36 years of The Godfather
Whichever way we approach The Godfather, its text and context, we cannot help but seeing this cinematic saga as a sort of watershed both in Coppola’s career and in the history of post-war American cinema, its production ethics in relation to spectatorship. Ushering the gangster movie into new expressive gauges while simultaneously reviving the colossal vaunt of a pre New-Hollywood era where the exhibition of money-power within the very body of the film was perceived as a stylisticonceptual datum, Coppola made this film “out of necessity” (interviewed in “Action”, May/June 1973).
“I believe in America”: this is the precise sentence opening The Godfather pronounced by a man asking for murder. Mafia is thus immediately invested of an allegorical task, namely to represent the felonious core of global capitalism whose paternal burden is incarnated by America. It is in this veiled and subtly exposed ideological critique that Coppola maintains a philological continuity with the European sensibility that had rhetorically ignited the New Hollywood and influenced his post-Cormanian work. The stylistic orchestration is nonetheless markedly oriented towards an operatic interpretation of the gangster movie, evoking a classical enactment of the family (and its oedipal tragedy) clearly visible in the almost stereotypical depiction of ethnicity, national habits and the oleographic characterization of its protagonists. And like in the Greek tragedy Coppola stages the killing of the father at the hands of the son replacing his obsolete and traditionalist leadership with a new corporate arrivisme decreeing the Americanization of the Sicilian clan.
This generational conflict comes to symbolize the old and new mafia, the old and new America and ultimately - and meta-cinematographically - the new and old Hollywood. On this binary opposition the whole film is structured. Good and evil coexist within the ethical violence of The Family. Violence and honour, blood and respect, loyalty and vendetta mirror, whilst financially undermining, the institutional logics of American society. Tenuous is the border between light and darkness, Don Vito Corleone – symptomatically suggesting what will later be colonel Kurtz’s morality – configures at the same time the virtuous paladin and a reactionary element. From this existential dualism also derives the aesthetic apparatus of Coppola’s epic, the insisted chiaroscuro, the contraposition between interiors and external locations, day and night. In fact, the different sequences are edited in calculated alternation so as to create a dialectically metaphorical contrast between inner mechanics and external logics.
Along this symmetrical opposition, light and darkness provide the image of a moral ambiguity that is the visual and poetical cipher of a filmic text suspended in its judgment and yet informed by authorial rigour. Classical is then the cinematic form against which Coppola measures himself freed from all oedipal fears, like Micheal facing his father demise, the director faces the magniloquent decay of a Hollywood that had by then lost its 40’s grandeur (whose brownish chromatism is quoted throughout) ambushed by the guerrilla of Roger Corman and its mutinous ranks (from which Coppola himself came). The Dream Factory though will soon neutralize this apparent innovation by conceding to its supposedly revolting children the reformist suffix “New” (whose hypocritical pusillanimity will be later explained by our illustrious former prime minister Tony Blair).
The disastrous state of Hollywood is subliminally exposed in the two Californian episodes of the film, the ones taking place in Los Angeles and in Las Vegas respectively.
In the first episode, Hollywood, although drenched in blood, is still grandiose and iconic (with its swarming studios lit by a glorious sun); in the second on the contrary we are presented with an image of the showbiz where greedy sclerosis and creative corruption have viciously triumphed.
Cunningly transiting through the big budget production – that is alluring as much as it is repelling – Coppola demonstrated with The Godfather how one’s personal vision can still make it through the censoring tentacles of corporate entertainment.
The recent restoration of the original print is thus an occasion to reflect upon a movie that cherishing more than what it superficially reveals.
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