Adventures of a Taxi Driver

For the critics of the time this 1976 entry was was a sex comedy that was neither sexy nor funny and which had absolutely nothing of interest in form, content or their combination.

Thirty plus years on what’s interesting about in this regard is the way it relates, albeit unconsciously, to some of the major critical debates taking place at the same time.

The opening sequence is a case in point. Taking a pseudo-documentary approach via a stentorian voice-of-god styled voice-off, it introduces the character of the taxi driver in the abstract. However, rather than providing us with a picture of a singular reality it instead emphasises, to comic effect, the contradiction between the official and actual versions of reality. Whereas the official version given in the voice-over presents an idealised vision of the taxi driver, the unofficial version given in the image mocks this ideal.

If we turn to academic film studies we might relate this to debates about the role of realism in cinema and whether it could be used to politically progressive ends.

Significantly the distinction here was not between left and right but rather between different left wing critics associated with different theoretical approaches.

On the one hand there were those critics associated with the journal Screen. They took a structuralist approach. On the other hand there were critics, sometimes associated with the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, who took a culturalist approach.

The Screen theorists were sceptical about the progressive potential of realism. Realism, they argued, relied upon a hierarchy of discourses and was unable to adequately address contradictions. They emphasised a cinema which was radical in both form and content and in which no-one element was privileged above the others as the conveyor of truth.

Despite its left-wing subject matter and the impeccable credentials of director Ken Loach and writer Jim Allen, the 1975 TV series Days of Hope was criticised by Screen theorists for taking a basically realist approach.

Much of the debate around the series ultimately came to focus upon one scene, in which an official report indicating that a workers strike will be resolved peacefully is juxtaposed with images of soldiers about to be sent in to combat the strikers. The problem the structuralists had with this scene was in its form: Sound and image were implicitly placed in a discursive hierarchy with one another, with the latter showing the truth that the former did not.

The structuralists themselves preferred taking an approach inspired by Berthold Brecht, by which the spectator was always to be reminded that he was watching a constructed fiction through the use of various distanciating techniques – here, for instance, audio and visual elements should have been separated out, made independent of one another.

Another of Brecht’s distanciating techniques was to have character directly address the spectator, thus breaking the fourth wall and the illusion that we were simply observing events as they naturally occurred.


My name is Joe North...

Coincidentally this also happens in Adventures of a Taxi Driver. Not only does protagonist Joe North then introduce himself to us immediately after the pseudo-documentary sequence – as a relatively common device – but he also continues these addresses throughout the course of the narrative:

“I've been at it a year or so now. I've got my own cab – well, I will have, as soon as I've finished paying for it.”

“I know what she needs. I can tell whether a bird has had a good seeing to the night before”

“Something tells me this could be my lucky night […] A right little sex bomb this one. You can tell from that voice, can't you – all husky and sexy. I reckon this one will need the smooth, suave, James Bond style chat-up.”

However simply using a distanciating technique does not mean that it will necessarily have a distanciating effect of the type assumed by Brecht and his 1970s acolytes. The primary purpose of these monologues, after all, is clearly to draw the viewer into identifying with Joe and agreeing with rather than challenging or rejecting his world-view.


A Blakey-like role for Stephen Lewis

Here it is true that we may reject this and read Joe's remarks against the grain. This, after all, was the idea encouraged by another of the structuralists' major influences, Barthes.

The problem for the 1970s Screen theorist is that the text in which Barthes most fully developed this idea, The Pleasures of the Text, is also a more post-structuralist work in which he made a number of challenges to their position; this challenge was all the more ironic insofar as he himself had profoundly influenced the Screen position through some of his earlier structuralist writings.

To the post-structuralist Barthes the issue was that those on the left who had eagerly taken up his ideas as a means of challenging the dominant bourgeois doxa were themselves increasingly becoming overly assertive in the absolute rectitude of their own para-doxa.

The issue here is whether we feel that contradiction has an end point. Marxist theory says that all contradictions will be resolved when we reach the final stage of communism. But what if we do not accept this position? Are we to be terrorised into silence for out own good, that as victims of false consciousness we do not know our own interests? Should we be prevented from seeing Adventures of a Window Cleaner? Should we be denied its pleasures and, indeed, displeasures?


Geeson as the bait, Anna Bergman as the switch?

For audiences at the time, displeasure likely manifest for those drawn in by the presence of Judy Geeson as a stripper who somehow manages never to show actually show any boobs, bums or bush, unlike the rest of the female cast; it should however also be pointed out that the film is more of an equal opportunities exploitationer than most others, inasmuch as we do get to see Barry Evans's bits.


The Jacey


Pinball wizard

For today's trash cinema fan the pleasures of the film text may well include such incidentals as the shots of 1970s Soho at night in an episode involving one of Joe's regular fares, a prostitute, who performs oral sex on her respectable middle-class pick-up with amusingly nasty consequences when Joe stops his cab suddenly.

Much like the episode in which Joe fails to realise that his fare is a female impersonator and the gay / transgendered impersonator misreads Joe's remarks about his friend Tom as indicating his own homosexuality, here we also see pleasure and unpleasure mixed up more directly.

The point, I would argue, is that trash cinema is far more complex than most criticism cares to acknowledge. The pity is that by keeping such films at arms length, the political potential of genuinely engaging with the popular audience and its preferred choice of culture remained unfulfilled. And when we consider that the film was more successful than Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver at the UK box-office, that has to be seen as something of a loss.

Antonio Gramsci and Birmingham School 1, Louis Althusser and Screen 0?

Cinesexuality

What we have here is an encounter between continental philosophy and a selection of often obscure, often extreme horror films, many of Italian origin, that is premised upon the idea of “cinesexuality,” the cinema as a lover whom we entertain in a masochistic way.

As a text which brings into contact the likes of Deleuze and Guattari (both singly and in combination), Blanchot and Irigaray with such films as Fulci’s City of the Living Dead and The Beyond, D’Amato Beyond the Darkness and Margheriti’s The Virgin of Nuremberg, it’s intriguing but daunting.



Most people who are into such philosophy are not going to be into Italian horror, while most people who are into Italian horror are not going to know very much about continental philosophy.

While there are definite connections to be made, as around the role of faciality in The Virgin of Nuremberg, with its Red Skull-like plastination-faced ‘Punisher’, or the fact that the common inspiration for both Fulci’s absurdist horror entries and Deleuze and Guattari’s “body without organs” was Antonin Artaud, the general impression is of two bodies of texts that don’t come together terribly much, where the theoretical texts dominate their film counterparts rather than there being a dialogue between the two and where academic shibboleths are more important than everyday communication:

“The images in The Beyond and City declare war on organizations and organizing principles, of narrative, of causal movement and result and of the organized body. Death results not in Mars’ slaughter of desire and subjects but the Order of Venus. This is a war on war, against the Order of Mars which is the war against creativity and thought as productive imagination, thus it belongs to the Venusian Order: ‘In other words [they resist] a phenomenon of accumulation, coagulation, and sedimentation that, in order to extract useful labor from the Body without Organs, imposes upon it forms, functions, bonds, dominant and hierarchized organizations, organized transcendences.’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 159) Fulci too has it in for the organization of the organs, (di)splaying flesh in a number of increasingly gruesome ways – spiders chew out eyeballs, crucifixions and acid baths abound, Emily’s throat and ear are ripped out by her guide dog in a more bloody homage to Suspiria. In City brains extrude from scalp, eyeballs bleed, heads have holes through their apex, intestines are spewed up and bodies are punctuated by clusters of writhing maggots.

The body in The Beyond and City is only successful in disarray; those bodies that remain organized end up wandering the empty wasteland of the beyond of the title. Fulci’s message is ‘destroy the organized flesh or be relegated to a land of pure nothingness’. Or perhaps nothingness is plethora, and as minoritarian bodies are relegated to nothing in majoritarian culture it may be an attractive option, nothing as everything.” (104-105)

To this I would merely ask and add, isn’t the symbol of the beyond itself neither that for Mars nor Venus but for Saturn?

Author Patricia MacCormack’s response might be to say that I am being overly literal, too concerned with the facts, the truth and other outmoded phallologocentric conceptions that she and Fulci’s films are against.

My rejoinder, assuming I haven’t (de)constructed a straw (wo)man out of her arguments here, is that by making me think about the planetary/astrological symbolism here, she has started me on the road to developing a new truth, as I then consider the contrast between Cronos (Saturn) and Aeon in Deleuze’s Cinema books, to thus relate the logic of Fulci’s films to the time-image; in so doing I’m drawing upon a Deleuzean notion of the truth, where what matters is being productive in a Nietzschean will to power/will to truth type way rather than correspondence with an external object or being logically consistent with the rest of the theory.

But most horror fans aren’t going to want to do this, just as most film academics won’t have any familiarity with these films beyond what MacCormack tells them.

As far as the film specialist is concerned, it is also worth noting that MacCormack doesn’t engage with Cinema 1: The Movement-Image and Cinema 2: The Time-Image. Although she mentions the work of Anna Powell, who has sought to relate concepts from these books to popular horror films, in passing, it is more to signal her difference in approach than build upon it in relation to less familiar films. (Suspiria is an exception, with both authors discussing it in their particular ways.)

Summary dismissal characterizes MacCormack’s approach to the likes of Michael Grant’s reading of The Beyond in relation to T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. The film, she claims, is not Gothic but Baroque, albeit (re)defined in a particular way that relates more to contemporary continental philosophy than art history. This may help us think differently about The Beyond, but why the need to deny an another alternative and the truth it creates?

Given that the book aspires to be “a pervert’s guide” to cinema, MacCormack’s choice of Italian horror films is also perhaps slightly disappointing: The pleasures of The New York Ripper are absent, along with those of D’Amato’s Dominican Republic films and the Cannibals Holocaust and Ferox.

At issue here, I suspect, is that certain (cine)sexualities, those that involve deriving sadistic pleasure from the non-concensual suffering of Others, remain beyond the pale, even (or especially) within the Queer Interventions series the book forms part of.

Away from film, one thing that’s telling in this regard is McCormack’s contrasting of Slayer’s 213, as a sufficiently genuine song about necrophiliac desire, and Cannibal Corpse’s “Necropedophile, where paedophilia, necrophilia and naughty swear words emphasize the act [of necrophilia] extravasated from desire at all, simply offered as something to shock by hitting sanctified lines of social values”: If Cannibal Corpse gets you off, has a use value for your pleasure, what’s the problem? You/they aren’t hurting anyone, after all. Also, where’s the mention of Slayer’s earlier cod-Satanist shock value Necrophiliac (“I feel the urge, the growing need, to fuck this sinful corpse”) here?

An 'it’ll never happen' imaginary round table idea: MacCormack and Pete Sotos discussing Maladolescenza…

La Polizia ha le mani legate / Killer Cop / The Police Can't Move / Portrait of a 60% Perfect Man

Having made a number of entertaining and effective gialli earlier in the 1970s Luciano Ercoli responded to the rise in popularity of the poliziotto in the middle of the decade and the political situation of the "Years of Lead" by turning his hand to the filone with the giallo-poliziotto crossover Troppo rischio per un uomo solo, this film and the once-believed-lost kidnap drama La Bidonata.

The story is straightforward, the narrative somewhat convoluted: A terrorist gang plant a bomb at an international conference in a hotel, killing and wounding various innocents. One of the investigating officers, the accident-prone but ambitious Balsamo, then happens upon one of the terrorists as he is leaving an apology for the atrocity, but is prevented from pursuing further when the man pulls a pistol. Balsamo is then put into police protection by Armando di Federico, played with typical gusto by the no-nonsense Arthur Kennedy, who has been assigned to head the investigation, until the time comes to give his testimone oculare. Unfortunately Balsamo then contrives to get himself assassinated, the assassin being played by the always welcome Gianfranco Cianfriglia. It's then up to Balsamo's friend and colleague Commissario Matteo Rolani, essayed by the invariably committed and convincing Claudio Cassinelli, to work out what is going on, bring everything together and generally save the day...

Though somewhat light in the flesh department, with the director's wife and muse Nieves Navarro / Susan Scott conspicious in her absence, Killer Cop - a retitling which gives a different slant on the proceedings than the original with its translation of The Police Have Their Hands Tied, or the alternative of Portrait of a 60% Perfect Man - otherwise delivers the goods, with strong characterisations and performances, as with Kennedy's character being known for his tendency to suck on mints when tense; necessary and sufficient levels of action, suspense and intrigue; and a soupcon of politics.

Ercoli and his screenwriters raise the subject of false flag terrorism and the apparent inability of the state in finding a solution, with a particularly interesting discussion amongst the passengers on a bus over whether the bombing was the work of reds or anarchists; whether they were acting on their own initiative or not, and the issue of strong versus weak government in relation to the Fascist past.

While probably purely co-incidental it all came across as a vernacular version of a similar public transport conversation in Slatan Dudow and Berthold Brecht's 1931 Kuhle Wampe - a film made in a similar crisis situation.

Issues of seeing correctly are also expressed by the fact that one of the terrorists, the one whom Balsamo could have identified, has actually lost his glasses and suffers from extremely poor vision. In addition to coincidentally or otherwise prefiguring a similar motif in Sergio Martino's Suspicious Death of a Minor, in which Cassinelli's investigator is continually breaking his glasses, this also seems to foreground a distinction between different types of poliziotto films.

To explain, by way of a bit of theory: In Cinema 1 Gilles Deleuze talks about two distinct forms of Hollywood genre cinema, those of the the large and the small form. Within the large form, within which Deleuze includes the gangster film, the basic structure is SAS'. Reading the situation, S, the protagonist acts, A, resulting in a new, usually improved situation, S'; the classical gangster film is actually different here, in that its trajectory is invariably a downwards one for the gangster protagonist, if thereby an upwards one for non-criminal society. Within the small form, within which Deleuze includes the mystery film, the basic structure is ASA'. Here the situation is initially unclear, only being revealed through the character's actions.

Transposing these ideas to the Italian filone cinema, I would argue that the more ostensibly apolitical poliziotto of the Umberto Lenzi sort, which characteristically takes the form of a succession of "binominal" duels between the cop and the criminals, is usually of the SAS' form. The protagonist knows who his antagonists are and that something is afoot. By contrast the more overtly political poliziotto of the Sergio Martino sort is usually of the ASA' form. The protagonist does not initially know who his antagonists are and thus proceeds blindly at first, acting to see what the situational consequences are and what "indices" are revealed.

Much like Ercoli's gialli, Killer Cop has a somewhat uneven tone. This is something that some may object to, that innocent people getting blown up should not be juxtaposed with slapstick comedy. In Ercoli's defence I would argue that the dose of comic relief supplied by Balsamo in particular was necessary to make the film palatable to its target audience within Italy.

Who would want to brave the mean streets of the time in going to the cinema to then see a film which dwelt on the aftermath of a terrorist bombing and offered only the scant relief that certain mavericks within the system might be capable of finding and dealing with those behind such crimes, albeit only after the (f)act?

It would have been too much, too depressing and despairing a conclusion. In such a popular / vernacular context, Ercoli's gallows humour has its reassuring function, that the good guys will prevail and the ordinary citizens be (mostly) saved.

He also has a knack for switching the tone from comic to tragic in an instant, as with the assassination of Balsamo when he foolishly goes shopping. One moment Balsamo is arguing with the stall-holder over his right to test the merchandise and accidentally disturbing the displays of fruit, the next he is knocking them over wholesale as a result of being shot.

The stall-holder's response is also telling and reassuring as he then concentrates his attention on the dying Balsamo rather than his spilled merchandise. An automatic response, perhaps, but one which also tells the viewer that there is a shared community of values that still prevail, even amongst the petty bourgeoisie.

Stelvio Cipriani provides another one of those same-sounding yet undeniably effective driving soundtracks.

In sum, another film that delivers everything required of it and a bit more...