Italy in Early American Cinema: Race, Landscape, and the Picturesque (review)

Giorgio Bertellini's Italy in Early American Cinema: Race, Landscape, and the Picturesque is simply an extraordinary achievement. Although based on his SCS award-winning dissertation, the book has been completely re-conceptualized; moreover, much of the text is new and the rest extensively rewritten. Expertly mining a broad spectrum of disciplines beyond cinema history – i.e. art history, aesthetics, anthropology, urban sociology, race theory, migration studies – Bertellini deploys an intricate methodological framework for his ambitious study. He also has been meticulous and indefatigable in discovering a wealth of original historical source material and honed and re-honed the text into an exemplary model of lucid, sophisticated, critical historical analysis.

Bertellini's book opens with a frame still from The Godfather Part II that perfectly condenses the multiple facets of its subject: the stage backdrop in an Italian-American melodrama theater that depicts in a single image the complex transatlantic relations between the landscape and people of Naples and those of New York City in the early twentieth century. In reflecting on the circulation of images of Southern Italy and Southern Italians, the book demonstrates that pre-photographic representations of the picturesque (inextricably linking the formal and ideological) informed early American cinema and its envisioned notions of national identity and racial difference. Ultimately, in order to contest and complicate the now common claim of cinema's novelty as the emblem of technological modernity, Bertellini makes the innovative move to situate early cinema within a much older geopolitical framework of racialized representations and receptions.

The first part of Italy in Early American Cinema is devoted to establishing the long iconic tradition of the picturesque as an "imaginative geography" produced by North European representations of Southern Italy and of Southern Italians as a stereotypical social group within its landscapes. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that tradition was popularized as "Southernism" (Bertellini's felicitous term) through democratized tourism, inexpensive reproductions (photographs, postcards, magazine and newspaper illustrations), "scientific" taxonomies of bodies and faces (branding brigands and criminals), "anthropological novels", and ultimately films such as Assunta Spina (1915).

The second, much longer part of the book first explores, in two chapters, how the iconic tradition of the picturesque was translated into the "New World" through landscape paintings of the Hudson Valley and especially the wilderness of "the West," landscape photography and travel films, and finally westerns and Civil War films, including those of D.W. Griffith. That exploration also has a second trajectory, showing how picturesque conventions came to define the representations of another "wilderness", that of an urban metropolis like New York City and its immigrant enclaves of Southern Italians, the latter epitomized in the photographs and texts of Jacob Riis. Two further chapters trace, in persuasive insightful detail, the shift from racially othered depictions of Italian immigrants in pictorial reporting and single-reel films such as AM&B's The Black Hand (1906) to more assimilated Italian-American character types in such feature films as Paramount's The Italian (1915), starring George Beban. The final chapter in Part II extends an earlier published essay on the café-chantant to include the impact of wartime newsreels on Italian immigrant audiences as well as that of several recently rediscovered Italian films based on nostalgic Neapolitan songs that were produced chiefly for "the diasporic Southern Italian communities in the Americas".

Italy in Early American Cinema concludes with a concise "Afterword" of methodological reflections that offers an important intervention in the current debates over early cinema's close relation to modernity. While neither ignoring nor devaluing the claims of cinema's novelty or the influential theories of cinema's "indexical" relationship to reality and temporality, Bertellini argues that no less theoretical attention should be given to "the 'new' medium's complicity with consolidated and widely circulating notions of social and national space", and especially "with notions of geopolitical difference and their nationally and racially specific articulations". In short, this "Afterword" turns a major historical study into an equally major theoretical...