Anamnesis in acts: documentary performance as intercession in Italianamerican and American Boy

Abstract

This article examines Martin Scorsese's Italianamerican (1974) and American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince (1978) in terms of their engagement with the various problems of rendering historical accounts on film. Cached in the secret places of sense memories and gesture, history in these films emerges as a vivid recollection of retrospective signposts. Italianamerican’s historiographic approach tellingly assumes a substantial compatibility between storytelling acts – the figure's comportment, gestures, and so on – and the broader social history of Italian immigration to America; while for its part, American Boy adopts the same strategy to reveal the abrupt termination of the earlier film's tale of a seemingly optimistic flight to the new world. This article closely examines how the films’ social actors come to function as conspicuous intercessors for the historical past and thereby intervene in our apprehension of the history in question. More than attempts to merely reconfigure Scorsese's ubiquitous authorial identity, these two films instead cataloge a set of externalized thoughts and emotions whose origin is a palpable relation to the history of immigration to America. In the final analysis, our comprehension of the particular storytelling acts on view in Italianamerican and American Boy comprises a unique form of historical understanding.