Beyond Leone: The Radical Lawlessness of the Spaghetti Western

As an introduction to the retrospective season, "Beyond Leone: The Radical Lawlessness of the Spaghetti Western", the Melbourne Cinémathèque and the Italian Institute of Culture present an audiovisual lecture by Rolando Caputo. The lecture will serve as a precursor to the season of six films programmed at the Cinémathèque, beginning on August 22. Although westerns had been made in Europe prior to Sergio Leone's epochal A Fistful of Dollars (1964), the astonishing wave of films produced in its wake constitute what is affectionately known as the spaghetti western. Cheap but rarely cheerful, from 1964 a plethora of brutal, iconoclastic and stylistically freewheeling gun operas came out of an opportunistic pan-European studio system at a torrential rate. At a time when the Hollywood western was in bloated decline, the Italian-Spanish version ripped up all moral niceties, presenting extreme violence and radical politics via revenge narratives set against local desert backdrops.

Details of the film season are available here:
http://www.melbournecinematheque.org/category/present-year/beyond-leone-the-radical-lawlessness-of-the-spaghetti-western/

This talk by Rolando Caputo will take an informed look at the genre and its stylistic flourishes, contextualising the period within Italian cinema history and the broader concept of the western film.

Rolando Caputo’s early research focused on formal analysis of narrative codes of storytelling, particularly in relationship to voice-over narration in stories structured around flashback sequences. This soon developed into an interest in avant-garde and experimental cinema, and was complimented in a practical form through him making a series of short ‘free-form’ films which were screened at a range of local and international festivals and forums, such as the Berlin and Melbourne film festivals. More lately, one of his key areas of teaching and research has been the traditions of European modernist narrative cinema. In this light he has contributed numerous scholarly audio commentaries and monograph essays to DVD releases of such canonical modernist works as Jean-Luc Godard’s Band àparte and Michelangelo Antonioni’s The Red Desert and La Notte, and the early films by R.W. Fassbinder. In 2005 he was appointed as an editor of the internationally acclaimed web journal Senses of Cinema.