ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the adventures of those predominantly third-generation directors who have rejected their roles in Huck Finn’s puppet theater and attempted to take possession of the theater itself or, to be exact, its twentieth-century incarnation, Cinema Paradiso. The question of spectatorship brings us to the heart of the way ethnicity is encoded in mainstream cinema. The spectator has traveled a long way to arrive, a good part of the journey mediated by violent montage, the cinematic instrument of violence that Coppola uses to enact the vendetta within the sacred context of familial religious rites. There is a long cultural history that explains why cinematic language should serve Italian Americans as their paradigmatic form of expression. The Italian-born Rodolfo Valentino, the greatest divo of the silent films, was the only Italian American to establish himself as a leading man in the Old Hollywood.
