Of the three Sergio who, with Leone and Sollima, reinvented the western legend made in Cinecittà under the name western spaghetti, Corbucci was certainly not the most subtle, but the most prolific and the darkest, instilling cruelty a baroque outrage in the service of a scathing and disenchanted political critique. In fact the Great Silence (1968), the filmmaker’s seventh western and absolute masterpiece, exacerbates this propensity for excess to the point of radicality, reaching heights of darkness rarely equaled.
ghostly shaman
Marrying the languid rhythm of a funeral song where the harshness of winter seems to have buried all traces of humanity, the film, on a sublime score by Ennio Morricone, tinged with crystalline dissonances, strikes first by its whiteness fluffy, its expanses of snow as far as the eye can see, breaking with the arid heat waves specific to the genre, which Corbucci had already taken the opposite view in Django (1966), with its puddles of mud riveting all living beings to the mire. This graphic bias, full of contrasts, gives it not only a dazzling visual splendor, but also a worried gravity, a monochrome without horizon that accentuates the effect of loops and muffled bubbles that structure the film. Moral pessimism borders on the most total nihilism. The violence, as if embalmed under the rigors of the ice, explodes in dizzying peaks and the shootings turn into mass massacres – an underlying critique of fascism.
Finally, in a world where dialogue is no longer possible, where speech no longer makes sense, silence prevails, hence the brilliant idea of a mute hero, Silenzio (camped by a Jean-Louis Trintignant in counter-use, with an impressive charisma). The taciturn mercenary, of whom the Man with No Name offered the most emblematic incarnation in the Dollar Trilogy, gives way here to a completely mute gunslinger, and for good reason: witness in his childhood of the assassination of his parents by bounty hunters, he was silenced in the most barbaric of ways, throat slit and severed vocal cords, hence his name, echoing his disability and the silence his presence imposes. A fine gunslinger from the West, he now walks slowly through the snowy mountains of Utah, muffled in animal skins, and, like an exterminating angel, a ghostly shaman, tracks down the lawless bounty hunters who, at the pay of crooked landowners, decimate the starving peasants of the region reduced to banditry to survive – a well-known episode in the history of the United States, the Johnson County War, of which Michael Cimino will deliver a melancholic version in his Heaven’s Gate.
Unscrupulous capitalism
To the silence of the hero, Corbucci opposes the feigned gentleness of the pitiless Tigrero (Klaus Kinski, of a rare sobriety), who seems to be his reversed double and the messenger of his death, and whose cynicism, sadism and pointillism – he records each of his crimes in his notebook – evoking bureaucratic barbarism, reminiscent of Italy’s fascist past, to which is added a critique of Western imperialism and unscrupulous capitalism. A nihilistic vision that the filmmaker shares through the staging alone (exchanges of glances, overframing, depth of field, sharp zooms and zooms out), especially in an unstoppable and terrifying finale. In this hopeless world, the slow glaciation descends on the bodies that the snow will cover with its implacable shroud.