Of course there were some French films around too, completely different from the American productions, films that gave a greater substance to my disorientation by establishing a special link between the places I knew from experience and the places of the elsewhere (this, I would later appreciate, is what the effect known as “realism” consists in), and after seeing the Algiers Casbah in Pépé le Moko I would look at the streets of steps in our own old town with new eyes.
The face of Jean Gabin was made of different stuff, physiologically and psychologically, from the faces of those American actors, faces that would never look up from a table bespattered with soup and humiliation as at the beginning of La Bandera. (Only Wallace Beery’s face in Viva Villa could bear comparison, and maybe Edward G. Robinson’s too.) French cinema was as heavy with smells as American films were light with Palmolive, polish and antiseptic. The women had a carnal presence that established them in the film-goer’s mind as at once living women and erotic fantasies (Viviane Romance is the actress I’m thinking of here), while the eroticism of the Hollywood stars was sublimated, stylized, idealized. (Even the most carnal of the American actresses of the time, the platinum-blond Jean Harlow, was made unreal by the dazzling whiteness of her skin. In black-and-white the power of the white transfigured female faces, legs, shoulders and necks, making of Marlene Dietrich not so much an immediate object of desire but desire itself, seen as some extraterrestrial essence.) I sensed that French cinema was talking about things that were more disturbing and somehow forbidden, I knew that Jean Gabin in Quai des brumes was not, as the Italian dubbing would have had us believe, a demobbed soldier who wanted to go and work a plantation in the colonies, but a deserter escaping from the front, something Fascist censorship would never have allowed a film to discuss.
So, I could talk for as long about the French cinema of the thirties as the American, but the discussion would digress into all kinds of other areas that have nothing to do with either the cinema or the thirties, whereas the American cinema of the thirties is entire unto itself, almost, one might say, as if it had no before and no after: certainly it has had no before or after in my life. Unlike French cinema, the American cinema of the time had nothing to do with literature: perhaps this explains why it is so separate from my experience as a whole, a profile isolated from all the rest: these cinema-going memories belong to my memories of a time before literature touched me.
What used to be called the “Hollywood firmament” formed a system entire unto itself, with its own constants and its own variables, a human typology. The actors represented models of character and behaviour; there was a hero available for every temperament; for those who aimed to tackle life through action, Clark Gable represented a sort of brutality leavened with boastful swagger, Gary Cooper was cold blood filtered through irony; for those who counted on overcoming obstacles with a mixture of humour and savoir faire, there was the aplomb of William Powell and the discretion of Franchot Tone; for the introvert who masters his shyness there was James Stewart, while Spencer Tracy was the model of the just, open-minded man who knows how to do things with his hands; and we were even given a rare example of the intellectual hero in Leslie Howard.
When it came to the actresses, the range of physiognomies and character types was more limited: the makeup, hairstyles and facial expressions tended towards a single stylization divided into the two basic categories of blondes and brunettes, and while within these two categories one might go from the spirited Carole Lombard to the practical Jean Arthur, and from the full, languid mouth of Joan Crawford to the thin, thoughtful lips of Barbara Stanwyck, what you found between those extremes was a succession of ever more indistinguishable figures, all to a certain extent interchangeable. Between the catalogue of women encountered in American films and the catalogue of women one meets off the screen in everyday life one could establish no connection; one might say that where one ended the other began. (Whereas with the women in French films the connection was there.) From the cheeky opportunism of Claudette Colbert to the pungent energy of Katharine Hepburn, the most important role model the female personalities of American cinema offered was that of the woman who rivals men in resolve and doggedness, spirit and wit, this lucid self-possession in confronting their male counterparts finding its most intelligent and ironic exponent in Myrna Loy. I speak now with a seriousness I wouldn’t at the time have been able to ascribe to those light little comedies; but deep down, for a society like ours, for the Italians as they were then, especially out in the provinces, this American woman’s independence and initiative was an instructive example, and one that to some extent got through to me. So much so that I made Myrna Loy my prototype of the ideal feminine, perhaps wifely, perhaps sisterly, but in any event personifying taste and style, a prototype that existed alongside fantasies of carnal aggression (Jean Harlow, Viviane Romance) and of languid, extenuating passion (Greta Garbo, Michele Morgan), both of which kindled a desire tinged with fear; or alongside that image of physical happiness and cheerful vitality that was Ginger Rogers, for whom I cherished a love star-crossed from the start, even in my daydreams, since I didn’t know how to dance.
One could question whether this creation of an Olympus of women at once ideal and for the moment unattainable was a blessing or a curse for a boy. One positive aspect it did have was that it encouraged you not to settle for the little or much you actually came across, but to project your desires beyond that, into the future or the elsewhere or the arduous; the more negative aspect was that it didn’t teach you to look at women with an eye eager to discover new kinds of beauty outside the established canons, or to invent new characters with what chance or quest led you to meet in your own life.
If to my mind the cinema consisted above all of actors and actresses, one should nevertheless remember that for me, as for all Italian moviegoers, only half of each actor and actress was truly present, in the sense that we got only their bodies and not their voices, which were substituted by the abstraction of the dubbing, by a conventional, alien, insipid diction, no less anonymous than the printed subtitles which in other countries (or at least in those where film-goers are thought to be more mentally agile) tell you what the mouths nevertheless continue to communicate with all the considerable charge of individual pronunciation, of a phonetic signature made up of lips, teeth, saliva, made up above all of the varying, geographically conditioned accents of the American melting pot, in a language that for those who understand it offers nuances of expression and for those who don’t brings with it an extra musical potency (such as one hears today in Japanese and Swedish films). The conventionality of American cinema was thus “dubbled” (you will excuse the almost pun) by the conventionality of the dubbing, which to our ears, however, became part and parcel of the film’s enchantment, something inseparable from the images, a sign that the power of the cinema was born silent, and that sound – at least for Italian cinema-goers – has always been felt as an appendage, a caption in block capitals. (The Italian films of the time, for that matter, although not dubbed, might just as well have been. And if I don’t mention them here, despite having seen and still remembering almost all there were, it’s because, for better or worse, they made so little impression, and hence there is simply no place for them in an essay presenting the cinema as another dimension of the world.)
In my determination to see as many American films as I could, there was more than a little of the collector’s doggedness, so that every role played by an actor or actress was like a postage stamp in some series I was gradually sticking down in the album of my memory, painstakingly filling in the gaps. So far I have mentioned only the famous stars, male and female, but my collector’s enthusiasm went beyond them to the scores of supporting actors who were a necessary ingredient of any film at that time, particularly for the comic parts (Everett Horton and Frank Morgan), or the “baddies’” (John Carradine and Joseph Calleia). It was a bit like in the pantomime, where all the roles are predictable, so that reading the cast list I would a
lready know that Billie Burke must be the somewhat dotty lady, Aubrey Smith the crusty colonel, Mischa Auer the penniless scrounge, Eugene Pallette the millionaire; but I would also look forward to the little surprise, of recognizing a well-known face in an unexpected role, wearing different makeup perhaps. I knew almost all their names, right down to the actor who always played the touchy hotel porter (Hugh Pagborne), and the one who was always the barman with the cold (Armetta); and where I’ve forgotten names, or never managed to find them out, I still remember the faces; of the various butlers, for example, who formed a category all their own in the cinema of the time, and a very important one too, perhaps because people had already begun to realize that the age of the butler was over.
But my erudition you must remember is the erudition of the simple film-goer, not the expert. I would never be able to compete with the erudite professionals in the field (nor even appear on quiz shows) because I have never been tempted to fill out my memories by consulting handbooks, film catalogues and specialized encyclopedias. These memories form part of a mental storehouse where what matters is not written documents but the casual deposition of images across days and years, a storehouse of private sensations I have never wanted to mix up with the storehouses of the collective memory. (Of the critics of the time I used to read Filippo Sacchi in the Corriere, very smart and alert to my favourite actors, and, later, “Volpone” in Bertoldo, who turned out to be Pietro Bianchi and was the first to establish a bridge between cinema and literature.)
I ought to say that this whole business lasted only a few years: my enthusiasm barely had time to reach self-awareness and escape from parental repression before it was suddenly suffocated by the repression of the state. All at once (1938, I think), in order to extend its self-sufficiency to the film industry, Italy introduced an embargo on American films. It was not, properly speaking, a question of censorship: as in the past, the censor continued to give or not give his approval to this or that individual film, and those that didn’t get it were never seen and that was the end of the matter. No, despite the clumsy anti-Hollywood campaign launched at the same time as the embargo (this was precisely the moment when the regime’s propaganda machine was falling into line with Nazi racism), the real reason for the measure was one of commercial protectionism, of creating space on the market for Italian (and German) productions. As a result, the four big American producers and distributors Metro, Fox, Paramount and Warner (as I said, I’m writing from memory, trusting in the exactness with which my mind recorded the trauma) were kept out, while films made by other American producers, such as RKO, Columbia, Universal and United Artists (which even before the embargo had been handled by Italian distributors) were still shown right up to the end of 1941, right up to the moment, that is, when Italy found itself at war with the USA. So I was still granted the occasional isolated treat (indeed, one of the biggest: Stagecoach), but my collector’s voracity had been mortally wounded.
Of course, when compared with all the other prohibitions and obligations that fascism had imposed, and the even tougher ones it was now imposing in those prewar years and would later impose during the war, the banning of American films was a minor, even minimal deprivation, and I was not so foolish as not to appreciate this: but it was the first to strike directly at me, who knew no other regime than fascism, nor had felt any needs other than those that the world I lived in had been able to prompt and satisfy. It was the first time that a right I enjoyed had been taken away from me: more than a right, a dimension, a world, a mental space; and I experienced this loss as a cruel oppression, one which contained within it all the forms of oppression that I knew about only from hearsay or from having seen others suffer. And if I can still speak of it today as of a blessing lost, it is because something went out of my life then never to return. By the time the war was over, so much had changed: I had changed, and the cinema had changed, changed in itself and changed in relation to me. My cinema-going biography resumes but it is that of a different cinema-goer, who is no longer just a cinema-goer.
With so many new ideas going through my head, whenever I thought back to the Hollywood cinema of my adolescence, it would seem a rather poverty-stricken affair: it hadn’t been one of those heroic eras of the silent cinema, or the introduction of sound, for which my first explorations of film history were now whetting my appetite. My memories of life during those years had changed too, and so many things that I had thought of as routine and insignificant were now dense with meaning, tension, premonition. In short, thinking back over my past, the world of the screen appeared much paler, more predictable, less exciting than the world outside it. Of course, I might always say that it was the dullness and banality of provincial life that pushed me toward those celluloid dreams, but that would be to resort to a cliché that oversimplifies the complexity of the experience. There is no point in my explaining here how and why the provincial life going on about me in my childhood and adolescence was in fact made up entirely of exceptions to the norm, how the sadness and listlessness, if such they were, lay inside me and not in the outward appearance of things. Even fascism, in a small place where one never grasped the mass dimension of phenomena, was a collection of separate faces, of individual attitudes, hence not a uniform mantle like a layer of tar but rather (I speak of the disenchanted viewpoint of a boy looking half from without and half from within) another contrasting element, a piece of the puzzle which because of its unusual shape was more difficult to fit in with the other pieces, a film whose beginning I had missed and whose end I couldn’t imagine. So what had the cinema meant to me in this context? I suppose: distance. It satisfied a need for distance, for an expansion of the boundaries of the real, for seeing immeasurable dimensions open up all around me, abstract as geometric entities, yet concrete too, crammed full of faces and situations and settings, which established an (abstract) network of relationships with the world of direct experience.
Since the war, cinema has been seen, discussed, made, in a completely different way. I don’t know to what extent postwar Italian cinema has changed our way of seeing the world, but it has certainly changed our way of seeing the cinema (any cinema, even American cinema). We no longer have one world within the brightly lit screen in the darkened theatre, and another heterogeneous world outside, the two being divided by a clean break, an ocean or abyss. The darkened theatre disappears, the screen becomes a magnifying glass placed on the routine world outside, forcing us to focus our attention on what the naked eye tends to skim over without settling on. This function has – can have – its usefulness, marginal, more substantial or occasionally very considerable. But it does not satisfy that anthropological and social need for distance.
At this point (to pick up the thread of individual biography) I quickly got involved in the world of the printed page, which along one margin or another borders on the world of celluloid. Immediately, I had the vague impression that, for the sake of my old love of the cinema, I must preserve my condition of spectator pure and simple, that I would lose the privileges that came with that condition if I were to join those who made the films: and anyway I was never tempted to try. But since Italian society is fairly restricted, one ends up sitting next to film directors in the trattoria, everybody knows everybody, and this takes away a great deal of the fascination of being a cinema-goer (and a reader). Add to that the fact that Rome for a while became an international Hollywood, and that the barriers between the film worlds of the various producing countries soon came down, and it’s obvious that every aspect of the old sense of distance was lost.
But I still keep going to the cinema. The exceptional encounter between spectator and filmed vision is always a possibility, whether thanks to art or to chance. In the Italian cinema one can expect a great deal from the personal genius of the directors, but very little from chance. This must be one of the reasons why I have sometimes admired and frequently appreciated Italian cinema, but never loved it. I feel it has taken more from my pleasure of going to the cinema than it has given.
For such pleasure has to be assessed not just in terms of the “art films” with which one establishes a critical relationship of the “literary” variety, but also with regard to whatever may or may not be coming out of the middle- and low-brow productions, with which one tries to re-establish the relationship of someone who goes to the cinema purely to watch.
Thus I ought to talk about the satirical comedy of manners which dominated middle-brow Italian cinema throughout the sixties. But in most instances I find it detestable, since the more ruthless its caricature of our social behaviour pretends to be, the more self-satisfied and indulgent it actually becomes; occasionally I do find it genial and lighthearted, informed by an optimism that has remained miraculously genuine, but then I don’t feel it helps us to make any progress toward self-knowledge. The fact is, looking ourselves in the eyes is no easy matter. Italian vitality quite rightly enchants foreigners, and equally rightly leaves me cold.
It is scarcely a coincidence that Italian cinema developed a homegrown product of consistent quality and originality of style only when it turned to the western, that is, when it rejected the dimension on which Italian cinema had founded its reputation and become bogged down, when it constructed an abstract space, a parodic distortion of a purely cinematographic convention. (But in this way it also says something about us, our mass psychology: about what the western means to us, about how we integrate and adjust the myth so as to invest our hopes and fears in it.)