses the emergence, proliferation and distribution of a range of popular film cycles (or filoni) – from conspiracy thrillers and vigilante films, to mafia and serial killer narratives – and examines what these reveal about their time and place. The engagement in these films with both the contemporary political turmoil of 1970s Italy and the traumas of the nation’s recent past offer fascinating insights into wider anxieties of this decade around the Second World War and its on-going political aftermath.

Ultimately, these cycles’ industrial conditions of rapid production schedules and concentrated release patterns are seen to be the key to understanding their significance, since these conditions allowed for swift responsiveness to political events, cinematic trends and attendant economic opportunities, while demanding the simplified construction of believable contemporary backdrops. The book thus reveals a repetitive accumulation of assumptions around historically constituted corruption, the impact of rapid socio-economic change and the lingering vestiges of wartime conflict.

Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western: Politics, Violence and Popular Italian Cinema

I.B. Tauris, 2011.

Ever more popular in the age of DVDs, eBay and online fandom, the Spaghetti Westerns of the 1960s have undergone a mainstream renaissance which has nevertheless left their intimate relationship to the troubled politics of 1960s Italy unexamined. Radical Frontiers reappraises the genre in relation to the revolutionary New Left and the events of 1968 to uncover the complexities of a cinematic milieu too often dismissed as formulaic and homogeneous.

Establishing the backdrop of post-war Italy in which the Roman studio system actively blended Italian and American culture, Austin Fisher looks in detail at the works of Damiano Damiani, Sergio Sollima, Sergio Corbucci, Giulio Questi and Giulio Petroni and how these directors reformatted the Hollywood Western to yield new resonance for militant constituencies and radical groups.

Spaghetti Westerns at the Crossroads: Studies in Relocation, Transition and Appropriation

Edinburgh University Press, 2016.

What links Italian neorealism to Django Unchained, French comic books to Third-World insurgency, and Bollywood song-and-dance to Eastern Bloc film distribution? As this volume illustrates, the answers lie in the Spaghetti Western genre. This object of fascination and affection for fans, filmmakers and academics alike arose from a diverse confluence of cultural strands, and remains the inspiration for many more, making the Western all’italiana a pivotal moment in cinematic history. This book brings together new research on this phenomenon from leading international scholars in a variety of disciplines, both to revisit the genre’s cultural significance and to consider its on-going influence on international film industries.

Grindhouse: Cultural Exchange on 42nd Street, and Beyond

Bloomsbury, 2016.

The pervasive image of New York's 42nd Street as a hub of sensational thrills, vice and excess, is from where grindhouse cinema, the focus of this volume, stemmed. It is, arguably, an image that has remained unchanged in the minds eye of many exploitation film fans and academics alike. Whether in the pages of fanzines or scholarly works, it is often recounted how, should one have walked down this street between the 1960s and the 1980s, one would have undergone a kaleidoscopic encounter with an array of disparate exploitation films from all over the world that were being offered cheaply to urbanites by a swathe of vibrant movie theatres. The contributors to Grindhouse: Cultural Exchange on 42nd Street, and Beyond consider grindhouse cinema from a variety of cultural and methodological positions. Some seek to deconstruct the etymology of grindhouse itself, add flesh to the bones of its cadaverous history, or examine the terms contemporary relevance in the context of both media production and consumerism. Others offer new inroads into hitherto unexamined examples of exploitation film history, presenting snapshots of cultural moments that many of us thought we already knew.

Book Chapters

Journal Articles

Second Phase Transnationalism: Reflections on Launching the SCMS Transnational Cinemas Scholarly Interest Group

Austin Fisher and Iain Robert Smith, Transnational Screens 10(2).

This article examines what the process of founding and chairing the SCMS (Society for Cinema and Media Studies) ‘Transnational Cinemas’ scholarly interest group revealed to the authors about the evolution of the field. Charting a progression in the group’s activities from workshops around disciplinary definition to more practical sessions addressing teaching and research methodologies, the article maps out key shifts that took place within the period 2013-2017. It also appraises the authors’ efforts to create lasting, tangible resources for future researchers and teachers. The limitations of such a group’s influence are balanced against its capacity to bring scholars from diverse disciplines into dialogue with each other, thereby offering insight into the breadth and depth of the ‘transnational cinemas’ field.

Il braccio violento della legge: Revelation, Conspiracy and the Politics of Violence in the Poliziottesco

Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies 2(2), 167-181.

This article analyses a strand of the Italian police thriller (poliziottesco) whose plots invest heavily in notions of official cover-up and high-level coup d’état conspiracy, in the cultural, political and historical coordinates of the ‘anni di piombo’/‘years of lead’. Prevailing scholarly discourses on the cinema of and about this era tend to identify a desire to seek explanation for the violent traumas and to see through the opaque webs of intrigue that characterize the national memory of the 1970s. By taking La polizia ringrazia/Execution Squad (Steno, 1972), Milano trema – la polizia vuole giustizia/Violent Professionals (Martino, 1973) and La polizia accusa: il servizio segreto uccide/Silent Action (Martino, 1975) as key examples, this article seeks to demonstrate that such films in fact occupy a divergent register of political address: one that seeks, not to explain or ‘make sense’ of the era’s intrigues, but instead to enact a ritual recognition of innate suspicion, pervasive corruption and assumed distrust. These films are appraised for their immediacy rather than their coherence, as documents of confusion rather than of investigative rigour. They thus enable a reading of ‘political cinema’ as being one that chronicles the range of political registers through which events were being represented to sections of the Italian public.

A Cult Called Django: on the Controversial Tail of a Transnational Bandito

Cine-Excess 1(1).

This article discusses the myriad cultural meanings of Sergio Corbucci’s Spaghetti Western Django (1966): by situating it as a document of an unstable, transitional national identity in 1960s Italy; by analysing its sporadic, ‘excessive’ textual make-up; and by examining the various transnational processes that have engendered and nurtured the film’s continuous reception tail in popular discourse. Relating the film to prevailing conceptions of ‘cult cinema’, it asks what significance lies in the film’s schizophrenic profile in the international marketplace, whereby its cult cachet has fed upon imitation and censorship in equal measure. Moreover, by assessing Django as a site of liminal exchange between and within national identities, the article identifies a ‘rootless’ text that has been in transit between cultures from the moment of its release into the global marketplace. A film that bespeaks multifarious acts of cultural borrowing, border crossing and translation, Django’s nomadic patterns of release, reception and appropriation are shown to bring into question both the ‘national’ and the ‘transnational’ cinematic referents.

A Marxist’s Gotta Do What a Marxist’s Gotta Do: Political Violence on the Italian Frontier

Scope: an Online Journal of Film and Television Studies (15).

1960s Italian Westerns are commonly viewed as postmodern undertakings, emptying the genre of ideological undertones and leaving stylised violence in their place. Indeed, the “Spaghetti” Western arose from processes of transatlantic borrowing in post-war Italy which, while emulating American models of modernity, appropriated and re-formulated symbols of US popular culture. From this hybrid genre in turn emerged a sub-category endorsing armed insurrection against Occidental capitalism; nowhere, it would seem, could the appellation ‘Western’ be more incongruously employed.

This article, however, asserts that this militant sub-genre merely adapted the preoccupations of the Hollywood paradigm, identifying therein appropriate means for disseminating such ideologies. Violence was an issue inherent both to the Western and to contemporary Italy, when radical protests and terrorism preoccupied the nation. If the Italian Western indeed drained the genre’s brutality of all meaning, this is not a charge that can be levelled at Damiano Damiani and Sergio Corbucci; such films as ¿Quien sabe? and Compañeros instead constitute populist manifestations of contemporary militant debates concerning armed insurrection. That such transposition was effected with little thematic subversion displays the ideological malleability of what Robert Warshow called the Western’s “serious orientation to the problem of violence”.

Blu-ray Extras

Video Essays