Anthony Julian Tamburri-Italian American Short Films and Music Videos A Semiotic Reading (2002)

I talian/Amer ican Shor t Films and Music V ideos
A Semiotic Reading
Anthony Julian Tamburri
Digital-I Books
An Imprint of
Purdue University Press
Italian/American Short Films and Music Videos
Italian/American Short Films and Music Videos

A Semiotic Reading
Digital-I Books An imprint of Purdue University Press West Lafayette, Indiana
Copyright 2002 by Purdue University. All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Tamburri, Anthony Julian. Italian/American short lms and music videos : a semiotic reading / Anthony Julian Tamburri. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-55753-232-X (pbk. : alk. paper) -- ISBN 1-55753-248-6 (digital : MS Reader) -- ISBN 1-55753-249-4 (digital : PDF) 1. Italian Americans in motion pictures. 2. Italian Americans in the motion picture industry. 3. Short lms--United States--History and criticism. 4. Music videos--United States--History and criticism. I. Title. PN1995.9.I73 T36 2002 791.43'6520351073--dc21 2002006873
for Fred Gardaph, friend and partner in cultural criminology
Contents
Acknowledgments Preliminaries for a Reading An Introduction
ix
Fictive Narratives
Subliminal Ethnicity What is [not] Italian/American about Lenas Spaghetti? Black & White, Scungill & Cannoli Ethnicity and Sexuality in Nunzios Second Cousin 13
29
Music Videos
Rock Videos as Social Narratives Madonnas Like a Prayer and Justify My Love Bending Rules 55
Documentaries
Will Parrinellos Little Italy People Telling Their Own Stories Ethnicity, Sexuality, Gender Mariarosy Calleris Uncovering After-thoughts Some Concluding Remarks Select Bibliography 79
93
105 109
Acknowledgments
A book of any sort usually owes a few debts for a variety of reasons. This is the situation with Italian/American Short Films and Videos: A Semiotic Reading. Abbreviated versions of three chapters originally appeared in the volume Adjusting Sites: New Essays in Italian American Studies and the two serials Bridge and Semiotic Spectrum. In addition, numerous people read either previous versions of the entire manuscript or portions thereof. Three people, especially, saw the manuscript on different occasions and offered invaluable advice: John Kirby, Fred Gardaph, and Victoria DeMara went well beyond the call of duty of both friendship and collegiality in offering up their comments, suggestions, and constructive criticism. Others who have opined on different parts of this study are William Boelhower, Flavia Brizio, Paolo Giordano, Christine Holmlund, Ben Lawton, Tracy Sharpley-Whiting, and Maurizio Viano. To all of these friends and colleagues I owe a tremendous debt. Last but by no means least, my greatest debt is to Maria, life partner and friend, who not only affords me the time to engage in such activities, but she also keeps me honest during the process.
ix
Preliminaries for a Reading

An Introduction
If every picture I made was about Italian Americans, theyd say, Thats all he can do. Im trying to stretch.Martin Scorsese, in Premiere (1991)
Why This Study?

The idea of this project was born, in part, from the desire to help create a forum for the Italian/American short visual narrative, be that narrative what we would readily consider an account of ction; a music video, which may also be a ction; or a documentary, this too a potential ction, be it only by virtue of the means with which we examine either genre (ction or documentary), if not also by some narratological aspect 1 of the nature of a text based on fact, documentary, or autobiography. Such notions we nd in recent work on autobiography, as Philippe Lejeune tells us in his classic study; or, more recently, Graziella Parati re2 minds us in her study of womans autobiography. Hence, I decided to divide this study into three sections dedicated, respectively, to the abovementioned categories.
The Short Film

The short lmand at this point I refer to that type of lm under sixty 3 minutes in length, be it a narrative ction or documentaryis a cultural product that, until three decades or so ago, enjoyed a fairly good fortune 1
with respect to being shown in many movie houses. When one went to the movies, until the late sixties especially, there was often a short lm of some sort, be it of animated or of real people, that preceded the main attraction, which thus provided numerous possible fora for such short narratives. This, I would suggest, is not the case today, for it is rare to go to a mainstream movie house and enjoy a prefatory short before the feature presentation. Today, very much in tune with the times, we are assailed by anywhere from ve-to-fteen minutes of trailers with a commercial mixed in every once in a while. Indeed, in some theaters the various trailers may take up to twenty minutes. This, of course, always makes one wonder when exactly the lm is to begin and how the actual beginning time of the lm jibes with what one sees in the papers or is told over the phone. On a related matter, one might also wonder if trailers themselves might not some day become their own form of art, as some critics have dared, though be it sarcastically, compared the trailer to its feature-length product. In this regard, I would remind the reader of an article in Newsweek, where we read that one-third of the 500-person audience opted not to stay for the lm, viewing only the two-minute trailer of the then 4 forthcoming Stars Wars: Episode IThe Phantom Menace. Indeed, Edmund Levy anticipated such a phenomenon when, four years before, he noted that despite the fact that many excellent shorts are available today, they have been muscled out of the theater by promotional trailers (3). Yet, in spite of the lack of venues for the short lm, it still seems to be very much in vogue. Moreover, unless the short lm is commissioned for something special such as an anthology of sorts that will run as a feature presentation (e.g., Boccaccio 70 [1970], New York Stories [1986], Boys Life II [1998]), it is often the young lmmaker at the helm of the project; this is particularly true for the so-called young lmmaker
Italian/American Short Films and Videos
who cuts her/his teeth on this timely production for an array of reasons, at the head of which we must list most obviously the economic factor. Indeed, numerous are the directors of these short lms, nished products of which are often shown in small movie houses, off-beat theaters, and university theaters- if not also at the more competitive lm festivals, be those festivals regional, national, or international. This last forum of the lm festival was in fact my introduction to the rst two lms in this study, Lenas Spaghetti and Nunzios Second Cousin. I met both directors at the screening of their lms at the 1994 Telluride Film Festival, where they were each extremely gracious in get5 ting to me, soon after, copies of their lms. An analogous sort of meeting took place with regard to Uncovering; I rst meet Mariarosy Calleri at a conference sponsored by the John D. Calandra Italian-American Institute on the lost world of Italian/American radicals, which took place in May 1997 at the CUNY Graduate Center. Will Parrinellos documentary, Little Italy, instead, came my way through more anticipated channels. Having made the rounds soon after its release on some PBS stations in the Northeast, it soon came to my attention that not only did this lm exist, but that it was enjoying a good deal of success among those who saw it, both reviewers and the public at large. The two Madonna videos, Like A Prayer and Justify My Love, took a much more commercial route; the rst I saw on MTV, the second I saw on the now (in)famous December 1990, Nightline preview, accompanied by Forest Sawyers interview with Madonna. Indeed, the brevity and conciseness of the short lm constitute some of its very appealing characteristics. Like the short-story writer, I would suggest, the ability of the short-lm lmmaker to be both concise and inclusive is what draws the viewer/reader to the text, and ultimately satises his/her curiosity. This, of course, would include the lmmakers capacity of some semblance of character-development, which would
prove essential in keeping the viewer/readers attention. Shorts tend to be highly visual; they tend to include more action with the storytelling relying more on images than on dialogue (Levy 1112). Thus, the shortlm lmmaker needs to develop a narrative strategy that is both economic in length and comprehensive in description, much in the same way the short-story writer has succeeded in writing in such a mode. This notwithstanding, the short may often have a twist at the end, offering up a 6 proverbial surprise ending. Such narrative success is evidenced by the six lms included herein. Each in its own way, especially the rst four lms, offers a storyline, albeit brief, that, while asking questions of its viewer, does not leave him/her hanging vis--vis information that might otherwise be considered fundamental to said story-line. Indeed, like many shorts, especially those made by younger lmmakers, these lms deal with subject matter such as sexual preferences, new family styles and strategies, youthful unrest, violence toward others, the search for direction, feelings of isolation, companionship, religion, new mores versus old, and the possible loss of social guidelines, as well as other themes. So much has been written on lm in general. One need only peruse the innumerable bibliographic listings in any study to see how exhaustive the critical and theoretical production has been to date. However, with specic regard to the short lm, the terrain is, for lack of a better word, quite barren indeed. Whereas in literary studies short ction 7 has enjoyed a good deal of critical and theoretical success, the short lms seem to be a target of study only within the more specic and specialized studies of the so-called avant-garde cinema or the documentary. Yet, even here, careful attention to the brevity of discourse takes secondstage, and notions of something we might consider to be specically a narrative strategy of the short lm is left for us to ponder.
Thus, while I shall, to some extent, refrain herein from theorizing specically about the short lm, my hopes are that the actual fact of discussing these six Italian/American shorts will at least gure as some sort of rst step, so we may, in our studies of visual Italian America, include as a necessary topic of investigation those shorts that have so often gone unexamined for an array of reasons the least of which is aesthetic quality. Thus, along with the likes of Dina Ciraulo, whom I mentioned earlier, certain other names come to the fore. Louis Antonellis extensive awardwinning experience with the short lm is unknown to the majority of Italian Americans, be they members of the public at large or actual scholars of the artistic world of Italian America; his lms have won countless prizes, both in the United States and abroad. A second case involves the work of Helen DeMichel, now having ventured into the feature-length world of cinema with Tarantella (1995). De Michel is another lmmaker who has proven to be most articulate with the short format. In addition, short documentaries, both here in the United States and in Canada, about the numerous Little Italies, if not the villages in Italy of the parents and grandparents of the lmmaker, abound. Santo Barbiere, Anthony Fragola, and Patrizia Fogliato are just three of the many names that come to mind in this category.
Some Background
Italian/American art formsmore precisely, literature and lmhave often been dened as those constructed mainly by second-generation writers about the experiences of the rst and second generations. I refer the reader to my essay, In (Re)cognition of the Italian/American Writer: Denitions and Categories, where, through a Peircean semiotic lens, I propose a re-denition of the Italian/American writer from the perspec8 tive of both chronology and cognition. Those with whom I discourse in 9 this essay are Robert Casillo, Frank Lentricchia, and Dana Gioia. They
each offered neat and clean denitions for works of two art formsand in a certain sense we can extend their meanings to other art mediathat deal explicitly with an Italian/American ethnic quality and/or subject 10 matter. Such denitions, nevertheless, essentially haltthough willynilly by those who offer themthe progress and limit the impact of those writers who come from later generations, all of which may result in a monolithic notion of what was/is and was/is not Italian/American literature. As I have already questioned elsewhere, what do we do about those works of artwritten and/or visualthat do not explicitly treat Italian/American subject matter, and yet seem to exude a certain ethnic Italian/American quality, even if we cannot readily dene it? That is, can we speak to the Italian/American qualities of a Frank Capra lm? According to Casillos denition, we would initially have to say no. However, it is Casillo himself who tells us that Capra, indeed, found his ethnicity troublesome throughout his long career (374) and obviously dropped it. My question then becomes: Can we not see this absence, especially in light of documented secondary matter, as an Italian/American sign in potentia? I would like to say yes. And, in this regard, I would suggest an alternative perspective on reading and/or categorizing any 11 Italian/American art form. That is, I believe we should take our cue from Scorsese himself and therefore stretch our own reading strategy of Italian/American art forms, whether they bedue to content and/or formexplicitly Italian/American, in order to accommodate other possible, successful reading strategies. Because of the work of those who have offered alternative perspectives through some of the more recent analytical and interpretive tools of hermeneutics, deconstruction, semiotics, and the like, we can readily broaden our view of what constitutes the Italian/American ex12 perience in the arts. I would thus propose that we reconsider Ital-
ian/American literature, for instance, to be a series of ongoing written enterprises that establish a repertoire of signs, at times, sui generis, and therefore create verbal variations (visual, in the case of lm, painting, sculpture, drama, etc.) that represent different versionsdependent, of course, on ones generation, gender, socio-economic conditionof what 13 can be perceived as the Italian/American interpretant. That is, the Italian/American experience may, to be sure, manifest itself in any art form in a number of ways and to varying degrees, for which one may readily speak of the variegated representations of the Italian/American ethos in literature, for example, in the same fashion in which Daniel Aaron once spoke of the hyphenate writer and Aijaz Ahmad, more recently, discussed new ways of considering third-world literature. In his response to an essay by Fredric Jameson on national allegory and third-world literature, in fact, Ahmad took issue with what he considered Jamesons limited and reductive assumption that third-world literature revolves primarily around the notion of a national allegory. This notion that literature may revolve primarily around one or two notions in order for it to be considered suchor perhaps because it is considered such and not something elsemay be seen as an analogue to the case of some ethnic literatures in the United States. Namely, that an ethnic literary piece has to contain certain thematic motifs or adopt specic formalistic structures in order for it to be considered part of that certain ethnic rubric. Otherwise, the work and its author are considered not to belong necessarily to that very same group of hyphenated writers. This somewhat reductive notion of categorizing art forms limits our ways of examining them, I would 14 suggest.
Notes
1. For my use of the slash (/) instead of the hyphen (-), see my To Hyphenate or Not to Hyphenate? The Italian/American Writer: An
Anthony Julian Tamburri Other American. For a concerted reaction to my To Hyphenate or Not to Hyphenate, see Franco Ricci, Disenfranchisement, or Your Life or Your Life, in The Flight of Ulysses: Studies in Honor of Emmanuel Hatzantonis, ed. Augustus A. Mastri, AdI. Studi & Testi 1 34859. Instead, for discussions on other alternatives to the usual hyphenated term, Italian-American, see the following two cogent essays: Ben Lawton, What Is ItalianAmerican Cinema? Voices in Italian Americana 6.1 (1995) 2751; and Luigi Fontanella, Poeti Emigrati ed Emigranti Poeti negli Stati Uniti, Italica 75.2 (1998) 210225. Lejeune reminds us of what he had stated earlier about the actual task of reading (i.e., analyzing) ctional and autobiographical texts: We must admit that, if we remain on the level of analysis within the text, there is no difference. All the methods that autobiography uses to convince us of the authenticity of its narrative can be imitated by the novel, and often have been imitated (13; emphasis textual); see On Autobiography, foreword by Paul John Eakin, translated by Katherine Leary. For Parati, in turn, autobiography becomes something more than the metaphor of truth (1) . . . it is, she tells us, a ction, [. . .] a narrative in which the author carefully selects and constructs the characters, events, and aspects of the self she or he wants to make public in order to convey a specic message about her or his past and present identity (4). See her Public History Private Stories: Italian Womens Autobiography. Edmond Levy says that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences tells us that shorts should be less than thirty minutes (See his Making a Winning Short: How to Write, Direct, Edit, and Produce a Short Film 11). Given the tendency of commercial thea-
2.
3.
ters to show lms of at least ninety minutes, I believe we can surely consider those under one hour as a short. 4. See Kendall Hamilton, The Second Coming, Newsweek 132.22 (November 30, 1998): 84. 5. At the 1995 Telluride Festival, I then met Dina Ciraulo, another Italian American whose lm, Touch, was also screened in the session of student lms. She, too, proved equally gracious in providing me a copy. 6. Again, I refer the reader to Levys Making a Winning Short, especially chapter 2, Dening the Short (1218). 7. I would state, en passant, that here, too, one might have a legitimate complaint vis--vis how much has been written on the long narrative lm. 8. Differentia, review of italian thought 6/7 (Spring/Autumn 1994): 9 32; now modied in A Semiotic of Ethnicity: In (Re)cognition of the Italian/American Writer. 9. Robert Casillo, Moments in Italian-American Cinema: From Little Caesar to Coppola and Scorsese, From the Margins: Writings in Italian Americana, ed. Anthony Julian Tamburri, Paolo A. Giordano, and Fred L. Gardaph 374396; Frank Lentricchia, review of Delano in America & Other Early Poems, by John J. Soldo, Italian Americana 1.1 (1974): 1245; and Dana Gioia, What Is ItalianAmerican Poetry? in Poetry Pilot (December 1991): 310. Now, with a brief postscript, in Voices in Italian Americana 4.2 (1993): 6164, followed by a Response by Maria Mazziotti Gillan (65 6). 10. One problem with denitions of this sort is that they exclude any discourse on the analogous notion of, for example, the hyphenate lmmaker. I refer to Daniel Aarons The Hyphenate Writer and American Letters, Smith Alumnae Quarterly (July 1964): 2137;
10
Anthony Julian Tamburri later revised in Rivista di Studi Anglo-Americani 3.45 (198485): 1128. What is important to keep in mind is that one can perceive different degrees of ethnicity in literature, lm, or any other art form, as Aaron already did with his hyphenate writer. For an inventory of what has been done to date, see Fred L. Gardaphs Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative; and my A Semiotic of Ethnicity: In (Re)cognition of the Italian/American Writer. I have opted for the Peircean categories of sign (or representamen) and interpretant, as opposed to the Saussurean couplet of signier/signied, for distinguishing between the image and the concept. Peirces denition of the sign is: A sign or representamen, is something which stands for something in some respect or capacity. It addresses somebody, that is creates in the mind of that person an equivalent sign, or perhaps a more developed sign. The sign which it creates I call the interpretant of the rst sign. The sign stands for something, its object. It stands for that object, not in all respects, but in reference to a sort of idea, which I have sometimes called the ground of the representamen (2.228; emphasis textual). See his Principles of Philosophy in Collected Papers, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. For more on the difference between Peircean and Saussurean notions of the sign, see Floyd Merrells recent study, Sign, Textuality, World 373, especially. For more, see Aijaz Ahmads response: Jamesons Rhetoric of Otherness and the National Allegory, Social Text 17 (1987): 4; now in In Theory.
11.
12.
13.
14.
Fictive Narratives
Subliminal Ethnicity
What is [not] Italian/American about Lenas Spaghetti?
Preliminary Thoughts
The title of this chapter obviously begs a couple of questions, one of which I have already dealt with elsewherea redenition of Italian/ American art forms from a post-1950s perspective: post-1950s not just for the advent of new ideas, rather a time when the notion of exploring 1 new ideas achieved some sort of validity. Other questions that may possibly arise are: 1) Why is not under erasure? and 2) What can I possibly mean by subliminal? Both are related; and sufce it to say that I use the adjective subliminal precisely because of its ambiguityan ambiguity that carries the various denitions of: a) barely perceptible, b) inadequate to produce a sensation or a perception, or c) existing or functioning outside the area of conscious awareness. All three denitions echo, in some form or another, Victor Turners well-known and wellcited denition of liminal entities as being necessarily ambiguous []; they are, Turner continues, neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, 2 and ceremonial. In what follows, then, we shall see how the two main characters 3 of Lenas Spaghetti, Hanna (Lena) and Herb, constitute liminal beings who, for the major part of this short lm, live on the threshold between two different emotional spaces. In a similar sense, it will also become apparent that Grecos Italian Americanness occupies an analogous interstitial space in his narrative framework. 13
14
Reading Filming Writing

Joseph Grecos Lenas Spaghetti is obviously not an explicitly Italian/American movie. In fact, one may want to argue that there simply isnt anything much Italian/American about this movie at all, except perhaps for the two words Lena and spaghetti. But I would contend that in this lm there is something beneath the surfacesubliminal, according to denitions a) and/or c) listed abovethat, to a certain degree, reects the directors Italian Americanness, his enthusiasm for his heritage as a third- or fourth-generation Italian American. It is something that, in the words of a Roland Barthes, instead of being, let us say, the cardinal functions/nuclei or catalysers, would be, instead, something in 4 the line of the indices or informants: that is, secondary signsbits and pieces of informationthat lie below the surface, which the regular viewer might easily overlook. And, here, when I say regular viewer, I have in mind the opposite of what we might call a model viewer, to echo Eco, or an ideal viewer, as someone like Chatman, Iser, or even 5 Prince would have it. Hence, the subliminal in this lm manifests itself in at least one of two ways. Namely, the fact that it operates within the realm of secondary signsfunctioning outside the area of conscious awarenessrenders it inscrutable, if not barely perceptible, to the regular viewer. For the sake of those who have not seen the lm, I offer the following, albeit brief, plot summary. Lenas Spaghetti is the story of thirteen-year-old Hannas move from one city to another and her initial feelings of loneliness. One day, after her father brings home a copy of her old towns newspaper, Hanna decides to answer a personal ad. The result is an ever-increasing epistolary relationship between Lena (Hannas pseudonym as make-believe actress) and Herb, a lonely thirty-three-yearold letter carrier. As the correspondence progresses, the relationship
15
steadily intensies, especially for Herb; and he subsequently decides to ask Lena to meet, declaring in the same letter his love for her. It is at this point that Hanna, frightened by Herbs admission of love and the prospect of an encounter, concocts yet another story, this time about her obligations to a theater group that is about to embark on a long road-trip and will be on the road for at least a year or two. Dejected, Herb nally takes notice of his female colleague, Adele, who, at her job as letter carrier, delivered to Herb Lenas correspondence while, all the time, harboring her own feelings for him. They talk, and Herb, nally taking notice of Adele as the thirty-three-year-old, Diane Keatontype female that she is, invites her to a home-cooked Italian dinner. In a parallel scene, Hanna strikes up a conversation with a very young girl on her school bus. As the bus stops and they get off, the two girls head home together in the same directionsimilar to Herb and Adele, the beginning, we may assume, of a long friendship. Lenas Spaghetti, one might say, is basically about love, or more precisely, about the blossoming of loveor, further still, the eld, to use a metaphor, on which the seeds of love are sown and from which one may reap a harvest. In a similar vein, we might also see this reaping as a metaphor for artistic creation, precisely because there are, even though this is a lm and there are no lms represented in it, references nevertheless to artistic creation, albeit indirect. There is a reference to writing, rst of all, in Lenas diary, as well as the actual correspondence that takes place between Lena and the lonely letter carrier, Herb, who initially places a personal ad to which she responds. Second, there are also numerous references to painting. In fact, we see that the postcards traveling back and forth between Lena and Herb are reproductions of, if they do not at the very least echo, Renaissance artwe have the painting of the two putti, as well as the Mona Lisa that lies on top of a stack of mail
16

6
Lena received from Herb. There is, in addition, the equally signicant element of Herbs own hobby, which is painting. In dealing with the notion of self-reexivity and the structure of a particular work, be it written or visual, framing and/or bracketing becomes an important narrative component. In the beginning of Lenas Spaghetti we nd that Herba lonely mailman, yearning for a signicant other, in search of loveis literally framed by two lovers who now wait for him to dole out their mail. Herb, that is, stands uncomfortably between these two people, as they so naturally express their love for each other in his company. Such framing/bracketing also occurs on other occasions throughout the lm. The female letter carrier is framed early on within the truck door of her postal vehicle; later, when Herb catches her reading his mail from Lena, she is again framed by her trucks door; thirdly, she is equally framed once more at the end of the lm, when Herb nally invites her to dinner. In a similar manner, Lena is also framed on a few occasionswe see her in the mirror in the bathroom, where she appears to be the young girl she truly is; other times she is framed by the mirror in her room, where she is shown writing to Herb or reading his letters. The last time we see her in this framed situation, she realizes she must not write any longer to Herb. One of the more explicit examples of self-consciousness, or selfreexivity, may be viewed through the lens of the notion of representation, that is representation of reality. What we, as viewers, see at the end of the lm is, in fact, a sign of reality in that which takes place when Lena decides she can no longer write to Herb because things have become, we might say, too hot for her. Although in her case the more correct term should be frightening, since he now admits his love for her and his desire that they nally meet. In a previous shot, we saw Lena sitting on her bed, contemplating Herbs letters. In this case, we see a similar shot in which she is now writing/narrating that she will not be able to
17
meet Herb. What is signicant here, as well as before, is that we are not looking at a sign of reality; that is, we are not looking at the interpretant 7 of an object, as Peirce would call it. We do not directly see Lena, we see, instead, her reection in the mirror. Thus, what we nd ourselves looking at is a sign of a sign of reality; namely, the image/concept is no longer separated from us, as would be the case, by one degree of separationi.e., through one sign and/or image. Rather, this reality is distanced from us through a second degree of separationthat is, we now have a reection (Lenas mirrored image) of a sign (= interpretant), Lena, which represents instead what we would readily call an object, a notion, a signied, a concept. It is also at this point where we witness a radical shift in Grecos visual narration. The switching of scenes, which up to this point has been an almost seamless process, is no longer a smooth transition from the previous scene to the next. At this point, we have a momentary blanka black screena literal gap in the narration that is, in its own right, a metaphorical gap similar to that which Wolfgang Iser discusses as part of 8 his general notion of the phenomenology of reading. In this vein, such a gap constitutes for the viewer, especially the model/ implicit viewer, a moment of repose for him/her to reconcile the information that s/he has gathered thus far, throughout the visual narration, in order for him/her to reconstruct a logical narrative sequence. Parallel to the radical shift in narration is a radical shift in the narrative. The relationship, or the desired relationship, between Lena and Herb changes dramatically. That is, his desire for the unique female, what we rst saw in Herbs personal ad, at this point is actually concretized, whereas before in the writing, in the correspondence, she remained exactly thatan idea, words, signs, an idea on paper, never an actual human being. A series of graphs illustrates the shift that occurs
18
and the various perspectives from which one may consider it:
1 Adults Children Herb Lena
2 Those Looking Herb Lena
3 Substitution Herb Lena
Be it from the perspective of adults vs. children (#1), the category of those in search of emotional supportread, lover or friend(#2), or the simple fact that there a substitution occurs (#3), in all three situations the imaginary/ctitious relationship of Herb <> Lena can no longer exist and is, per force, dramatically transformed. The only way that any type of relationship can be upheld is for both principles (Herb and Lena) to be substituted for the second set of principles (F.L.C. & Girl on Bus) waiting in the wings, so to speak, as the arrows now illustrate: 1 2 3 Adults Children Herb Lena Those Looking Herb Lena Substitution Herb Lena
F.L.C. Girl on Bus
F.L.C Girl on Bus
F.L.C Girl on Bus
Be it, then, Herb substituted by the girl on the bus or Lena substituted by the female letter carrier, in both changesand according to any of the three perspectives listed abovewe witness a semiotic chiasmus of sorts in that the one sign, Herb (= adult/lover), is substituted by/for another, Girl on Bus (= child/friend); or, similarly, the other sign of the original couple, Lena (= child/friend), is substituted by/for its antonym, F.L.C.
19
(= adult/lover). In either situation, the change brings about positive results. Thus, on the one hand, Herbs desired person is now reied in the gure of the female letter carrier [= his unique female] while, on the other, Lenas [or, now, Hannas] desired person, a friend inasmuch as a friend is also emotional support, is reied in the young girl on the bus, as they now walk off at the end as, we may assume, soon-to-be friends. These dynamics thus come to a head as both desires are satisedthe search for the unique female on Herbs part, and the search and/or desire for a friend on Lenas. One signicant aspect here with regards to writing, or the desire for writing, is that the activity becomes the conduit, the channel, or, to remain faithful to my initial metaphor of sown elds, writingor better, the paper on which one writes [canvas, with regard to Herbs painting] 9 is the eld on which such seeds of desires and ideas are sown. At the beginning, Herbs personal ad underscores the importance of writing as some type of source of satisfaction and/or happiness: Like to write? opens his personal ad. In a similar manner, Lena in turn expresses an analogous emotion when she states in her diary that Lena [is] the only friend [she has]. And through writing, Herb and Lena create an imaginary relationship that brings them, though ever so temporary, a semblance of happiness. But writing is also just that, writing. It constitutes an imaginary world of ideas, notions, and desires that are not and/or can not be concretized. They remain, therefore, safely in the realm of the imaginary. This harsh truth comes to light at the end of the lm when Lena sends Herb her farewell letter. At this point, the two mediawriting and painting seem to be brought to the fore. In front of his painting of a woman eating spaghetti, Herb reads Lenas letter, which she signs, Your pen pal, thus keeping herself within the realm of the written, far from the real world and far from Herb. Lenas sign-off, that is, recalls the writing
20
process, as invention, as creation of a reality, if not as the art of writingBut not Reality! In like fashion, Herb, in turn, replicates, albeit unknowingly, Lena, as he also has set up an imaginary world that exists only in the realm of paper and canvas, not in the concrete world. Thus, here, too, we may speak in terms of the liminal, as both characters in their own imaginary worlds exist temporarily on the threshold of desire; for they remain in a state betwixt and between the everyday reality of the real world and the desired condition of their imaginary world. Yet writing as conduit, we may assume from the lms ending, has a positive value within the greater scheme of this love story. This, I would submit, is signaled throughout the lm in a number of ways. First and foremost, writing, or the delivery of the written word, is what Herb does. In this real world of the written, love may still blossom, though not between Lena and Herb. Instead, a relationship blossoms between Herb and his female counterpart, the letter carrier, and writing (the written) has its integral role. Though they do not write to one another, as Herb receives his letter/cards from Lena, the female letter carrier reads them and, through her reading, in a very peculiar and vicarious manner, we might say, also engages in an epistolary dialogue with Herb. After all, she is the one who actually delivers to Herb his mail and, in so doing, occasionally teases Herb about his special correspondence! In fact, in delivering to Herb one of Lenas last postcards, there is a moment when both Herb and the female letter carrier literally make a connection. As she hands Herb Lenas postcard, still holding on to an end of it, she notices some paint on Herbs nose. Herb, in the meantime, took hold of the other corner of the postcard, and, as they each remain grasping on to an end of Lenas postcard, the female letter carrier wipes the paint off of Herbs nose. What is signicant here, of course, is that the two, for the moment, are literally connected by Lenas mail (i.e., postcard) to Herb, which, in turn, up to this point was the topic of conversation between
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Herb and the female letter carrier. Mail, in fact, is one of the very rst, as also one of the very last, verbal signs we seefor the lm opens with Herb in the mailroom of an apartment building; and, in a similar manner, the mailbox near Lenas bus stop and the white basket in the female letter carriers truck are two of the last verbal signs we see. Thus, while mail is one of the reasons Herb initially moves in search of his unique female, who just happens, temporarily, to be Lena (= a person with no face, hence a sign only), mail is the very reason why he and the female letter carrier eventually get together, when Herb offers to cook her an 10 Italian dinner.
Italian Spice
Turning now to a discussion of what is or is not explicitly Italian/American about Lenas Spaghetti, as I have already stated earlier, one may surely argue that, on the surface, there is no Italian/American quality to this lmexcept, of course, for something as blatant and, dare I say, banal as Hannas made-up name, Lena, and her trumped-up rec11 ipe for spaghetti. Yet, were we to engage in a discussion of implicit and explicit semiosis, we might easily nd that a dose of Italian Americanness and/or Italianness exists in the lms visual narrative in the fore12 shadows, in the background, that is, namely, beneath the surface. In this regard, then, any sense of Italianness and/or Italian Americanness becomes, like that of Herbs mothers English speech, an accent; it adds avor to the narrative but it does not necessarily move it toward one or another specic direction. To echo once again Roland Barthes, the Italian Americanness of Lenas Spaghetti gures not so much as integral parts of the narrative logic, rather as those indices and informants that we saw beforebits and pieces of information that, while they are not necessarily the main component of the lms narrative, they underscore those aspects of the story-line such as character, feeling, atmosphere, and phi-
22
losophy, as well as aid in the authentication of the so-called facts of the 13 story-line. Other examples of Italian/American signs appear in other parts of the lm. Along with the above-mentioned accent of Herbs mother and her salutation of ciao, we also have two specic names mentioned on two different occasionsUberto and Evalinathat conjure up images of, if not specically Italian Americans, at least Latins, be they Italian or Hispanics. Again, we must keep in mind the notion of intentio lectoris that is, the readers interpretive arsenal in ascribing signicance to these two signs (Uberto and Evalina). These names, I would add, seem to appear at a moment of need and comfort, when Herb seems to be at his two lowest moments in the lm. The rst instance is just before Lena writes to him for the rst time, as he, at home seemingly alone and dejected, receives a phone call from his Italian mother in which she offers to x him up with Evalinas daughter. The second time these Mediterranean names appear is toward the end of the lm, when Herb is once again feeling dejected after Lenas farewell letter. Here, too, Herbs mothers accented voice reappears to offer, unknowingly once again, comfort and solace in her willingness to x him up, for a second time, with Evalinas daughter. On both occasions this seemingly Italian/Mediterranean mother, as we might readily consider her, comes to the rescue. A sense of Italian Americanness continues to be articulated throughout the lm via these and other secondary signs. In the postcards that travel back and forth between Lena and Herb, for instance, we nd, as we saw above, reproductions of Renaissance art in the recurring paintings of the two putti, the cherubs. Secondly, I remind my reader once more of the Mona Lisa that stands out atop the stack of mail Lena received from Herb. Thirdly, food, and more precisely, spaghetti, becomes the common denominator. That is, the appearance and function of
23
food in this lm serves as a sort of elixir, that linchpin which initially binds Lena and Herb, as it also ultimately brings together Herb and the female letter carrier. That is, food is the initial nexus for the epistolary relationship between Lena and Herb, when she very soon in their correspondence sends to him her recipe for spaghetti, as well as the ragion dessere of the rst date between Herb and Adele, the female letter car14 rier, as we see at the end of the movie. Of course, what is ultimately signicant here is that spaghettii.e., the recipe for spaghettibrings together the lonely people in this lm. Food initially binds them. More specically, Italian food brings together these three people, ctionalized and real, and ultimately, to various degrees, satises their wishes and desires, especially those of Herb and the female letter carrier. So this is a story that is highly American, a simple love story in that we witness only the beginning of their romance, which obviously takes place, in the foreground, between two seemingly non-ethnic Americans. Yet, on the other hand, somewhere in the background of this story, we may readily perceive echoes of an Italianness and/or Italian Americanness that continues to rise throughout Grecos visual narration. In returning now for a moment to the aforementioned mirror image of Lena where she is distanced from us through a second degree of separation, one may, indeed, speak in terms of self-protection and selfelucidation with regard to this characters reection in the mirror. Mary Jo Bona offers an acute reading of Carmolina, a character in Tina De Rosas Paper Fish, when she states that Carmolina, in mimicking Leonardo, writes in reverse both as a protection and elucidation of the self (98), especially since, as Bona points out, double consciousness charac15 ters may be attracted to mirrors, reecting windows, [etc.] (105). A curious difference between the book and the lm, however, lies in who is using the mirror. As Bona points out, it is clearly the character, not the
24
narrator, who uses the mirror. In the lm, conversely, Lena does not consciously sit in front of the mirror in order to see herself. Rather, it is the directorial personality (or, narrating agency), what or whom in the literary text we might consider the author (or, narrator), depending on the circumstances, who places Lena in front of the mirror. Thus, we might look more toward Greco the director, and not Lena the character, and consider the mirror his self-protection and/or self-elucidation of his own double-consciousnessread here, ethnicitythat is then mirroredPun intended!in the image of Lena. It is thus here that I would point to an instance where we might return to the liminality of Grecos seemingly nonexistent ethnicity in this lm. In a sense, Hannas concocted character, Lena, to whom she does not ascribe any ethnic quality, becomes nevertheless a reminiscence of Italian Americanness insofar as the proper name Lena, combined with her favorite food spaghetti, reeks of italianit as strongly as a freshly prepared bowl of broccoli di rapa reeks of garlicthe one can not do without the other; it cannot not conjure up concepts of Italian America. Yet, this Italian America remains, within Grecos narrativelike the classic liminal state that lies outside the normal classicatory systems only in that interstitial space of, to paraphrase again Victor Turner, betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by [in our specic 16 case, narrative] custom, convention, and ceremonial. Indeed, as I mentioned at the outset, both Lena and Herb also inhabit a state of liminality, or marginality, for most of this lms narra17 tive. Having just moved, Lena is temporarily without friends and thus in search of some sort of emotional support one would readily nd in friendship. Similarly, Herb, thirty-three, is a seemingly hopeless lovelorn bachelor in search of his idea of the unique female. Both gure as individuals who have slipped through what we might now consider the emotional network of classications that normally locate states and po-
25
sitions in cultural space (Turner 95). And since there is no two without three, as the Italian saying goes, it would not seem illogical or far-fetched to append Greco himself to our trinity of liminal beings. For, while he has scattered numerous secondary signs of Italian Americanness throughout his narrative, he does not assign any specic position to this ethnicity. In the more prevalent form of Barthesian indices and informants, Grecos italianit, thus infused in his lm, remains neatly situated in a state of signifying limbo, waiting to be activated by an array of potential viewers and their respective semiotic acts. To conclude, nally, with the statement that this is, among other things, an Italian/American lm, I would submit thusly only inasmuch as America is that very kaleidoscope, a country of unique individuals that form a unique population, made up of people from all different origins, who at one point or another try to become part of a mainstream, that is assimilate, and yet often tend, conversely, to hold on to various bits and pieces of their heritage. In this sense, then, Lenas Spaghetti is precisely that. It is an American lm, by no means explicitly Italian/American, that is at the very best implicitly Italian/American, insofar as this American lm has been, here and there, peppered with the directors Italian heri18 tage.
Notes
1. I make this distinction because while there were new faces on the scene, older faces, often forgotten by the establishment, were revived, reread, and reappropriated for constructing a different critical discourse. My own rereading of Italian/American literature appropriates the newer voices that are Umberto Eco, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wolfgang Iser, and the like; yet it also goes back to C. S. Peirce, whose seminal notions of sign, rstness, secondness, and thirdness lie at the base of my 1994 essay.
26 2. 3.
Anthony Julian Tamburri Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Antistructure 95 100. Lenas Spaghetti, directed by Joseph Greco, screenplay by Rachel A. Witenstein. Senior Thesis of The Florida State University School of Motion Picture, Television and Recording Arts. The Florida State University, 1994. The lm premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, September 1994. Functions, for Barthes, are units of content that drive the narrative. The essence of the function, according to Barthes, is the seed that it sows in the narrative, planting an element that will come to fruition latereither on the same level or elsewhere, on another level (89). Catalysers, instead, ll up space between the cardinal functions. In turn, indices index character, feeling, atmosphere, and philosophy. In addition, informants serve to authenticate; they are pure data of immediate and, I would add, local signication. For more on Barthes notion of narrative, see his seminal structuralist essay Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives (1966) in Image Music Text 79124. I am clearly making an analogy to the special construct of the ideal or model reader of the world of literary hermeneutics. For various notions on this concept of the model and/or ideal viewer, see Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader; Seymour Chatman, Story and Discourse; Wolfgang Iser, The Implied Reader; and Gerald Prince, On Textual Readers and Evaluators, VS (Versus) 52/53 (1989): 11320. For more on general notions of literary hermeneutics, see Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method. An Italian icon par excellence, the Mona Lisa appears in the background of numerous American lms. One need only think back to True Love by Nancy Savoca.
4.
5.
6.
Italian/American Short Films and Videos 7.
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8. 9.
10. 11. 12.
13.
14.
For more on Peirces tripartite notion of the sign, see, for a quick overview, Charles Sanders Peirce, What Is a Sign? (1894) in Philosophical Writings of Peirce 98104. See, especially, his chapter How Acts of Constitution Are Stimulated in The Act of Reading 180231. As a point of information, and in keeping in line with my metaphor, I would refer the reader, at this point, to the oldest Italian text on record, the Indovinello Veronese: Se pareba boves, alba pratalia araba, et albo versorio teneba, et negro semen seminaba. Indeed, because she belongs to the real world is one of the reasons why the female letter carrier can and does eventually touch Herb. Trumped-up since she cribs the recipe from a cookbook. What is signicant here for my reading strategyas I assume the opening pages of this essay have already signaledis that I adhere to Umberto Ecos notion of intentio lectoris with ample conciliation to intentio operis, since any readers intertextual arsenal employed must always, to a certain degree, be context sensitive; in some way or another, that is, the readers decodication must jibe in some way with the text. For more on Ecos notion, see his Intentio Lectoris: The State of the Art, Differentia, review of italian thought 2 (Spring 1988): 14768. As Barthes reminds us, I would point out that catalysers, indices, and informants have the common denominator of being, with respect to nuclei, expansions. Nuclei, instead, form nite sets, are governed by logic, and are at once necessary and sufcient. Over the centuries, food has often appeared as a type of elixir or connector of people, be they characters in novels, short stories, plays, or, later on, in the cinema, a topic that deserves its own time and place. In the meantime, I would point out two recent studies on
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Anthony Julian Tamburri food: Gian-Paolo Biasin, Flavors of Modernity: Food and the Novel; and Massimo Montanari, The Culture of Food. Mary Jo Bona, Broken Images, Broken Lives: Carmolinas Journey in Tina De Rosas Paper Fish, Melus 14.34 (FallWinter 1987): 87106. Turner, The Ritual Process 95100. For more on liminality vis--vis marginality, and a general brief introduction to the liminal, see Gustavo Prez Firmat, Preliminaries, in Literature and Liminality: Festive Readings in the Hispanic Tradition xiiixv. One question that may rise here, and elsewhere, is how much of Grecos implicit ethnicity is purposely hidden. With regard to such a desire on the artists part to mask her/his Italian Americanness, see Fred Gardaphs Visibility and Invisibility: The Postmodern Prerogative in Italian/American Narrative, Almanacco 2.1 (Spring 1992): 2433. My viewing copy of Lenas Spaghetti came courtesy of the director, Joseph Greco, whom I warmly thank. I also would like to thank Professor Mark Pietralunga, who accepted an earlier version of this essay for presentation at The Florida State University Conference on Comparative Literature and Film, 1995.
15.
16. 17.
18.
Black & White, Scungill & Cannoli

Ethnicity and Sexuality in Nunzios Second Cousin
Tom DeCerchios short lm, Nunzios Second Cousin, debuted at the 1994 Telluride lm festival and is now included in the anthology Boys Life II, in national distribution throughout the United States. One of six shorts chosen for the Resume Films session, Nunzios Second Cousin was an instant hit with the audience for its up-front-and-in-your-face manner of dealing with sensitive and controversial issues. In his lm, DeCerchio confronts the questions of race and homosexuality, two seemingly taboo issues in the general community of Italian America, thus forming a triangle of issues of race, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. The basic semiotic premise to this chapter, as elsewhere herein, is that the study of signs proves to be more than adequate in the analysis of aesthetics and cultural artifacts. Semiotics proves to be the interpretive tool that can examine the signifying process of such artifacts and uncover the epistemological procedure that ascribes meaning and value to signs, which, I believe, we already saw in chapter one. As will become apparent in this chapter, Nunzios Second Cousin exudes a sui generis ideology independent of the usual white hetero-patriarchal control. As such, this counter-hetero, nonwhite ideology dees the typical white hetero-[fe] male-sexual gaze in not affording him his usual position of control. In this case, semiotics becomes the mode of analysis to identify the procedure of how signs may bear meanings in a specic sign system, as is the one we nd in Nunzios Second Cousin.
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30
A Meeting of Cultures
From the opening scene, sexuality constitutes both a prominent and problematic theme in the lm. The initial confrontation between the racially mixed gay male couple and the gay-bashing group of suburban boys sets the stage for the conictual theme of homosexuality. Anthony, the police 1 ofcer, and his black date exit a bar and are on their way to what we might assume to be a delightful dinner when they are spotted by some 2 prospective gay-bashers from Cicero, Illinois, who soon attack them. What they do not know is that Anthony does not represent the stereotype of the gay man: instead of the effeminate, seemingly shy and weak male, Anthony proves to be a type of macho gay who, though off-duty, is 3 nevertheless packing his pistol. Considering the sui generis system of upsetting the semiotic apple cart of traditional signication, one should not ignore the morphemic similarity between the name of the bar here Cheeks, an obvious gay barand the more popular, mass-media bar of the early 1980sCheers, where heterosexuality reigned, and homosexuality was taboo. Further, as shall become apparent later, in spite of DeCerchios explicit use of ethnicity and sexuality throughout this lm, secondary levels of signication, seemingly subliminal, may readily rise to the surface of the conversant viewers interpretation, a semiosic process we already saw in chapter 1. The concept of polyvalence, if not the phenomenon of a type of unlimited semiosiswhere meaning is consistently created from the preceding sign through one mental process to another, such as by analogy or extensionis in effect from the very beginning. One of the bashers, for instance, states: two fucking fruits just showed up on radar. The play on words of radar and the recently coined term gaydar is too blatant to ignore and may thus serve as a hint, especially in retrospect, of what is to come from the point of view of signication. Yet this too proves, in a hermeneutical sense, semantically slippery. For it is true, as I have stated, that
31
the morphemic similarity of radar and gaydar come to the fore. But the young mens gaydar, so to speak, is not consonant with whom they nd, as 4 Anthony is most straight-appearing, and quite macho to boot. In a similar retrospective mode, Jimmy Cerentano exhorts his 5 friends with a most telling battle-cry: Lets beat them back into yesterday. The chronological marker of yesterday, as compared not only to today but especially tomorrow, rst calls to mind the dichotomous binomial of old world versus new world; yet it now also references the dyad old attitudes toward gays versus new [i.e. post-Stonewall] attitudes toward gays. The usual form of the expression is beat [someone] back into last week, but by the substitution of the word yesterday, the utter6 ance lends itself more easily to identication with the (cultural) past. This notion of old vs. new is later underscored in other ways, one example being a subsequent episode of Mr. P and his racist comment couched in the proverbial opener, you know what they say . . . , as if the they say assigns valence to the statement. Jimmys clothing, in turn, aids in ascribing a more broad interpretation to his statement. His athletic jacket with the big C (Cicero) on his chest broadcasts both his masculinityit is an athletic jacketand his racismthe C stands for Cicero. The idea of signs signifying and their array of possible meanings is also exhibited in Anthonys statement to the would-be bashers and, as just mentioned above with regard to gaydar, what we may call their supercial reading of the sign <Anthony and Black date>. Anthony underscores their misreading when he states, with gun in hand: After tonight youre going to remember that the next time you decide to go out and fag bash, that sometimes fags bash back. The repetition of the two terms fag and bash, used here together in two totally different and dichotomous contexts, tells us, here specically, 1) that not all gay men act in a manner similar to the stereotype of the effeminate male exaggerating
32
his non-masculine ways; and, rhetorically, 2) that, be it here or elsewhere, what we are told may need to be examined for signicance other than the rst that comes to mind. This sense of polyvalence, nally, is also underscored by Anthonys black dates reaction to his (Anthonys) statement to one of the boys who tries to bond with him: You want to bond with me? Get on all fours and Ill stick my dick in your ass, says Anthony, to which his lover responds: Anthony, I hope youre speaking metaphorically. This episode proves to be a particularly rich moment in the lm for a number of additional reasons. First, for Mediterranean culture, generally, at least since ancient Greece and Rome, penetration (whether vaginal or anal) has been the ultimate sign of masculine dominance and 7 privilege. The insertive man in male/male sex was not, then, seen as effeminate, while the receptive man was quintessentially so. Thus, by threatening to penetrate the basher, Anthony is actually threatening (in Mediterranean terms) to unman him by performing a sign of masculinity that is, historically, even more masculine than fag-bashing. Semiotically speaking, to underscore my initial premise, this falls well in line with what we may assume to be DeCerchios possible intention of upsetting the semiotic apple cart, as traditional sexual roles are rhetorically threatened and thus, on a more broad scale, called into questionthis calling into question being relevant for all sex roles presented herein, I would hasten to add at this point. Second, the black mans comment is supremely campy and ironicindicating not only a total lack of trepidation at this imminent threat of violence and hatred, but also a mild, lip-curling disdain at the notion of his Anthony having, as he might describe it, to fuck someone as unsavory as this would-be basher. Known (originally among urban American Blacks) as shading or throwing shade, this mode of deprecation is typically gendered culturally as feminine and stands in carefree mocking opposition to the masculine mode of depreca-
33
tion performed by the bashers. In addition, it also subtly belies the clich that every gay man desperately hungers for sex with any straight man. All this, I would further contend, now sets the stage for the next thirteen minutes of the lm, for which the spectator has been put on alert that s/he 8 may not be the idle consumer of texts, as Barthes tells us, but must engage, as Barthes also tells us, in an active process of signication. As it becomes apparent that Anthony, this white, gay police ofcer, is from the same Chicago suburbs as the would-be bashers, and he knows the family of one of the boys, he tells Jimmy to meet him the following evening at 7:00 P.M. at a specic address in Cicero. While the young man is suspicious, and perhaps even afraid, he does go; and the meeting turns out to be a dinner invitation to the police ofcers unsuspecting mothers house in what we can readily consider the old neighborhood in Cicero, Illinois.
At the Table
As the dinner scene occupies the rest of the lms duration, it becomes the stage for the would-be bashers epistemological initiation into the world of homosexuality, if not polysexuality. No longer surrounded by his friends, the young would-be basher must now endure the police ofcers lectures, for lack of a better word, on sexuality. More specically, he must now confront, conceptually for the rst time, the issue of homosexuality, and Anthonynow Tony as he is back in the old 9 neighborhood becomes his teacher. On a more general scale, we witness the confrontation of two different sets of sign systems. The traditional, Italian/American sign system of white heterosexuality clashes head-on with an Italian/American sign system that has been altered according to the gay police ofcers individual life situation. Such polyvalenceor better, rhetorical malleabil-
34
ity of signsis evidenced in a number of ways. Through a few seemingly insignicant transitional scenes, or just simple comments, the clash between a traditional Italian/American sign system and one having undergone a more radical modication also comes to the fore. While Cicero is already marked, to some degree, by an Italian Americanness, in that it is well known as an Italian enclave, DeCerchio also invests ethnic signs early on in the lm when Anthony has the boys recite an apology to all the fags in the world, that gay people are good people; for he also has them repeat that Michelangelo was gay and hes a freaking genius. At this point, Anthonys statement reects, in disaccord with that of the would-be bashers, a new Italian/American sign system that adds homosexuality as an accepted characteristic. On the other hand, once Anthony goes back to the old neighborhood, he confronts the cancer of racism that seems to permeate some white, working-class ethnic enclaves. We see this in his conversation with Mr. P: Mr. P: Its always nice to have a cop around. You know what they say: A cop a day keeps the niggers away! Anthony: Yeah. Well, I wish they wouldnt say that. The clash between the old world and the new world is exhibited in two ways. First, Anthony responds in disagreement: Well, I wish they wouldnt say that. Then, in another sign of disagreementthis time not verbalMr. P exhibits puzzlement to Anthonys reaction to his unbeknownst to himselfracist comment. All this is then further underscored by the irony in the fact that Anthonys date of the night before was a black man. In what I have already stated above, another scene calls to the fore an example of semiotic freedom. It is here, when Anthony Tony tells his mother of their dinner guest, that Jimmy becomes Nunzios second cousin: Anthonys mother, Mrs. Randazzo, readily assumes that
35
Jimmy is Nunzios relative because of the similarity in last names, an example of what we might otherwise call a supercial reading, or better yet, with tongue a bit in cheek, a eeting act of semiosis that does not get really to the meaning of things. On the other hand, we might slightly rethink Anthonys mothers semiotic act: For, be it supercial on her part (or tongue-in-cheek on DeCerchios part), Mrs. Randazzos assumption is also a sign of the innate goodness and generosity of Anthonys mothernot only in polar opposition to the reception Anthony received from the bashers, but also a sign of rst-generation and immigrant Americans unswerving hospitality, a presumption of goodness based on shared bloodlines and ethnicityHes Nunzios cousin, he must be all right! Hence her unhesitating willingness to take a total stranger into her house and prepare a special meal for him. In this sense, Mrs. Randazzo is very much the generous Italian/American mother who, in doting on her children, is more than willing to take into her home her sons friends. On the other hand, Mrs. Randazzo is not the iconic, stereotypical Italian/American woman we might expect. Neither in dress nor in physicality does she resemble the stereotype: no hair pulled back set in a bun on the top of her head; not necessarily short, stocky, and possibly overweight, as we might nd in the more stereotypical representations of the Italian/American mother, especially the widow, as we may assume of Mrs. Randazzos marital status. Thus, here too, I would contend, DeCerchio engages in another form of upsetting the semiotic apple cart, as we nd a constant clashing of expected and unexpected imagery vis--vis the Italian/American mother gure. Such undermining of expected sign-functions is both ironic and important because the lm constantly problematizes the space Jimmy occupies: Is he Italian (read, Italian American) or American? Gay or straight? Friend or foe? To the extent that he shares Mrs. Randazzos culture, he will be familiar with those norms of hospitality. To the extent
36
that he intended evil against her beloved son, he certainly did not deserve them, nor would she ever have extended them had she known of his illwill. Further still, Mrs. Randazzos assumptive act of semiosis becomes even more telling once Jimmy nally gets to the house. Anthonys mother greets Jimmy at the door and tells him she knew his second cousin, who was a good guy until he became a Fascist. It is this ironic reference to Jimmys presumed cousins (Nunzio) Fascism that provokes further signication. True or false, the relationship established by Mrs. Randazzo between Jimmy and the Fascist Nunzio extends such despotism to Jimmy who, here now, is not so much an Italian Fascist as the despotic homophobe/racist engaging in violent gay-bashing. As we switch to the dinner scene of the movie, the heart of the lms sixteen minutes, the clash of two different sign systems takes a turn. The polyvalence of Anthonys speech, both his deliberate and seemingly non-deliberate double meanings, are, in a comic manner, underscored to some extent by his mothers apparent ignorance of her sons true sexuality. That is, Mrs. Randazzos unawareness of her sons actual sexual orientation not only creates ambiguityif not the license 10 thereofbut it also adds a bit of comic relief during these scenes. In addition, we see that Anthonys role reects the semiotic slipperiness of polyvalence; here, at different times during the dinner, Tony takes on the role of bully, informer, and/or teacher. After Mrs. Randazzo establishes the relationship between Jimmy and Nunzio, Anthony comes to greet Jimmy at the door and proceeds to tell him what is in store for him after dinner. In a scene couching the threat of violence in comedy, the taller and stockier Anthony puts his arm around Jimmy and, while rst tapping on his chest and then waving back and forth in his face a long, thick salami, states: I bet you thought I invited you here to fuck you in the ass. Pausing, he then continues, No. Im gonna wait until after dinner. Then, after pushing Jimmy into the
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house, he closes the door behind them. Here, of course, we see DeCerchios blatant use of phallic imagery in the form of the salami, further exaggerated in, let us say, its physical abundance. It is, rst of all, a sign of threatening force that, at the same time, refers to the legendary attribute of genital abundance often imputed to Italian men. Yet, it goes one step further in its semiotic function; for one other potentially signicant marker is the salamis colordark brown; let us not forget Anthonys date of the evening before, the black man in leather pants and chest11 wear. For here, semiotically speaking, we are again in the realm of secondary signs, something that, in the words of a Roland Barthes, instead of being, let us say, the cardinal functions/nuclei or catalysers, would be, instead, something in the line of the indices or informants: those secondary and tertiary signs that seem to have no constitutive function in the production of meaning yet, when all is said and done, gure 12 signicantly. Thus, as viewers, we are subliminally reminded of the race issue, introduced at the beginning by Anthonys date, which has now seemed to fall by the wayside. Both Mr. Ps rewritten racist proverb of a nigger a day, and the dark salami keep race, albeit in the background, as part of the general semiotic of the lmic text. To digress a bit, any discussion on race and Italian Americans is a complex one, to say the least. One need only think back to the two infamous, tragic episodes of Howard Beach (1987) and Bensonhurst (1989), where Italian Americans were, to the chagrin of many, on the wrong side of the racial divide as they victimized blacks in two Ital13 ian/American neighborhoods. On another front, also questionable is one of the more popular books among Italian Americans on Italian Americans by an Italian American. Richard Gambinos Blood of My Blood proves to be a semi-scientic, semi-personalized account of the 14 Italian Americans early years in the United States. Unfortunately, one of the books later chapters engages in perpetuating a stereotype of
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blacks; in setting up a dichotomy between blacks and Italian Americans vis--vis music, we read that, according to Gambino, while Italians are more melodious because of their Italian legacy of opera, blacks are more rhythmic because of their African musical heritage. Gambino would have us believe that such observations about music and body and language are trivial. On the contrary, such observations indeed underscore a long15 lived stereotype we should eschew. A third case of Italian/American bigotry involves Senator Alfonse DAmato, who made the headlines for his outrageous imitation of Lance Ito, presiding judge in the O. J. Simpson trial, on nationally syndicated radio. While on occasion, the things Mr. DAmato does only bring ridicule upon himself, such as the time he sang his rendition of Old MacDonald Had a Farm on the House oor, on other occasions, he is an embarrassment to the community at large. The Judge Ito incident is one of those times. On April 5, 1995, while being interviewed by Don Imus, in a mock Japanese accent DAmato launched into his imitation of little Judge Ito, when he and Imus were discussing the reopening of the Senate Banking Committee hearings on the Clintons involvement with Whitewater. Imus, an often controversial host himself, suggested that DAmato and his committee wouldnt attract as large an audience as long as the O. J. Simpson trial continued on TV. Judge Ito will never let it end, DAmato said in a fake accent. Judge Ito loves the limelight. He is making a disgrace of the judicial system. Little Judge Ito will keep us 16 from getting television for the next year. The remarks in themselves are ridiculous and would have gone unnoticed but for the fact that this man dared to make fun of a people by stereotyping and deriding the way they supposedly pronounce the English language. The fake Japanese accent used by DAmato makes those remarks offensive to all people who are concerned about bigotry and racism in the United States. All Italian immigrants, especially those who learned to speak English in grade
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school, and their progeny should take special offense at Mr. DAmatos racist behavior. As children, many immigrants were the recipients of such racism because they did not speak English well, or because they had, as many Italian Americans did, the oily brown lunch bag, or for 17 whatever other reason that differentiated them from their classmates. Equally disappointing is the fact that there has been no overt denunciation of Mr. DAmatos actions by Italian/American foundations and organizations, especially from those groups that, whenever possible, com18 plain about the image of Italian Americans portrayed by the media. In contrast to those who have willy-nilly contributed to the schism between blacks and Italian Americans, one can nd others who have championed not only similarities but indeed called for an interethnic understandingif not cooperation. Some of Mary Bucci Bushs short stories place Italian Americans alongside blacks in an analogous struggle 19 for dignity and equality in their everyday life. Rose Romano has discussed the notion of Italian Americans, especially those of southern Ital20 ian origin, as people of color. Similarly, as was pointed out earlier (note 14), Jerome Krase and Robert Viscusi have spoken specically to the Bensonhurst tragedy in their respective calls for inter-racial/ethnic solidarities. Finally, in a more general context, Rudolph Vecoli has dis21 cussed the notion of Italian Americans as not always just white folks. Perhaps three of the more poignant calls for similarities between, and solidarity among, Italian Americans and blacks can be found in Felix Stefanile, Daniela Giosef, and Patrick Gallo. Stefaniles poem, 22 Hubie, which carries as epigraph the 1943 news item Army experiments with mixed units: Negroes being admitted to white companies. Hubie is a wistfully lyrical account of friendship between a black and Italian American during World War II. Stefanile, in juxtaposing the local racism of the Anselmo Club to the more systemic racism of the Army,
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pin-points the two distinct wars Hubie and his white friends must wage, as their friendship, we are told, endured: A blackman and a white man, thats for sure, this other war and the cagey cowardice of habit, turning honest blood to ice. I think that we were brothers once, The Twins, the fellows called us, masking their wide grins. Whats left is poetry, the penance for my sins. In a similar manner, Giosef recounts on one occasion her experience as one of the Freedom Riders, in an essay in which she also discusses analogous tragedies that both Italian Americans and blacks have 23 endured. Further, her creative writing and editorial work have consistently exhibited much disdain and disgust toward prejudiced and racist 24 thought-patterns. In what may seem to be a rare move among social scientists of Italian America, Patrick Gallo, in turn, closed his 1974 study with a type of call to arms for which Italian Americans and blacks should form the ethnic coalition that would gure as the nucleus of an interethnic response to the WASP dominant power structure. What is needed, Gallo wrote at the end of his study, is an alliance of whites and Blacks, whitecollar and blue-collar workers, based on mutual need and interdependence, and hence, an alliance of political participation. Namely, the notion of us and them, not us against them. But, Gallo continued, before this can realistically come to pass, a number of ethnic groups have to develop in-group organization, identity, and unity. Here, Viscusis notion of the group narrative comes to mind, which he so eloquently rehearsed in his Breaking the Silence. Finally, Gallo stated, [t]he Italian-Americans may prove to be a vital ingredient in not only forging that alliance but in serving as the cement that will hold our urban centers to-

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gether. Gallo, we see, anticipates what Stuart Hall was to state years later with regard to cultural studies, reminding us that we must learn not to speak in terms of racism or prejudice in the singular, but of racisms 26 [as also prejudices] in the plural. DeCerchio, from what we have seen thus far, has learned this lesson well. For let us not forget the close-up, at the beginning of the lm, of Anthony and his date kissing, as their facesone black the other whiteoccupy a large part of the center of 27 the screen. In continuing our discussion of Nunzios Second Cousin, we see that the closing door now brings us into the house, that closed sphere of the domus, where, in one sense, all that goes on is to be kept secret according to the old concept of omert, an imported sense of silence and honor that existed among immigrants and subsequent generations of Italian Americans. It is only here that the secrets can be told. But even here, as we shall see, they must be told in a euphemistic manner. I have deliberately avoided, here, the term metaphor for reasons of practicality. For be it metaphor, analogy, simile, or any other mechanic of signicant allu28 sion, even the slightest hint of the bare fact of the matter can not be articulated, according to the cultural laws of omert. Hence, DeCerchios cinematographic semiotic consists of a plethora of signs and signfunctions that continue to call into question the problematic themes introduced at the beginning of the lm: sexuality, race, and ethnicity. At the dinner table we see that Jimmys experience as an athlete mirrors Anthonys. When Jimmy responds that he is on the wrestling team, Mrs. Randazzo responds excitedly: No kidding! So was Tony! Yeah, he was captain of the team. While her voice grows soft, she continues: Oh I was so proud, I remember, the way he used to jump on those little boys. It was beautiful. As the mother leaves the room to get more scungill, Anthony turns to Jimmy and, in moderated tone, states: You know, Jimmy, I think when all those guys were rubbing against
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me and I was rubbing against them, on the wrestling team, I think thats what made me become a homo. In fact, Im sure of it. Of course, what Anthonys statement underscores is the myth that homosexuality is something you might catch, as Anthony, in an obviously facetious manner, says he did when he was on the wrestling team. But more important here is also the tone of Anthonys voice. Now, for this one exchange, Anthony is not at all menacing as before but seemingly serious, and controlled in tone and manner. In a sense he has dropped the mask of bully (super macho) and, for the moment, put on that of the informer/teacher. But there is even more to this statement, especially in the two phrases rubbing against me and I was rubbing against them and that is what made me become a homo. For let us not forget that the action of rubbing is not so much an act of origination as stimulation; that is, while for Jimmy, in believing in the mythology, homosexuality is a contagious disease, for Anthony the rubbing against other male bodies was an act of stimulation of what was already there. Thus, he grew into, he became, to paraphrase his own words, the homosexual he is. The puzzling and frightening prospect for Jimmy, at this point, is that he not only is too close to this specic situation, but his own experience as young man is beginning to mirror Tonys: they are both Italian Americans from Cicero who went to the same high school and were on the wrestling team. This said, I would now contend that, in retrospect, after Anthonys statement to Jimmy, facetious or not, Mrs. Randazzos pride and sense of beauty we witnessed earlierOh I was so proud, I remember, the way he used to jump on those little boys. It was beautiful.serve, though unknowingly to her, as an aesthetic comment of approval of Anthonys homosexuality. While the dinner scene progresses couched often in a comedic vein, two important aspects of DeCerchios semiotic come to the fore. First, we witness a semiotic of opposites, as Anthonys description of
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his date is all but a lie, except for the fact that he had a date; for Anthony tells his mother that he had a date with a blondepresumably a woman for Mrs. Randazzoand he laughingly says he will bring her around to meet his mother. We should not lose the irony on the imagined womans blonde hair. First, blonde, too close to the color white to ignore, acts as a direct counterpoint to the skin color of Anthonys date the evening before. Second, any blonde-haired gure also stands in contradistinction to Anthonys Italianness, usually associated with darkhaired, dark-eyed individuals. Third, the blonde woman also gures as the idealized female gure who may, as such, also readily cancel out the ethnic element in general. Finally, blonde is the whitest of whites, and in the context of race, especially, it also conjures up the notion of the Aryan ber-raceultimately white, ultimately masculine. The second aspect of DeCerchios semiotic comes into play here during dinner as the parallel between Jimmy and Anthony grows yet stronger, up to now all the time couched in terms of athleticism, which in itself is a sign of masculinity that supercially counters the 29 stereotype of the homosexual. For instead of telling her something about Anthony (and here Anthony threatens Jimmy to tell her about his own homosexuality), Jimmy blurts out a statement about himself: Im the captain of the wrestling team too. Such a telling similarity, I would caution, should not be considered merely the obvious sign of Jimmy as young Anthony, who will also grow into his gay adulthood, as we might readily decipher. I would suggest, instead, that we also read this sign, in the spirit of a Peircean semiotics of unlimited semiosis, as a sign of congregation of different sorts, gay and straight, as opposed to the easier reading of the gathering of simulars, as I just mentionednot to overdo the clich, gay or straight, were all the same. The cannoli scene that follows serves as further proof of the polyvalence that not only pervades this lm, but inltrates our daily
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lives in general. Further still, this polyvalence, precisely because of the lms theme of homosexuality, as well as the specics of Anthonys gay relationship with the black man, now transforms itself into a type of 30 metaphor, a sign, for the acceptance of a polysexual society. The short exchange between mother and son becomes comical. I got the kind that you like with the little nuts, Mrs. Randazzo says. With the chocolate nuts? responds Anthonya question that not only refers to the general image of the phallus, but the addition of chocolate nuts brings us back to the beginning of the lm and, in a not too subtle way, ties in once again the issue of race, as we saw earlier in the salami scene. Indeed, the comedic aspect of this exchange continues even as the question Anthony asks is, not so metaphorically speaking, a serious one. As his mother leaves the room, Anthony, with a type of Cheshire-cat grin, turns to Jimmy and asks: You want a cannoli? To which Jimmy, now most mindful of this newly invested sign of the cannolo, responds quickly and shakingly, No. In the nal scenes of the lm, Anthony qua police ofcer, in his confrontation with Jimmy qua would-be basher, directly points out the differences and/or contradictions in each persons cultural and signifying reservoir of experiences. He actually indicates different interpretations one may give to certain actions and behavior, one example being the practice of high-school wrestling and what it may mean for young men and their true feelings of sexuality. This is Anthony/Tonys nal lesson for Jimmy. I got news for you Jimmy boy, he states. Bashing fags is not going to stop you from becoming one. You got to trust me. I tried it! As Anthony forces a kiss on Jimmy, and eventually pushes him to the ground, a few conicting cultural signs come into play. They are: 1) the aluminum-foil phallus at the center of the kiss scene. The phallus, one would quickly assume, should only signify one thing in this situation, as any two men kiss; 2) the Madonna statue next to which
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Jimmy falls can only represent, in our quick assumption, a counterbalance to the homosexual kiss; and 3) the pasta/scungill now strewn all over Jimmy, as he is left to fend for himself in assigning some sort of valence to this experience, might readily signify the ethnoideological mess in which he now nds himself. For, as Anthony says his disgusted good-byesSee ya!we see Jimmy, covered with pastathe ultimate Italian sign of food!staring up toward Anthony with a perplexed look, as Anthony now enters the house and, denitively we might say, closes the door behind him; whereas Jimmy, the high-school macho wrestler, must now wrestle with this plethora of seemingly contradicting cultural signs into which he has been strewn. Before going on, we might spend a few moments discussing the violence Anthony exhibits at the dinner table when he threatens Jimmy to reveal to his mother his homosexuality. It is, to be sure, an uncomfortable moment, especially when considered in the greater scheme of actions throughout this short movie. To a certain degree, DeCerchios representation of Anthony as violent is in line with representations of gays in lm, especially that which we might consider Hollywood cinema, since gay relationships were often presented as inherently violent, as 31 Vito Russo established in The Celluloid Closet. That is, Russo continued, the sex and violence that Hollywood attributed to the gay lifestyle were indistinguishable from the violence against gays in real life (164). But Anthony exhibits an exaggerated violence, I would contend, something similar in appearance and semiotic function to Richard Dyers notion of what he considers the gay category macho: that exaggerated masculinity [whose] very exaggeratedness marks it off from the conven32 tional masculine look on which it is based. What we have, namely, is an excess of masculinity in that macho, continues Dyer, is far more clearly the conscious employment of signs of masculinity (42; emphasis textual), which, similar to other predominant forms of gay male ghetto
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culture, camp and drag[, . . .] self-consciously play[s] the signs of gender, and . . . in the play and exaggeration . . . an alternative sexuality is implieda sexuality, that is, that recognizes itself as in a problematic relationship to the conventional conation of sexuality and gender (42). This, to be sure, is the situation with Anthony. He surely represents an alternative to conventional notions of gender and sexuality. For, while his alternative status may be ideologically consonant with Russo and Dyer, it is, I would submit, nevertheless different both from what they tell us as well as what we might readily consider conventional sexuality and gender. While it is true that Anthony is a gay male who exhibits violence in this lm, he does so not as part of the gay couple Russo speaks to in his study. Instead, Anthony demonstrates his violence as reaction to the violence threatened on him and his date by the group of gay bashers with bats in hand. He thus turns the table on them and actually threatens to bash, in his own words, the fag bashers. His alternative sexuality, then, is not only problematic to the relationship to the conventional conation of sexuality and gender, as Dyer would have it, but it is problematic to the conventional conation of homosexuality. Anthony, that is, as sign, similar to other familiar signs we have seen thus fari.e., his black date and his motherare part and parcel of DeCerchios sui generis ideology, which continuously upsets what I have alluded to earlier as the semiotic apple cart.
Some Concluding Thoughts

As a police ofcer in good standingfor we may readily read his earlier statement about what he would do were he not a police ofcer Anthonys role in his encounter with Jimmy is transformed into the more specic dual role of the anti-gay-bashing police ofcer and, in this role, also the teacher of the possibly redeemable homophobe. From the beginning of this short lm, in both the city scene and in the suburb, race and
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ethnicity play equally important and integral parts. As seen above, in Nunzios Second Cousin all three themes recur and serve as integral components of DeCerchios visione del mondo and, at the same time, rufe, to a great degree, the dominant cultures feathers. Anthonys nal lesson to Jimmy underscores, on the one hand, the difference between them as he tries to kiss Jimmy who ghts to move away; yet, on the other hand, Jimmys wrestling experience mirrors Anthonys, as the latter states: Bashing fags is not going to stop you from becoming one. You got to trust me. I tried it! It is in fact the cultural conundrum of homosexualitys originthe question of nature vs. nurturethat is underscored here and ultimately closes this brief lm, leaving to Jimmyas well as to the spectatorhis own semiotic freedomand we might add responsibilityfor constructing meaning. What ultimately becomes apparent in this small and delightful 33 lm is, as Mary Jo Bona stated in her introduction to FUORI, that cultural and sexual identities resist a unitary denition, allowing for multitextured identities that embrace nuance and interpret change as necessary 34 to ongoing development. What this lm also suggests is the necessity of a continual renegotiation with ones ethnic and sexual identities, and to some extent, an appreciation of the possibilities of richness that may result from a conuence of their Italian/American and lesbian/gay cultures. For this, we can say, is the lesson for all Jimmys to learnsince he is a nice boy, as Mrs. Randazzo states, saying good-bye to him, but just a little misguided, as Anthony had stated earlier in the evening, before Jimmy arrived. In conclusion then, Tom DeCerchio chose a narrative of both past and present that underscores his characters identity as initially homosexual, while at the same time uncovering his ethnic identity as Italian American. He chooses rst to introduce the more taboo identity of sexuality, identied also with racial difference, only then to transform it, by
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downplaying race and substituting it with the specic ethnic quality of Italian America. In so doing, he demonstrates his keen awareness of both the intersection and eventual clashespecially in those Little Italys that are Cicero, Illinoisbetween not only ethnicity and class, and ethnicity and community, buteven more signicantly chargedbetween ethnicity and sexual identity. Nunzios Second Cousin thus brings to the fore notions of sexual orientation, race, and ethnicity, offering a visione del mondo that transgresses, and, I might add, rejects, all that is traditional, conformist, and racially masculinist.
Notes
This is an expanded version of what I presented at the conference Adjusting Sites, 46 October 1997, Padova, Italy, now published in Adjusting Sites: New Essays in Italian American Studies, ed. William Boelhower and Rocco Pallone. 1. 2. Date is the word Anthony uses when he refers to him in his conversation with the boys from Cicero. For those who know the reputation of Cicero, Illinois, vis--vis racial awareness, one can only ascribe a keen sense of irony, as well as a strong dose of parody, to DeCerchios use of this Chicago suburb as the main characters home town. As such, it thus gures as the geographical analogue to Queenss Howard Beach and New Yorks Bensonhurst. Let us not lose the metaphoric irony in the image of the pistol, an obvious phallic symbol ubiquitous throughout society. On the other hand, one might see Jimmys gaydar in good form. For, as we shall see later, there is some ambiguity vis--vis Jimmys sexuality, as parallels between his and Anthonys upbringing come to the fore during dinner at Anthonys mothers house.
3. 4.
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Here, I am relying on my notion of the retro-lector, a special construct that affords us the possibility to engage in a reverse form of intertextuality so that those signs that come later serve as semiotic intertexts for those previous signs which may, or may not, have proven to be of a difcult signifying nature. See my Aldo Palazzeschis riessi: Toward a Notion of a Retro-Lector, The American Journal of Semiotics 7.1/2 (1990): 10524. 6. I would also point out that DeCerchio has opted for this expression marking the past as opposed to the future-looking synonymous phrase: to knock [someone] into next week. 7. See e.g. Kenneth Dover, Greek Homosexuality; Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure; John J. Winkler, The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece; and David M. Halperin One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love. 8. For more on this notion, see Roland Barthes, S/Z, trans. Richard Miller. 9. What becomes ethnically curious here is that Anthony is Anthony outside his ethnic enclave; however, once he enters the Italian/American neighborhood of Cicero, he is now Tony. 10. Moreover, like the carefree attitude of Anthonys black date, it underscores the post-Stonewall conviction that being gay can be other than tragic and melancholy. 11. The legendary large penis is also an attribute imputed to black men, for which another form of identity may seem to rise to the surface. Let us not forget that Italians, southern Italians in particular, were often considered people of color; this was especially true of the opinion of early sociologists who looked upon most immigrant groups as non-white. I would also add that this attribution of non-
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Anthony Julian Tamburri whiteness is now a voluntary characteristic a number of Italian Americans of southern Italian descent have adopted. I refer the reader to chapter 1, note 4, for a reminder of Barthess notions of functions, neclei, catalysers, and the like. Robert Viscusi (Breaking the Silence: Strategic Imperatives for Italian American Culture) and Jerome Krase (Bensonhurst, Brooklyn: Italian-American Victimizers and Victims Voices in Italian Americana 5.2 [1994]: 4353) are two members of Italian America who have spoken to these issues. First published by Doubleday, Blood of My Blood was recently republished in its original form in Canada (Guernica, 1996) without any preface or postface that should have contextualized the study, as more than two decades had passed since its 1975 publication. See his Blood of My Blood, especially 33133. Quoted from the Chicago Tribune(April 6, 1995). Ironically, if one hears Judge Ito speak, one immediately notices that he does so in a much more articulate manner than does Mr. DAmato. Judge Itos diction, syntax, and grammar are, in the estimation of some, far and away superior. These comments on Alfonse DAmato are a modied, abbreviated rendition of what appeared in the column Grafti, Voices in Italian Americana 6.1 (1995): 2056. To our chagrin, DAmato has company in his peculiar world of ethnic insensitivity. In January 1998, we read about John Lombardis ignorance of not knowing his biscotti from his cookies when, in wanting to compliment, as he stated afterwards, his new boss, he referred to him as an oreo, since the new chancellor, black, according to Lombardi, knows how to deal with the white powerbrokers of the academic world.
12. 13.
14.
15. 16. 17.
18.
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19. See her collection of stories, A Place of Light, and her single story Drowning. 20. See her Coming Our Olive in the Lesbian Community, in Social Pluralism and Literary History: The Literature of the Italian Emigration, ed. and intro. Francesco Loriggio 16175. 21. See his essay, Are Italian Americans Just White Folks, Through the Looking Glass: Italian and Italian/American Images in the Media, ed. Mary Jo Bona and Anthony Julian Tamburri 317. 22. See his The Country of Absence 549. 23. See her Breaking the Silence for Italian-American Women: Maligned and Stereotyped, Voices in Italian Americana 4.1 (1993): 114. 24. Giosefs concern for prejudice can be found in her poetry collection Word Wounds and Water Flowers, in her anthology On Prejudice: A Global Perspective, and in her most recent collection of ction, In Bed with the Exotic Enemy, especially The Bleeding Mimosa, Beyond the Spit of Hate, and Equal Opportunity Employer. 25. Patrick J. Gallo, Ethnic Alienation: The Italian-Americans 209. 26. See his Race, Culture, and Communications: Looking Backward and Forward at Cultural Studies, Rethinking Marxism 5.1 (1992): 1018. 27. As we shall see, such a scene is reminiscent of the kiss that takes place between the Madonna character and the black Christ in Madonnas music video Like a Prayer (1989). 28. For an excellent excursus on the origins of metaphor and its semiotic relationship to the contemporary world, see John T. Kirby, Aristotle on Metaphor, American Journal of Philology 118 (1997): 51754.
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29. I underscore supercially precisely because homosexuality is not as rare among athletes as some would have us believe. 30. The cannolo, for those who do not know, is a dessert of sweet dough baked in tubular form with a ricotta-based lling. 31. Vito Russo, The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies 164. 32. Richard Dyer, The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations 40. 33. See her introduction, Gorgeous Identities: Gay and Lesbian Italian/American Writers, FUORI: Essays by Italian/American Lesbians and Gays, ed. A. J. Tamburri, VIA Folios 6: 112. 34. See also Bonas epigraph from Stuart Hall: [Cultural identity] is not something which already exists, transcending place, time, history and culture. . . . Far from being eternally xed in some essentialized past, [cultural identities] are subject to the continual play of history, culture and power. Far from being grounded in a mere recovery of the past, which is waiting to be found, and which, when found, will secure our sense of ourselves into eternity, identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past (Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation, Framework 36 [1989]: 69).
Music Videos
Rock Videos as Social Narratives

Madonnas Like a Prayer and Justify My Love Bending Rules
When Madonna grabs her crotch the social order is effectively transgressed. Chip Wells, Florida State University Poor is the man whose pleasures depend on the permission of another. Justify My Love
Preliminary Thoughts
Of the numerous things Madonna calls to the foreor, for that matter, any of her performancesis how little society tends to tolerate ambition (and success) in women. Lest we forget that still today women feel the strains, the pushes and pulls, of what it means to be a successful, inde1 pendent woman in a world still grounded in patriarchy. Madonnas vid2 eos seem to have always caused a stir for one reason or another. Too sexual; too provocative; too much skin; undergarments as outerwear; little boys in peep shows; women in submissive positions; etc. The litany is ever-long, and it seems no one will give her a breaknot that she really needs one! As will become apparent in the following pages, a Madonna videoLike a Prayer and Justify My Love especiallyoften exudes a female sui generis ideology, independent of the usual patriarchal control. In so being, this female ideology dees the typical male gaze in not af55
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fording the male his usual position of control. In a Madonna video, in fact, if the male does gaze, his control of the gaze is often re-appropriated 3 by Madonna, the protagonist. Sexuality constitutes both a prominent and problematic theme of Madonnas music/performance but it is not always all-encompassing. Religion and race play equally important and integral parts in her videos. In the rst video discussed herein, all three themes reoccur. In fact, together these three themessexuality, religion, and raceserve as integral components of Madonnas visione del mondo and gure, at the same time, as reasons for which some of her videos rufe, to say the least, the 4 dominant cultures feathers. Thus, it is that sexuality and religionand at this point we should also add gendercombine with race to form a radically different visione del mondo, which now surpasses in its provocative nature most of the so-called mainstream videos that have thus 5 far appeared. The second video, in turn, abandons the religious theme, bringing to the fore notions of sexuality, race, and sexual orientation. Together, both videos offer a visione del mondo that transgresses, and I might add, rejects, as we already saw with DeCerchio, all that is traditional, conformist, and racially masculinist. The manner in which texts are interpreted todaythe theoretical underpinnings of a reader and/or viewers act of disambiguation, that isis much more broad and, for the most part, tolerant of what may once have seemed to be incorrect or inadequate interpretations. Today the reader/viewer has as many rights as the author in the semiotic process. In some cases, in fact, the reader/viewer may even have more rights than the writer/artist. Lest we forget what Italo Calvino had to say about literature and the interpretation thereof; and here, I would contend, one may easily substitute any art form for Calvinos literature, and viewer for his reader. For Calvino, the reader relies on a form of semiosis which places him/her in an interpretive position of superiority vis--vis the au-

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thor. In Cybernetics and Ghosts Calvino considers the decisive moment of literary life [to be] reading (15), by which literature will continue to be a place of privilege within the human consciousness, a way of exercising the potentialities within the system of signs belonging to all societies at all times. The work will continue to be born, to be judged, to be distorted or constantly renewed on contact with the eye of the reader (16). In like manner, he states in Whom Do We Write For that the writer should not merely satisfy the reader; rather, he should be ready to assume a reader who does not yet exist, or a change in the reader (82), a reader who would be more cultured than the writer himself (85; Calvinos emphasis). That is, Calvino foresaw a reader with epistemological, semantic, practical, and methodological requirements he [would] want to compare [as] examples of symbolic procedures and the construction of logical patterns (8485). Such a position is, to be sure, equally valid for the viewer of visual texts. Like a reader, the viewer also depends on his/her own repertoire of knowledge in order to interpret more 7 fully a visual narrative. In making such an analogy between reader and viewer, I do not ignore the validity of the writer/artist. For while it is true that the act of semiosis relies on the individuals time and place and is therefore always new and different with respect to its own historical specicities vis--vis the dominant culturei.e., the canonit is also true that the writer/artist may willy-nilly create for the reader greater difculties in interpretation. Namely, if we accept the premise that languageverbal and/or visual is an ideological medium that can become restrictive and oppressive when its sign system is arbitrarily invested with meanings by those who are empowered to do soi.e., the dominant culture/the canon-makers so too can it become empowering for the purpose of privileging one coding correlation over another (in this case the canon), by rejecting the canonical sign system and, ultimately, denying validity to this sign system
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8
vis--vis the interpretive act of a non canonical text. Then, certain ideological constructs are de-privileged and subsequently awarded an unxed status; they no longer take on a patina of natural facts. Rather, they gure as the arbitrary categories they truly are. All this results in a pluralistic notion of artistic invention and interpretation which, by its very nature, cannot exclude the individualartist and viewerwho has [re]created and developed a different repertoire of signs. What becomes signicant about Like a Prayer and Justify my Love is that while the rst video did not enjoy the privilege of being viewed in a tolerant manner, the second was, in fact, banned before it 9 could even be shown on MTV. I would contend, moreover, that initially, and to some extent still today, each video has been viewed and/or judged according to a more traditional sign system that does not allow for alternative interpretations that may offer a more constructive reading of the videos, and thereby resituate it in a different interpretive locus. For this reason, Madonna rufes the feathers not only of the canon-makers, but those of any other traditional viewer. Indeed, to the extent that her videos can exist, in their opinion, only on the margini.e., not shown on MTV, or, later, shown only in the wee hours of the morningand not in the mainstream, even though she is, for all practical purposes, a mainstream video artist par excellence given the fact that she is one of the top money makers ever in the entertainment industry. As performer/artist, Madonna, in fact, redenes traditional signs, codes, and referents by, at the very least, situating them in new combinations and thus reinvesting 10 them with new interpretants. The proverbial fan was sullied, perhaps for the rst time on a grand scale, with the video, and its, by now, (in)famously canceled TV commercial, Like a Prayer. The power of its opposition was such that less than a year laterthat is, barely two years after a wildly popular acceptance in 1988Madonna found herself vilied in the many headlines
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of the major Italian dailies as heretic par excellence. Indeed, within a period of less than two weeks, the time-span between what were to be her Turin and Rome concerts, the latter was canceled due to lack of sales combined with a wave of last-minute refunds. The second occurrence of a bad odor surrounded Justify My Love. Having bent MTVs rules of nudity once before, baring her breasts in her previous video, Vogue, Madonna believed she was going to get away with it again, as she stated on Nightline, since MTV had included her uncut Vogue in its various programs. But, the censorship and conservatism that is sort of sweeping over the nation, as she dened the 1990 US cultural mindset, set into motion a series of events from which, ultimately, she was to gain. The suppression of MTVs planned December 1, 1990 viewing of the video 1) provoked her appearance on ABCs Nightlinethat, despite the 1:00 A.M. airtime and the threat of war in the Persian Gulf, generated the largest 1990 audience; and, 2) thrust her again into the category of rsts, since her only alternative for getting her video viewed was to package and market it as a single.
Like a Prayer
Like a Prayer focuses primarily on race and religion, both of which play an integral part in Madonnas narrative. One of the rst things to remem11 ber is that much of the video is presented in the form of a dream. Moreover, while the bulk of the videos narrative constitutes a dream sequence, the narrative is often interspersed with events from Madonnas 12 reality. Thus, events from a dream state are combined with those from reality, and together they form a fragmented and disorienting narration. As a consequence, the viewer remains initially confused by the unexpected combination of events and ultimately puzzled by the incongruence of coding correlations that do not appear to lead to a neat process of signication. The viewer, as a result, must rely (= re-lie?) on his/her in-
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tertextual reservoir. If this reservoir is steeped in tradition, if it is not open, if not at least tolerant, to new coding correlations, the vieweri.e., the pre-postmodernist viewercannot decode the resituated sign functions and, therefore, s/he remains at a loss for any sort of successful interpretation. Like a Prayer opens with a type of prologue. There are four quick shots that announce the major theme of the racial dilemma depicted in the video. There is a burning cross, la KKK, a quick shot of one of the white muggers, another quick shot of a black man being escorted by a white policeman, and Madonna, who takes refuge in a church where she immediately nds a statue of a black Christ behind bars. In a discussion following an oral presentation of this video, my labeling this character a black Christ was called into question, as one member of the audience wanted to see him as a reference to a black saint in general or, perhaps, more specically, to San Martin de Porres, a black saint of South America who aided African slaves brought to Per in the seven13 teenth century. My predilection to see a Christ gure in this character derives from his clothing. In traditional Roman Catholic settings, the Christ statues were robed in the same manner as this gure, identical 14 robes and colors. Moreover, if we were to see this video as one of Madonnas many attempts at overturning tradition, I would submit that this reference to a christological imagery suits much better her desire to present a topsy-turvy world of Catholicism than would reference to a saint many of whom may not know. Thus, for me, the dress with which he is presented is much too blatant to ignore. In an analogous story of unfounded accusations, then, we witness the tragedy of a black man unjustly accused of mugging/killing a white woman who, in actuality, is attacked by three white men. When Madonna enters the church, she nds a black Christ behind a barred chapel: he is literally locked in behind a barricade. Before anything else takes place, Madonna lies down on a pew
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and enters into what we may readily consider a dream state, as the lyrics readily imply: I hear your voice, its like an angel sighing I have no choice, I hear your voice Feels like ying I close my eyes, Oh God I think Im falling Out of the sky, I close my eyes Heaven help me. Almost as if she were on the very edge of the beginning of this dream world, she rst encounters a black women who literally thrusts her into the dream state in which Madonna will immediately liberate the black Christ. Once Madonna opens the barred barricade, the black Christ statue comes to life, whispers something in her ear, kisses her good-bye on the forehead, and exits the church. An intriguing point here is Madonnas manipulation of the messianic theme. First, as mentioned above, Madonnas Christ is black, an aspect incongruent to the Catholic church. Second, Madonna herself becomes Christ-like in that she receives the stigmata from the knife that falls from the Christ statue. This is underscored, in a sense, by the lyrics when she sings Youre here with me as she picks up the knife only to drop it quickly after receiving stigmata. Third, in yet another sense, Madonna also appears Christ-like in that she has delivered, so to speak, the imprisoned black Christ. The videos narrative is perhaps best characterized by the following lyrics: Like a dream, no end and no beginning Youre here with me, its like a dream Let the choir sing.
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They tell the viewer, among other things, that the narration oscillates between what seems to be the real and the non-reali.e., the abovementioned dream statealbeit a mimetic one. The dramatic event of the video that takes place at this point is the mugging/killing of the white woman by three white men. The quick menacing glance toward Madonna by one of the attackers is quickly juxtaposed to the appearance of the black man who immediately comes to the aid of the wounded woman. But, to his misfortune, a police car pulls up and the ofcers immediately assume he is responsible for the crime. As the black man is taken away by the policea scene already anticipated in the prologue the white attacker smugly glances at Madonna as if to signal his satisfaction at getting away with the crime. It is at this point that the racial element is underscored visually and, to a strong degree, verbally. What follows is a scene in which Madonna is in a large eld of burning crosses la KKKanother scene anticipated in the prologuesinging the following lyrics: Life is a mystery, everyone must stand alone I hear you call my name And it feels like home Just like a prayer, your voice can take me there Just like a muse to me You are a mystery Just like a dream, you are not what you seem Just like a prayer No choice Your voice can take me there At rst glance the lyrics appear to contain a straight-forward quasireligious, moral, and ethical meaning. They can easily have a religious
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connotation in that the mystery constitutes the proverbial mysteries of the Catholic church and all it represents. That everyone must stand alone because, again according to a moral and ethical point of view, everyone is responsible for his/her actions and must respond accordingly. Indeed, as the video progresses, it shifts to an interior shot of the church with a large choir singing, repeating lyrics similar to the above-cited, a scene easily considered a reinforcement of this religious message. Yet, from another perspective, the ultimate meaning of these lyrics can be readily construed as one of general racial dis/harmony among humankind. To be sure, Madonnas church in this video is not the traditional Catholic church one may readily associate with an Italian Ameri15 can. Here, hers is a reconstituted sui generis church lled with blacks only, inclusive of the Christ gure: she is the only white person. As the only white person in the video, Madonnas presence affords the possibility of alternative meaning production. The mystery of the rst stanza, that may, at rst glance, constitute the mysteries of the church, may now constitute the mysteries of the human race and question its tolerance of 16 violent racism. Indeed, one may also include the church when speaking of the human race, since, as stated above, Madonna has reconstituted the notion of church in this video. With Madonna as the addresser and the black Christ/black man as the addressee, the lyrics of the second stanza also undergo a reevaluative semiotic process that is eventually underscored once reconsidered in juxtaposition to the visual image. The key words here are prayer, muse, mystery, dream, and seem. At rst glance, all ve words contribute to the construction of a series of ambiguities, if not non sequiturs. However, when read within the context of what is presented thus far in the videothe black man being unjustly accused of a crimethe phrases in this stanza take on a complex series of meanings that, against the backdrop (here, a literal one) of racial dis/harmony (= the burning crosses),
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seem to follow a certain logic. Prayer connotes hope and inspiration (= your voice can take me there), while muse underscores the second term, especially. And while mystery, on the other hand, may signal the unknown, any sense of fear from the mystery (i.e., not knowing) of the black man is mollied by the analogy to dream, a positive reference point, which is underscored by the lyrics you are not what you seem. As already stated, the entire scene consists of Madonna singing these lyrics against the background of burning crosses la KKK, which, 17 on the one hand, reminds the viewer of the racial/racist element. However, of the twenty-four different camera angles of Madonna in this scene, only two (the rst and the seventeenth) are long shots in which the burning crosses occupy most of the screen: in all the other shots, Madonna is the prevalent gure. This series of shots is then followed by an interior scene of the church in which the black choir, singing repeatedly the second of the above-cited stanzas, welcomes Madonna with open arms. As the choir scene progresses, it is interrupted on a few occasions. The rst is a side-view close-up of the black Christ bending over someone. Before seeing who this is, the scene switches back to the choir. After a quick refrain, we now see Madonna, in a dream-like state, rolling over on the pew where she rst lay down. What follows from here on is a succession of inter-changing scenes which underscores the presence of the blacks and ultimately situates them in an equal if not more signicant position of empowerment in Madonnas sui generis church. The black woman who occupies center stage in the choir scene is a type of priestess in front of whom Madonna eventually kneelsa recollection of the typical ancient baptism scene, this time, however, without the baptismal urn. As the scene progresses, the video switches to a close-up of the black Christ and Madonna about to kiss. But a sudden switch back to the previous scene momentarily interrupts, as if to remind the viewer of the church setting. Once the kiss
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takes place, the screen is lled with a close-up of the two faces, one black the other white, and what follows is a series of six quick scenes underscoring a collision of diametrically opposed racial ideologies. As the camera scans upward above the black Christs head, the following images quickly succeed one another: 1) one large burning cross; 2) Madonna dancing; 3) a eld of burning crosses; 4) a quick, frontal closeup of Madonna with both hands to her mouthtoo quick at regular speed to be sure if she is happy or anguished; 5) a quick, frontal close-up of the wooden Christ statues face cryingthis time tears of blood; and 6) the black man being taken away by the police. At this point, as the choir scene continues with everyone still singing the same stanza and dancing, Madonna is now surrounded by a group of small children, an obvious signal to the future, while two following scenes signal the end of Madonnas dream. First, the statue, now wooden again, assumes its original position; second, the barred chapel in which we rst saw it, now closes. Madonna, in the meantime, awakes and sees the choir now exiting the church in twos. A quick camera shot to the statue behind barsthis time not Madonnas glancereminds the viewer of the black Christ. Once Madonna does glance toward the black Christand at this point the viewer sees only Madonna looking in the direction of the statuewhat she sees is the falsely accused black man behind bars. The barred chapel in which the Christ statue stood is suddenly transformed into a jail, which now holds the black man who tried to rescue the white woman from the white muggers. As witness, Madonna frees the black man and the curtain falls, signaling the end of the storybut not the end of the video. The nal shot before the curtain call is, one might say, a mini-epiloguea close-up, chest-high, of Madonna against, this time, a blurred background of burning crosses. What Madonna eventually does in this video is layer her narrative text to the extent that it consists not only of the reality of a narrative
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text and, therefore, includes the ctive reality one readily assumes the narrative text represents, but she adds to this the dream sequence. To further complicate matters, her dream sequence is consistently interrupted by scenes from the ctive reality, and the boundaries between the one and the other are ultimately blurred. This blurring of textual boundaries is consonant with her overriding theme of the necessity to blur social boundariesi.e., racial, here specicallythat Madonna seems to so readily transcend in most of her videos. The black Christ Madonna frees is, in her ctive reality, the falsely accused black mana parallel too striking to ignore which, here, is underscored by the fact that one actor plays both roles. Madonnas twentieth-century, secular Christ, this black man, an obvious outsider in this video who is falsely accused of committing a crime perpetrated on a white woman by three white men, reies the false accusations launched against the biblical Christ, also an outsider in his own time, whose otherness, in this video, is now represented by, among other things, his skin color. Yet Madonna does not stop at skin color vis--vis the black Christ gure in her blurring of social boundaries. Sexmore precisely, interracial sexconstitutes a signicant and integral component of 18 Madonnas visione del mondo as articulated throughout this video. The unjustly accused black man reminds us of the canonical (i.e., white patriarchy) threat, Black man mugs/kills [read, rapes?] white woman, which leads to the repression and/or suppression of interracial couples, especially black men with white women. Here, Madonna irreverently overturns this notion in a number of ways. First, the kiss between the two is reminiscent of the Sleeping Beauty/Prince Charming fablein this case, however, a black prince brings her back from her sleep state. Second, Madonna implies a willing orgasm with a black, as may be evidenced by the lyrics, Just like a prayer, Ill take you there, sung here by the choirespecially the black priestessas the black Christ bends

19
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over to kiss Madonna. Furthermore, as the scene switches to Madonna dancing in the church, she sings Just like a prayer, your voice can take me there. In sum, Madonna breaks down the traditional virgin/whore dichotomy in this church scene and further layers her text by including a black man/Christ.
Justify My Love
Like Madonnas previous video, Like a Prayer, Justify My Love consists of a story-line, if we may indeed consider it as such, presented to a great extent in a dream state. Moreover, while the bulk of the videos narrative constitutes a dream sequence, the narrative is often interspersed with events from Madonnas [ctive] reality. Thus, events from a dream state are, again, combined with those from [the ctive] reality, and together they form a potentially fragmented and disorienting narration. Indeed, as in Like a Prayer, the viewer here remains initially confused by an unexpected combination of events and thus befuddled by the incongruence of coding correlations which seem to subvert a neat process of signication. The viewer ultimately nds him/herself in the same initial, interpretive dilemma of the viewer of Like a Prayer, depending on his/her predisposition to a post-structural interpretive arsenal. From the very beginning, as Madonna enters the hotel corridor, to the very end, when she leaves her lovershe half-dazed as she exits the room, he half-dazed sprawled on the sofathe characters often emulate states of suspended animation or are presented in, if not as, surrealistic situations. Thus we have, for instance, the various people, in couples or groups of three, lounging around in a state of semi-sleep; then there is the bare-breasted woman who ercely grabs the crotch of the man in 20 chainsMadonnas loveron the sofa; and, nally, there is the recurring octopus-like androgen dressed in black tights who, in addition to
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his/her surrealistic characteristic, often signals a change in scenery throughout the video. As the video begins, Madonna, in a loosely tting black coat over lace lingerie, enters a questionably looking hotel corridor only to immediately meet up with her lover, whom she joins from the end of the hall. A bit tattered looking, but anxious to see her, he moves forward as she squats against the wall and eventually opens her coat, exposing stockings, garters, and bra straps, and continues to erotically, to put it nicely, massage herself. She then pulls herself up against him, openmouthed and ready to kiss, saying: You put this in me so now what, so now what Wanting, needing, waiting, For you to justify my love. What then follows in this video is an array of images, on the one hand familiar and comfortable, on the other unfamiliar and disturbing, which contribute to an overall series of images in conict with one another, thus creating gaps in what would normally be a neat process of communication and interpretation. The dream-like atmosphere may fulll a number of functions in this video. First, from a socio-ideological point of view, it allows Madonna, as artist/auteur, to offer up the images she indeed includes. By couching them in this dream state, they lose some of their potentially scandalizing impact and become, to a certain degree, innocuous, since they are presented not as a reality desired to be concretized, but rather as simple fantasies one enjoys as such. Second, accompanied by a slowmotion effect, the dream state allows the spectator to better view the dynamics on the screen. In this case, as the action slows down, the spectator notices that it is indeed Madonna, and not her lover, who is in charge of
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their actions and deeds. Third, in a manner similar to the second function, this slow-motion effect may indeed also be seen as a narratological compromise, since the sign system in this video is incongruent to what the spectator would normally expect, the slow-motion effect thus takes on a constitutive function with regard to the spectators overall interpretive role in the semiotic process. In this case, the spectator may be in a better position to decipher those codes and referents Madonna had enciphered in such unorthodox imagery. To be sure we may indeed ask, What are we to do with all these images that clash and collide as the video progresses? Crucixes are conspicuously present as Madonna and her lover engage in their pleasures; a Christ gure briey appears as the dynamics seem to shift from the man being in controlher lover is literally on top of herto the woman in controlMadonna now literally on top of him. Indeed, this shot of the woman in controli.e., on topseems to last a bit longer. Also, there is a shift from heterosex to female homosex as a female gure dressed as a male inconspicuously substitutes herself for Madonnas lover, who, suddenly, is virtually framed by their limbs as he looks on, half-dazed, from the sofa. Indeed, if these shots of Madonna on the bottom seem to last longer than when she is on top, let us not forget that the scenes of her on the bottom also consist of a series of changes in which her lover is substituted by the female dressed as male. The transgression of boundaries and behavioral code switching are implicit in the array of different people who inhabit the video. In various forms of masqueradeandrogynous and euphoric/erotic (?) some of the men and women in the video are black, others are white, and others still are Latin as the spectrum of human colors is, here within, represented in its various hues. The same can be said for sexuality. Here, too, there is the representation of all possibilities as female homosex is explicit in the above-mentioned substitution of the female gure for
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Madonnas lover, and male homosex is implicit in a number of the ambiguously dressed gures, both of which seem to be punctuated by the seemingly non-sexed-dressed androgen occupying not necessarily a mere space in between, but, rather, a point of potentiality from which any of the above socio-cultural possibilities can spring forward. Yet, even within a more conventional discourse of male/female roles, codes are switched. One need only recall the Cavaniesque, barebreasted woman in black suspenders and military cap who, with a most condent air, saunters into the room, turns to Madonnas loverwho is now in a body harnessboldly grips his chin to kiss him squarely on the mouth, and continues to reach down and grab his crotch. In the meantime, we hear the following lyrics: Tell me your dreams Am I in them? Tell me your fears Are you scared? Tell me your stories I am not afraid of who you are? Indeed, Madonna, the artist/co-writer/co-director, is extremely aware of what she is doing. On two occasions she, as protagonist in the video, looks directly into the camera, once smiling as the two androgynous gures paint moustaches on each other, the second time laughing as she runs down the hall at the end of the video. Deliberately ambiguous and button-pushing, as she herself characterized this video during her Nightline interview, Madonna indeed displays herself as social construct only to subvert the seemingly conventional image and the viewers initial impression once she has drawn her viewer into her narrative. To be sure, we may say that if traditional feminism says No more masks!, Madonna seems to be saying, We are nothing but masks!, which, to
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some extent, may help to explain her ever-changing array of personae throughout her music and video career.
Postmodernism Performed
Madonnas desire to blur both the formalistic and contextual boundaries of her narrative text and infuse it with re-invested signs of re-situated interpretants, something she had already done successfully in Like a 21 Prayer, and succeeds in repeating in Justify My Love, surely places 22 here within the realm of the postmodern. She is, similar to the true avant-gardists at the beginning of this century, a desecrator of what they considered a stultifying canon. In todays terms, she is, to quote from Franco Ricci, the epitome of the postmodern concept of simultaneity of 23 form, seamlessness of content, synthesis of traditions. Thus, it is within this framework that one can alternativelythat is, successfully (?)view her videos. For the modernist viewer, one rooted in the search for existing absolutes, Madonnas sign system appears contemptuous, if not also contemptible. For the post-modernist viewer, one who is open to, if not in search of, new coding correlations, Madonnas sign system instead appears rejuvenating: her videos indeed present a sign system consisting of manipulated sign functions which ultimately redene the sign according to her own ideological specicities. Surely then, one may recall Lyotards incredulity toward metanarra24 tives, late twentieth centurys increasing suspicion in narratives universal validity, for which artistic invention is no longer considered a depiction of life; rather, it is a depiction of life as it is represented by 25 ideology, since ideology presents what is, in actuality, constructed 26 meaning as something inherent in that which is being represented.
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Notes
I owe a heart-felt debt to Maurizio Viano, who invited me to deliver a lecture at Wellesley College on Madonna and Michael Jackson, many comments of which were dedicated to the two Madonna videos I discuss in this chapter. 1. In this regard one need only recall the 1992 resignation of Doctor Frances Conley from the Stanford University Medical School faculty for reasons of gender insensitivity. Unless otherwise noted, when I say video I also include the lyrics. See, for example, E. Ann Kaplan, Feminist Criticism and Television, Channels of Discourse 21153. Today, to be sure, the notion of dominant culture or canon, as we knew it until not so long ago, may now be placed into question: Who are the members of the dominant culture? What constitutes the canon today as opposed to ten or twenty years ago? These questions notwithstanding, I shall use these terms as aesthetic points of comparison in so far as for dominant culture or canon I understand that which is considered correct, right, artistic, etc. by that community of people that has the power to decide (read, impose?) such issues. I use the word mainstream here since it was Madonna herself who characterized her art as such during her Nightline interview December 3, 1990. See his Cybernetics and Ghosts and Whom Do We Write For in The Uses of Literature, tr. Patrick Creagh. These essays were originally published in 1967. Caveat lector: What I have in mind here is that any reader/viewers response in this semiotic process is, to some degree or another, content- and context-sensitive.
2. 3. 4.
5.
6.
7.
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See, for example, V. N. Volosinov, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik: A sign does not simply exist as a part of realityit reects and refracts another reality. Therefore, it may distort that reality or be true to it, or may perceive it from a special point of view, and so forth. Every sign is subject to the criteria of ideological evaluation (i.e., whether it is true, false, correct, fair, good, etc.). The domain of ideology coincides with the domain of signs. They equate with one another. Wherever a sign is present ideology is present also. Everything ideological possesses semiotic value (10). 9. This obviously recalls the uproar over the video Like a Prayer, which, imagistically, is different from the Pepsi commercial, and yet provoked the cancellation of the commercial despite the fee having already been paid to Madonna. 10. In a similar vein, John Fiske sees Madonnas image not as the model meaning for young girls [sic] in patriarchy, but a site of semiotic struggle between the forces of patriarchal control and feminine [sic] resistance . . . (272). See his British Cultural Studies and Television, Channels of Discourse 25489. For more on my use of Peircean categories of sign (or representamen) and interpretant, I remind the reader of the introduction, note 13. 11. What a curious coincidence that both this video and Martin Scorseses The Last Temptation of Christ contain dream sequences of a sexual nature that caused much uproar and provoked many to deny the artistic and speak to what they saw as the profane, if not heretical, as the Italian public seemed to label it at times. 12. From this point on, I shall use italicsMadonnawhen referring to the protagonist Madonna.
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13. See also Susan McClary, Living to Tell: Madonnas Resurrection of the Fleshy, Genders 7 (Spring 1990): 121. 14. Indeed, this Roman Catholic heritage of mine, in Gadamerian terms, constitutes part of my anterior relationship to the subject matter as viewer/reader of this video. See Gadamer and his notion of the hermeneutic circle in Truth and Method 262. 15. Madonna does wear her ethnicity on her sleeve, and therefore ones initial expectations would conjure up the image of a congregation inclusive of members of her ethnic group, since Italian Americans are predominantly Catholic. 16. Violence and racism are just two of the many social ills Madonna has condemned. AIDS, violence to women, and child abuse, for example, are part of her long list of social cancers. For more specics, see her December 1990 interview on Nightline. 17. In an essay on Madonna and Mariarosy Calleri, Elisabetta Convento suggests the following: Those images of the burning crosses that appear . . . in the video can remind us of the KKK of course, but I would also say that in Christian symbolism we can also associate them with heresy and the kind of death the heretics were condemned to [suffer] (Madonnas Like a Prayer and Calleris Uncovering: Italian/American Women in Search of an Identity [2]). 18. Interracial sex is also an important component of the thematics in Justify My Love, where Madonnas notions of sexuality/sex are further complicated by the articulation of sexual fantasies inclusive of sex partners, men and women, who, on occasion, remind us of the androgyne, as we shall see. 19. The dichotomy of secular and religious love deserves more space than can be dedicated to it in this study. Fiske makes some signicant comments in this regard in his essay, British Cultural Studies and Television (280).
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20. This bare-breasted woman in this video has an uncanny resemblance to Lucia (Charlotte Rampling) in Liliana Cavanis The Night Porter (1974). 21. For more on Like a Prayer, see my The Madonna Complex: Justication of a Prayer, Semiotic Spectrum 17 (April 1992): 12; Carla Freccero, Our Lady of MTV: Madonnas Like a Prayer, Boundary 2 19.2 (Summer 1992): 16383; Ronald B. Scott, Images of Race and Religion in Madonnas Video Like a Prayer: Prayer and Praise, in The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities, and Cultural Theories, ed. Cathy Schwichtenberg (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993) 5777; and Linda Hutcheon, On Irony (New York: Routledge, 1997). A more recent piece of a more general nature that contains approximately one page dedicated to the two videos discussed in this chapter is by Fosca DAcierno, Madonna: The Postmodern Diva as Maculate Conception, in The Italian American Heritage: A Companion to Literature and Arts 4918. 22. E. Ann Kaplan, among others, has already placed Madonna in the category of the postmodern even though Madonnas videos, according to Kaplans simplistic formulaic chart, contain more narrative than is usual for the type (239). 23. See his brief essay, Madonna: Towards a Transvaluation of Values, Metro Magazine (November 1990): 40. 24. Jean-Franois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi with a foreword by Fredric Jameson xiv. 25. Lenard J. Davis, Resisting Novels: Ideology and Fiction 24. 26. Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism 49.
Documentaries
Will Parrinellos Little Italy

People Telling Their Own Stories
Lest we forget!Ralph Fasanella The New York Daily News described Little Italy as a lm very tenderly told [that] bursts with heart, humor, warmth, tradition and respect; and the San Francisco Examiner found it riveting . . . wonderful and uplifting. Written, produced, and directed by Will Parrinello with John Antonelli, of the Mill Valley Film Group, Little Italy won the prestigious Gold Hugo award for Documentary: History/Biography at the 1996 Chicago International Film Festival. Other awards earned include a Golden Gate Award at the 1996 San Francisco International Film Festival and the Award of Creative Merit at the 1996 American International Film Festival. Like the kaleidoscopic country [and] not a melting pot that is the United States, as August Coppola tells us late in this lm, Will Parrinellos narrative is a type of kaleidoscope. Through a mixture of extended interviews, historical footage and photographs, home movies and pictures, and Italian (popular and operatic) and Italian/American music, Parrinello explores the various phenomena of culture, language, ethnic identity, gender, acculturation, and assimilation, or lack thereof. On the one hand, his interviewees tell their stories directly into the camera; on other occasions they are the voice-over for the various pictures and scenes Parrinello draws and constructs from his visual artifacts of newsreels, photos, home movies, and his own camera work. The people we 79
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meet therefore become both his subjects and co-authors as they oscillate between telling their own story as well as the story of others, especially those who can not speak for themselvesthe immigrants who are no longer with us. Such a technique thus further humanizes the stories we are so used to seeing instead in the form of picture-books with captions or the usual documentary with historical footage accompanied by the voice-over of someone we may or may not knowe.g., a well-known cultural gureand who may or may not have any personal connection with the stories being told. Thus, Parrinellos narrators are part and parcel of the story as well as the story-telling, all of which bridges, as much as possible, certain semiotic gaps present in both verbal and visual texts. Little Italy is divided into eight sections: 1. Wrenching in the soul; 2. Non parla italiano?; 3. Table as temple; 4. Power not authority; 5. Passion has us; 6. What they understood is Italian American; 7. I could have been in that village; 8. I didnt know who I was. Thus, emigration, assimilation, food, women, identity, stereotypes, ethnic (re)discovery, and sense of self constitute the thematic foundation of Little Italy. As these cultural phenomena constitute the outline of Italian Americas poly-generational history, they also serve as a type of road-map that the later Italian American must consult in his/her quest for ethnic self-discovery. Section I is very much based on typical imagery of the Italian immigrant and their Italian/American progeny. Here Parrinello gathers an array of voices that communicate the various feelings and sentiments of these early generations. He also does so by including those voices of the second and third generation who engage in a type of comparative analysis of the differences between the groups. His spokespeople include Ellis Island child-immigrants who are now adults, children and grandchildren of those who have experienced some sort of success, and an Italian professor who obviously sees the United States through a different lens.
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Also important in this section, Parrinellos viewer becomes privy to the North/South dilemma, so often ignored by both Italians and those who believe they represent Italy and Italian Americans. The North/South issue is, in fact, much too signicant to ignore, and Parrinello makes sure, by inserting it here, that his viewer is informed early on, especially since a good number of the people who populate his lm are from Southern Italy. As section I lays down a solid foundation for the viewers notion of the Italian Americans immigrant heritage, section II deals with the issues of what the Italian American may and/or should do in order to maintain if not recuperate his/her heritage. Here, in fact, were introduced to, perhaps, Italian Americas most eloquent spokesperson to date, Robert Viscusi, who, with a little bit of help from his paesano August Coppola, spells out a project of maintenance/recuperation of ones ItalianAmericanness through a familiarity of Italian and Italian/American cul2 ture and a solid knowledge of the Italian language. As with members of any ethnic group, the Italian American needs to engage in some form of discovery of her/his italianit through such activities as research and bilingualism, to mention only two 3 signicant aspects. Visually, such a notion is best represented by the paintings of Ralph Fasanella, which Parrinello highlights from the very beginning of his documentarypaintings that depict the humble beginnings of the Italian immigrant. Indeed, such engagement in a rediscovery and reappropriation of ones italianit is best underscored by the constant appearance in many of Fasanellas paintings of the proverbial phrase, Lest we forget, always conspicuously set-off by a frame of some sort so that the viewers gaze may catch it head-on in his/her line of sight. In fact, it is no small irony, I would submit, that in section II of this lm, it is Ralph Fasanella who tells us that we lose [our] identity when [we] become American, thus underscoring the need to reengage in order
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to maintain both identiers of the ethnic couplet, be it noun or adjective, Italian American. Sections III and IV deal with two Italian and Italian/American icons par excellence: food and the mother gure. Many of the interlocutors tell us how the kitchen is at the center of the temple and that food is the object around which the main ritual revolves. Eating dinner, in plain English, as we are told, is an event. True! But it is more than this, as Italian/American culture is more than food. If there is a critical point to bring to the fore, it is perhaps the emphasis here and in one or two other places in the documentary where the director/cameras eye zeroes in, unfortunately, on those one or two things that underscore some of the less desirable images. For it is not so much the eating, as it is the meeting, that constitutes the event that takes place in the kitchen. Yes, it is the food at the center of the table that gives nourishment, but it is also the conversation during dinner that solidies the family and nourishes its members of those intangibles that we can not easily shoot with the camera; nor can we readily describe them in our writings or include them in the many inventories of ethnic characteristics. The bonding that takes place in the kitchen is thus one that includes, and yet transcends, physical nourishment. The kitchen in both the Italian (read, in Italy) and Italian/American household was the center of the household universe; for along with its function as a place of nourishment, the kitchen was most often the location of the great hearth whose second function was the heat source, since in those times central heating was still a thing of the future. Thus, the kitchen was, especially in the colder months, a place for the family to gather. As a consequence, even after its use as a heat source was no longer necessary, the kitchen maintained its function in the various paesi whence many an immigrant came, as it continued to be in the Italian Americans household, and also as a meeting place for the family
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to discuss those important issues that needed the requisite attention. Vis4 cusi and Coppola happily raise the kitchen to this level in Little Italy. The mother gure, mamma, is introduced to us with an array of photos accompanied by the background music of the eponymous song, Mamma. Indeed, who better than Jerry Vale to sing, who, along with Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, and Perry Como, was among the top Italian/American crooners par excellence of the late fties, sixties, and early seventies and made the song famous in the United States. The main point here in Parrinellos lm is that while the woman seems to be in a position of inferiority, it is really she who rules the roost. True matriarchy, were lead to believe in Little Italy, makes men think theyre in charge, when instead the woman actually inuences all the decision-making to her liking. The emphasis on the womans ability to rule the roost, so to speak, is such that one of Parrinellos co-narrators sees man belittled in USA culture. Such notions of quasi-absolute power endowed upon Italian and Italian/American women seem somewhat out of line with a good deal of the sociological, literary, and lmic representations of the female, be she Italian in Italy or Italian/American in the United States. One need only peruse some of the more popular books and essays on the subject to see that the Italian and Italian/American female did not enjoy a desirable position in the society in which she lived. Be it a perusal through some of the more popular ction or the more noted sociological and anthropological studies, one would nd that the Italian or Italian/American woman lived within a delineated framework, as a certain behavioral pattern was expected of her, and other behavior was eschewed. Carlo Levis autobiographical novel, Christ Stopped at Eboli, offers us a picture of village life in general, as well as a complex portrait of the female within those village mores we come to know, especially through the character 5 Giulia. Many of Levis observations are reiterated in other non-ctional work, such as Charlotte Chapmans and Ann Cornilesons respective es-
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says on Southern Italy. The Italian immigrant-woman in the United States often experienced a parallel life. In literature, Mario Puzos A Fortunate Pilgrim and Helen Barolinis Umbertina both portray the trials 7 and tribulations the immigrant woman often endured. Valentine Rossilli Winsey, in turn, analyzed early on similarities in his keen essay on the 8 preWorld War I immigrant woman. Finally, with regard to lm, the waters may seem muddy a bit, but certain lms, I would submit, bare out my point of a marginalized position for women in Italian America. Take, for example, Nancy Savocas True Love (1989) or Household Saints (1993); one might also consider the females position in such classics as 9 The Godfather (1972) and Mean Streets (1973). Entitled Passion has us, section V deals with the gure of the effusive Italian and Italian American. Be it the philosophy of carpe diem, or some other trait we might associate with the Mediterranean individual, we see here that passion is something presented as a quasi-somaticethnic characteristic. It is something I cant turn off, says one of Parrinellos many co-narrators. It is, as Diane Di Prima adds, full-out attention, full-out love. It is to a certain degree more than any of the above and perhaps best dened here in the lm as a sense-of-self in a culture that denies self, especially that of the other. To be sure, Italian immigrants and their progeny surely have and continue to represent different variations, at different times, of the self of the other. Thus, I would submit, it is precisely this sense of otherness, to some degree, that the Italian American needs to cultivate. It is indeed the ip-side, I would also argue, of what I have referred to thus far as the rediscovery and/or reinvention of ones italianit. For it is true, as Larry DiStasi tells us in section VI, that we are in a type of never-never land, [being] neither the one or the other. But we need to be sure that we know who we are as we occupy this space: hence the rediscovery and reinvention, which can only come about through a method of educationsomething I referred to earlier as
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ethnic self-discovery, analogous to Viscusis strategic imperatives. This accomplished, it becomes clear that there is absolutely nothing wrong with inhabiting the interstitial space that is Italian America, thus considering it more in a positive sense and not as a place where one is stuck, as we are told. For sure, especially in todays world of postmodernist thought and globalization, the interstice affords the informed other the opportunity to chose, if not alternate his/her experience. This, to some extent, is what we might reconsider Chaz Palmentieris notion to be, when in this section he makes reference to getting the balance. It is the ability to weigh the pros and cons, the weaknesses and strengths, and reconstruct an image of the Italian American that indeed includes all those positive characteristics of the Italian/American individual, regardless of whether said characteristics are Italian, immigrant, or Italian/American. Such an imagistic reconstruction, however, does not afford the Italian American the privilege to rewrite history in order to eliminate that which is also a negative aspect of our past. Thus, the pasta and mobster crap that Marco Greco sees Americans associating as Italian characteristics par excellence may sometimes become a necessary evil. To be sure, this is where one might go off on a tangent and discuss what some consider the validity, both aesthetic and thematic, of certain lms such as The Godfather (1972), Mean Streets (1973), and/or GoodFellas (1989). However, given the scope of this study, I would only state here that sometimes certain works may also invoke a more intense reading that allows the viewer to grasp more rmly the inner semiotic underpinnings of a text. With brief regard to the three lms mentioned above, let us not forget that in each case the so-called mob gure was presented as both a physically violent and, often, a sentimentally devoid individualin nuce, a pathetic and despicable human being. In this regard, then, I would only remind the reader of Don Vitos death in The Godfather. While playing with his grandson, Anthony, he feigns being a monster. Besides the ini-
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tial fear he instills in Anthony, signicant in itself, two other important items stand out: 1) This is the last image we have of Don Corleone, as he runs through the tomato plants, rst chasing then being chased by his grandson; 2) As he lies dying, unbeknownst to his grandson, Anthony begins to spray him with what we can only assume to be insect repellent, if not, given the dramatic date of the scene, DDT. Such a combination of events is too signicant to ignore; it is almost as if the future generationthe sign of which is Anthonyhere now rebuffs the old world of 10 organized crime. In addition, we must not forget that the subsequent scenes are those where Michael proves to be the cold-hearted person he truly has become: what follows are the intertwining scenes of the ve murders being performed at Michaels command, as he stands in as godfather to his sisters child, the one who will soon be a widow, the killing of his brother-in-law also at Michaels command. This reprehensible individual should surely not be high-lighted in any positive manner in what we might consider the Italian/American cinema; however, the reprehensibility of these Maa individuals is brought to the fore, as we see above, and censorship, when their presence is necessary in the story-telling, becomes an ironic form of aesthetic bullying. Section VII is perhaps the most ironic part of the documentary. For if we were to point out an infelicity or two, I would include Parrinellos choice of narrator here in a section dedicated to going back to Italy; it is not a happy one. If there is an American writer of Italian descent who has proven to be less helpful even in situations that were to be otherwise, it is Gay Talese. How ironic for Talese to be one of the main interviewees in a lm where 1) many of the interviewees are most informed about their Italian Americanness, either through personal or professional interests, and 2) a good number of the interviewees decry the presence of the Maa. With regard to the second point, Talese made his reputation, to a signicant degree, with a book on the very same subject

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matter that he decries: Honor Thy Father dealt with the reputed gangster Joe Bonanno and his family, both intimate and extended. In addition, and with regard to the rst point, Talese could not have done any better to set back further the cause for Italian/American literature, when he published a front-page piece entitled, Where are the Italian-American Nov12 elists? In a somewhat self-centered rant on the lack of Italian/American writers, Talese only went on to demonstrate his ignorance on the subject. Instead, he could have saved the New York Times paper; and for other people well-informed on the subject, he could have avoided causing a bad case of agida, had he only consulted the necessary works that were available to him at the time in any decent municipal or college/university library. Rose Basile Greens 1974 book on the subject matter, The Italian-American Novel: A Documentation of the Interaction 13 between Two Cultures, lists well over 200 novelists in its bibliography, and VIA and Italian Americana have continued to bring to the fore the writings of both young and established American writers of Italian de14 scent. The case of Gay Talese is not at all uncommon among Italian Americans who, as we say in our various Little Italies, made it big. Often these individuals are called on to be a sort of spokesperson for Italian Americans. In some cases we have excellent results; in other cases we are left, at the very least, perplexed by the hubris certain coethics of ours seem to possess when it comes to expounding on Italian/American culture. Taleses case is further underscored, albeit subtly, by the fact that he has, so gladly it seems, Americanized the pronunciation of his surname. Other examples come to mind. I would only make brief reference to the businessman who, in his already-made speech, refers to Giambattista Vico as a Renaissance thinker, or the medical doctor who coedits a book on Italian/American culture. My intention here is by no means to engage in a discourse of territoriality: however, I am quite sure that nei-
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ther of these two gentlemen would want any literary scholar either to keep their books, or perform surgery on them or their relatives. But this, too, is part of the plight of the Italian American: to have those not necessarily well-informed for the occasion, but who have had success in other totally unrelated elds, expound on the overall, cultural landscape of Italian America. The notion of identity is reserved for the nal section of the lm. Here, in section VIII, as we follow our narrators throughout their composite voyage from the docks of New York and the marina of San Fran15 cisco, we come to understand that being Italian American is [indeed] a riddle, as Robert Viscusi tells us in his narrative interventions; for the ethnic individual can not avoid the constant state of cultural negotiation in which s/he must engage vis--vis the dominant cultural paradigm after s/he has consciously rediscovered and deliberately reappropriated his/her 16 Italian Americanness. This, in fact, is what we witness in Little Italy; and in so doing, we also discover that all the Little Italys, those neighborhoods in most cities that became a refuge from that early hostile culture, has also become for the later generations a place to renew bonds with old friends and relatives and, ultimately, revitalize Italian and Italian/American customs and traditions. Little Italy is both an intimate and profound journey into that often misrepresented world of Italian America. A universe often misunderstood by the medias stereotypical representations of Italian Americans, Parrinello succeeds in bringing to the fore the real issues of Italian America vis--vis its past, present, and future. Parrinello draws on the experiences of artists and artisans (Ralph Fasanella, Chris Pomodoro), professors (Donna Gabaccia, Paolo Palumbo, Robert Viscusi, and August Coppola), writers (Diane di Prima, Larry DiStasi, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and Gay Talese), actors/writers (Chaz Palmentieri, Marco Greco), and other not-so-famous people primarily from the San Fran-
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cisco and New York areas. Indeed, it is this ecumenical aspect of Parrinellos video that places it above many of the other documentaries done thus far. For he weaves his story from the words of Italian Americans, from all walks of life, and from both the east and west coasts. Documentaries like Little Italy may often run the risk of indulging in both a defensive and overwhelming nostalgia, extolling the virtues of that which really underscored the very stereotypes the members of the ethnic group eschewed while complaining about the unidentiable and ubiquitous they who supposedly held the group down. Parrinello, to his credit, instead has skillfully avoided this trap; while his interviewees mention the struggles they or their parents and grandparents have endured, they do speak more to the various triumphs these very same people accomplished despite the various roadblocks they encountered. Thus, a positive tone subtends the entire video; and Parrinellos viewer, especially the Italian American, comes away with a sense of gleeful triumph and pride for his/her groups success. Through this video more than others, to close with Larry Di-Stasis words, the Italian American public [may nd] its own story, its real story.
Notes
1. 2. 3. Little Italy. Will Parrinello, producer & director. Mill Valley Film Group, 1995. 55 minutes. I have in mind Robert Viscusis seminal essay Breaking the Silence. Along with Viscusis seminal essay Breaking the Silence, see also his more recent engagement in the newly born magazine Bridge 4 (1998): 7173. I am reminded of the kitchen scenes in Moonstruckthe lm many Italian Americans seem to disdain, includes a couple of kitchen scenes where the most important of issues are discussed.
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90 5. 6. 7.
Anthony Julian Tamburri Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli. See Charlotte Gowers Chapman, Milocca, A Sicilian Village; and Ann Cornileson, Women of the Shadows. See Mario Puzo, A Fortunate Pilgrim; and Helen Barolini, Umbertina, now available from Feminist Press, 1999. For an early, critical analyses of the gure of the female in literature, see Rose Basile Green, The Italian Immigrant Woman in American Literature, in The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America 342. One should also look at Mary Jo Bonas work thus far in order to get some idea of the womans position in Italian/American literature. Along with her book, Claiming a Tradition: Italian-American Women Writers, there is also her edited anthology, The Voices We Carry. In addition to Bonas critical writing, one need also consult Edvige Giuntas work on Italian/American women writers, one example being her editorship of the special issue of Voices in Italian Americana (7.2 [1996]), on Italian/American women. Indispensable also, of course, is Helen Barolinis earlier anthology, The Dream Book: Anthology of Italian American Women Writing, which provided us with our rst general look at the Italian/American woman writer. I would also underscore Rachel Guido deVriess Tender Warriors, and Gianna Patriarcas poetry collection, Italian Women and Other Tragedies. In addition to Valentine Rossilli Winsey, The Italian American Woman Who Arrived in the United States before World War I, Studies in Italian American Social History, ed. Francesco Cordasco, see also Virginia Yans-McLaughlin, Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 18801930; and Betty Boyd Caroli, Robert F. Harney, and Lydio F. Tomasi, eds. The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America.
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11. 12. 13.
14. 15.
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For more on women in Italian/American cinema, see Francesca Canad Sautman, Women of the Shadows: Italian American Women, Ethnicity and Racism in American Cinema, DIFFERENTIA review of italian thought 6/7 (Spring/ Autumn 1994): 21946; and Dawn Esposito, Looking at Myself but Seeing the Other: Images of Italian Americans in the Cinema, The Italian American Review 5.1 (1966): 12635. In retrospect, of course, this scene proves most ironic and truly stands out from the perspective of Godfather III, where it becomes clear that Anthony has totally rebuffed the family business and will do only as he pleases, sing in the opera, despite his fathers wishes to the contrary. Honor They Father. Where Are the Italian-American Novelists? New York Times Book Review 14 Mar. 1993: 1+. Also available to Talese were Helen Barolinis The Dream Book and our own From the Margin: Writings in Italian Americana, for him two possible up-dated companion pieces to Basiles book. Italian Americana dates back to 1974, whereas the rst issue VIA appeared in 1990. While I nd this lm to be one of the most well-balanced of traditional documentaries we have thus far on Italian Americans, I would have preferred to see some attention given also to the Midwest and/or the South. I have in mind both Chicago and New Orleans and their respective surrounding areas. Then I would have been able to write of the composite voyage from the docks of New York to the marina of San Francisco. I also remind the reader of August Coppolas comment I cited at the opening of this chapter, where he states that the United States is, in fact, kaleidoscopic country [and] not a melting pot.
Ethnicity, Sexuality, Gender

Mariarosy Calleris Uncovering
Filmmaking becomes the place for the recreation of the self.Mariarosy Calleri As in other chapters dedicated herein to short lms that do not follow a traditional narrative trajectory, the basic semiotic premise with regard to Uncovering (1996) is that the study of signs proves to be most adequate, if not necessary, in the analysis of aesthetics and cultural artifacts, since it examines the signifying process of such artifacts and reveals the epistemological procedure that invests meaning and value in signs. As we already saw with the other lms examined thus far, here too, then, semiotics becomes the mode of analysis to identify the procedure of how signs may bear meanings in a specic sign system, as are those we nd in this lm. Uncovering exudes a sui generis ideology independent of the usual white, hetero-patriarchal control. As such, this counter-hetero, non-white ideology dees the typical white, hetero-[fe]male-sexual gaze in not affording the viewer his/her usual position of control. Indeed, Uncovering is a provocative and delightful short lm that demonstrates, among other things, how members of a post-1980s generation deal with issues of in1 tolerance, be such intolerance steeped in gender, race, or sexuality. Furthermore, from the specic view-point of ethnicity, this lm gures also as a signicant marker of how the [im]migrant Italian living in the United States may perceive the importance and impact of such issues in the United States in the mid-1990s. 93
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Mariarosy Calleris thirteen-minute, experimental documentary Uncovering was a nalist at both the 10th European Media Art Festival (Osnabruck, Germany [1997]) and the Mixed Messages Festival of the 1997 Media Studies Graduate Showcase of The New School of Social Research. Analogous to DeCerchios narrative lm and Parrinellos traditional documentary, Uncovering calls into question a stereotypical semiotic of the Italian [read also, Italian American]. Whereas Parrinellos concern in his documentary was more general in scope, and DeCerchio focused in specically on issues of gayness, Calleri examines the concept of woman, and those notions of the exotic, examined against a backdrop of ethnicity and race. Similar to DeCerchio, then, what Calleri proposes is a new sign system for the narrative, now, of the Italian and Italian/American female. Also, similar to what we saw, Calleri sets up two different sets of sign systems: the traditional, Italian/American sign system of white heterosexuality, which clashes head-on with an Italian/American sign system that has been altered according to womans life situation. Such an examination of clashing sign systems within Italian America is one of the aesthetic characteristics that distinguishes Calleris documentary from Parrinellos. Whereas he cogently sets up the usual dialectic of Italian America vis--vis the dominant United States, cultural paradigm in Little Italyonly hinting at the internal differences within Italian AmericaCalleri tackles head-on the issue of internal differences, and implicit, instead in Uncovering, is the dialectic that is explicit in Parrinellos documentary. What we thus nd in this experimental documentary is that this Italian/American female occupies a space that is contrary to the stereotype. No longer at home in the kitchen, nor appendage to her male partner, she sheds all and any sort of prudery both in her physical expression and her male preferences. Throughout a good deal of the lm we bear witness to the naked body of the Italian woman. In a caress during the
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middle minutes of the lm, she and a naked African/American male constitute the visual backdrop for a long series of answers to the rst of 2 three questions: What characterizes an Italian woman? She metamorphoses, we come to see, from that of a woman with a great body and an accent, . . . very warm, very family oriented, [and] a great cook, to sexy, beautiful, with a lot of attitude, . . . a lot of umph, very sensual, . . . a very powerful woman, to sophisticated. Such a metamorphosis is signaled in a most articulate manner. Our very rst image of woman appears at the opening of the lm: she is woman with camera, as the credits tell us, an obvious allusion, we may assume, to the process of lmmaking itself. But, once the series of questions and answers begins, with which we may characterize the heart of the documentarys narrative, our next image of woman is a mannequin in a store window dressed in a brides gown. This is then juxtaposed to the bi-racial couple which has been set-off from the previous image by a few moments of a blank screen framed in black, another sign clamoring quite loudly in what we will see is, from a traditional view-point, a cacophony of signs and sign-functions. Indeed numerous functions of these various signs, much too signicant to ignore in this opening series, come to the fore. First, we seem to have two different narrations taking place simultaneously. The woman with camera seems to be set-off as one narrative, juxtaposed to the second narrative of the mannequin in a store window dressed in a brides gown, the biracial couple, and the voice-overs. But the woman with camera is ultimately signaled in the second narrative by the presence of the blank screen, which serves as a type of reminder of the camera if not, better still, the very act of lmmaking. This blank screen, moreover, may have a second, alternative function; for while it is true that this blank screen may very well signal the process of lmmaking, it may also signal a cue for the process of lm viewing. It may, concomitantly, I would
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tantly, I would add, easily represent the proverbial tabula rasa which, here, is necessary for the viewer to possess in order to grasp more rmly 3 Calleris sui generis gendered, ethnic sign system. A second function that comes to the fore concerns the mannequin in the store window dressed as a bride. A more traditional imagistic representation would be difcult to nd. Equally signicant is her position in this opening series; she is literally bracketed between the woman with camera and the biracial couple, each of whom, we come to know, are representative signs of Calleris sui generis sign system. Therefore this mannequin dressed as a bride, indeed a simulacrum, we might say, is the sign par excellence of the traditional Italian female who is now placed under erasure, to a certain degree, as she is shadowed by the less traditional gures of the Italian woman. For let us also not forget that the mannequin qua simulacrum is the typical ectomorph we see in many shop windows, advertisements, and other public fora that have obscured a healthy view of the female. More anorexic than not, these svelte gures may often impact negatively on a young woman sense-of-self, as some 4 studies have already shown. Calleris female, instead, is the opposite. Beginning with the female half of the biracial couple, it is clear we are dealing with a woman who clearly falls into the category of the endomorph. By no means overweight, in a general sense, but surely heavier than the ectomorphs were accustomed to seeing, this women is the descendent, we might say, of the female models of Titian, Ruben, and the like. In fact, later in the lm, we have at least three examples of the healthy looking female, images that are juxtaposed in some cases to the ever-recurring mannequin: 1) the quick cut-aways to the Renaissance portraits of lounging women either in Titian or other Italian Renaissance painters; 2) the quick cut-aways to photos of the young and buxom Soa Loren (which may also be a bit ironic, but we can not ignore her consistent presence here in the second half of the lm as a counterpoint to the
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mannequin bride); and the entire bathroom scene of our woman in panties, whose shapely body is much more consonant with one of Titians women than those we nd in todays world of advertising. To digress briey, we would be remiss not to mention this womans activity in the bathroom. Basically, she is applying make-up to her face, as if getting ready to go out for the afternoon or evening. There is, however, a curious turn of events: as soon as she nishes applying her make-up, she proceeds to wash her face, thus taking off, discarding, if not erasing, all that which she had just applied on to her person. In so doing, she rejects, we might readily assume, that traditional role (make-up = mask) society often asks of woman. As an aside, I would remind the reader that mascara is very similar to the Italian word maschera (= mask); I would also point out that the word truccarsi (to make oneself up) has as its root trucco, which in Italian can mean either make-up or trick of some sort, where the trick here, at rst glance, might be seen as played on the woman. But, to the contrary, it is Calleris woman who plays a trick on society by eventually ridding herself of the often imposed mask. These, to continue, are the women who populate Calleris sui generis sign system, not the mannequin as bride. And, in this regard, let us also not lose the irony in Calleris use of the mannequin as a counterpoint; for the mannequin may surely represent a sort of automatism which, in a male-female relationship in a male-centered context, can easily be translated into excessive obedience on the females part. Thus all of the above, I would submit, leads us to yet another signicant aspect of the biracial couple. For as the voice-over accompanies most of the above-mentioned scenes of the white female and black male caressing, we see their bodies but not their faces. In fact, we only see the womans face toward the end of the lm, underscoring, I would suggest, each ones everypersonness, signifying thereby not so much their individuality of personhood but rather their generality of gender, ethnicity, and
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race, which here clamors much more loudly given the broad spectrum these signs must re-present. The remaining two questions in Uncovering are: How would you describe an Italian woman? and What makes her different from an American woman? to which an array of responses ow. With regard to the second of our three questions, two of the more signicant responses are: a) Brunette, thats all I can think of. and b) Olive skin, dark hair, 5 attractive as far as dark eyes, wilder, southerner. Both responses call to mind the notion of Italians, especially Southern Italians, as people of color. Let us not forget that this is not so foreign a notion among a good number of Italian Americans. I remind the reader of both the essays and creative works of some people Ive already mentioned earlier in this study vis--vis the relationship between Italian Americans and blacks: e.g., Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum, Mary Bucci Bush, Jerome Krase, Rose Romano, Pasquale Verdicchio, Maurizio Viano, and Robert Viscusi. All this is then underscored in one of the answers to the third question, when the man responds: More white women or American women are just very passive, an Italian or Hispanic woman would more or less take that extra mile, you know, just to get what she wants. We nd the formula white = American juxtaposed to one of Italian = Hispanic, so that the Italian is indeed part and parcel of a category that we might readily establish as one of color. It is also at this point that the notion of difference is nally punctuated both verbally and visually. In the responses we have seen thus far, the Italian woman is situated in the realm of colorness. In this nal list of responses, yet another one underscores the general notion of difference:
99
You cant generalize, the good thing about Italian women, like all Italians, its that they are so different, you know. [. . .] They are all different, yah. Italian women are not the same, are they? This response is curiously signicant indeed, and, in its own way, nicely ambiguous. The key words here are, of course, generalize and different, both of which underscore plurality; and I would include the adverbial so, which can only emphasize the Italian womans distinction among woman. We also see that the notion of difference is extended to Italians in general; so that while Calleris lm is mostly concerned with the position of the Italian woman, she momentarily takes advantage of the situation here to include in her praise of distinction and singularity also the Italian females brother, so to speak. This is one of the few points where Calleri and Parrinello overlap, as they both speak, each in their own way, to the difference between Italians and the rest of the community in which they live. What also becomes signicant here, among an array of important components, many of which we have discussed, is the use of the adjective Italian, not Italian American. Looking at the lm in its entirely, we may readily understand Italian, here, as an all-encompassing term that includes the Italian in Italy, the Italian immigrant in the US, as also the Italian American. Through such interrogation, the lm both questions and ultimately debunks the stereotypes of the Italian and Italian/American female. Finally, we would be remiss a second time were we not to return to the notion of self-reexivity when we spoke of the woman with camera earlier in this chapter. To continue, we may surely assume that Calleris notion of lmmaking is one that situates it as a privileged mode of communication vis--vis the logos. Besides the obvious fact of her
100 Anthony Julian Tamburri having chosen the visual over the verbal, two instances underscore her predilection for lm. Uncovering ends with Sheila Chandra singing Woman I am calling you. What becomes signicant here, in this regard, is the repetition of the question, as if it were a refrain, Where do I go to nd images of women? where we can not ignore the emphasis obvi6 ously placed on images. Moreover, equally signicant, is what we nd a bit earlier in the lm. Just before the third question is articulated, there is an Italian rap song. Almost as if in code to her Italian-speaking coethnics, Calleri has us hear in Italian without translation: Le cose importanti sono difcili da dire, e poi le parole le 7 rendono stupide e piccole. Words, that is, are totally useless, we see from above. They render the important unimportant: stupid and inconsequential, for all practical purposes. But, I would submit, words are problematic for another reason. For, while it is true that this brief part of the lm may be in code, as I mentioned above, it is also true, we see here, that language has a limited ability in scope; and not just because it renders the important as inconsequential, but it is limiting as to who may or may not understand the message to be communicated. Hence the visual; especially in a lm like Uncovering, where language may enhance the lms communicative act, but is not totally necessary for it to succeed. It is also abundantly clear in Uncovering that Calleri does not want her viewer to lose sight of the fact that s/he is watching a lm and must, therefore, interpret it accordingly. There is an initial set of images framed by the woman with camerathe balustrade and veranda; the initial, grainy quality of the lm that cuts to the balustrade; the sea, seagull, and jet in the sky; the lm framed in black of the seagull; the playground and dollall of which constitute a set of signs enclosed by the second appearance of the woman with camera. The lm framed in black (of the
Italian/American Short Films and Videos 101 seagull), for instance, offers a combination of signs that may be interpreted accordingly: 1) You are watching a lm. Therefore you, as viewer, should be ready to seek out meaning, and gure out how signs may signify herein; 2) The seagull, then, may be the one sign you, viewer, should especially consider: its elusive freedom of ight is surely one obvious interpretation of this agile bird zigzagging about. Indeed, the seagull reappears on a few other occasions, lastly but not leastly, as one of the closing images of Uncovering, in a similarly framed screen which may ultimately underscore its allusive, semiotic freedom of ight. It is, in fact, Calleris semiotic freedom that allows her to construct the lm she does. And, in an analogous sense, it will be up to the viewers semiotic to discover that which we may assume to be part and parcel of her desired semiotic. To be sure, Calleris Uncovering ultimately proposes a new way of viewing the Italian female and her body, physically and conceptually, in her relationship to gender, sexuality, and race. On the screen, that is, Calleri uncovers woman, both literally and metaphorically, vis--vis her relationship to man, accented here by her ethnicity and his race. Calleri, thus, I would suggest, also uncovers her viewers relationship to this triad of gender, race, and ethnicity, as her viewer is left to ponder the thirteen minutes of experimental narrative that exudes such an ideologically charged semiotic.
Notes
1. I use the label post-1980s as a marker precisely because of the decades association with what has now become known as the me generation of the Reagan era, when government itself was considered by many, in its own way, not to be sensitive to issues of civil intolerance. The image of a black and white person occupying the entire screen occurs in two other of our lms in this study. I remind the reader of
2.
102 Anthony Julian Tamburri the close-up shots in Madonnas Like a Prayer and DeCerchios Nunzios Second Cousin. In both cases a kiss occupies the entire screen: in the rst case, the black Christ and Madonna kiss; in the second case, Anthony and his black male date ll the screen as they kiss. One might also want to see this tabula rasa analogous to, for example, Isers gap, or Derridas trace, or even Peirces unlimited semiosis, all of which require a lling in the sign with some form of signicance, be it only preliminary or, if possible, more grounded. For more on the representation of women in cultural productions, see Susan Bordo, Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body; and Mary Russo, The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, and Modernity. Given the Italian context in which Calleri has and continues to work, this description of the Italian woman may have a strange intertext. It is rather consonant with a general description that calls to mind one of Italian literatures most controversial female characters: Giovanni Vergas La Lupa of the eponymous short story. Another repetition that may subtly allude to the visual is the statement, Women [whose/your] wisdom is in your dreams, as if to underscore the visualization of her thoughts. Translation: Important things are difcult to say, and then words make them [seem] stupid and small.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
After-Thoughts
After-Thoughts
Some Concluding Remarks
What should be apparent, rst and foremost, from the previous ve chapters, is the conspicuous interest in their ethnicity some of the so-called newer generation of Italian/American lmmakers exhibit in their respective lms, be such lms a ction, a documentary, or a music video. More signicant, however, is the lens through which they see their Italian/American heritage. While the older generations concentrated more on the by now well-known thematics of immigration and organized crime, as well as the debunking thereof, these younger artists/performers of short lms have added to the general theme of heritage, at various de1 grees, of race, gender, and sexuality. The lms included in this study run the gamut on the reworkings of ethnicity. Grecos Lena Spaghetti is a wistful adventure into what I have shown to be a prime example of liminal ethnicity. There, he constructed a universal narrative of two persons desire for friendship and companionship and, in so doing, succeeded in weaving into his narrative those ethnic signs that so clearly, once uncovered, comprise and thus exude a fundamental Italian Americanness. In a similar manner, Madonnas Like a Prayer also contains Italian/American ethnic markers that gure as liminal interpretants. As part of the background of this videos narrative, we saw that any wellinformed reader with a semiosic sensitivity to Italian America may readily uncover in this narrative an Italian/American repertoire of signs. But this video also brings to the fore themes and motifs we found in other 105
106 Anthony Julian Tamburri short lms examined herein, specically those concerned with issues of race and prejudice. Race, indeed, constitutes a signicant issue in a number of these short lms. And while it is true that lms such as The Godfather and Mean Streets have shown the deplorable racist behavior of those individuals who populate these lms, hardly any Italian/American director has truly dealt up-front and in-depth with the issue in a feature-length lm. To my knowledge, there are two lms by Italian Americans where the race issue vis--vis Italian Americans is in the forefront. The rst is A Bronx Tale (1993), directed by Robert De Niro and written by Chaz Palmenieri, where both racism and race-crossing are integral parts of the lm. The other lm I can recall that includes race-crossing as an integral part of its narrativethough not necessarily vis--vis Italian Americansis the lesser known The Price of Kissing (1997). Written and directed by Vince DiPersio, it tells the story of two white women who have a crush on the same black man. Otherwise, the only well known lmmaker to deal with this issue directly thus far is Spike Lee in his lms Do the Right Thing (1989) and Jungle Fever (1991). Here, instead, we see that race also gures prominently in DeCerchios Nunzios Second Cousin and Calleris Uncovering. All three lmsa ctional narrative, a music video, and a documentaryquestion the status quo of the relationship between whites (read, Italian Americans) and blacks. Race, which has became to some degree an ugly stain in Italian/American his2 tory to our chagrin, is here redened. Similar to Patrick Gallos perspective, these three lmmakers examine the race issue through a similar lens; eschewing the argument of us against them, all three lms underscore instead the hopes and necessity of us and them. Gender and sexuality, to continue, constitute the common denominators of Madonnas Justify My Love and, once again, Uncovering. Both lms call into question the issue of woman and her ability and basic
Italian/American Short Films and Videos 107 right to be able to choose, here couched in the personal issue of ones sexual choices. In Uncovering, one aspect of choice, which we must add to what we have said before, is also synonymous with freedom, is manifested by the womans black partner, as race-crossing is not necessarily a prevalent characteristic of Italian America. But Justify My Love also calls into question homosexuality, as, at one point, we saw Madonnas partner transform, albeit briey, into a woman. Homosexuality, of course, is what also lies at the base of Nunzios Second Cousin, with race as the secondary, though indispensable, motif. Each in its own way, all six lms in this study transgress, to one degree or another, those traditional narrative formats we might readily associate with a more conformist discourse of the Italian/American lmmaker. Even Parrinellos Little Italy examines the conventional themes of Italian/American history through a different lens. In his decision to have an innumerable amount of people tell their own stories, he succeeds in recounting the history of Italian America through a plethora of different voices with a backdrop of lm footage and still photographs that, in the end, constitute a unique narrative that is, like the United States, kaleidoscopic in nature. This, too, we learn from all the lms herein, is the nature of Italian America; it is a community of individuals, each with his/her own likes and dislikes, who share to a certain degree a similar culture and heritage, which in the end is perhaps the greatest challenge of allthe sharing of commonalities and its resultant transcendence of differencenot just to the lmmakers, writers, and the like, but indeed to every member of the community. What each lm has surely succeeded in doing, is to offer to its viewer a new way of seeing Italian America and its many facets. In the end, each lm uncovers its viewers relationship to the internal and external dynamics of all the Little Italys as notions of race, gender, sexuality, companionship, family, and other issues that come to the fore. In this
108 Anthony Julian Tamburri sense, newness becomes the operative word as these lmmakers, each in his/her own way, have succeeded, at these various stages in their careers, in maintaining an artistic freedom that has allowed them to engage in different forms of a sui generis creativity. In so doing they have, therefore, avoided, at all costs, falling victim to the shackles of both a thematic and formalistic tradition, appropriating, as we have now seen, a more liberating and expansive discourse.
Notes
1. Indeed, we should not ignore other Italian Americans in between these two generations who have reworked the thematics of crime in general if not, specically, organized crime. I have in mind Abel Ferraras The Bad Lieutenant and The Funeral. Here I remind the reader of what we saw previously with regard to Alfonse DAmato and John Lombardi, to name two examples.
2.
Select Bibliography
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110 Anthony Julian Tamburri Bona, Mary Jo. Broken Images, Broken Lives: Carmolinas Journey in Tina De Rosas Paper Fish. Melus 14.34 (FallWinter 1987): 87106. Bordo, Susan. Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. Bush, Mary Bucci. Drowning. San Diego: Parentheses Writing Series, 1995. . A Place of Light. New York: Morrow, 1990. Calvino, Italo. Cybernetics and Ghosts. In The Uses of Literature, trans. Patrick Creagh. New York: HB, 1986. . Whom Do We Write For? In The Uses of Literature, trans. Patrick Creagh. New York: HB, 1986. Caroli, Betty Boyd, Robert F. Harney, and Lydio F. Tomasi, eds. The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America. Toronto: The Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1978. Casillo, Robert. Moments in Italian-American Cinema: From Little Caesar to Coppola and Scorsese. In From the Margins: Writings in Italian Americana, ed. Anthony Julian Tamburri, Paolo A. Giordano, and Fred L. Gardaph, 374396. West Lafayette: Purdue UP, 1991. Chapman, Charlotte Gowers. Milocca, A Sicilian Village. Cambridge, MA: Schenkan, 1971. Chatman, Seymour. Story and Discourse. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1978. Convento, Elisabetta. Madonnas Like a Prayer and Calleris Uncovering: Italian/American Women in Search of an Identity, Florida Atlantic Comparative Studies 5 (2002).
Italian/American Short Films and Videos 111 Cornelisen, Ann. Women of the Shadows. New York: Vantage Books, 1977. DAcierno, Fosca. Madonna: The Postmodern Diva as Maculate Conception. In The Italian American Heritage: A Companion to Literature and Arts, ed. Pellegrino DAcierno, 4918. New York: Garland, 1999. Davis, Lenard J. Resisting Novels: Ideology and Fiction. London: Methuen, 1987. deVries, Rachel Guido. Tender Warriors. New York: Firebrand, 1986. Dover, Kenneth. Greek Homosexuality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 1978; 2nd edition 1989. Dyer, Richard. The Matter of Images: Essays on Representations. New York: Routledge, 1993. Eco, Umberto. Intentio Lectoris: The State of the Art. Differentia, review of italian thought 2 (Spring 1988): 14768. . The Role of the Reader. Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1979. Esposito, Dawn. Looking at Myself but Seeing the Other: Images of Italian Americans in the Cinema. The Italian American Review 5.1 (1966): 12635. Firmat, Gustavo Prez. Preliminaries. In Literature and Liminality: Festive Readings in the Hispanic Tradition, xiiixv. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1986. Fiske, John. British Cultural Studies and Television. In Channels of Discourse, ed. Robert C. Allen,25489. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1987. Fontanella, Luigi. Poeti Emigrati ed Emigranti Poeti negli Stati Uniti. Italica 75.2 (1998): 210225.
112 Anthony Julian Tamburri Foucault, Michel. The Use of Pleasure. New York: Routledge, 1985. Freccero, Carla. Our Lady of MTV: Madonnas Like a Prayer. Boundary 2 19.2 (Summer 1992): 16383. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. New York: Continuum, 1988. Gallo, Patrick J. Ethnic Alienation: The Italian-Americans. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1974. Gambino, Richard. Blood of My Blood. Toronto: Guernica, 1996. Gardaph, Fred L. Italian Signs, American Streets: The Evolution of Italian American Narrative. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1996. . Visibility and Invisibility: The Postmodern Prerogative in Italian/American Narrative. Almanacco 2.1 (Spring 1992): 2433. Gioia, Dana. What Is Italian-American Poetry? Poetry Pilot (December 1991): 310. [Reprinted, with a brief postscript, in Voices in Italian Americana 4.2 (1993): 6164, followed by a Response by Maria Mazziotti Gillan (656).] Giosef, Daniela. In Bed with the Exotic Enemy. Greensboro: Avisson P, 1997. . Word Wounds and Water Flowers. West Lafayette: Bordighera, 1995. . Breaking the Silence for Italian-American Women: Maligned and Stereotyped. Voices in Italian Americana 4.1 (1993): 114. . On Prejudice: A Global Perspective. New York: Anchor Doubleday, 1993. Giunta, Edvige. Special Issue on Italian/American Women Writers. Voices in Italian Americana 7.2 (1996).
Italian/American Short Films and Videos 113 Green, Rose Basile. The Italian Immigrant Woman in American Literature. In The Italian Immigrant Woman in North America America. Toronto: The Multicultural History Society of Ontario, 1978. . The Italian-American Novel: A Documentation of the Interaction between Two Culture. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson UP, 1974. Hall, Stuart. Cultural Identity and Cinematic Representation. Framework 36 (1989): 69. . Race, Culture, and Communications: Looking Backward and Forward at Cultural Studies. Rethinking Marxism 5.1 (1992): 10 18. Halperin, David M. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love. New York: Routledge, 1990. Hutcheon, Linda. On Irony. New York: Routledge, 1997. . The Politics of Postmodernism. New York: Routledge, 1989. Iser, Wolfgang. How Acts of Constitution Are Stimulated. In The Act of Reading, 180231. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1978. . The Implied Reader. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1974. Kaplan, E. Ann. Feminist Criticism and Television. In Channels of Discourse, ed. Robert C. Allen, 21153. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1987. Kirby, John T. Aristotle on Metaphor. American Journal of Philology 118 (1997): 51754. Krase, Jerome. Bensonhurst, Brooklyn: Italian-American Victimizers and Victims. Voices in Italian Americana 5.2 (1994): 4353. Lawton, Ben. What Is ItalianAmerican Cinema? Voices in Italian Americana 6.1 (1996) 2751.
114 Anthony Julian Tamburri Lejeune, Phillipe. On Autobiography. Foreword by Paul John Eakin, translated by Katherine Leary. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989. Lentricchia, Frank. Review of Delano in America & Other Early Poems, by John J. Soldo. Italian Americana 1.1 (1974): 1245. Levi, Carlo. Christ Stopped at Eboli. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1947. Levy, Edmund. Making a Winning Shot: How to Write, Direct, and Edit a Short Film. New York: Holt, 1994. Lyotard, Jean-Franois. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Translated Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Foreword by Fredric Jameson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984. McClary, Susan. Living to Tell: Madonnas Resurrection of the Fleshy. Genders 7 (Spring 1990): 121. Merrell, Floyd. Sign, Textuality, World. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1992. Montanari, Massimo. The Culture of Food. London: Blackwell, 1993. Parati, Graziella. Public History Private Stories: Italian Womens Autobiography. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1996. Patriarca, Gianna. Italian Women and Other Tragedies. Toronto: Guernica, 1994. Peirce, C. S. Principles of Philosophy. In Collected Papers, ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1960. . What Is a Sign? (1894). In Philosophical Writings of Peirce, 98104. New York: Dover, 1955. Prince, Gerald. On Textual Readers and Evaluators, VS (Versus) 52/53 (1989): 11320.
Italian/American Short Films and Videos 115 Puzo, Mario. A Fortunate Pilgrim. New York: Putnam, 1963. Ricci, Franco. Disenfranchisement, or Your Life or Your Life. In The Flight of Ulysses: Studies in Honor of Emmanuel Hatzantonis, ed. Augustus A. Mastri. AdI. Studi & Testi 1. Chapel Hill: AdI, 1997. . Madonna: Towards a Transvaluation of Values. Metro Magazine (November 1990): 40. Romano, Rose. Coming Our Olive in the Lesbian Community. In Social Pluralism and Literary History: The Literature of the Italian Emigration, ed. Francesco Loriggio, 16175. Toronto: Guernica, 1996. Russo, Mary. The Female Grotesque: Risk, Excess, and Modernity. New York: Routledge, 1995. Russo, Vito. The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies. Revised edition. New York: Harper and Row, 1987. Sautman, Francesca Canad. Women of the Shadows: Italian American Women, Ethnicity and Racism in American Cinema. Differentia review of italian thought 6/7 (Spring/Autumn 1994): 21946. Scott, Ronald B. Images of Race and Religion in Madonnas Video Like a Prayer: Prayer and Praise. In The Madonna Connection: Representational Politics, Subcultural Identities, and Cultural Theories, ed. Cathy Schwichtenberg, 5777. Boulder, CO: Westview, 1993. Stefanile, Felix. The Country of Absence, 549. West Lafayette, IN: Bordighera, 2000. Talese, Gay. Where Are the Italian-American Novelists? New York Times Book Review 14 Mar. 1993: 1+. Talese, Gay. Honor Thy Father. New York: Doubleday, 1971.
116 Anthony Julian Tamburri Tamburri, Anthony Julian. Black & White, Scungill & Cannoli: Ethnicity and Sexuality in Nunzios Second Cousin. In Adjusting Sites: New Essays in Italian-American Studies, ed. William Boelhower and Rocco Pallone, 183200. Stony Brook, NY: FILibrary, 1999. . Uncovering Ethnicity, Race, and Sexuality in Mariarosy Calleris Uncovering. Bridge 5 (1999): 7275. . A Semiotic of Ethnicity: In (Re)cognition of the Italian/American Writer. Albany, NY: SUNY P, 1998. . The Madonna Complex: Justication of a Prayer. Semiotic Spectrum 17 (April 1992): 12. . To Hyphenate or Not to Hyphenate? The Italian/American Writer: An Other American. Montral: Guernica, 1991. . Aldo Palazzeschis :riessi: Toward a Notion of a RetroLector. The American Journal of Semiotics 7.1/2 (1990): 10524. Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Antistructure,95100. Chicago: Aldine, 1969. Vecoli, Rudolph. Are Italian Americans Just White Folks? In Through the Looking Glass: Italian and Italian/American Images in the Media, ed. Mary Jo Bona and Anthony Julian Tamburri, 317. Staten Island: AIHA, 1996. Viscusi, Robert. From America to Italy in Search of a Mirror. Bridge 4 (1998): 5961. . Breaking the Silence: Strategic Imperatives for Italian American Culture. Voices in Italian Americana 1.1 (1990): 113. Volosinov, V. N. Marxism and the Philosophy of Language. Trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1986.
Italian/American Short Films and Videos 117 Winkler, John J. The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece. New York: Routledge, 1990. Winsey, Valentine Rossilli. The Italian American Woman Who Arrived in the United States before World War I. In Studies in Italian American Social History, ed. Francesco Cordasco. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littleeld, 1975. Yans-McLaughlin, Virginia. Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 18801930. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977.
Ethnic Studies/Film Studies

This book constitutes a first look at the little-known phenomenon of the Italian/American short film. What becomes apparent is the conspicuous interest these members of the newer generation of Italian/American filmmakers exhibit vis--vis their ethnicity, be such films a fiction, a documentary, or a music video. Equally significant is the lens through which they see their Italian/American heritage. While the older generations concentrated more on the by now well-known thematics of immigration and organized crime, as well as the debunking thereof, these younger artists/ performers of short films have added to the general theme of heritage, at various degrees, that of race, gender, and sexuality.
Anthony Julian Tamburri is a professor of Italian at Florida Atlantic University, where he is also chair of the Department of Languages and Linguistics. He is the author of seven other books, including A Semiotic of Ethnicity: In (Re)cognition of the Italian/American Writer and To Hyphenate or Not to Hypenate: The Italian/American Writer: Or, An Other American? and is editor or co-editor of twelve collections, including the best-selling anthology From the Margin (1991/2000) and Screening Ethnicity (2002). He is a co-founding editor of Voices in Italian Americana: A Literary and Cultural Review.
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I talian/Amer ican Shor t Films and Music V ideos

Anthony Julian Tamburri

Purdue University Press

Italian/American Short Films and Music Videos

Italian/American Short Films and Music Videos

Anthony Julian Tamburri

Digital-I Books An imprint of Purdue University Press West Lafayette, Indiana

Copyright 2002 by Purdue University. All rights reserved.

for Fred Gardaph, friend and partner in cultural criminology

Acknowledgments Preliminaries for a Reading An Introduction

Preliminaries for a Reading

Why This Study?

The Short Film

Anthony Julian Tamburri

Italian/American Short Films and Videos

Anthony Julian Tamburri

Italian/American Short Films and Videos

Anthony Julian Tamburri

Italian/American Short Films and Videos

Italian/American Short Films and Videos

Anthony Julian Tamburri

Reading Filming Writing

Italian/American Short Films and Videos

Anthony Julian Tamburri

Italian/American Short Films and Videos

Anthony Julian Tamburri

1 Adults Children Herb Lena

2 Those Looking Herb Lena

3 Substitution Herb Lena

F.L.C. Girl on Bus

F.L.C Girl on Bus

F.L.C Girl on Bus

Italian/American Short Films and Videos

Anthony Julian Tamburri

Italian/American Short Films and Videos

Anthony Julian Tamburri

Italian/American Short Films and Videos

Anthony Julian Tamburri

Italian/American Short Films and Videos

Italian/American Short Films and Videos 7.

10. 11. 12.

Black & White, Scungill & Cannoli

Anthony Julian Tamburri

Italian/American Short Films and Videos

Anthony Julian Tamburri

Italian/American Short Films and Videos

Anthony Julian Tamburri

Italian/American Short Films and Videos

Anthony Julian Tamburri

Italian/American Short Films and Videos

Anthony Julian Tamburri

Italian/American Short Films and Videos

Anthony Julian Tamburri

Italian/American Short Films and Videos

Anthony Julian Tamburri

Italian/American Short Films and Videos

Anthony Julian Tamburri

Italian/American Short Films and Videos

Anthony Julian Tamburri

Some Concluding Thoughts

Italian/American Short Films and Videos

Anthony Julian Tamburri