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Historical Migrations: Italianamerican and American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince
Ethnic Reminiscences: Foundations and Reveries
Commissioned by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), Italianamerican (1974) was first conceived within the wider context of Americaâs planned Bicentennial observances in 1976. Indeed, first screened in its familiar forty-nine-minute form at the 1974 New York Film Festival, and then broadcast as an abbreviated twenty-eight-minute contribution to PBSâs commemorative A Storm of Strangers series, Scorseseâs most elemental and âpersonalâ production was envisioned as an unassuming tribute to the periodâs celebratory ethnic revival.1 âThe mid-1970s,â Matthew Frye Jacobson writes, ârepresented the consolidationâ of a revivified ethnicity in America (2006, 17), and Scorseseâs intimate short film about his parents and their experiences as second-generation Italian Americans is in many ways a representative historical objectâif its everyday backdrop and warm familial accents give it the appearance of a home movie, Italianamericanâs deepest roots can surely be found in the periodâs distinctive political-cultural topography. Jacobson points to the developing interest in âgenealogical researchâ and an associated desire to safeguard assorted types of âheritageâ as defining features of the white ethnic revival, and he explains how they would finally generate novel popular idioms for national belonging in the 1970s. Moreover, and more importantly, he describes a pervasive turn to particularized accounts of Americaâs past during this decade, and this would decisively shift critical understandings of history to the more nebulous dimensions of subjectivity and âidentity.â Jacobsonâs focus on the convergence of state sponsorship and grassroots ethnic reclamation projects in the 1970s indicates the degree to which Scorseseâs documentary was embedded withinâand beholden toâthese cultural preoccupations. The stateâs âmounting interest in pluralismâ (Jacobson 2006, 54) undoubtedly led it to exploit the energy and activities on view in Italianamerican, but ethnically focused films of its kind could in turn authorize a developing commitment to the nationâs broader âmosaicâ inheritance. Scorseseâs provisional plan (eventually abandoned) to follow Italianamerican with several more entries in a cycle devoted to American ethnic histories only confirms the perceived appeal of this material to a national audience in the mid-1970s.2
Jacobsonâs wide-ranging analysis of the white ethnic revival in Roots Too: White Ethnic Revival in Post-Civil Rights America (2006) includes a very brief and unsympathetic synopsis of Italianamericanâs main emphases and methods. âItalianamerican,â he notes, is among âthe most complete fossilized records of [the 1970sâ] impulse to recover ethnic heritage,â and he derisively compares Scorseseâs interviews with his parents to a college studentâs âheritage huntâ (2006, 53). Because it was sanctioned by the state in the form of its NEH award and proposed by its producers as a contribution to the countryâs Bicentennial festivities, Italianamerican is simply another vehicle for political meaning in Jacobsonâs account. It establishes more evidence for the regeneration of ethnicity in the 1970s and its critical reversal of Americaâs earlier assimilationist or âmelting potâ aspirations, of course; but as a consequence, Scorseseâs short documentary, like other popular works of its type, obscures a rather different national history of racial antagonisms and inequalities. According to Jacobson,
In the years beyond the melting pot there arose a new national myth of origins whose touchstone was Ellis Island, whose heroic central figure was the downtrodden but determined greenhorn, whose preferred modes of narration were the epic and the ode, and whose most far-reaching political conceit was the ânation of immigrants.â
(2006, 7)
In the candid and resourceful storytelling of its subjects, Italianamerican unreservedly describes this familiar tale of the immigrantâs odyssey to America at the turn of the twentieth century. Yet the filmâs unassuming stories, apparently personal and deeply rooted in the specific details of the Scorsesesâ historical experiences, also signpost much wider developments in 1970s America. In other words, in the terms of Jacobsonâs white ethnic revival, an embryonic nation of immigrants would definitively reach its new self-understanding through the reiteration of such ostensibly subjective parables.
Although he is exceedingly dismissive of Italianamerican, Jacobsonâs attempt to situate Scorseseâs film in a more expansive historical context is constructive and worth pursuing further. This documentary might indeed appear âfossilized,â but only when it is fastened too firmly to the directorâs ubiquitous âbiographical legendâ and the predominant terms of an auteurist discourse.3 Originally conceived as a commemorative endeavor, Italianamerican, like so much of Scorseseâs subsequent documentary output, was indelibly shaped by the ethnic revivalâs pervasive language of reclamation: a desire to reconstruct, recuperate, regenerate, or retrieve an historical experience of immigration provided the primary motivation for the filmâs production. But Italianamericanâs approach to its core historiographic commission reveals many meaningful differences from other more orthodox efforts to revivify ethnicity throughout the early-1970s. According to Les Keyser, Scorsese âwanted to nothing to do with a mundane, stereotypical account of Italians pouring off ocean liners, encountering Ellis Island, then crowding into Lower Manhattanâ (1992, 1), and he would accept the NEH assignment only if he was permitted more latitude in determining Italianamericanâs form.4 One can easily imagine a version of the NEHâs projected documentary: abundant voice-over exposition, assorted archival moving images and photographs, retrospective testimony from a wide assortment of anonymous Italian immigrants, a narrative of hardships and eventual success, and so forth. But Italianamerican chooses instead to have its directorâs second-generation Italian American parents respond to his questions and simply tell their life stories to a camera and crew of filmmakers in their Little Italy apartment, and the finished film makes only fleeting use of the iconographic imagery alluded to by Keyser. As a consequence, an especially expressive type of storytelling predominates throughout the film, as do the conspicuous repetitions of ceremonial undertakings (the telling of stories, cooking, eating, and talking at the dinner table) and the extemporaneous movements of subjects within the restricted space of the familyâs apartment. Italianamerican might intermittently have the appearance of a âhome movie gone madâ (Keyser 1992, 2), but its approach, that is, its conscious choices and circumvention of the ethnic revivalâs fundamental prescriptions, should be understood in terms of its inception as an historical project: these choices are effectively interventions in the periodâs broader commemorative activities; they are ultimately attempts to activate different historical materials within the setting of the decadeâs wider ethnic revival.
Scorseseâs unwillingness to, as he puts it, âgo back to 1901 with stock footage and a narrator saying, âIn 1901â âŠâ (Kelly 1991, 17), implicitly acknowledges the disproportionate dispersion of certain kinds of images and movies during the 1970s, but it also indicates a deeper engagement with the assorted questions or problems of historiography, particularly as they relate to his documentary assignment. Indeed, his abandonment of the periodâs accumulating iconography of European immigration should compel us to precisely distinguish Italianamericanâs perspective on the eraâs widespread sense of ethnic renewal. Can we, for example, more accurately characterize this filmâs originality as an account of Italian American history? Should we in fact understand Italianamerican as a commemoration and assessment of the 1970s ethnic revival? If conventionalized photographs in this period typically dispensed vernacular knowledge about the histories of immigration to America, Scorseseâs short film pointedly interrupts the immediacy of such imagery by concentrating on a substantially different task: it attends closely to its present-day storytellersâ embodied recollections; it highlights the smallest changes in their comportment, storytelling, and the velocity, intonation, and sound of their voices because these are keys to comprehending several less apparent features of the history in question. In this respect, Italianamerican resists one prevailing aspect of the ethnic revival, namely, its developing rendition of the immigrant experience as a set of archival images, and replaces it with another of the eraâs characteristic historiographic tendencies: the construction of social âhistories from belowâ and their attendant reliance upon oral accounts of the past. According to Alessandro Portelli, the tonality and âvolume range and the rhythm of popular speech carry implicit meaning and social connotationsâ (1998, 65), and these should be differentiated from other modes of conveying historical experience such as writing or the abundant âstock footageâ mentioned by Scorsese. In other words, the âtone,â âvolume range,â and ârhythmâ of idiomatic communication establish a foundation for any oral history. Italianamericanâs methodical attentiveness to popular speech and storytelling, the deportment of its principal storytellers, and the self-reflexive conduct of its interviews indicate how the filmâs final form comprises a critical apprehension of the eraâs ethnic renaissance. In Jacobsonâs brief account, Italianamerican seems to be little more than an ossified relic, but the film can be more usefully understood as an active reassessment of the ethnic revivalâs central predispositions as well as its accompanying historiography. Although it is not the directorâs first experience with documentary filmmaking, Italianamerican effectively represents Scorseseâs true âbeginningâ as a documentarian dedicated to rendering accounts of the historical past. In many ways, the film initiates the directorâs longstanding preservationist efforts, but only insofar as it apprehends such work in the identifiable idiom of ârecovery.â Edward Said has helpfully distinguished âbeginningsâ from âorigins,â describing the former as âfirst step[s] in the intentional production of meaningâ (1975, 5). Italianamericanâs perceptive and focused participation in the periodâs ethnic resurgence, I want to suggest, establishes precisely this kind of meaningful âbeginningâ for Scorseseâs documentary production.
In what follows, I return to Italianamerican and its exhausted follow-up, American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince (1978), and I closely examine their shared approach to meeting the various challenges of rendering historical accounts on film during this period. Collected in sense memories and storytelling deportment, history in these two films is consistently drawn from their narratorsâ lucid documentation of a wide range of retrospective signposts. Effectively dispensing with the iconographic archival resources alluded to above, Italianamericanâs approach implies a substantial compatibility between the Scorsesesâ artless storytellingâtheir natural comportment, gestures, and vernacular rendering of historical accountsâand the larger social history of Italian immigration to America at the onset of the twentieth century. American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince, in many ways an extended and apprehensive epilogue to Italianamerican, assumes this same approach in order to register the termination of the Scorsesesâ optimistic stories of arrivalâand cautious assimilationâin the new world. As a consequence, the filmsâ storytellers come to function as conspicuous intercessors for the historical past: their particular narration of assorted anecdotes intervenes decisively in the filmsâ interpretations of the histories in question. In other words, the Scorsesesâ and Princeâs increasingly communicative storytelling grasps a meaningful dimension of the past and discloses a very different generational attunement to the filmsâ broader story of migration to America. As weâll see, Italianamerican and American Boy finally catalog a set of externalized thoughts and emotions whose source is a substantial relation to the historical experience of immigration to America. In Antonio Gramsciâs familiar formulation, the âstarting point of critical elaborationâ is a developing self-consciousness, or an awareness of oneself âas a product of the historical process to date which has deposited in [oneself] an infinity of traces, without leaving an inventoryâ (1971, 324). In Scorseseâs Italianamerican and American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince, we can perceive the framework for this type of self-consciously critical inventory, and our attendant efforts to clarify and characterize each figureâs unique storytelling, that is to say, our determination to recognize the filmsâ accumulating assemblage of historical traces, are what ultimately direct our comprehension of their perspectives on the past as history. Simply put, Italianamericanâs (and American Boyâs) adoption of this amalgam of observational and participatory methods distinguishes it from the NEHâs projected expository approach, and it is the key to understanding Scorseseâs particular rendering of historical accounts.5
Emotions in the Emulsion: Italianamerican and American Documentary in the 1970s
Although it was plainly conceived as the first of Scorseseâs self-described âsmaller projectsâ (Christie and Thompson 2003, 113), Italianamerican continues to figure prominently in interviews with the director. He has on occasion provocatively called it âthe best film I ever madeâ (Kelly 1991, 17), but more often he describes this unpretentious short documentary as an experimental laboratory for his subsequent fiction filmmaking explorations. In other words, Italianamericanâs permanent value is repeatedly said to reside in the instructive solutions it establishes for the close cognate problems of fiction filmmaking:
We shot medium shots of people talking [in Italianamerican], and intercut with some music over stills of them. To me it seemed very, very strong. It smashed all those preconceptions about what a film should look like and how a film should be presented. It also freed me in a sense. It streamlined the style for Taxi Driver. And in Raging Bull, we didnât give a damn. We didnât care about transitions, really. What I should say is, we didnât care about artful transitions.
(Kelly 1991, 18; emphasis in original)
In this and many other similarly retrospective assessments, Scorsese values the Italianamerican experiment primarily for its embryonic challenges to conventional filmmakingâits unvarnished compositions, its recourse to a small number of set-ups and simple editing strategies, its informal deployment of music and soundsâand the apparently easy transferability of such methods to his fiction work.6 The renewal of Scorseseâs non-fiction film practice since 1995, however, has been accompanied by intermittent reflections upon these same issues, along with several unexpectedly speculative assertions about the blurred boundary between documentary and fiction filmmaking, their typically knotted reciprocity, and most significantly, Italianamericanâs pivotal influence on his approach to working with actors in the much more familiar Hollywood setting. For example, in a wide-ranging interview about documentary filmmaking with longtime collaborator, Raffaele Donato, Scorsese further develops his previous ideas about Italianamericanâs long-lasting lessons, particularly those gleaned from the experience of...