Leone launched the popular craze for “cinema cinema”; he was the earliest postmodernist director of mainstream films and one of the finest storytellers the cinema has ever produced. And yet Sergio Leone has always proved difficult to categorize: art films/popular films; personal films/genre films; comedies/tragedies; American myths/Italian stories; Hollywood/Cinecittą in Rome. Because of this difficulty, his legacy has been seriously under-rated and still is. His influence on contemporary cinema - the modern action hero, films about films, ironic fairy tales, the interplay of music and image, sound design, stylish visuals, framing - has been profound, even though he only directed seven films.
In European cinema in the mid-1960s, it became fashionable to make “films about films” - especially about Hollywood genre films - but the results tended to be restricted to the art-house circuit and international festivals. Sergio Leone was the first modern film artist to make really popular films - films which remained, to a surprising extent, personal to him as well. In all his films, there are memories of growing up and going to the cinema in Rome, of living through “someone else's war” in 1939-1945, and above all of his first encounter with real-life Americans when he was fourteen - in the form of GIs advancing north from Salerno in southern Italy. He never forgot the experience.
The films of Sergio Leone - Italian films about American myths - raise the question, “Who owns the Western?” Yes, the Western is one of the great American art forms, but it has long since become a global text belonging to everyone. The Western also has its roots in many different sources. Most modern cultures have their own “take” on the Western, and some - such as the Italian - have even nourished the American version.
banner: Charles Bronson as Harmonica, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968) Courtesy of Paramount Pictures.
|
|
