Articles by: Laura e. Ruberto

On December 3, 1921, a documentary called La visita dell’ Incrociatore Italiano Libia a San Francisco, Calif., 6-29 Novembre 1921 (The Visit of the Italian Cruiser Libia to San Francisco, Calif, November 6-29, 1921) premiered at the People’s Theater in San Francisco.

 

The film was directed by a then-unknown Italian immigrant, Francesco “Frank” Capra, who had come to the U.S. at age 6 from Bisacquino, Sicily, and was raised mostly in Los Angeles. The theater was on Howard Street, near Third, and might have been razed to build the George Moscone Center in 1981, though any Italian American tie-in between the city’s slain mayor and the Hollywood director would be coincidental.

 

 

As the title of La visita explains, the short film documents the arrival and sojourn of the Italian warship Libia to San Francisco in November 1921. The Libia, in a post-World War I two-year celebratory tour, had previously stopped in other Italian American enclaves in California: San Diego, San Pedro, and Monterey (the film concludes with a rudimentary world map and a line tracing the cruiser’s route around the globe).

 

In certain ways, La visita embodies a nationalistic fervor that we can rightfully call fascistic (although Mussolini’s March on Rome occurred in 1922, his Fasci di Combattimento were formed in 1919, and by May 1921 Agostino Di Biasi had even formed a Fascist organization in New York). Between the fluttering Italian flags, the clouds of balloons, the name of the ship, the healthy lean men in uniform, and a written prologue that references the glories of the madre-patria, it’s hard not to think of the colonizing efforts and nationalistic fervor that helped bring Mussolini to power.

 

Whatever Capra’s ideological commitments,the film is an amazing document of early-twentieth-century San Francisco and the cultural elite of the city’s Italian community; at the same, it offers subtle previews of elements that would later get defined as Capraesque.

 

The film presents a vision of the city that is almost wholly Italian, so centralized it is on the neighborhoods comprising today’s North Beach and parts of Fisherman’s Wharf. Other than a ceremonial encounter on what seems to be the steps of city hall with a group of local officials, including then-mayor James Rolph, the film stays almost entirely in or around Washington Square and Pier 43—comprising practically the two ends of what was then known as the Latin Quarter.

 

What’s more, the narrative focus is on happenings related to the Italian Virtus Club (the film’s producers). The club was an Italian American athletic organization—one of a handful of Italian fraternal organizations that existed with a specific sports angle in the city. Eventually the clubs merged into the San Francisco Italian Athletic Club. That the word “Italian” was removed from the name of the club during WWII and reintroduced in the post-civil rights era (1978) is a tidy illustration of the fluctuating connotations of an Italian immigrant identity in the U.S. 

 

In the film we see members of the Virtus Club meet the cruiser when it moors and accompanies the sailors throughout most of their stay in the city. Before the joyful encounter, we see a few shots of fisherman and their families on their fishing boats as well as Capra himself talking on the pier.

 

There is a beautiful series of shots as the fishing boats move towards the cruiser, almost embracing it, as the large ship moves towards the pier. Here is how Brown University Italian Studies doctoral candidate Evelyn Ferraro recalls this scene: “it so nicely evokes the reunion of a mother—la nave madre patria—with the migrant children, but in a reverse situation whereby the symbol of the madre patria is the mobile element” (email exchange, January 29, 2010). In fact, the last inter-title, in  flowery verse, refers to the cruiser as the “lembo viaggiante” (literally, the “traveling hem,” suggesting a part of the country that has gone astray perhaps) and then reads “Viva l’Italia! Viva la Marina Italiana! Viva la Libia!”

 

From a soccer game to a grand dinner and ball at the famed Fior d’Italia (a spot that claims to be the oldest continually-operated Italian restaurant in the US), these sailors were living large. The Italian visitors were showered with treats: trays of pastries and cakes paraded onto the Libia as a way to sweeten the “bitter waters” of the ocean, a special reception in their honor by the local Vittoria Colonna Club (a social service organization run by Italian American women) at one of the Bank of Italy’s buildings, and a meal with Hollywood celebrities like Dorothy Revier (née Velegra), known as the “Queen of Poverty Row,” later the model for the “torch lady” for Columbia.

 

 

Although a solemn mass is said on board, most of the scenes are secular, indulgent, and jovial (that it was the era of prohibition certainly makes one wonder what the sailors may have brought from the homeland to share with their American cugini). In referring to his canonical works, Lee Lourdeaux argues that the Italian aspects of Capra’s films show the “joyful side of communal city life” (Italian and Irish Filmmakers in America 132); such a view certainly comes across here.

 

The sailors’ stay on the Barbary Coast did not cause much of a stir in the city at large, an idea reinforced by the film’s focus on all-things Italian American. Joseph McBride noted a number of headline events happening in the city that month (most scandalously the trial of Roscoe Conkling “Fatty” Arbuckle) that probably detracted from this international visit.

 

 

The reprint comes from the Library of Congress in conjunction with Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation. How exactly the Library of Congress obtained its copy is unclear, though at some point someone at the Italian American Athletic Club recognized Capra’s name on a reel in their archives and sent it to D.C. (McBride lecture, PFA, January 24, 2010).

 

The film’s intertitles are all in Italian (titles by “Frank Capra and J.J. DeMore/Giulio DeMoro”), suggesting that the film was meant for export or, more likely, for an Italian immigrant audience  in the States. As work by Giorgio Bertellini, Sabine Haenni, and others has recently begun to characterize, U.S. film production in the silent era was quite international, with a recognition of the niche markets afforded by recent immigrant filmgoers.

 

In any case, the film remains a gem: important for the transnational migration history it documents and the socio-cultural stories it displays. Further, it calls attention to Capra’s Italian identity in ways that much of his work tends to do only indirectly. That in it we might also start to detect the playful narrative style and sometimes cloying tone Capra was later known for only adds to the significance of this silent film.

 

 

And me? Well, I’m left wanting to create a series of holiday cards with all my favorite Italian American activist heroes…

 

 

I recently had an opportunity to see a retrospective of John Baldessari’s work at San Francisco’s Palace of the Legion of Honor, and I was struck by the consistency of his style even over many decades and a variety of media. Baldessari’s particular blend of texture, color, light, and words comes through from his now-classic “I Will Not Make Anymore Boring Art” (1971) to his photogravures “Some Narrow Views: Either Tall or Wide (2004).

    


But I sensed something else, something more elusive than texture, something harder to describe than color, something more than irony. I sensed an ethnic side to Baldessari’s art; I became certain, in fact, that it was there to be found. My search may well be willfully essentialist, but I like to think of it as a postmodern musing on identity and culture, as Pasquale Verdicchio recently reminded me in a conversation, whereby migration comes to support rather than negate the possibility of a particular kind of ethnic positionality within art.


John Baldessari was born in 1931 in National City, California—just minutes away from downtown San Diego and the Mexico-U.S. border. His parents were both immigrants: his mother, a Dutchwoman who had come to the U.S. to work as a nurse and his father, an “ethnic” Italian, who came to the U.S. as an Austrian citizen (from the town of Albiano, today part of Italy, in the province of Trento) looking for work (more on this later). 


We could argue that as a postmodern artist Baldessari produced an entire oeuvre—each piece a pastiche evoking hybrid identity, multiple perspectives, varying interpretations—that suggests a migrant’s experience as an outsider embracing a new world. Or, at the very least, we could say that his work is representative of the multicultural space of twentieth-century California. By themselves, such generalizations don’t get us too far.


Early in his career, Baldessari worked a lot in video, including making an 8-minute piece in 1974 called “The Italian Tape.” It’s a smart, though rather obvious, reflection on misunderstanding and language, with an over-the-top Italian romantic melody suggestively playing in the background. By itself, it cannot get me to where I want to be.

 

Two decades later, in 1992, he made a series collectively called “Cliché” (“Cliché:  North American Indian, Red,” “Cliché: Eskimo, Blue,” “Cliché: Japanese, Yellow”)

 

 

Was it living along the U.S.-Mexico border? Growing up with immigrant parents? Or merely the epoch of self-conscious identity politics that led Baldessari to create these pieces? Regardless, it’s there—at once a critique of ethnic representation in popular culture and a beautiful amalgam that, if it wasn’t for the title, might even be misunderstood as supporting rather than dismantling stereotypes. Nevertheless, the series suggests an awareness of ethnicity that might seem missing in much standard postmodern art.


But there’s a quality even more essential to Baldessari’s work that emerges from a consideration of his oeuvre, an aspect of his approach that may gesture toward a diasporic identity. Central to most of his work is process: Baldessari takes objects apart and puts them back together differently; he manipulates photographs, constructs objects, he calls attention to the everyday by rearranging things. Certainly this attention to, so to speak, the constructedness of things is emblematic of much twentieth-century art. To suggest that such moves might somehow link Baldessari to aspects associated with an Italian immigrant/Italian American identity (attention to labor, working with your hands, decorating/beautifying/making place out of the everyday, l’arte di arrangiarsi, of making do, etc.) would be stretching things, making something out of nothing.


And then I come across an oral interview with Baldessari from 1992, conducted by Christopher Knight. I quote a section at length.


 

CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: And what did your father do?

JOHN BALDESSARI: Well, he was sort of a self-made man. He arrived in Colorado in the midst of, well, the beginning of the Depression, I suppose, and was a coal miner. And I guess he had a real entrepreneurial streak, from stories he would tell me. He already was making money then by essentially recycling. Which it was interesting, by the way, parenthetically, going to India, I felt right at home where they recycle everything, don’t throw anything away, and I’d think, “God, I know this life.”

CHRISTOPHER KNIGHT: [laughs]

JOHN BALDESSARI: And he would pick up cigarettes and dry them out on the stove and reroll them and sell them you know. And I guess he made his first break, he said, by. . . . There was a triangle of land where railroad tracks, that apparently wasn’t used or anything, and he asked the railroad company if he could use it. And he was living in the Alps, was well trained in cultivating land—you know, taking rocks out and so on. And [he] cultivated that area and started growing onions. And parlayed that into where he was actually shipping onions, and had already started making money. And I remember once my sister got him to sit down and go through all of the jobs he’s ever been through, and she said she just lost track. But it was always this propelling himself hustling, you know, never really working for somebody. And we had a restaurant, he had grocery stores. And I guess at the point where I was born, what he was doing was pretty interesting at the time, was in the salvage business, and he would contract to tear down buildings, houses. You know, either buy them for very little or just get them for nothing, and then salvage all of the material and build houses with the material and sell off the rest of the stuff in a store he had. And until the idea of tract housing caught on, it was a pretty good scheme. And then parlayed that money into buying real estate and. . . . And I remember as a child, basically what I did was sort of. . . . You know, taking apart faucets and reconditioning them, painting them, and taking nails out of lumber and. . . . And I sometimes think that has a lot of bearing on the art I would do because I was. . . . It would almost be in like some sort of museum, you know, looking at maybe two hundred different kinds of faucets, but all generically the same, but seeing all the variations. And taking them apart, painting the handles or what have you. And always looking at things—like “Why is this faucet better than that faucet?” that sort of thing. And I got a taste of the hands-on thing—you know, taking things apart, putting them together, painting things, and so on. My mother babysat me by. . . . You know, I would get something, ten cents a day, something like that in an allowance.


 

Self-conscious or not, taking his words in all seriousness, Baldessari’s memories of his childhood experiences and working class immigrant milieu seem to be reflected in his art.

 

Indeed, Baldessari’s art is obviously not representative of an Italian American ethnic identity in the way that Joseph Stella’s or Ralph Fasanella’s paintings are. His work instead suggests to us that artistic output might offer layers of meaning that are not always visible, that may not even be self-conscious, but rather speak to the multidirectional movement of ideas and identity.


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Coda:

Check out one of Baldessari's videos, "Six Colorful Inside Jobs," a piece with a self-conscious take on everyday spaces.

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