Andrea Ferrante: La terra di Bob

At Cinecitta Studios near Rome, young director Sergio Leone worked under the American pseudonym Bob Robertson on Hollywood productions set in the world of Roman mythology. Later, under his Italian name, he created Westerns that are considered the cinematic founding myth of the United States and have gone down in film history. After the decline of the era of monumental films, word spread at Rome‘s Cinecitta Studios that West German director Harald Reinl had brought a German Western to the cinemas with great commercial success. So Sergio Leone shot ‘A Fistful of Dollars,’ a remake of the samurai film ‘Yojimbo’ by Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. Kurosawa followed the aesthetic of the Westerns of his role model John Ford. Kurosawa found the literary sources for ‘Yojimbo’ in Dashiell Hammett‘s hardboiled crime novels. In them, the Westerner as a mythological figure has moved from the endless expanses of the prairie to the canyons of the big cities. Through this special path of cultural transformations and appropriations, the Westerner of Leone was sent into the vastness of the European landscape, this time carrying the cynicism and moral questionable nature of modernity in his saddlebags. The worldwide success of the Italo-Western has had a lasting influence on Hollywood and the mother of all films. In this collage series, Giulia Ferrante complements her black-and-white photographs of Puglia's agricultural landscape and the industrial sites of Taranto with one or more collaged ‘Westerners.’ The archetypal silhouettes made of black adhesive foil imbue everyday spaces with mythological significance.