Giorgio Bertellini,
Italy in Early American Cinema: Race, Landscape and the Picturesque.
Indiana University Press, 2009
ISBN-13: 978-0-253-22128-5
US$24.95 (pb)
464pp
(Review copy supplied by Indiana University Press)

“Southernism: The answer to the Southern Question?”

Giorgio Bertellini’s Italy in Early American Cinema: Race, Landscape and the Picturesque fills a much needed void in our understanding of the role that Italians and Italian Americans played in the cultural construction, interpretation and appropriation of their image (both ‘fixed’ and moving) and its relationship to the socially constructed imaginary of racial difference that, while seemingly more fluid, from the 18th through to the 20th centuries, remains nonetheless rooted in a genealogical discourse of modernity.

It is generally agreed that since its formation in the 1860s, the young Italian nation found itself confronting endemic elements of disunity, encapsulated in the so called “Southern Question.” From the perspective of those inhabiting the northern part of the peninsula, the south was considered economically, culturally and morally backward. Its integration into the newly formed nation state was deemed by many observers as the most urgent and simultaneously arduous mission facing Italian politics and culture. Were southern Italians “essentially” different from northerners? Was this difference the result of history or genetics? Was their backwardness rooted in unmovable socio-cultural structures? Or, conversely, did southern Italian culture represent a form of “resistance” to modernity? These, and similar questions were, and still are, part of a specific discourse on the Italian South that is both national and transnational.

As Bertellini points out, the image of southern “Italian” backwardness was first codified among Northern European intellectuals, artists and aristocracy who had traveled south for centuries before Italian unification. The tasks of the 19th and 20th century Italian artists, political thinkers and writers were therefore twofold: to articulate the “Southern Question”, with a view to its importance for the formation of a national Italian identity and to do so against the background of a wider non-national discourse in which the Italian nation as a whole was represented as “Europe’s South”. Bertellini successfully departs from this double bind and demonstrates that the relationship between cinema and meridione (southern Italy) is a complicated reality that concerns not only a national cinematic culture, but also the history of cinema and visual culture in general. His decision to focus on both the aesthetic and ideological underpinnings of this relationship takes the reader on a Grand Tour that is indeed grander, and more persuasively nuanced, than any chiaroscuro effect or play with perspective that a viewer might find in the vedute, paysage classique or pastorals that Bertellini introduces to link the visual techniques and technologies of cartography, drawing and painting to those of theatrical performance, still photography and finally cinema.

Drawing on Bordieu’s work on cultural distinction, Bertellini moves beyond the standard question of the South and beyond a simple framing of a cinematic past that nostalgically relies on a certain evocation of the Italian land and people by using moving images in much the same way that first painting and then photography had been used during the age of the Grand Tour to commodify and fetishize “Italianicity” for Italians and foreigners alike in order to pose a theory of what he terms “Southernism.” Bertellini is able to articulate this ideology by drawing on a larger body of cultural productions and by examining them in a framework that is at once anthropological and formalist. Working in more than one register, across the old world and the new, and across multiple centuries, Bertellini convincingly locates the manifestation of Southernism in the aesthetic and formal qualities of early American (and European) cinema.

While we are consistently reminded that early cinema relied on a more romantic and picturesque understanding of Italy that emerged from the travel writings and landscape paintings of 19th century Northern European visitors to Italy, as well as a mode of address that recalls the theatrical traditions of commedia dell’arte, what Bertellini locates and names, in reference to the racial and ethnic representations of the Italian or Southern other in silent cinema in both the US and Italy, are the broad strokes that can be applied to cinematic representations that continue to persist today. The Italian, American and Italian American ability to capitalize on a certain understanding of “Italianicity” and “Southernism”, and convey this message through comedic and dramatic images that evoke the pastoral, poverty, passion and beauty of the Italian land and people to commodify and fetishize the cinema for Italians and foreigners alike, is a critical model that has implications for a variety of transnational cinemas. Yes, Bertellini succeeds in bringing to our attention some overlooked works of early American cinema, but most importantly he astutely demonstrates that representations of otherness in American cinema were the consensus product of both the Northern, Southern (European) and American imaginary.

Regina Longo,
UC Santa Barbara, USA.

Created on: Monday, 23 August 2010