Il Coltello di ghiaccio / Knife of Ice

Drawing acknowledged inspiration from Robert Siodmak's classic proto-proto-slasher The Spiral Staircase, the last of Umberto Lenzi's gialli with Carroll Baker differs from its predecessors in replacing financially motivated conspiracies to murder with an insane killer.

Though a strong entry on the whole, the film is marred by an awkward opening sequence and not entirely convincing surprise ending – not in itself necessarily a bad thing nor particularly rare within the filone, but not well enough executed to really work except as a demonstration of Chion's cathartic “screaming point” notion. (Knife of Ice is also of interest in terms of Chion's positing of the mute – the voiceless presence – as antithesis of the acousmetre – the bodiless voice – and as a companion piece / counterpoint to the likes of Cat o' Nine Tails and Crimes of the Black Cat as yet another giallo exploration of disability and its effects upon our experience of the world.)


Nice sentiment, shame about the misspelling


A reminder that Lenzi was also the man who brought you Cannibal Ferox and a neat demonstration of the attraction / repulsion dynamics of horror?






It's all about reading the signs

We begin with a series of bullfights. They're not entirely gratuitous, insofar as the different reactions of cousins Jenny (Evelyn Stewart) and Martha (Baker) to the killing of the animals – or, more positively, the skill and bravery of the toreros – seems intended to provide us with insights into their respective personalities, but do add an unpleasant element that sits somewhat uncomfortably with the more restrained approach found elsewhere in the film; treat it as a historical artefact, a demonstration of what passed for representative displays of Spanishness to tourists in the dying days of the Franco regime, and it shouldn't impact too much on the film in toto.

Following the bullfight – an incident some months in the past, as it soon turns out – we learn that Martha is mute following a traumatic incident when she was 13 years old, in which her parents died in a train crash. She has never been able to near the railway since – until today, that is, as she goes to meet her cousin at the station, who is returning to the family villa following a successful singing tour – i.e. Jenny found her voice and Martha lost hers.






The rhetoric of the close up and rack focus

On the way back home, their chauffeur Marcos (Eduardo Fajardo) is forced to stop the car as its engine is overheating. While he goes to fetch help, a strange looking man suddenly appears out of the fog and stares at the women menacingly, but disappears before Marcos returns; he did not see the man, he tells them.

At the villa we are introduced to the rest of the family and their associates. There is uncle Ralph (George Rigaud), with a dodgy heart and an interest in the occult; housekeeper Mrs Britain; Father Martin and his young ward, Christina – whose birthday it is – and Martha's physician, Dr Laurent.

That night Jenny is disturbed by a noise, goes to investigate and its then dispatched by an unidentified black-gloved knife wielder.




Before and after

The body is soon discovered – but not before a well-executed suspense sequence that also builds suspicion as to who knows what – and the police called in. Their questions establish the chauffeur, housekeeper and doctor as suspects - or red herrings, of course – whilst the fact that this is the second body to have been found in dubious circumstances in the past 24 hours points to the presence of a maniac in the locality.


Lenzi's representation of the killer's depredations is uncharacteristically restrained.






Mark of the Devil I, II and III as an occult subplot develops

At Jenny's funeral Martha is disturbed by the sight of the mystery man in the bushes, but he disappears before she can alert any of the others to his presence. There is, however, a potential clue in the form of a satanic pendant, while the man's wild-eyed stare makes the inspector think that he may also be a drug addict.

More worryingly the inspector also conjectures that the killer, whoever he or she may be – perhaps satanist equals drug addict equals killer is too neat an equation for Lenzi – has a particular interest in blondes and that Martha may well be next on his agenda...


The screaming point #1 - Martha uses the car horn to alert the others to her grim discovery of Jenny's body




The screaming point #2 - what will Martha do this time? Note that unlike the knife-wielder who dispatched Jenny this figure is not wearing black gloves

Well written, directed and performed in the main – Baker is particularly impressive in her mute role – Knife of Ice is a thoroughly professional piece of work marred primarily by that ending. This said, the journey there, the process of figuring out whodunnit amidst all the potentially meaningful exchanges – “Yes, I have an idea who might have committed these crimes – but then who doesn't? Why don't you ask Father Martin's opinion?” – is an enjoyable one.

Though perhaps relying on the zoom-in and extreme close-up a touch too often and over-indulging in flashback montages for some viewers, Lenzi elsewhere demonstrates an admirable facility for prolonged suspense sequences where something may be lurking in the shadows or the fog or not.




Little dots of yellow that didn't have to be there

Indeed, its perhaps this general excessiveness that ultimately makes the film work: when everything is so hysterical and histrionic, everyone becomes a suspect and every look, gesture, word or element of mise-en-scene overdetermined with possible significance.

Testa t'ammazzo, croce... sei morto... Mi chiamano Alleluja / They Call Me Hallelujah

Yes, it's yet another spaghetti western, Guiliano Carnimeo / Anthony Ascott's Testa t'ammazzo, croce... sei morto... Mi chiamano Alleluja / They Call Me Hallelujah. Made in 1971, it stars giallo stalwart George Hilton and can be pretty much summed up as a combination of most of the post-Leone trends in the genre: knockabout comedy a la Trinity; James Bond style gadgets a la Sabata, and a Mexican revolution setting out of Run Man Run, Compañeros and so on.

As a result, it's enjoyable but lightweight; a description, oddly enough, that also seems fairly appropriate to Ascott's giallo venture of the following year, The Case of the Bloody Iris, for better or worse.

There's also a very giallo-esque moment in Hallelujah that sees our titular anti-hero sneak in on one of the bad guys as his wife is shaving his beard. He gives her a chloroform soaked cloth, takes the razor, and puts it to the malefic's throat.




Not a giallo, despite the black gloves and arm and straight razor; then again in a giallo would the killer give a warning?


Ascott uses the kaleidoscope lens in Case of the Bloody Iris's psychedelic cult / orgy sequences as well

Interview with Bill Lustig

An interesting interview with Bill Lustig of Anchor Bay and Blue Underground, shedding some light on the current realities of the cult DVD marketplace:

http://www.cultfilmsenkutfilms.com/extras/bill_lustig.html

Cimitero senza croci / Cemetery without Crosses

I've been on a bit of a spaghetti western binge at the moment. The best new discovery has been Robert Hossein's Cemetery Without Crosses, co-written by a certain Dario Argento and dedicated by Hossein - who produced, directed, wrote and starred in the piece, remarkably without compromising it - to Sergio Leone.


From one auteur to another?

While it might be possible to seek common elements between the film and Leone's Once Upon a Time in the West - as the Leone film co-authored by Argento, along with Bertolucci - that are not in evidence in Leone or Hossein's other films as possible Argento-isms, in truth I think that would be a largely futile exercise.

One thing that did leap out, however, was the way in which Cemetery's Manuel takes his black gloves out of a musical box and invariably dons the right one before going into action; at one point he even gets an opponent to back down by simple virtue of putting it on. It's classic unimportant prop to signifying fetish material.


The glove box also plays a tinkly music box theme like Mortimer's and Indio's watches in For a Few Dollars More or the killer's tape in Deep Red


Let's go to work...


No, not the infamous panty-ripping murder in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage but some Italian western black glove action

There's also a well staged suspense sequence where Manuel, having schemed his way into the home of the family whose daughter he intends to kidnap, is seated at the dinner table with the rest of their hired hands. Nobody speaks, the only sounds those of cutlery and typically messy spaghetti western eating. Everyone turns to look at him - has he been rumbled? As it turns out, no, with the release of tension coming not through a moment of violence, Leone style, but a Hitchcock style gag, as the family and their hirelings play a practical joke on the new recruit.

More generally, the film made me think about what seem to be the fundamentally different ways in which spaghetti westerns and gialli deal with trauma. In gialli trauma is more likely to induce insanity than a desire for revenge, which often also takes a somewhat confused and generalised form in which the society as a whole or certain groups within it are to blame. In spaghettis trauma usually leads to straightforward vendetta, even if the path to its fulfilment may well be just as convoluted and strewn with flashbacks and mystery elements.

Wait Until Dark

This is yet another non-giallo, non-Argento film whose relevance to this blog has to be demonstrated. We could simply invoke the old chestnut of there only being two sorts of anything, the good and the bad, and that Wait Until Dark fits into the former category.

But we can do better, in terms of how different the history of the giallo could have been. For the film was a big success in Italy, where it went by the title Gli Occhi della notte - literally The Eyes of the Night - and put director Terence Young in the running to direct The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. He didn't of course, and the rest is history, Argento taking the genre to new artistic and commercial heights and inspiring a raft of imitators.

More interesting than this oft-told story, however, is the way in which Wait Until Dark also reverberates into later giallo productions, notably Argento's subsequent essay in the thriller form, The Cat o' Nine Tails, which shares with it the notion of a blind protagonist, and Duccio Tessari's Puzzle, with the same MacGuffin of hidden drugs that the protagonists – one suffering from amnesia and other from a broken leg to give them not too similar states of disability – are initially unawares of.


The doll


The plane

Aparted from a play by Frederick Knott, almost all of the action within Wait Until Dark takes place in the one location, in near real time. The way the filmmakers initially open out the action is interesting from a giallo perspective though, insofar as it entails the familiar tropes of air travel and the doll. Drugs mule Lisa takes the doll, which is stuffed with heroin and also happens to play a distinctive music-box style tune, from Montreal to New York, passing it on to photographer Sam Hendrix on the pretext that it is for a little girl who is sick and that she does not want to be seen with it on her when she meets her own daughter as the child will not understand that the doll is not for her. (Try that nowadays and I wonder how far you would get.)

At the airport Lisa is intercepted by her old partner Harry Roat (Alan Arkin) who murders her offscreen - though there are moments of shock, this is more of a suspense film characterised by restraint and menace rather than gratuitous violence - and puts her body, contained within a transparent plastic clothes bag, in the cupboard of the Hendrix's apartment. (Not a million miles away from Five Dolls for an August Moon's meat locker, then.)


The psycho; one of the best incarnations of the type out there besides Luciano Rossi


The body, wrapped in plastic

Things get a little confusing here - another reminder that it's not just gialli that can be accused of suffering from less than water-tight naratives - as another couple of men, Mike Talman and an ex-cop by the name of Carlino, turn up at the apartment looking for Lisa. They also leave their prints all over the place, placing them right where Roat, who shows up shortly after, wants them. (In keeping with the theme of blindness, non-visual details attain a greater importance than usual here, though with an element of inconsistency at times, one feels.)

Around about this point Susy Hendrix (Audrey Hepburn) returns home. Recently blinded in an accident, she does not notice the men's presence, taking the little details that are out of place, like the chair she nearly trips over, as stemming from the child upstairs, Gloria, visiting when she was out. Roat and company sneak the body out, dumping it where it is later found. Believing that Susy knows the whereabouts of the doll, Roat and his reluctant co-conspirators concoct a story that implicates Sam in Lisa's murder and the doll as the thing that can prove his innocence.

Unfortunately there are also those little details, like the fact that two different men being played by Roat both seem to be wearing the exact same pair of creaky new leather shoes, that begin to arouse Susy's suspicions and place her in increasing danger...

Il Miele del diavolo / The Devil's Honey

Watching this 1986 Lucio Fulci film through a beat up English dub, pan and scan VHS sourced print with burnt-in Norwegian subtitles is obviously hardly the best way to experience it, particularly the contribution made by Allejandro Ulloa's cinematography. Nevertheless, The Devil's Honey still has something about it even in this format, as a kind of “perversion story” for the '80s.

While more an erotic thriller than purist's giallo in terms of its dynamics, it makes for an interesting companion piece to Argento's Opera, released the following year, thanks to the sadomasochistic thematics and relationships running through both films and the casting of sisters Blanca and Cristina Marsillach in the key female roles.

With Cristina Marsillach proving one of the most difficult actors Argento ever worked with, it seems that Fulci got the better part of the deal here, Blanca happily submitting to every indignity The Devil's Honey's various writers could dream up.

She plays Jessica, a young woman very much in love with Johnny, a young musician - saxophonist, naturally - who treats her like dirt. When she falls pregnant, he forces her to have an abortion, telling her that the last thing their relationship – and his career – needs right now is a mewling infant. Then Johnny has an accident and needs an urgent operation.

The only man who can perform it is Dr Simpson, nicely essayed by Eurotrash stalwart Brett Halsey. He's got problems of his own, finding it easier to relate to prostitutes than his wife Carol, played by the top-billed but underused Corinne Clery, herself no stranger to this kind of material as her roles in the likes of Story of O and Hitch-Hike testify. With his wife's words ringing in his ears - basically it's me or your job - Dr Simpson fails to save Johnny's life.

Obsessed with her deceased love and the man she holds to be responsible for his death, Jessica then abducts him and takes him to an isolated beach-front house to extract her revenge...

Assault

Taking a short cut through the woods that abut her school, Tessa Hurst (Lesley-Anne Down) is sexually assaulted. The trauma of the attack leaves her mute and oblivious to the world, despite the efforts of young doctor Greg Lomax, giving Detective Chief Superintendent Velyan (Frank Finlay) and his men little to go on in their investigation of the case.

A couple of months later another girl, Susan Miller, unwisely takes the same shortcut. When art teacher Julie West (Suzy Kendall) learns this from the other pupils she is ferrying home in her car - a precautionary measure lest the maniac, who clearly has local knowledge, strike again - they go into the woods to search. The car gets stuck in the mud and in the half-light Julie sees a diabolical figure standing over the girl, who proves to have been raped and murdered.






Through a Glass Darkly - Julie sees the killer standing over the body

Unsurprisingly Julie's testimony that she saw a figure who looks like the Devil does not go down well, although its sensationalist aspect – the place is known as Devil's End, though this remains a somewhat underdeveloped notion despite the film's AKA titles In the Devil's Garden and Satan's Playthings – appeals to sleazy newshound Denning (Freddie Jones), who then proceeds to harass her in a way that would not go down well with the press complaints commission.


The Art of Darkness - Julie painting the devil

This prompts Julie to come up with a scheme of the it's-so-crazy-it-might-just-work variety: get Denning's newspaper to run a story showing a couple of her paintings of a devilish figure with the announcement that the next issue will reveal the real killer's identity, thus forcing him to show his hand.






Black-gloved antics

Whoever it might be, there are no shortage of suspects, like the husband of schoolmistress Mrs Sanford, with his collection or pornography and dubious interest in the pupils, or Lomax himself, with his remarkable ability to always show up at the crime scene and “a pill for every occasion”; no talking cures for this man.








In an Italian film the recurring use of yellow might mean something; here it's harder to tell how conscious the filmmakers were of the colour's associations, not that their main audience would have been likely to have gotten them.

Featuring an unidentified often black-gloved stalker, a traumatic primal scene and an artistic amateur sleuth protagonist who cannot quite remember that vital detail, Assault makes for a fascinating if not entirely successful attempt at transposing the Italian giallo to a small-town British setting, where Fiats and Lancias may morph into Morris Minors and Jaguars but the often dubious sexual politics remain the same.

In common with many Hammer-style films – Edinburgh-born director Sidney Hayers was earlier responsible for Circus of Horrors and Night of the Eagle – the film is hampered by bad day-for-night work and continuity, with darkness quite literally falling in the pivotal what-did-she-really-see sequence. Likewise, while this sequence is effectively rendered, in contrast to the generally undistinguished and by-the-numbers mise-en-scene, it is telling that we do not get any flashbacks to it in the manner of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, perhaps indicative of a fundamental lack of imagination or aspiration on the filmmakers' part. The film also suffers from an overused and unattractive main theme that leaves one longing for the elegance and intricacies of a Morricone or Nicolai score.


Trivia fans may also note that the schoolgirl whom Mr Sanford paws is played by Janet Lynn from Pete Walker's sexploitation entry Cool It Carol!; Walker would later also direct the giallo-esque Schizo from a script by David McGillivray, whose critical beat for the Monthly Film Bulletin saw him cover a number of gialli around this time.




A neat equation, (no sex please we're) British style: nudie pictures equals pervert equals rapist and murderer?

On the plus side, the mystery remains engaging to the end whilst Kendall again makes for an attractive woman in peril. One is also struck, however, at just how wholesome she appears, more wide-eyed dolly bird than potential raptor, affording a more limited range of possibilities than contemporaries like Susan Scott, Edwige Fenech and Barbara Bouchet,but also confirming the appropriateness of her Spasmo casting as uncomfortably moral conspirator.

Some links:
Sidney Hayers appreciation
A review of the film that makes the giallo connection

A slightly technical question on the meaning of 70mm

I'm involved in my local film society here in Edinburgh. We've been working on programming our next season and one of the themed ideas we came up with was a selection of 70mm films. The films we would be showing are probably the obvious choices, things like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Lawrence of Arabia. But, in browsing giallo posters on Ebay over the years, I've often noticed that a fair number, especially on the Spanish ones, seem to suggest that they were 70mm presentations.


The Bloodstained Butterfly


My Dear Killer


All the Colours of the Dark

Is this the case and, if so, is it 'true' 70mm or just a process that allowed the description to be used but wasn't really the same thing at all as far as quality went, perhaps akin to the widescreen processes often used on Italian westerns a few years earlier.

Again, it would seem unlikely that these films were still available in 70mm and even less likely that they would be viable in terms of getting an audience – it's more that enquiring minds want to know...

Another stairwell

Thanks for the stairways folks; here's another


From The Cat o' Nine Tails

La Vittima designata / The Designated Victim

It took Dario Argento thirty-five years to formally acknowledge his indebtedness to Hitchcock in the form of Do You Like Hitchcock, in which a film student comes to suspect his neighbour has taken inspiration from the Anglo director's 1951 Patricia Highsmith adaptation Strangers on a Train when her mother is murdered. It was by no means the first giallo to do so, however, as this 1971 entry from the little-known Maurizio Lucidi demonstrates.

At first glance Milanese businessman Stefano Argenti seems to have it all: wealth, success, and a beautiful girlfriend, Fabienne. In reality, however, he is still dependent on his neurotic and shrewish wife, Luisa. She got him started in the advertising business and holds the shares in their agency in her name. Neither is she about to sell up at a bargain price just so that Stefano can go back to his homeland, Venezuela, with no particular stated aim in mind; Stefano can hardly explain that Fabienne rather than Luisa is the one who figures in his plans.


The first moment of contact between Stefano and the as yet unidentified Count, and also a concessions to black-gloved convention

Enjoying a few days away in Venice with Fabienne, a solution to Stefano's dilemma presents itself in the form of a seemingly chance encounter with Count Matteo Tiepolo. Coincidence soon transforms into conspiracy as the two men exchange stories and, releasing that they are in a identical positions in having unwanted relatives, make a tacit agreement to switch murders: Tiepolo will take care of Luisa, then Stefano will kill Matteo's brother...


Pierre Clementi as the vampire-like Count; coincidentally director Maurizio Lucidi later worked uncredited on Nosferatu in Venice

Although it is difficult to fully gauge La Vittima designata / The Designated Victim – the alternate Slam Out title seems meaningless and inappropriate – from the slightly cropped, English dub version I saw here, it nevertheless comes across as a quality piece of work; in this regard is worth also noting that this is one of those films where a credit for preparing the English-language version is given. (Unfortunately, while the film is now available on DVD, there does not seem to be the optimal English subs / Italian dub option.)

Clementi is perfectly cast as Tiepolo, while Milian once again impresses with his versatility as Argenti. Although the female leads are adequate in performance and eye candy respectively, I couldn't help mentally substituting Laura Betti for Marisa Bartoli as Luisa and Dagmar Lassander for Katia Christine as Fabienne respectively and finding my imaginary cast more enticing; I suspect others will find something similar.

The score, composed by Luis Enrique Bacalov and performed by The New Trolls has a symphonic / progressive rock vibe to it. Not only is it comparatively unusual compared to the more usual easy listening, musique concrete and party music idioms, it works. Milian also contributes here, providing the gently sung title theme, with lyrics derived from Hamlet of all things – “to die, to sleep, maybe to dream...” – that recurs throughout the action and, crucially, resonates beyond the final act.

The mise en scène is subtle by the standards of much filone film-making, making it clear that Tiepolo is Argenti's douple without resorting to more characteristic, heavy-handed devices. Shock zooms and extreme close-ups are conspicuous in their absence (Perhaps we have a nicely ironic doubling between Luisa's repeated insistence that her husband be quiet, as yet another little tic adding to his sense that she must die, and the filmmakers' preferred approach to their material?)

Milan and Venice are used effectively – if the latter's representation perhaps smacks of tourist cliché, the point is that such touristic imagery, as seen in the first exchange between Argenti and Tiepolo, is warranted precisely because Argenti and Fabienne are at that moment tourists sightseeing in the city.

We also have to remember that their respective roles, as ad-man and model, are in a sense all about the perpetual (re)definition of signifiers. A romantic weekend in Venice or a bouquet of flowers equals love (per “say it with flowers”) and Tiepolo is to all intents and purposes that image besides that dictionary definition of decadent, decaying aristo.

Thus, if the filmmakers do not manage to transcend their source material they do engage with and go some way towards subverting or Italianising it. While the basic themes are the same as those of Strangers on a Train – exchange / transference of guilt, the double etc.– there are sufficient variations on that film's patterns to establish The Designated Victim as something more than – to here throw in some cliché metaphors of one's own – spiced-up leftovers with added garlic sauce (i.e. post-studio code nudity etc.)

In this regard, Argenti is also quickly established as a more compromised character than Strangers on a Train's Guy Haines. Rather than being shocked by Tiepolo's making good on his proposal, Argenti takes it at face value and attempts to make the most of the situation. His problem is not murder per se, but queasiness over having to perform the act itself by way of reciprocation, with a further interesting variation insofar as the absence of either man's family also means that he never actually sees the monstrous brother whom he is to slay.

It is this same unease that also establishes something of a distinction between the two men; that they are not complete doubles. (Although of course we can always here bring in the mirror double as meconnaissance / misrecognition if we want to get all psychoanalytical; as per usual I don't.) for while Tiepolo may well be a psychopath in the mode of Bruno Anthony or the later Tom Ripley, Argenti needs another to spur him into action and fundamentally appears to lacks the requisite guile and cunning. Here we can note his feeble early attempts at convincing Luisa to sell her shares for their mutual benefit, with his use of “I” rather than “we” putting her on guard. Or consider the awkwardness with which he gives his alibi to the police, able to tell them he was “at the movies” but not what film he saw, other than it was “a western”.

Yet perhaps this is also an honest statement of fact about the filone cinema and the way many critics have consistently failed to engage with in by relegating films like this to the status of inferior-Italian-imitation-with-nothing-to-say almost as a matter of policy rather than approaching them without prejudice and with an openness to the possibility that they might actually be something more. This was, after all, the great achievement of the French critics of the 1950s in looking anew at American Hitchcock vis-a-vis British. The challenge now, I would contend, is to afford this same consideration to the 1970s Italian post-Hitchcock of the giallo, especially as it exists beyond Argento.

Alex Cox book on Spaghetti Westerns

In case anyone doesn't know about this: Alex Cox, director and ex-presenter of Moviedrome and all round good guy has a manuscript he wrote on Spaghetti Westerns, 10,000 Ways to Die, but unfortunately never published, available for download from his website

From the first few pages, it looks to be an interesting counterpoint / companion piece to Christopher Frayling's Spaghetti Westerns; the beauty of course is that if you don't like it, well, it hasn't cost you anything...

Stairway to Heaven? Or Powell, Bava, Argento

One of the many small pleasures I get from watching gialli are the abstract, almost avant-garde configurations that appear from time to time. Stairways are a good example of this:


From Giuliano Carnimeo's The Case of the Bloody Iris




From Dario Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage; I love the reversal of perspectives here.


From Mario Bava's Kill Baby Kill

It's the lighting, with the contrast of colours or simply black and white; the spirals, rectangles and triangles; the sheer way in which the filmmaker and his cinematographer take something we are all familiar with but make us look at it afresh; that we could take a still like this, frame it and stick it in a gallery.

But it's also the meaning that these stairwells have beyond simply being locations in which action plays out, with ascension to paradise or descent into inferno equal possibilities. And it's another point of intersection with other key figures, if we think of Hitchcock's use of stairs in the likes of Notorious, Suspicion and Psycho, or Powell, with A Matter of Life and Death even going by the alternative title of Stairway to Heaven...

Emanuelle Around the World derive

This morning I settled down to watch the XXX version of Joe D'amato's Emanuelle - perché violenza alle donne? / Emanuelle Around the World, only to find myself drifting away from the film part of the way through.

It was nothing to do with a dissatisfaction with the film: using the familiar travelogue format, as the roving reporter finds herself going from continent to continent in search of a scoop and busting a woman-trafficking ring in the process, it offers the usual pleasures like familiar cult faces (and bodies), situations and music, all coupled with "exotic" locales and expectably-unexpected moments, be it George Eastman's turn as an Indian guru or the various sometimes literal what-the-fuck encounters.

Rather, it was that the film increasingly got me thinking about the wider phenomenon of cult yet again and, more specifically, about the different approaches we take to it as consumers and producers of discourses around such texts. (Yes, it's double domed deconstructionist time; with apologies to Joe Carducci...)

The first thing here is the challenge a film like Emanuelle Around the World poses in terms of the sometimes cherished notion of authenticity. For while D'Amato frequently voices a personal preference for softcore over hardcore material in interviews, he would then typically go on to say that he was also aware of the harsh realities of the market. Thus, whereas we can take films such as The Slasher is a Sex Maniac or 99 Women and say with some confidence what constituted the director's original version or vision and that hardcore inserts were not a part of it, here we perhaps cannot.

Indeed, part of my own pleasure in watching the film – thinking about it also made me re-view it – in not having yet seen the alternative edit in the Black Emanuelle box set (give it time...) comes from making educated guesses at what point the alternative footage gets cut in or out and Gemser herself left the scene.

The second thing, but also perhaps intertwined with the first to some degree, is the way in which films like these help expose some of the fault lines in cult film discussion more generally. I'm thinking here of something like Video Watchdog and what its remit as "the perfectionist's guide to fantastic video" actually means, or the Mobius Home Video forums and their policy over what it's acceptable to discuss, worth quoting for both referring to D'Amato and attempting to situating him in a particular generic context:

While discussion of mainstream-oriented unrated or X-rated films that may feature sexually explicit material is okay, discussion of adult XXX-rated films and DVDs (including vintage "blue" films) and their cast and crew is outside the scope of MHVF. Rare exceptions may be made for the discussion of XXX films legitimately connected to cast or crew primarily known for their mainstream work (e.g., the films of Joe D'Amato, Radley Metzger, Abel Ferrara, etc.), or cult films such as CAFE FLESH. We're interested in keeping MHVF open to underage readers as much as possible, and allowing the discussion of XXX-rated films would impede that goal. MHVF also doesn't have the necessary legal disclosures and warnings to alert parents or concerned readers to the presence of discussion topics about XXX-rated films.

(Annoyingly the URL of the specific post / page is masked, making it harder to cite in the appropriate fashion; it's on the posting policy and FAQ page.)

While it is true that this film isn't strictly speaking a fantasy one and, more generally, that the notion of fantastical cinema is itself a slippery one - e.g. the anglophone definition of fantasy versus the francophone fantastique - one does sometimes get the feeling that the boundaries are sometimes somewhat inchoate and ad-hoc. When is the sexual content of a horror or fantasy film - again note the possible conflation /confusion – such that it is “really” a sex film? (The reaction of some critics to the opening sequences of Cronenberg's Crash comes to mind.) At what point does a Metzger or D'Amato cease being a “mainstream” director? What does “mainstream” mean in the cult context - is it simply a coded “not porn”?

Perhaps Jean Rollin's Phantasmes was just a porn film that its director effectively disowned, his use of a pseudonym a way of signifying that it was not a Rollin film, as Tohill and Tombs note, but what about much of Jess Franco's oeuvre in this regard, not to mention his own remark in one his Obsession interview to the effect that porn is just another genre?

Or maybe it is that there is sometimes too much of emphasis upon the auteur as source of meaning – if Rollin says this is not a true Rollin film, then that is it, case closed - or upon empirical detail – X seconds of footage are different Y into the film - as against what this difference might mean, within cult discourse.

The crucial word here is might, the issue that of taking on board a more interpretive approach whilst avoiding the pitfall of academic approaches that become so detached from the film - or worse, fail to engage with it in the first place - and simply disappear up their own arguments.

The task, I would argue, is to bring the two approaches into closer contact with one another, hopefully allowing for a kind of contagion so that the cult and fan types become infected with theory and academic and theoretical types with supporting their claims via more empirical evidence.

One piece that's came to mind in regard to this film specifically is Xavier Mendik's Black Sex, Bad Sex: Monstrous Ethnicity in the Black Emanuelle Films in the edited collection Alternative Europe. Examining the cycle as a whole, Mendik argues that they express an Italian unease at the racial Other, such that Laura Gemser is a fundamentally monstrous figure. It's not an argument I would necessarily agree with wholeheartedly - I think there's too much of the sadistic male colonising gaze in there and insufficient scope for irony or self-parody - but at least Mendik attempts to engage with the significance of what he sees, rather than simply providing an itemisation of factual detail.

And all that, I guess, is a rambling attempt to justify my own interest in taking a phenomenological approach to Argento, that it is – hopefully – a theoretical approach that allows one to move from the experience of the film / text to a reflection on the meanings of that experience and text while being true(r) to them than the alternatives I've looked at. (Well, that and I don't think anyone else has done it yet...)

Some thoughts on Cat o' Nine Tails

I have been thinking a lot about Argento's second film, Cat o' Nine Tails, recently.

It is a film which is often evaluated as the weakest of his early period. Reading responses to the film, much of the criticism seems to fall into two camps. Many fans don't seem to be particularly willing to go beyond Argento's own negative appraisals of the film, in a the-master-has-spoken manner. Those with a more critical orientation, meanwhile, often seem to react negatively to the film because its particular interests do not accord with their theories; Gary Needham's Kinoeye article is a good example.



The more I think about the film, however, the more I find I like it. Admittedly this could be simple perversity; a desire to demonstrate an independent position vis-a-vis an author-god, or that the limited applicability of film psychoanalysis is in accord with the approach I want to use as an alternative.

Any film with a blind protagonist who feels his way through the world with a cane that is essentially a part of his body rather than a separate thing is, I have to admit, pretty much a gift as far as a phenomenological, cinaesthetic reading is concerned.

Plus, no doubt some would be suspicious of any film that has to be worked at in this sort of way – shouldn't the best films have an effect the first time round and then unveil new resonances and depths with each viewing?

In this regard, I find Argento films seem to fall into a number of camps here. There are some, like The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Deep Red and Inferno, that I fell in love with the first time I saw them and can watch again and again and always find something new to enjoy in. There are others, including Trauma along with Cat o' Nine Tails, which took longer and more effort to get a handle on.

Crucially, however, I think this is a reflection of the interplay of “surface” and “depth” in Argento's cinema; that different films work in different ways with them, rather than as anything to do with one group being superior or inferior to the other.



So, my question to you is: what do you like or dislike about Cat o' Nine Tails, either in itself or in relation to other Argento films.

For the record, here is a brief itemisation of some of my current thoughts:

I think the film suffers, reception wise, from the lack of a endlessly re-viewable set piece as in its predecessor. But the sequence in the train station leading up to the murder of Calabresi is suspensefully constructed and the montage of shots as he goes under the train so tight and precise – bang, bang, bang – as to be sufficient compensation.

I think the performances are better, or at least Argento was more comfortable with his actors this time around and could get them to simply be there as elements within the frame, somewhat akin to the approach favoured Antonioni and Hitchcock; Cinzea de Carolis also has that rare quality among child actors of not being in the least bit annoying. Arno and Giordani are characters one feels warmer towards than their counterparts in the other Animal Trilogy films, although crucially this not come at the cost of making them idealised types devoid of flaws – Giordani makes his leaps of judgement, while Arno's flipping out at the end has dubious parallels with the killer's.

The editing has an edginess and experimental quality to it, as if with flashes of insight and precognition that seem to double for Arno's sixth sense and thus perhaps prefigure themes in Deep Red and beyond; Bianca Merusi's murder also feels like something of a dry run for Amanda Righetti's in Deep Red and if you look carefully you can see that she also has a door-handle incident slightly reminiscent of those in Inferno.

The science is more convincing than Four Flies on Grey Velvet. Even if the XYY chromosome idea might have been discredited, genetic predispositions seem to have become more rather than less discussed.

I especially like the ironies within the writing, the attention to detail that too often goes unrecognised perhaps on account of the legacy of the Argento-as-visual-stylist approach.

It is the way Arno and the killer respond existentially to the hands that fate has dealt them, and that we here have a scientist who for all his purported brilliance seems to too easily slip from correlation to causality – after all, it is only a significantly higher proportion of the prison population who have the XYY combination, not all of them. Or the way in which the blackmailer and those engaged in industrial espionage are seeking the same ends, independently and in ignorance of one another, yet it is the way in which they come together in terms of the subsequent investigation that confuses things so much. Or the parallel between Bianca's watch with the cameo portrait of her dead love and the cameo portrait on the slab of her own tomb.

Yes, there are weaknesses – who killed Braun, why and with what consequences (though I wonder if this could be given a queer reading akin to that Robin Wood performs on Hitchcock's Rope) or the coincidence of having Anna cut her hand at the inopportune moment for example – but ultimately I feel it is a film that deserves a second look.

Art of Darkness

Something I chanced upon while browsing: an art installation inspired by Suspiria:

http://p-l-m.blogspot.com/2007/03/stan-douglas-suspiria-2002.html

Una Libélula para cada muerto / A Dragonfly for Each Corpse

Though the giallo and spaghetti western are essentially Italian forms, it is easy to forget just how many were co-productions with Spain in particular. And just as there was the odd paella western where the Spanish input was dominant, so there is also the odd giallo that might well be labelled an amarillo instead, like Carlos Aured's Los Ojos azules de la muñeca rota / Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll and this film, together proving that the Italians did not have a monopoly on bizarre titles by any means.

The link in both cases - from his appearance some unkind souls might well say missing link - is weightlifter turned one man horror factory Paul Naschy who, in addition to taking the male lead also performed scripting duties under his given name, Jacinto Molina.


The killer indulges in a spot of tachisme, Tenebrae style


Free hand for a tough cop as Scaporella confronts a pervert

Working once more with Argentinean-born director Leon Klimovsky, the barrel-chested Molina here appears as Inspector Scaporella, a cigar-chomping, moustachoied type who could give Maurizio Merli a run for his money in the perpetually angry cop stakes – until that is, he then blows his tough-guy credentials somewhat by donning an apron and preparing dinner for his wife Silvana.


One of the killer's calling cards


The loving couple - Naschy and his cigar, oh and Blanc as well


Two of Silvana's friends and possible suspects / victims

She is played by Erica Blanc who, as just about the only Italian amongst the cast and crew, was perhaps in there for business rather than artistic reasons; if so, however, this strategy apparently did not work insofar as the film was not released in Italy.

Oddly in this regard the location is actually an Italian one, with the city of Milan suffering the attentions of mysterious Dragonfly Killer. He or she – the red flares that offset the otherwise de rigeur black gloves and jacket add a deliberate element of ambiguity – is killing off various degenerates and low-lifes in an apparent clean-up-the-city type crusade.


The killer is on the phone


The girl who knew too much

Scaporella himself doesn't seem to mind, but the higher-ups want results, especially after the killer takes out three hippies one of whom happens to be the son of the police chief.

This time, however, there is at least another clue besides the trademark artificial dragonfly that the killer leaves on each of his victims: a button.



Not just any button, however, but a quality, "high-fashion" type button - "craftsmanship," explains Scaporella.

Yes, having an aspiring designer as a wife has its advantages, especially when she is so much smarter than Scaporella and associates with the kind of people who can tell him that the killer's modus operandi is reminiscent of the ancient sect of the Caldeans. They apparently had a policy of marking out prostitutes, homosexuals and other deviants with Dragonflies, you see.

The only problem is that Silvana's investigation is also the type that, being more likely to unmask the killer, is all the more dangerous....

Though a pan and scan badly dubbed VHS sourced copy is hardly the best way to experience A Dragonfly for Each Corpse, I can't see myself desperately seeking out the recent Spanish-language only DVD just in case it is classic that has been lost in translation.


The stripper who does the Belle de Jour style coffin routine

Rather, on the evidence here, it falls squarely into the trashy, campy so-bad-its-good category whether through Naschy's enjoyable over-the-top performance; Blanc's frequent and ever-more outrageous costume changes; the use of where-have-I-heard-this-before musical cues from A Bay of Blood, Blood and Black Lace and some unidentified spaghetti western (all simply credited to CAM Espana); quotably bad dialogue and sleazily contrived situations like the stripper / prostitute whose client requires her to play dead or the group of Nazi biker types who attack Scarporelli in a subplot.

Nice little short film

Semih Tareen send me a link to a short film he has made, entitled Giallo and dedicated to Mario Bava. It's got the colours; the music; a woman in peril with Edwige Fenech-style eye make-up; and even throws in a Bergmanesque allusion that I'm sure Argento would appreciate, as the killer and his victim play chess before he dispatches her. I also liked the branches that brush against the outside window, presumably done Bava-style by having a couple of guys waggling them as appropriate.

Check it out here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0nCfEWxDIs

Also be sure to look at the other links on the page – some trailers, an interview with Mariano Baino and more.

Enjoy!

Cult cinema and translation

Recently I've been thinking a bit about the issues of translation in relation to cult films like gialli. It's a combination of various things - talking with someone who's working on doing English subs for a film; re-viewing different versions of The Cat o' Nine Tails in English and Italian, and a post by Tim Lucas on Video Watchblog where he talks about the new subtitles on Rabid Dogs and how they are different from the version he prepared a number of years back - that have just happened to come together. (As an aside, how often to films get retranslated compared to literature or theory? How often do cult films compared to art ones? Times they are a changing...)

Lucas talks about how two toughs would, in English, be unlikely to call their boss "Doctor"; it taps into an Italian respect for titles and academic achievement and differences in the wider educational system compared to English norms, for as the Collins English-Italian dictionary entry explains:

"In Italy anyone who has a university degree in any subject can be addressed with the title of 'dottore'; so someone who is called 'dottore' is not necessarily a medical doctor."

What this made me think of, oddly enough, is William Foote Whyte's early sociological classic Street Corner Society, where he studied an Italian-American street gang whose street-smart leader went by, you've guessed it, the name of "Doc"...

Maybe it's the ease with which the English doctor can be shortened and familiarised in this manner and the Italian doesn't lend perhaps doesn't lend itself to this in the same way. I don't know; whatever the case, I'm going to have to listen to Rabid Dogs more intently the next time I watch it...

In terms of Cat o' Nine Tails, meanwhile, it's not just the little changes in dialogue - in the English dub the driver who discovers the unconscious night watchman says he must be drunk again and the Italian dub that he must be sleeping, implying different middle-class expectations as to what a working-class watchman does - but also the various written inserts of notes, newspapers, letters and diary entries.

Maybe it's being ultra-nerdy but I would like to see discs start including alterate versions of written inserts to be able to compare them in case there are potentially meaningful differences. Or maybe we - as fans and scholars - need to start taking screengrabs / rips of such moments to build up our own repositories.

"Traduttore, traditor" in the Italian, which translates into the French as "Traduire, c'est trahir," which translates into the English as "to translate is to betray..." adds a certain irony to all of this, naturellement...

Spaghetti western blog

I may have mentioned this excellent Brasilian blog before, but thought it worth doing so again as there are now English translations of the posts. http://dollarirosso.blogspot.com/

Coincidentally I have been on a bit of a spaghetti western kick myself at the moment, having gone through the Pistole non discutono set, which I would heartily recommend to anyone with an interest in the genre. Even within the five films included, it is fascinating to see the evolution of the filone from the early, comparatively traditional / American styled Duello nel Texas and Pistole non discutono (directed by Mario Caiano, who recently cropped up here in relation to his giallo Eye in the Labyrinth) through the peak period McGregors films (which as a Scot I find fascinating, perhaps for all the wrong reasons) onto the post-Trinity comedy / parody of La Vita, a volte, è molto dura, vero Provvidenza?

Again, not giallo but still relevant, precisely because lots of those who did gialli also did westerns and it was in that genre that Argento got his break, via Leone and Once Upon a Time in the West, where he also met Bertolucci leading to his being given The Screaming Mimi and, well, the rest is history...

Comizi d'amore / Love Meetings

Although this blog is nominally about the giallo film and Dario Argento, I think it is important to maintain a sense of perspective and try to watch a variety of cinema. You can never tell when something is going to prove relevant, or provide some new insight or idea.

This 1965 documentary from Pier Paolo Pasolini is a case in point. In it the director goes round Italy, microphone in hand, conducting vox populi interviews in which he asks ordinary Italians for their views on such topics as divorce, homosexuality and the whether the closure of brothels via the 1958 Merlin Law was a good or bad thing.

As such, it provides a fascinating insight into the kind of discourses around modernity that Mikel Koven argues - I think correctly - that we see in gialli five or ten years later. Putting it another way, I think anyone who enjoys – say – the debates between Marc Daly and Gianna Brezzi in Deep Red as much as the set-pieces would get a lot of out this.

Another link

A nice little introduction to Argento; it perhaps will not tell anyone visiting here much they did not already know, but does have some trailers and a piece of art for The Stendhal Syndrome that I do not think I had ever seen before:

http://nosmokingintheskullcave.blogspot.com/2006/07/great-film-icons-1-dario-argento.html

El Giallo Italiano - La Oscuridad y la Sangre

A friend studying in Spain picked this up for me; I do not read Spanish but flicking through it I wish I did...

The book is divided into four parts. The first takes a broad view of the genre, with essays on the relationship between the giallo literature and film; the history of the genre; aesthetics and the role of woman as victim (with a picture of a topless, body-painted Edwige Fenech from Case of the Bloody Iris wrongly identified as from Strip Nude for Your Killer). The second looks at key filmmakers, with Argento, Bava, Ercoli, Freda, Fulci, Lenzi and Martino each getting a short chapter. The third looks at key film from other filmmakers - Death Laid an Egg, The Fifth Cord, Slaughter Hotel, The Bloodstained Butterfly, My Dear Killer, The Eye in the Labyrinth, What Have You Done to Solange, The Assassin Reserved Nine Seats, The Killer Must Kill Again and The House with the Windows that Laughed. The last part discusses the giallo in Spanish context and the relationship between the giallo and the slasher film.

Nightmare / Nightmares in a Damaged Brain

George Tatum suffers from homicidal mania. The doctors at the institution where he was incarcerated following a multiple murder have never been able to establish the root cause of his illness, but have been treating him with an experimental drug. Believing George cured they release him. He then disappears...

Written and directed by Romano Scavolini, this is one of those films that I had wanted to see for a long time. Partly it was its status as a video nasty, complete with notorious guess-the-weight-of-the-brain-in-the-jar promotional competition and the dubious distinction of seeing its distributor jailed. Then there was the controversy over the extent of Tom Savini's involvement, whether he contributed the make-up effects or only acted in an advisory capacity. And then there was the attention lavished on it in the book Spaghetti Nightmares, where Scavolini is given what seems an undue prominence at the forefront of Italian fantasy cinema. So when a VHS rip, panned and scanned but apparently uncut, appeared on the file sharing network over the weekend, it was a must download and watch.






The Tenebrae shot, take one

The film lacks most of the familiar giallo iconography, with the mask that George dons at one point seeming more to do with Halloween than anything else. Likewise, with his identity as disturbed killer established at the outset – a strategy that also makes the film more Maniac than The New York Ripper, to identify two reference points and further identify that this is the kind of territory which some may not wish to enter – the main mysteries are exactly where he is going and what lies at the root of his psychosis.






The Tenebrae shot, take two; note the killer kid as one likely reason why the film had trouble during the Video Nasties era

Really, however, neither is particular enigmatic, with the extensive cross-cutting between George and a seemingly unconnected family and use of flashbacks to a childhood trauma probably enough to give giallo and slasher fans strong sense of deja vu about the proceedings.

Scavolini's direction is a mixed bag. He does some nice tricks, like using the Tenebrae shot of one character bending down to reveal another behind them, or shooting through a hole in a door, but fails to lavish comparable care and attention on the majority of the scenes and set-ups, making their by-the-numbers nature all the more apparent. Likewise, in using the bend over reveal shot twice – even worse, with the second actually at what should be the climactic revelation – the effect is to ironically dilute its impact and make you think that Scavolini was running increasingly short on ideas or borrowings from Carpenter, The Shining, The Godfather (!) and whatever else. (In fairness, however, it also to be acknowledged here that his film pre-dates Argento's, while the diegetic referencing of Blow-Up when a Polaroid of an empty house seems to reveal a figure at a window also signals Scavolini's willingness to acknowledge his influences, even if I do not think the results demonstrate him to be in any way equal to them.)


Killer in a Sid Haig rather than William Shatner mask?


Kids and guns - a winning combination


The performances are variable. Baird Stafford, who would later appear in the director's Vietnam movie Dog Tags (and, if the IMDB is to believed, nothing else) is scarily convincing as the compulsive killer, although the other adult performers are generally less impressive. The child actors are more annoying than anything else, though it could also be argued that this is part of the point with one in particular, a practical joker and boy who cried wolf type by the name of CJ, sorely testing the patience of his mother, her boyfriend and the babysitter.

One unintentional source of amusement is the central computer system the clinic staff appear to be using as they track down George. Maybe they had access to cutting edge equipment, with vague hints at a conspiracy whereby the now-reformed George is to be put to work for the government or military, but the thing makes Google seem somewhat inadequate.

L' Occhio nel labirinto / The Eye in the Labyrinth

We open with enigmatic, oneiric images of a wounded man (Horst Frank) running through a maze of twisty passages, rendered alike thanks to an omnipresent blue light and disorientating expressionistic mise-en-scene.

As a hand sticks a knife into the man's back once more – filone fans should take note that this is one of the few iconographic concessions they are going to get for a while and that even here there is a perhaps telling absence of black leather gloves – the sound of a telephone rings and our protagonist, Julia (Rosemary Dexter) is rudely awoken.

Where is Lucas, asks the caller.

Julia does not know, but suggests he might be the clinic.

At the clinic there is no sign of Lucas. He went to a conference a few days ago, but the receptionist admits she thought this was just a pretext for his spending some quality time Julia.

A patient bursts in and proclaims that Lucas is in Maracudi. Exactly what this means no-one knows.




The vaguely Caligari style interiors of the titular labyrinth; any similarity is, I think, purely intentional.

Returning home, Julia finds a gunman waiting for her. He demands to know where Lucas is and once satisfied that Julia does not know calmly leaves, albeit with the threat of killing her should she go to the police.

Looking through Lucas's diary, Julia finds an entry simply marked “Maracudi” and discovers that it is a small coastal town, the kind one would not know of unless one had been there before. En route – he were may note what seems to be an emphasis on the colour yellow in the form of Julia's blouse and car and the attire of the petrol pump attendant who curious seems to have seen her before – Julia thinks she sees Lucas, only for it to turn out to be another man.




Reading the signs

In the town, a curiously empty place eerily reminiscent of one of De Chrico's metaphysical paintings, Julia enters a cafe and asks around in the hope that someone might recognise Lucas from his photograph. No-one seems to, though one of the men she asks then approaches her outside – having in the interim exchanged words and glances with another, unbeknownst to Julia – and says he can take her to him.

The man leaves Julia outside a ruined building, which she then explores; the perceptive or self-deceptive viewer may also notice that the place appears to have some uncanny similarities to the one in her dream. Someone then apparently tries to kill her with falling masonry and steals her bag. Fleeing, Julia then bumps into the mystery man from the cafe (Adolfo Celi).


An Italian word, spoken in English, with Danish subtitles; the international quality of the giallo film is matched by that of their audience today


Reading the signs once more

Explaining that she cannot go to the police on account of being a foreigner whose visa has expired – note again another giallo outsider protagonist – Julia asks him if there might be a hotel nearby. There is not, but he suggests that she might instead be able to stay with a friend, and takes her to the place, which he used to own and is now an orphanage. He also dismisses that anyone might have been trying to kill her, saying that the building is old and the man from the cafe is just the local nut. Julia, not having seen the hand that triggered the fall that could have killed her, has no particular reason to believe otherwise – she is not paranoid, after all...

Later Julia gets her bag back. Everything is there except, curiously enough, the photo of Lucas. Seeing how much finding him means to her, the mystery man then suggests that she might try at Gerda's villa – it is the place where various artists and suchlike hang out.

Arriving there after various travails, Julia is disappointed to find that Gerda (Alida Vallil) does not know any Lucas. Indeed, she wonders who might have sent Julia to her and, on hearing the mystery man's description, puts a name to his face, Frank, and identifies him as something of a rogue.

Despite not being able to help, Gerda welcomes Julia to stay the night and introduces her to some of the other inhabitants of the colony, including an avant-garde composer who tape records their conversations for the sounds they contain and a constantly bickering pair whose theatrical work gets more and more off-Broadway with each season.

That evening Julia and some of the others play scrabble. The word murder – assassino – gets played, with the camera curiously lingering on the scrabble board and then zooming in. If the meaning of this image is momentarily unclear – are we seeing this from Julia's point of view or being given another piece of the puzzle that she is not party to? – it is soon to be reappraised as the going gets ever weirder.

Looking at Gerda's bookshelf – itself a suggestion that, in her search for Lucas, Julia is operating with more heightened perceptions than normal, such that what could have been a innocuous choice of word itself becomes invested with significance – Julia notices a copy of an unusual book she gave Lucas as a gift and asks Gerda if she may look at it. Gerda refuses and, while explaining that the book was given her by her first husband, manages to do so in a way that can only further pique Julia's interest.

Someone phones for Julia but then declines to speak or identify themselves. Again, we see who it is: Frank, back in the cafe.

Julia announces that she is going to bed and that she will be leaving in the morning, which prompts Gerda to call the others; exactly for what we do not see.

While everyone else is sleeping, Julia sneaks into the lounge and takes the book off the shelf. Its front page has been removed, such that it could have been the same copy as she gave Lucas, complete with dedication. Not everyone is sleeping, however, as a man walks in with a gun, having heard a noise and wanting to check that she is not an intruder. He seems to be the same man as in the town, the one who led her to the ruined building. Julia asks him if this is is indeed the case and he responds in the negative, an answer which she accepts...

Come the next morning Julia has decided to stay. She does not, however, pursue the search for Lucas with any urgency but instead enagages in a spot of sunbathing. Her relaxation is short-lived as a youth from the village flashes the light from a mirror in her eyes and says that Frank wants to see her at the orphanage...

As signalled by its pre-credits quotation from Borges (“A labyrinth is build to bewilder the mind of man. Its architecture, however rich in symmetries it may be, is subordinate to this end”) this is another one of those aspirational arthouse/grindhouse crossover gialli that seems designed to reward attentive viewers and somewhat frustrate others.

While not quite an anti-giallo in the sense of Antonioni's otherwise somewhat comparable L'Avventura, insofar as the various enigmas are ultimately resolved and the narrative tightness does not allow for the empty spaces to be matches by anything like the same commitment to dead time, The Eye in the Labyrinth is certainly up there with the likes of Luigi Bazzoni's Footprints on the Moon, Francesco Barilli's Perfume of the Lady in Black and Pupi Avati's House with the Windows that Laughed as another quality giallo-for-people-who-do-not-like-gialli.

The operative term is, I think, overdetermination, “the idea that a single observed effect is determined by multiple causes at once, any one of which alone might be enough to account for the effect." Any time, that is, you think you have found something that does not work, or which weakens (read cheapens) the overall effect – an over-emphatic zoom, a too-significant line of dialogue etc. – you find yourself coming back to reinterpret it again as working in relation to some other emergent, immanent re-configuration.

And, if the psychoanalytic reading is the one which co-writer and director Mario Caiano himself encourages us to take it is is the very way in which his overdetermined mise-en-scene, as the consciousness of the camera becomes equivalent / indiscernible from that of the characters and the auteur – whose perspective is this; is it objective, subjective or ultimately transcendentally intersubjective – that makes the film also amenable to this kind of alternative Pasolinian interpretation, whether or not Caiano was himself aware of it. (From what I have seen of Caiano in interviews, however, I would not be surprised..)

Whatever the case – you may not share my perspective and that is much of the pleasure of interpreting texts like this – there can be no doubt about the quality of the performances (albeit with Horst Frank apparently enjoying a more prominent billing than his screen time would warrant, indicative of the German co-production involvement one suspects) and production values as a whole, with attractive cinematography and an appealing jazz score from Roberto Nicolosi.

A labyrinth that, then, paradoxically allows us to take many different routes from beginning to end – if indeed, there is ever an end...

Some links

Yahoo Group dedicated to European Film scores, including Nicolai, Piccioni, Umiliani and other favourites of ours.

http://launch.groups.yahoo.com/group/eurofilmscoresociety/

Also Movie Music Italiano, with some very interesting interviews, including Nora Orlandi, Pino Donaggio and Edda Dell'Orso:

http://www.freewebs.com/moviemusicitaliano/maestrointerviews.htm

An Easter rising

The Zora cover, using the same art and Gothic logo as the original

Just in time for Easter, a tale of death and resurrection. This is an English translation of the origins issue of the Italian fumetti Zora, a one-shot published by Eurocomics in 2003. I found the link to it on http://comix-collection.blogspot.com/, which has links to lots of adult comics, in a mixture of English, French and Italian, and then downloaded all the images, numbered them in sequence and created a .CBR file for easy reading

Get it here: http://rapidshare.com/files/24789698/Zora.cbr

The story starts in 1859 as Zora's father, Professor Pabst, returns to London from a scientific expedition to Transylvania. He has with him Dracula's coffin, but as a scientist does not belief in vampires and that the remarkably preserved state of Dracula's corpse must have a rational, natural explanation. He also has a hot-looking daughter, Zora, for whom he has the hots in an amusing display of Victorian hypocrisy, even having a peephole in the bathroom that looks into her bedroom where, naked, she entertains her own fantasies and tries to sleep. Restless, Zora then gets up and goes to have a look inside Dracula's coffin, summoning up courage she had lacked earlier. She also kisses the corpse on his lips. Back in her room and reading a book about the vampire, Zora then discovers that this act, coming from a virgin, is supposed to bring Dracula back from the dead...

Now all we need are the other 124 issues that were published in Italian between 1972 and 1979 to continue the saga.

Admittedly this has nothing to do with Argento nor the giallo directly. But again it is part of the general culture in which they emerged – remember that Argento and Luigi Cozzi had the idea of doing a revisionist Frankenstein film as a co-production with Hammer around the time of Four Flies on Grey Velvet or indeed the later Argento-brand fumetti in which he appears as the Crypt Keeper style master of ceremonies.


Argento, fumetti style

Deodato?

I was watching Ruggero Deodato's The Washing Machine a couple of nights back. At one point in the film the main character's neighbour comes to his door, disturbed by the noise. Is this a cameo by Deodato himself?

Libido

Although in these posts I sometimes question the validity of taking a psychoanalytic approach to each and every giallo, there is no doubt that it has their place. This 1967 entry is a case in point. Opening with a quotation from Freud and a classic “primal scene” if ever there was one – the young Christian hears a noise emanating from his father's chamber and walks in to discover the man murdering his mistress – it then proceeds to play out the enduring consequences of this trauma and his father's suicide (though significantly no body was ever found) on Christian some 20 years later.

During this intervening years Christian (Giancarlo Giannini) has been kept away from the cliff-top mansion that is one part of his inheritance by his guardian and mentor Paul (Luciano Pigozzi) who has dutifully kept the place in good repair and also endeavoured to have the young man's case assessed and treated by the very best experts in mental health and illness.




The creepy doll and the creepy kid


The moment of trauma

But now, as Christian and his fiancee Eileen (Dominique Boschero) and Paul and his partner Brigitte (Mara Maryl) – significantly and suspiciously something of a dead ringer for Christian's father's mistress – converge on the house for what may be the last time prior to the young man's belated age of majority, doubts start to surface on all sides as Christian comes to believe that his father is not dead and continues to haunt the grounds...

Neatly maintaining the balance between alternative explanations and rationales until the final act and benefitting from a quartet of fine performances and some nice touches – the aforementioned Wellesian hall of mirrors and the Jiminy Cricket musical doll that provides for a diegetic leitmotif of the sort later picked up upon by Argento in Deep Red to name but two – this is a giallo that is ripe for rediscovery.


Twenty years later in Opera it would be Like / Not Like My Mother!

Although it has traditionally been the performance by Giancarlo Giannini that has attracted the most attention, on account of his more art-house friendly work for Lina Wertmuller in particular and the fact that the film represents his debut, genre fans may be more likely to enjoy the opportuntity to see Alan Collins / Luciano Pigozzi in a more substantial role than usual.

Strangely, however,the most important contribution to the film's success is perhaps that that made by Mara Maryl, precisely because she both plays to and with / against the dumb blonde sexpot stereotype in a way that keeps you guessing.

It thus comes as no surprise on reading an old Video Watchdog interview with Maryl's writer husband Ernesto Gastaldi – also co-director here, although he indicates in the same interview that the co-credited Vittorio Salerno did not really contribute much to the finished film after his brother Enrico Maria Salerno was replaced by Pigozzi – that she provided him with the initial idea for the film and was keen to establish herself as an actress at the time.

This notwithstanding, there is also however an unmistakable Gastaldi touch to the proceedings. Indeed, if one reads Libido in relation to some of of Gastaldi's other works, it emerges across as something of a transitional work, poised between the gothic/broken mirrors and modern/broken minds milieux of The Whip and the Body and The Strange Vice of Signora Wardh respectively, albeit with an uncharacteristic focus on the neurotic (or psychotic – again, is it real or in his mind?) male.

In this regard is it also worth noting how the film features a virtual reprise of the Kurt Menliffe at the window and mysterious muddy footprints scenario of Bava's film and that the surname Corot, later applied to George Hilton's character in Martino's, makes a prior appearance here.

Via Fritz Lang

I was recently reading Reynolds Humphries book Fritz Lang, a study of the German director's American period films. While I find Humphries' approach too psychoanalytical for my liking - no surprise really, considering that it is an English translation of a thesis produced under the supervision of none other than Christian Metz in the 1970s - there are some useful summary descriptions and insights in there:

“[I]n the Langian textual system [...] all manifestations of vision and representation are bound up with questions of relativity and truth. Things may never be what they seem, but this tends to be elided in a desperate striving to pass belief off as knowledge in an attempt to maintain the ego as the center of a fixed network of concepts whose ideological nature is patent.”

“The Langian textual system is concerned first and foremost with the spec(tac)ular nature of the image and how we see it. [...] [T]his theme is often inscribed into the diegesis via the search of an investigator who believes that knowledge is a question of clear vision but who fails to understand that such vision is a matter not just of seeing things as they are but of grasping one's place in a discourse as subject of desire, of the unconscious.”

Substitute Lang for Argento and it seems to me you also have pretty good descriptions of the “textual systems” of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Deep Red and Tenebre.

Plus Ministry of Fear has both a seance sequence and a character named Neale...

Yet another must buy

Another Cinedelic book/CD combination, with poliziotto character actors:

http://www.cinedelic.com/records/attoriamanoarmata.htm

The Giallo's Flame

I got a CD by these guys a while back, kind of a score to an imaginary 70s giallo or poliziotto and very cool. They now have some new stuff out. Enjoy.

http://myspace.com/thegiallosflame

Words and (no) pictures #5

A little exercise:

Take the same set of pictures as below, or subsitute any other image of Sam Dalmas trapped in between the doors of the gallery, unable to intervene and forced to reflect upon what he has just witnessed and apply the following:

"Hymen

The word hymen comes for the Greek for skin, membrane or the vaginal hymen.

In deconstruction it is used to refer to the interplay between, the normally considered mutually exclusive terms of, inside and outside. The hymen is the membrane of intersection where it becomes impossible to distinguish whether the membrane is on the inside or the outside. And in the absence of the complete hymen, the distinction between inside and outside disappears. Thus, in a way, the hymen defies formal logic and is neither outside nor inside, and after penetration, is both inside and outside.

Showing the problematics of a simple word like hymen questions what "is inside" and "is outside" mean, they cannot here be considered in the usual logic of mutual exclusion (sometimes called law of excluded middle). Thus we get a contrast to formal logic, and especially the ancient and revered principle of non-contradiction, which from Aristotle says "one cannot say of something that it is and that it is not in the same respect and at the same time". Yet, the hymen is inside and is not inside in the same respect and at the same time (ie, using a formal logic tranlation of "inside" to "not outside")."
- From the wikipedia entry on deconstruction

Or, what do those images of the man-in-black and the woman-in-white mean when read through the colour codes, conventions and symbolisms of film noir and spaghetti western? Was Monica attacking Alberto or defending herself against what she thought was his attack? What do the labels of victim and victimiser really mean in a case like this, of a woman who misidentifies with her attacker and a husband who "loved not wisely but too well" and will kill and if need be die for her?

Old but good

A couple of links to extended discussions of Argento and his cinema:

Jigsaw Lounge: http://www.jigsawlounge.co.uk/film/argentolounge.html
Slant: http://www.slantmagazine.com/film/features/darioargento.asp

Words and pictures #4

“Scholars are only now beginning to work their way into its [Benjamin’s Arcades project’s] labyrinthine structure, a structure Adorno claimed only Benjamin himself could fully explain. Let us simply note two important aspects of this project. The first is that Benjamin based it on the revolution in architecture that the use of iron and glass had made possible. Here, commentators have noted in particular than Benjamin was fascinated by the new spatial relationships between interior and exterior that the use of glass made possible: the street could be brought inside, and the inside was opened up to the public. The difference between private and public was thus becoming problematic...”
From John Lechte's entry on Walter Benjamin in Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers