MY PERSONAL VIDEO LIBRARY 5

I think that serious modern narrative is the elaboration of the artistic reaction to the emergence, consolidation, and dominance of the Modern State. The modern novel was born with Miguel de Cervantes‘ Don Quixote, the story of a man who lived mentally in the past (chivalry, codes of honour, weak political structures) and physically in the present (the emergence of the centralised Modern State where the law, not the knight’s sword, maintains order). Freud takes Don Quixote seriously, because he sees in him the last vestiges of the value of living life according to honour rather than according to the rules backed by the threat of State retribution. This theme – honour versus State-mediated justice – opens the Godfather trilogy. Indeed, modern narrative is the story of the State.

(Some believe that Staparola’s racy The Facetious Nights mark the beginning of modern narrative, but I disagree. There’s a movie ( Le piacevoli notti, 1966) based on this collection of saucy short stories.)

I think cinema follows in the steps of literature: good movies are movies about the State (and the individual): good movies are always political – philosophically political, that is.

So my own personal video library is divided into Political Movies (further subdivided into Westerns and Mafia movies) and Miscellaneous (comedies, horror movies, romantic movies, etc).

The Western is the political movie par excellence. Whereas Shakespeare offered the English a mythology about the creation of their country (just like Virgil had offered the Romans), so did Hollywood offer the Americans an own mythology about the creation of their country.

But that’s not the kind of Western I like. The Western I like is the European Western, the Italian Western in particular... a genre that encompasses some 600 specimens of which a fistful are worthy of discussion. In its most refined form, the Italian Western is an artistic reaction to the home-spun American mythology of the making of America. (To be continued.)