Introduction
Among aficionados of the Italian Western, Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966) is celebrated as a tour de force of the ‘Spaghetti’ aesthetic. Surreal, macabre and gleeful in its violence, its status as a non-Sergio Leone text bestows upon it a counter-canonical kudos further enriching its value as a ‘cult’ artefact. This film has become a pop-cultural phenomenon in its own right ever since its initial success spawned a host of imitations and unofficial sequels. Yet the story of Django and its myriad patterns of reception is a complex and at times contradictory one: of obscurity as well as proliferation, of censorship and controversy as well as admiration. Where critical and scholarly discourses are concerned, it has frequently been subsumed into the larger Spaghetti Western milieu. It is the purpose of this article to offer a close reading of Django’s own relationship to its historical, transnational and generic contexts.
By foregrounding the word ‘cult’ in my title I am investing in a well-established field of academic inquiry that touches upon such sub-cultural phenomena as exploitation films, the ‘midnight movie’ and the ‘video nasty’. As might be expected of any categorisation encompassing such a diverse assemblage of generic and national reference points, ‘cult cinema’ is a sometimes bewilderingly nebulous entity. It is not, therefore, my purpose here to use Django to ‘define’ this concept in any programmatic or exhaustive manner. Nor do I seek to shoehorn the film into any pre-ordained theoretical paradigm. There are, however, a number of recurring and inter-related criteria within prevailing scholarly models in the field that offer illuminating points of entry for an investigation into Django’s cultural significance.
Django and Cult Connotation
Firstly, the notion of ‘cult cinema’ is predicated upon an oppositional, even confrontational, relationship with the mode of cinematic consumption commonly labelled ‘mainstream’. Cult audiences are studied for their adherence to what Jeffrey Sconce influentially identified as ‘paracinema’: an alternative ‘reading protocol’,[1] whereby films are consumed through resistance to official narratives or perceptions of a prescriptive cultural canon. Such approaches tend to advance Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of ‘distinction’ by focusing on ‘taste’ as a culturally- and politically-conditioned discourse, and interrogating dominant assumptions that invest cultural capital in conceptions of finely wrought artistry.[2] Cult fandom can thus be analysed for its embrace of what Jancovich et al label ‘the aesthetics of transgression’,[3] bestowing that which is judged to be the detritus of filmic output with kudos for its counter-canonical, niche rebelliousness. A second, and intimately related, element of ‘cult’ becomes apparent when scholars analyse the films themselves and the way they are constructed as texts. Here, we find varying levels of gore, outrageousness or transgression against ‘acceptable’ mores: an umbrella succinctly summarised by Mathijs and Mendik as ‘yukkie stuff’.[4] Where such stylistic or (perceived) moral ‘excess’ leads to censorship or officially sanctioned opprobrium, this element is in turn analysed for its capacity to foster cult value through a film’s lack of availability and consequent desirability. Notably, the works of Martin Barker and Kate Egan on the UK ‘video nasty’ phenomenon have demonstrated that the level of hysteria surrounding such films is apt to feed a cult notoriety quite independent of their actual content.[5]
Finally, and once again closely related to the last point, cult films are studied for how they invite a peculiar kind of intense and active fandom. This can manifest itself in a variety of guises: most strikingly, through such communal, participatory and ritualised events as the fancy-dress sing-a-long screenings of The Sound of Music.[6] Such dedication to cult cinema is also, however, registered by direct and culturally visible imitations or appropriations in subsequent films: a process framed by Mathijs and Sexton as one whereby ‘filmmakers have used audiences’ management of their “cult attitude” to consciously design films to include transgressive, exotic, offensive, nostalgic or highly intertextual narratives and styles’.[7] This latter mode of engagement shows us that ‘cult’ is not only a type of consumption or reception, but also a marketing strategy and a production practice. Furthermore, it underscores an important dual notion: that cinematic output is itself a mode of active reception and response to filmic texts; and that filmmakers are themselves simultaneously critics and audience members, constantly reacting to and reworking the cultural artefacts that surround them. Umberto Eco famously identified the phenomenon of films self-consciously indulging in nostalgic intertextuality in reference to previous cult films as ‘meta-cult’.[8] This kind of cinema is often framed within discourses of postmodernity as transnational currents take a text beyond the cultural specificity of its borders and, as we shall see, is of particular relevance when assessing the legacy of Django.
The elements here listed will each in turn inform my reading of Django as a ‘cult’ film, but this alone would hardly be a revelatory evaluation. Mathijs and Sexton discuss the playful intertextuality, and attendant cult cachet, running throughout the Spaghetti Western genre,[9] while Mathijs and Mendik include Corbucci’s film in their recent compendium of 100 Cult Films.[10] My purpose is instead to utilise this theoretical framework to examine the various cultural and transcultural processes that have engendered and nurtured the film’s continuous reception tail in popular discourse. A document of rapid shifts in the global outlook of its home country, Django is a site of liminal exchange between and within national identities. Yet its nomadic patterns of release, reception and appropriation bring into question the very concept of the ‘national’ cinematic referent.
Firstly, it is important to locate Django in the specific cultural contexts from which it emerged. The film registers a broad cultural transition towards Americanised modernity taking place across Western Europe in the post-war era: most specifically, of course, that within 1960s Italy. The rapidity of the ‘Economic Miracle’ and attendant expansion of mass communications media in the 1950s, along with the national alignment with the American sphere of influence as the Cold War intensified, meant that a second-hand, imaginary conception of US popular culture became ever more visible in Italy in the thirty or so years following the Second World War. This is by no means to say, however, that such a relationship amounted to linear domination or displacement of native discourses in the face of a transatlantic behemoth. This era of Italian cultural history was instead characterised by processes of negotiation, appropriation and in some cases resistance to the artefacts of American popular culture: artefacts that in the immediate post-war period had been described by poet, literary critic and translator Cesare Pavese as ‘a kind of great laboratory where we pursued the task of creating a modern taste, style and world’.[11] Having never physically crossed the Atlantic, Pavese instead creatively reinscribed a perceptual America through his essays on, and translations of, literary figures such as Melville, Whitman and Faulkner. His metaphor of a laboratory expresses a sense that Americana offered concoctions to be selected, adapted and blended by Europeans to negotiate a ‘modern’ sensibility.
This balance between appropriation of, and creative negotiation with, American reference points was by the 1960s one of the defining features of Italy’s cultural and political identities, and nowhere is this more tangible than in the Spaghetti Western. Italian transpositions of the USA’s hallowed foundation myth proliferated to number nearly five hundred films by the late 1970s,[12] yet critical and scholarly discussion of this genre revolved for many years around one director: the globally lauded auteur Sergio Leone (to name just one example, Marcia Landy analyses the Italian Western’s transcultural contexts at length, but only films associated with Leone are afforded attention).[13] It is notable that, when Django is discussed in such circles, it is often specifically selected as a more faithful document of the preferences of 1960s Italian audiences. Christopher Frayling writes that the film’s anti-clericalism ‘was to become one of the trade-marks of Italian Westerns aimed at the home market (as distinct from Leone’s more sentimental presentation of the priesthood, in films which were pitched at international audiences)’.[14] David Martin-Jones selects Corbucci’s film because it registers distribution practices and audience habits similar to those of Italy’s terza visione sector (‘third-run’ provincial cinemas, as opposed to the more profitable inner-city or urban prima visione chains): ‘The style eschews the psychological motivation and linear development of both US westerns and Leone’s films’.[15] Both position Django at a remove from Leone, as a more authentically Italian or ‘niche’ genre text: a notion made more explicit still by Dimitris Eleftheriotis, who chooses Django because Corbucci’s work ‘is more alien to Anglo-US critics than the films of the now canonized Sergio Leone, whose [work now resides] within mainstream discourse’.[16]
This counter-canonical approach is not simply a case of scholars being purposefully contrary, to assert a superior knowledge of genre history and cultural nuance to the multiplex-going hoi-poloi. The film can indeed be seen to demonstrate an ‘Italian-ness’, by which claim I do not seek to evoke reductive national stereotypes of quaintness, antiquity or Latin exuberance. Recent trends in Italian film studies are moving to eschew linear reliance upon the ‘national’ referent, instead examining cultural and sub-cultural currents within conceptions of national identity. Alan O’Leary and Catherine O’Rawe, for example, have argued that notions of Italian cinema somehow ‘reflecting’ the national character are rendered obsolete by the less coherent, and therefore often overlooked, milieu of popular Italian cinema. They argue instead that such cinemas do indeed register ‘versions of “Italian-ness”’, but not necessarily those sought by historians.[17] In a similar vein, Django can be located as a document of a particular kind of ‘Italian-ness’: one in the throes of the confusing upheavals of the 1960s, where popular transcultural reference points are merging and blending. As we shall see, its haphazard reworking of the Western is an apt manifestation of this transitional Italian identity, experimenting with fragments of Americana in a manner akin to Pavese’s ‘great laboratory’.
Django and the Controversies of Fandom
Beyond the corridors of academe, Django’s position of productive obscurity extends to what the film offers the fan, the film buff and the movie geek. While Leone became a veritable giant of global cinema, Corbucci’s work (of which Django is by some distance the most well known) was ‘discovered’, cherished and appropriated. Barrie Pattison’s reminiscence gives an indication of the kind of fandom demanded: ‘For those of us who tracked down Sergio Corbucci’s work in the ethnic cinemas and double feature flea pits round the globe, he holds a larger place in our affection than many more applauded [filmmakers]’.[18] This subterranean existence can be ascribed to various elements of the film itself, both in terms of its internal ‘textual’ make-up and of its patterns of release and consumption. Though Django certainly does owe a debt to Leone’s breakthrough hit A Fistful of Dollars (1964), this mostly resides in the storyline of a stranger arriving in a deserted town and playing rival factions off against one another (what Frayling dubs the Spaghetti Western’s ‘foundation’ plot).[19] Such narrative concerns are by no means the sine qua non of a film that foregrounds mud-wrestling whores, centre-frame mutilations and an army of Klan-esque red-hooded racists. It is indeed through the erratic, faltering nature of Django’s narrative structure that its ambivalent ‘Italian-ness’, alluded to above, is most tangible.
From its very opening shots, Django is an enigma, intriguing the viewer with a set of elusive perceptual and semantic challenges. Who is this lone, faceless figure coming into grainy focus as he walks away from a tight zoom shot? What has happened to his horse, that he must carry his own saddle? Most perplexingly of all, what is inside that coffin that he laboriously drags through this desolate (yet oddly moist) desert wasteland? That the last question is the only one whose riddle will be fully solved (and that this revelation involves an unforgettable scene of mass carnage) speaks volumes about Corbucci’s approach, and by extension the film’s cult status. Narrative, characterisation and verisimilitude have here been paid little heed, in a film that offers a series of visually and aurally striking crescendos, many of which offer bravura renderings of elaborate torture or death: for example, the orgiastic carnage once the coffin’s deadly cargo is revealed; the ear-slicing; the hand-crushing; and the drawn-out, baroque showdown in a windswept graveyard.
Such snapshots have assured Django an iconic influence on subsequent cult cinema, but are also entirely indicative of the industrial conditions of 1960s Italian genre cinema. Christopher Wagstaff develops an observation by Anthony Mann comparing the erratic narrative arc of many Spaghetti Westerns to an ‘electrocardiogram for a clinic case’, to illustrate their purposeful appeal to the audiences of Italy’s terza visione sector. This social context was one in which audience members would come and go, and talk during the show, except for the regular parts designed to grab their attention.[20] Django, it should be stressed, was not a creation of the terza visione production line that Wagstaff describes, but a larger, internationally released film. What is clear, however, is that Corbucci was operating within the conventions of a genre in which narrative coherence and dialogue by no means came before eye-catching panache in production practices. Django’s free-floating climaxes of violent action and stylised posturing are entwined within this cultural and industrial milieu.
Among aficionados of the Italian Western, Sergio Corbucci’s Django (1966) is celebrated as a tour de force of the ‘Spaghetti’ aesthetic. Surreal, macabre and gleeful in its violence, its status as a non-Sergio Leone text bestows upon it a counter-canonical kudos further enriching its value as a ‘cult’ artefact. This film has become a pop-cultural phenomenon in its own right ever since its initial success spawned a host of imitations and unofficial sequels. Yet the story of Django and its myriad patterns of reception is a complex and at times contradictory one: of obscurity as well as proliferation, of censorship and controversy as well as admiration. Where critical and scholarly discourses are concerned, it has frequently been subsumed into the larger Spaghetti Western milieu. It is the purpose of this article to offer a close reading of Django’s own relationship to its historical, transnational and generic contexts.
By foregrounding the word ‘cult’ in my title I am investing in a well-established field of academic inquiry that touches upon such sub-cultural phenomena as exploitation films, the ‘midnight movie’ and the ‘video nasty’. As might be expected of any categorisation encompassing such a diverse assemblage of generic and national reference points, ‘cult cinema’ is a sometimes bewilderingly nebulous entity. It is not, therefore, my purpose here to use Django to ‘define’ this concept in any programmatic or exhaustive manner. Nor do I seek to shoehorn the film into any pre-ordained theoretical paradigm. There are, however, a number of recurring and inter-related criteria within prevailing scholarly models in the field that offer illuminating points of entry for an investigation into Django’s cultural significance.
Django and Cult Connotation
Firstly, the notion of ‘cult cinema’ is predicated upon an oppositional, even confrontational, relationship with the mode of cinematic consumption commonly labelled ‘mainstream’. Cult audiences are studied for their adherence to what Jeffrey Sconce influentially identified as ‘paracinema’: an alternative ‘reading protocol’,[1] whereby films are consumed through resistance to official narratives or perceptions of a prescriptive cultural canon. Such approaches tend to advance Pierre Bourdieu’s notions of ‘distinction’ by focusing on ‘taste’ as a culturally- and politically-conditioned discourse, and interrogating dominant assumptions that invest cultural capital in conceptions of finely wrought artistry.[2] Cult fandom can thus be analysed for its embrace of what Jancovich et al label ‘the aesthetics of transgression’,[3] bestowing that which is judged to be the detritus of filmic output with kudos for its counter-canonical, niche rebelliousness. A second, and intimately related, element of ‘cult’ becomes apparent when scholars analyse the films themselves and the way they are constructed as texts. Here, we find varying levels of gore, outrageousness or transgression against ‘acceptable’ mores: an umbrella succinctly summarised by Mathijs and Mendik as ‘yukkie stuff’.[4] Where such stylistic or (perceived) moral ‘excess’ leads to censorship or officially sanctioned opprobrium, this element is in turn analysed for its capacity to foster cult value through a film’s lack of availability and consequent desirability. Notably, the works of Martin Barker and Kate Egan on the UK ‘video nasty’ phenomenon have demonstrated that the level of hysteria surrounding such films is apt to feed a cult notoriety quite independent of their actual content.[5]
Finally, and once again closely related to the last point, cult films are studied for how they invite a peculiar kind of intense and active fandom. This can manifest itself in a variety of guises: most strikingly, through such communal, participatory and ritualised events as the fancy-dress sing-a-long screenings of The Sound of Music.[6] Such dedication to cult cinema is also, however, registered by direct and culturally visible imitations or appropriations in subsequent films: a process framed by Mathijs and Sexton as one whereby ‘filmmakers have used audiences’ management of their “cult attitude” to consciously design films to include transgressive, exotic, offensive, nostalgic or highly intertextual narratives and styles’.[7] This latter mode of engagement shows us that ‘cult’ is not only a type of consumption or reception, but also a marketing strategy and a production practice. Furthermore, it underscores an important dual notion: that cinematic output is itself a mode of active reception and response to filmic texts; and that filmmakers are themselves simultaneously critics and audience members, constantly reacting to and reworking the cultural artefacts that surround them. Umberto Eco famously identified the phenomenon of films self-consciously indulging in nostalgic intertextuality in reference to previous cult films as ‘meta-cult’.[8] This kind of cinema is often framed within discourses of postmodernity as transnational currents take a text beyond the cultural specificity of its borders and, as we shall see, is of particular relevance when assessing the legacy of Django.
The elements here listed will each in turn inform my reading of Django as a ‘cult’ film, but this alone would hardly be a revelatory evaluation. Mathijs and Sexton discuss the playful intertextuality, and attendant cult cachet, running throughout the Spaghetti Western genre,[9] while Mathijs and Mendik include Corbucci’s film in their recent compendium of 100 Cult Films.[10] My purpose is instead to utilise this theoretical framework to examine the various cultural and transcultural processes that have engendered and nurtured the film’s continuous reception tail in popular discourse. A document of rapid shifts in the global outlook of its home country, Django is a site of liminal exchange between and within national identities. Yet its nomadic patterns of release, reception and appropriation bring into question the very concept of the ‘national’ cinematic referent.
Firstly, it is important to locate Django in the specific cultural contexts from which it emerged. The film registers a broad cultural transition towards Americanised modernity taking place across Western Europe in the post-war era: most specifically, of course, that within 1960s Italy. The rapidity of the ‘Economic Miracle’ and attendant expansion of mass communications media in the 1950s, along with the national alignment with the American sphere of influence as the Cold War intensified, meant that a second-hand, imaginary conception of US popular culture became ever more visible in Italy in the thirty or so years following the Second World War. This is by no means to say, however, that such a relationship amounted to linear domination or displacement of native discourses in the face of a transatlantic behemoth. This era of Italian cultural history was instead characterised by processes of negotiation, appropriation and in some cases resistance to the artefacts of American popular culture: artefacts that in the immediate post-war period had been described by poet, literary critic and translator Cesare Pavese as ‘a kind of great laboratory where we pursued the task of creating a modern taste, style and world’.[11] Having never physically crossed the Atlantic, Pavese instead creatively reinscribed a perceptual America through his essays on, and translations of, literary figures such as Melville, Whitman and Faulkner. His metaphor of a laboratory expresses a sense that Americana offered concoctions to be selected, adapted and blended by Europeans to negotiate a ‘modern’ sensibility.
This balance between appropriation of, and creative negotiation with, American reference points was by the 1960s one of the defining features of Italy’s cultural and political identities, and nowhere is this more tangible than in the Spaghetti Western. Italian transpositions of the USA’s hallowed foundation myth proliferated to number nearly five hundred films by the late 1970s,[12] yet critical and scholarly discussion of this genre revolved for many years around one director: the globally lauded auteur Sergio Leone (to name just one example, Marcia Landy analyses the Italian Western’s transcultural contexts at length, but only films associated with Leone are afforded attention).[13] It is notable that, when Django is discussed in such circles, it is often specifically selected as a more faithful document of the preferences of 1960s Italian audiences. Christopher Frayling writes that the film’s anti-clericalism ‘was to become one of the trade-marks of Italian Westerns aimed at the home market (as distinct from Leone’s more sentimental presentation of the priesthood, in films which were pitched at international audiences)’.[14] David Martin-Jones selects Corbucci’s film because it registers distribution practices and audience habits similar to those of Italy’s terza visione sector (‘third-run’ provincial cinemas, as opposed to the more profitable inner-city or urban prima visione chains): ‘The style eschews the psychological motivation and linear development of both US westerns and Leone’s films’.[15] Both position Django at a remove from Leone, as a more authentically Italian or ‘niche’ genre text: a notion made more explicit still by Dimitris Eleftheriotis, who chooses Django because Corbucci’s work ‘is more alien to Anglo-US critics than the films of the now canonized Sergio Leone, whose [work now resides] within mainstream discourse’.[16]
This counter-canonical approach is not simply a case of scholars being purposefully contrary, to assert a superior knowledge of genre history and cultural nuance to the multiplex-going hoi-poloi. The film can indeed be seen to demonstrate an ‘Italian-ness’, by which claim I do not seek to evoke reductive national stereotypes of quaintness, antiquity or Latin exuberance. Recent trends in Italian film studies are moving to eschew linear reliance upon the ‘national’ referent, instead examining cultural and sub-cultural currents within conceptions of national identity. Alan O’Leary and Catherine O’Rawe, for example, have argued that notions of Italian cinema somehow ‘reflecting’ the national character are rendered obsolete by the less coherent, and therefore often overlooked, milieu of popular Italian cinema. They argue instead that such cinemas do indeed register ‘versions of “Italian-ness”’, but not necessarily those sought by historians.[17] In a similar vein, Django can be located as a document of a particular kind of ‘Italian-ness’: one in the throes of the confusing upheavals of the 1960s, where popular transcultural reference points are merging and blending. As we shall see, its haphazard reworking of the Western is an apt manifestation of this transitional Italian identity, experimenting with fragments of Americana in a manner akin to Pavese’s ‘great laboratory’.
Django and the Controversies of Fandom
Beyond the corridors of academe, Django’s position of productive obscurity extends to what the film offers the fan, the film buff and the movie geek. While Leone became a veritable giant of global cinema, Corbucci’s work (of which Django is by some distance the most well known) was ‘discovered’, cherished and appropriated. Barrie Pattison’s reminiscence gives an indication of the kind of fandom demanded: ‘For those of us who tracked down Sergio Corbucci’s work in the ethnic cinemas and double feature flea pits round the globe, he holds a larger place in our affection than many more applauded [filmmakers]’.[18] This subterranean existence can be ascribed to various elements of the film itself, both in terms of its internal ‘textual’ make-up and of its patterns of release and consumption. Though Django certainly does owe a debt to Leone’s breakthrough hit A Fistful of Dollars (1964), this mostly resides in the storyline of a stranger arriving in a deserted town and playing rival factions off against one another (what Frayling dubs the Spaghetti Western’s ‘foundation’ plot).[19] Such narrative concerns are by no means the sine qua non of a film that foregrounds mud-wrestling whores, centre-frame mutilations and an army of Klan-esque red-hooded racists. It is indeed through the erratic, faltering nature of Django’s narrative structure that its ambivalent ‘Italian-ness’, alluded to above, is most tangible.
From its very opening shots, Django is an enigma, intriguing the viewer with a set of elusive perceptual and semantic challenges. Who is this lone, faceless figure coming into grainy focus as he walks away from a tight zoom shot? What has happened to his horse, that he must carry his own saddle? Most perplexingly of all, what is inside that coffin that he laboriously drags through this desolate (yet oddly moist) desert wasteland? That the last question is the only one whose riddle will be fully solved (and that this revelation involves an unforgettable scene of mass carnage) speaks volumes about Corbucci’s approach, and by extension the film’s cult status. Narrative, characterisation and verisimilitude have here been paid little heed, in a film that offers a series of visually and aurally striking crescendos, many of which offer bravura renderings of elaborate torture or death: for example, the orgiastic carnage once the coffin’s deadly cargo is revealed; the ear-slicing; the hand-crushing; and the drawn-out, baroque showdown in a windswept graveyard.
Such snapshots have assured Django an iconic influence on subsequent cult cinema, but are also entirely indicative of the industrial conditions of 1960s Italian genre cinema. Christopher Wagstaff develops an observation by Anthony Mann comparing the erratic narrative arc of many Spaghetti Westerns to an ‘electrocardiogram for a clinic case’, to illustrate their purposeful appeal to the audiences of Italy’s terza visione sector. This social context was one in which audience members would come and go, and talk during the show, except for the regular parts designed to grab their attention.[20] Django, it should be stressed, was not a creation of the terza visione production line that Wagstaff describes, but a larger, internationally released film. What is clear, however, is that Corbucci was operating within the conventions of a genre in which narrative coherence and dialogue by no means came before eye-catching panache in production practices. Django’s free-floating climaxes of violent action and stylised posturing are entwined within this cultural and industrial milieu.
Cult crescendo: the explosion of violence is announced by accelerated editing.
The scene for which the film is most well known is also the most illustrative of this point. The massacre of Major Jackson’s gang in the main street is an arresting crescendo, positioned for maximum attention-grabbing effect through both the narrative exposition and the pace of the editing. Ten minutes of screen-time prior to this explosive peak, Django demonstrates his deadliness by killing four of Jackson’s men in the saloon. The space in between these two moments of thrilling violence is one of slow-paced cinematography and clunky dialogue, as Maria professes her love for our antihero, and we then follow him as he goes outside the next morning. From the moment Jackson leaves the saloon to the moment at which he returns for the showdown (a total of 377 seconds), there are only 31 cuts in the film’s editing (at an average of just over 12 seconds per shot, including one take of over a minute). As the gang then approaches Django, and Luis Bacalov’s rousing score builds to a climax, the editing pace quickens markedly, as 21 cuts occur in the 131 seconds up until Django takes the machine gun out of the coffin (at an average of 6.2 seconds per shot). Finally, the massacre itself takes only 43 seconds, during which time 27 cuts (at an average of 1.6 seconds per shot) frame 28 on-screen deaths (see Figures 1 and 2 above). This sporadic pace, whereby peaks of action are announced by acceleration of the editing or music, and interspersed with lengthy troughs of relatively extraneous dialogue, maps onto the audience preferences depicted by Wagstaff, and continues throughout the film.
Close call carnage: the sufferings of Brother Jonathan and Django depicted in centre-frame close-ups
The film’s 90-minute running time, rather than steadily building up to the climactic ending, offers a spasmodic succession of climaxes, each of which appeals for audience attention through such stylistic amplification, visual bizarreness, violent spectacle, or all three: the whipping of Maria, and Django’s first showdown with Jackson’s men (between minutes 3 and 7); Jackson’s execution of Mexican peons and initial confrontation with Django (minutes 20-27); the aforementioned massacre (35-36); the mud-wrestling whores, followed by the preacher’s ear being sliced off and force-fed to him (40-43); the attack on the Mexican fort (50-54); the saloon fight between Django and Ricardo (59-61); Django’s explosive escape from General Hugo and the Mexicans (70-72); Django’s recapture and gruesome hand-crushing punishment (74-76); and the slaughter of Hugo’s gang (79-80). Of these, two scenes in particular stand out for their overt emphasis on the details of bodily trauma. Both the amputation of Brother Jonathan’s ear and the crushing of Django’s hands occur in lurid centre-frame close-ups (Figures 3 and 4). Robbie Edmonstone has pertinently identified in these two sequences adherence to an ‘excessive’ aesthetic, whereby cinematic techniques invest in the acts of violence to offer the viewer visual and aural pleasures surpassing the demands of narrative motivation or continuity. That the moments of on-screen gore are brief does not mitigate their capacity for transgression: the lingering, gleeful reaction shots of Hugo and his men as Django’s hands are audibly broken serving to emphasise further the gratification offered in spectating such acts.[21]
National Narratives and the Quest for Blood
It is important to emphasise here that Django was far from unique for either its sporadic structure or its wilful eschewal of narrative demands. As Wagstaff’s study makes clear, this approach was very much characteristic of production practices surrounding the Italian Western in the 1960s. Indeed, this very typicality is a key element of what makes Django such a valuable document of its culturally turbulent time and place. The film’s playful reworking of the Hollywood Western’s iconographies gives us access to an Italian sensibility experimenting with the building blocks of Americana: the oblique, reductive references to the American Civil War in particular displacing one of the genre’s talismanic rites of passage, and contributing to a sense of transnational burlesque. Such culturally specific textual readings of this film, however, can only take us so far, since its ‘cult’ significance was largely fostered outside the borders of Italy, once the film hit the global marketplace. If Django has indeed attained a counter-canonical kudos and a status amongst genre aficionados as an ‘authentic’ Italian Western, this has been fostered by distribution and reception patterns in parts responsive to the very scenes of ‘excess’ discussed above.
Returning to the title of this article, the word ‘called’ serves to highlight the importance of nomenclature in the international release patterns of Spaghetti Westerns. A number of these films explicitly dwelt upon the naming of their heroes in one or more of their titles across different markets: A Man Called Sledge (Vic Morrow, 1970), Lo chiamavano Trinità... / They Call Me Trinity (Enzo Barboni, 1970), Il mio nome è Nessuno / My Name is Nobody (Tonino Valerii, 1973), Il mio nome è Shangai Joe (Mario Caiano, 1973), A Man Called Blade (Sergio Martino, 1977), to name but a few. More than just a titular shtick, however, preoccupation with a hero’s name was also frequently an important marketing strategy. With a keen eye on the preferences of a variety of export markets, many producers sought to cash in on the regional popularity of particular character cycles by rebranding their films for a given locale. Spaghetti Western ‘hero’ personae were often formulaic to the point of being interchangeable, and would appear in numerous films that could be named after whichever character cycle was the most popular in a given time and place: Sabata, Sartana, Trinity or Ringo, for example. The ‘Django’ name became the most extreme example of this phenomenon by some distance, with a rapid-fire glut of around fifty unofficial sequels, spin-offs, rip-offs and shameless rebrandings (the first – Pochi dollari per Django (León Klimovsky, 1966) – appearing just four months after the original’s release). This phenomenon was in large part due to the domestic success of Corbucci’s film, which was the fourth highest grossing Spaghetti Western out of 58 released into Italy’s prima visione circuit in 1966.[22] Equally influential, however, was Django’s significant box-office success in West Germany, which meant that many films whose Italian release titles bore no mention of Corbucci’s coffin-dragging outlaw appeared with a ‘Django’ makeover in this export market. Il suo nome gridava vendetta (Mario Caiano, 1968), for example, appeared in German cinemas as Django spricht das Nachtgebet, while Texas, addio (Ferdinando Baldi, 1966) became Django, der Rächer to exploit the star presence of Franco Nero.[23]
The Cult Called Django
Despite such successes in mainland Europe, Django’s profile in the international marketplace was decidedly schizophrenic. That the film is perceived to have flown beneath the radar of ‘mainstream’ popular culture is a direct result of its initial obscurity in Anglophone markets. At first, it secured only sporadic and unofficial grindhouse distribution in the USA and was banned outright in the UK for its unacceptable levels of violence (in the very scenes already discussed: the ear slicing and the hand crushing). It was not until 1980 that the film would become available in Britain, on VHS, Betamax and V2000,[24] and it had to wait until 1991 for its first UK cinematic outing: a one-off release courtesy of the British Film Institute.[25] In the USA, the development of Django’s cult following can in part be traced through the Spaghetti Western fanzines that emerged in the 1980s: most notably, Spaghetti Cinema and Westerns all’italiana. One correspondence in particular, from Issue 7 of LA-based Spaghetti Cinema (July 1985), offers an informative insight into both the film’s lack of availability, and its desirability. Noting the inclusion of Django in a previous issue’s videotapes list, a reader from Oklahoma exclaims:
I was shocked to see The Big Gundown and Django listed. These are the only ones I saw on the list that aren’t available here! Please, Bill [Connolly: the fanzine’s editor]… fill me in on these two all-time classics… I would love to own pre-recorded VHS cassettes of them! (emphases in original).
At this point, the editor interjects: ‘Well, I sort of jumped the gun on these two titles. […] Django is listed as available from Magnum Home Video, but I’ve not yet found a store carrying it’.[26]
Such fan discourses give us an indication, however anecdotally, of how the film’s limited distribution patterns brought influence to bear upon its status as a coveted ‘cult’ artefact. The impression given is one of a treasure remaining tantalisingly out of reach, with rumours of impending availability circulating amongst a coterie of devotees. Certainly, from the grindhouse to the video store, Django long resided in a subterranean enclave of American pop-cultural consumption. Yet the yearning to take possession of the film so demonstrably expressed in the pages of Spaghetti Cinema was not simply a passive process of waiting for distribution outlets to certify the experience. Django’s discursive position as an exploitation film meant that it was consumed alongside other obscure, sub-cultural, exotic or transgressive products. Its global legacy has been negotiated through fans of such output acting not only as consumers, but also as active producers of cultural meaning. Accordingly, the response to Corbucci’s film should also be measured by how it provided inspiration to subsequent filmmakers and, through appropriation and reworking, became an exalted transnational reference point in the annals of exploitation cinema.
One of the first intertexual references to Django, outside the Spaghetti Western genre itself, further imbues the film with a sub-cultural, indeed countercultural, cachet. Perry Henzell’s radicalised paean to Jamaican class struggle The Harder They Come (1972) frames Corbucci’s film as a pole of identification for the underprivileged and disenfranchised of Kingston’s slums. Early on in Henzell’s film, the machine gun massacre from Django is shown playing at the local Rialto Cinema. The scene is spliced with reaction shots of the Jamaican audience, talking loudly back at the screen and rooting for Django as he kills Jackson’s gang of masked racist Confederates. At the end of The Harder They Come, when the protagonist Ivan has become a doomed social bandit battling against the corrupt authorities, the filmmakers explicitly associate his struggle with that of Franco Nero’s gunslinger. As the police advance on Ivan he takes cover behind a fallen tree, replicating Django’s perilous scenario, and the reaction shots of the Rialto audience are repeated, now spliced with Ivan’s heroic demise. By positioning Django as a locus for a subaltern worldview, Henzell’s film registers a subversive currency by this time commanded by Corbucci’s bizarre take on the Western genre. Furthermore, The Harder They Come was itself released onto the ‘midnight movie’ circuit in the USA, serving to introduce American audiences to the visually striking machine gun massacre, and enhancing Django’s cult value.
It is indeed through North American consumption habits and related fan discourses that the legacy of Django has been negotiated in its most globally visible terms. Such a politicised appropriation as appears in Henzell’s film has been eclipsed by the ‘fan-boy’ sensibility of the grindhouse and the video store, which has enshrined Corbucci’s film as a ‘cult classic’ thanks largely to the knowing intertextuality of Quentin Tarantino (and, to a lesser extent, Robert Rodriguez). Tarantino’s is a purposefully active reading practice akin to that which Henry Jenkins, drawing from the work of Michel de Certeau, labels ‘textual poaching’:[27] an impertinent assembly of reference points, whereby disparate fragments of texts are selected and re-used, their ‘meaning’ reliant upon the logic of their use in a new cultural context. The ear-slicing sequence from Reservoir Dogs (1992) is the single most notorious such ‘quotation’ from Django, but weaponry hidden in coffins (From Dusk Till Dawn, 1996) and guitar cases (El Mariachi, 1992) similarly provide grist for the rapacious mill of movie trivia so characteristic of online fandom by admitting Corbucci’s film into lists of ‘references’ (most visibly, the Internet Movie Database page for Django’s ‘Connections’).[28] Such knowing tributes as these invariably utilise Django as one ingredient in a melting pot of pop-cultural bricolage. Yet the relationship that emerges here is in some ways the reverse of that outlined by Jenkins, who states: ‘Like the poachers of old, fans operate from a position of cultural marginality and social weakness’.[29] In the work of Tarantino, the fan-boy ‘copy’ has come to possess more cultural capital than the Italian ‘original’. His global success means that many audiences are likely to be introduced to Django alongside other exploitation films as a result of viewing his work, for which reason Leon Hunt has dubbed him a ‘gatekeeper auteur’: that is, one who exhibits his connoisseurship by purposefully resurrecting obscure and counter-canonical filmic texts.[30] Tarantino has indeed ‘taken possession’ of Corbucci’s text, and become the guardian of its legacy. To borrow Jenkins’ terminology, the ‘poacher’ has become the ‘landowner’.
At first glance, Tarantino’s latest title rather seals the deal. Django Unchained (2012) is, for obvious reasons, the director’s most explicit reference yet to Corbucci’s film. Its storyline bears little resemblance to its namesake – here, the character named Django is a freed black slave – but its playful titular reference has nevertheless ignited a new wave of ‘cult’ awareness around the Italian film. By further assimilating Corbucci’s film into Tarantino’s long-term project to re-enact a wide array of 1960s and 1970s exploitation cinema, this now-overt colonisation of the ‘Django’ brand continues a process evident in many of the aforementioned ‘quotations’. Subsumed amidst equally knowing nods to a multinational amalgam of gangster, kung fu, horror and samurai films, these selective references to Django’s most memorable scenes serve to distil its cultural memory into a slideshow of half-remembered set-pieces (a reading that, as we have seen, is invited by the film’s piecemeal construction). Viewed through the prism of this exercise in nostalgic pastiche, the film’s cult cachet amounts to an obscure, offbeat Spaghetti Western with a predilection for aural dismemberment and a gun hidden in a coffin. Divorced from its cultural specificity, the intriguing document of 1960s Italy already outlined appears to endure solely as part of a hermetically sealed world of ‘cool’ movie quotations.
Such a reading, by applying discourses of postmodernity, may account for the hybridising approach to defunct genres taken by Tarantino, but as an appraisal of Django it is inadequate. To posit this film as a simulacrum cut adrift from its national roots is to assume that such roots were ever firmly attached in the first place. As we have seen, Django’s cultural significance instead lies in its documenting of the unstable, amorphous nature of the ‘national’ referent. The issue of the film’s nomenclature in particular was entwined with notions surrounding the negotiation and translation of cultural tastes across borders, since the practice of liberally attaching the word ‘Django’ to films with little or no relationship to Corbucci’s is nothing new. From the moment this film was released into the global marketplace, it was always already ‘transnational’.
In this context, Miike Takashi’s Sukiyaki Western Django (2007) offers an altogether apt appropriation of the brand. This film’s displacement of the Italian Western’s ‘foundation’ plot[31] into a mythologised Japanese locale immediately evades any ‘national’ anchor. Steve Rawle has written of how this ‘rootless’ film challenges boundaries of genre and nationhood, its choice of such a culturally decoupled reference point as Django offering a complex forum for transnational exchange.[32] That Miike’s film is spoken in a disorienting phonetic English while enacting overt references to Django’s theme tune (sung in Japanese) and iconic gun-in-a-coffin claims the Italian film as a text that has always been in transit between cultures. The parting narrative joke – that the surviving child at the heart of the story later ‘made his way to Italy and was known as a man called Django’ – insists once more upon the nomadic nature of this name, even while it pokes fun at the Spaghetti Western’s debt to Japanese cinema (through Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo (1961)).
Clearly, Django fits into prevailing conceptions of ‘cult cinema’ in a number of ways: the counter-canonical kudos; the ‘excessive’ aesthetic and resultant controversy, censorship and limited availability; and the slow-burning reception tail transcending national borders to produce tributes and pastiches. Yet the ‘transnational’ appellation in my title has emerged as a problematic entity, for it assumes the integrity of the ‘national’ referent as an oppositional starting point. Much as Cesare Pavese’s creative translations pointed to a recalibration of Italian-ness in the post-war era, so the make-up and distribution patterns of Corbucci’s film bespeak cultural identities whose attachment to regional or national imperatives was weakening. What emerge from this analysis are in fact multifarious acts of border crossing and translation, through which the single signifier ‘Django’ has acquired disparate inflections, has traversed boundaries of culture, genre, and ‘good taste’, and has remained by its very nature a document of ‘uprootedness’ in a globalised age.
Footnotes
[1] Sconce, J. (1995) ‘“Trashing” the academy: taste, excess, and an emerging politics of cinematic style’, Screen, 36 (4), 371–393: 372.
[2] Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
[3] Jancovich, M., Lázaro Reboll, A., Stringer, J. and Willis, A. (2003) ‘Introduction’, in Jancovich, M., Lázaro Reboll, A., Stringer, J. and Willis, A. (eds), Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 1–13: 3.
[4] Mathijs, E. and Mendik, X. (2008) ‘Editorial introduction: what is cult film?’, in Mathijs, E. and Mendik, X. (eds), The Cult Film Reader. Maidenhead: Open University Press. 1–12: 3.
[5] Barker, M. (ed.) (1984) The Video Nasties: Freedom and Censorship in the Media. London: Pluto Press; Egan, K. (2007) Trash or Treasure? Censorship and the Changing Meanings of Video Nasties. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
[6] See Conrich, I. (2006) ‘Musical performance and the cult film experience’, in Conrich, I. and Tincknell, E. (eds), Film’s Musical Moments. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 115–131: 117–118.
[7] Mathijs, E. and Sexton, J. (2011) Cult Cinema. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 8.
[8] Eco, U. (1986) ‘Cult movies and intertextual collage’, in Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality. London: Picador. 197–211.
[9] Mathijs and Sexton 2011: 228–229.
[10] Mathijs, E. and Mendik, X. (2011) 100 Cult Films. London: BFI. 65–66.
[11] Torriglia, A.M. (2002) Broken Time, Fragmented Space: A Cultural Map for Postwar Italy. London: University of Toronto Press, 79.
[12] Fisher, A. (2011) Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western: Politics, Violence and Popular Italian Cinema. London: I.B. Tauris, 224.
[13] Landy, M. (2000) Italian Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 181–204.
[14] Frayling, C. (1986) ‘Django’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 53 (625), 55–56: 56.
[15] Martin-Jones, D. (2011) Deleuze and World Cinemas. London: Continuum, 43–46.
[16] Eleftheriotis, D. (2001) Popular Cinemas of Europe: Studies of Texts, Contexts and Frameworks. London: Continuum, 109.
[17] O’Leary, A. and O’Rawe, C. (2011) ‘Against realism: on a “certain tendency” in Italian film criticism’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 16 (1), 107–128: 115.
[18] Pattison, B. (1991) ‘Sergio Corbucci: obituary’, Cinema Papers, 82, 46–47: 47.
[19] Frayling, C. (1998) Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone. London: I.B. Tauris, 51.
[20] Wagstaff, C. (1992) ‘A forkful of Westerns: industry, audiences and the Italian Western’, in Dyer, R. and Vincendeau, G. (eds), Popular European Cinema. London: Routledge. 245–261: 253–254.
[21] Edmonstone, Robert J. (2008) Beyond ‘Brutality’: Understanding the Italian Filone’s Violent Excesses. PhD thesis: University of Glasgow, 77.
[22] Fisher 2011: 220, 224.
[23] For a more complete list of titles, see Wagstaff, C. (1998) ‘Italian genre films in the world market’, in Nowell-Smith, G. and Ricci, S. (eds), Hollywood and Europe: Economics, Culture, National Identity 1945-95. London: BFI. 74–85: 81–82.
[24] Pre-Certification Video: www.pre-cert.co.uk
[25] Hammond, W. (1991) ‘Django’, Time Out, 29 May, 59.
[26] Connolly, W. (1985) ‘Spaghetti mail, video and cinema to come’, Spaghetti Cinema, 7, 42–50: 48.
[27] Jenkins, H. (1992) Textual Poachers: Television Fandom and Participatory Culture. London: Routledge.
[28] Internet Movie Database. Django ‘Connections’: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060315/trivia?tab=mc
[29] Jenkins 1992: 27.
[30] Hunt, L. (2008) ‘Asiaphilia, Asianisation and the gatekeeper auteur: Quentin Tarantino and Luc Besson’, in Hunt, L. and Wing-Fai, L. (eds), East Asian Cinemas: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film. London: I.B. Tauris. 220–236: 220–222.
[31] Frayling 1998: 51.
[32] Rawle, S. (2011) ‘Transnational, transgeneric, transgressive: tracing Miike Takashi’s Yakuza cyborgs to Sukiyaki Westerns’, Asian Cinema, 22 (1), 83–98: 91–92.
[1] Sconce, J. (1995) ‘“Trashing” the academy: taste, excess, and an emerging politics of cinematic style’, Screen, 36 (4), 371–393: 372.
[2] Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
[3] Jancovich, M., Lázaro Reboll, A., Stringer, J. and Willis, A. (2003) ‘Introduction’, in Jancovich, M., Lázaro Reboll, A., Stringer, J. and Willis, A. (eds), Defining Cult Movies: The Cultural Politics of Oppositional Taste. Manchester: Manchester University Press. 1–13: 3.
[4] Mathijs, E. and Mendik, X. (2008) ‘Editorial introduction: what is cult film?’, in Mathijs, E. and Mendik, X. (eds), The Cult Film Reader. Maidenhead: Open University Press. 1–12: 3.
[5] Barker, M. (ed.) (1984) The Video Nasties: Freedom and Censorship in the Media. London: Pluto Press; Egan, K. (2007) Trash or Treasure? Censorship and the Changing Meanings of Video Nasties. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
[6] See Conrich, I. (2006) ‘Musical performance and the cult film experience’, in Conrich, I. and Tincknell, E. (eds), Film’s Musical Moments. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. 115–131: 117–118.
[7] Mathijs, E. and Sexton, J. (2011) Cult Cinema. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 8.
[8] Eco, U. (1986) ‘Cult movies and intertextual collage’, in Faith in Fakes: Travels in Hyperreality. London: Picador. 197–211.
[9] Mathijs and Sexton 2011: 228–229.
[10] Mathijs, E. and Mendik, X. (2011) 100 Cult Films. London: BFI. 65–66.
[11] Torriglia, A.M. (2002) Broken Time, Fragmented Space: A Cultural Map for Postwar Italy. London: University of Toronto Press, 79.
[12] Fisher, A. (2011) Radical Frontiers in the Spaghetti Western: Politics, Violence and Popular Italian Cinema. London: I.B. Tauris, 224.
[13] Landy, M. (2000) Italian Film. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 181–204.
[14] Frayling, C. (1986) ‘Django’, Monthly Film Bulletin, 53 (625), 55–56: 56.
[15] Martin-Jones, D. (2011) Deleuze and World Cinemas. London: Continuum, 43–46.
[16] Eleftheriotis, D. (2001) Popular Cinemas of Europe: Studies of Texts, Contexts and Frameworks. London: Continuum, 109.
[17] O’Leary, A. and O’Rawe, C. (2011) ‘Against realism: on a “certain tendency” in Italian film criticism’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 16 (1), 107–128: 115.
[18] Pattison, B. (1991) ‘Sergio Corbucci: obituary’, Cinema Papers, 82, 46–47: 47.
[19] Frayling, C. (1998) Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone. London: I.B. Tauris, 51.
[20] Wagstaff, C. (1992) ‘A forkful of Westerns: industry, audiences and the Italian Western’, in Dyer, R. and Vincendeau, G. (eds), Popular European Cinema. London: Routledge. 245–261: 253–254.
[21] Edmonstone, Robert J. (2008) Beyond ‘Brutality’: Understanding the Italian Filone’s Violent Excesses. PhD thesis: University of Glasgow, 77.
[22] Fisher 2011: 220, 224.
[23] For a more complete list of titles, see Wagstaff, C. (1998) ‘Italian genre films in the world market’, in Nowell-Smith, G. and Ricci, S. (eds), Hollywood and Europe: Economics, Culture, National Identity 1945-95. London: BFI. 74–85: 81–82.
[24] Pre-Certification Video: www.pre-cert.co.uk
[25] Hammond, W. (1991) ‘Django’, Time Out, 29 May, 59.
[26] Connolly, W. (1985) ‘Spaghetti mail, video and cinema to come’, Spaghetti Cinema, 7, 42–50: 48.
[27] Jenkins, H. (1992) Textual Poachers: Television Fandom and Participatory Culture. London: Routledge.
[28] Internet Movie Database. Django ‘Connections’: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0060315/trivia?tab=mc
[29] Jenkins 1992: 27.
[30] Hunt, L. (2008) ‘Asiaphilia, Asianisation and the gatekeeper auteur: Quentin Tarantino and Luc Besson’, in Hunt, L. and Wing-Fai, L. (eds), East Asian Cinemas: Exploring Transnational Connections on Film. London: I.B. Tauris. 220–236: 220–222.
[31] Frayling 1998: 51.
[32] Rawle, S. (2011) ‘Transnational, transgeneric, transgressive: tracing Miike Takashi’s Yakuza cyborgs to Sukiyaki Westerns’, Asian Cinema, 22 (1), 83–98: 91–92.