Lo Spettro / The Ghost

Dr John Hichcock is not a well man. Confined to a wheelchair by illness, he survives only due to regular injections from his friend and fellow physician Dr Charles Livingstone. What is worse than his physical condition, however, is his mental one. “Just a living corpse,” and increasingly obsessed with a world beyond this one, Hichcock wears himself out in séances and repeatedly makes suicidal gestures.

Finally tiring of Hichcock's antics, Dr Livingstone and Hichcock's younger wife, Margaret, decide that it would be best for all concerned if he be allowed to die: his suffering will be at an end, while they will no longer have to carry on their affair in secret and will doubtless inherit the considerable estate.




“One day you might regret that you stopped me from killing myself” – Elio Jotta as the sinister Dr Hichcock and Peter Baldwin as Dr Livingstone

One night Dr Livingstone thus fails to give Hichcock one of the drugs he needs, leading to his death. Hichcock's body is interred in the family tomb, and the will read, which presents Margaret and Charles with a nasty surprise, Hichcock having unexpectedly left the majority of his money to the local orphanage.


The two lovers in a not-so secret embrace; the blue light is a recurring visual motif

Worse follows, as the key to Hichcock's safe cannot be found. Housekeeper Catherine, who had earlier acted as a medium for Hichcock during the séances and has a habit of creeping onto the scene at inopportune moments, suggests that it must have been buried with him.

While Hichcock's body is in his coffin (and is in fact decaying faster than usual, on account of his treaments) a series of inexplicable apparitions compel Margaret and Charles to consider the possibility that his spirit lives on and is haunting them...

Despite seeing director Riccardo Freda – billed under his customary Robert Hampton name – reuinted with Barbara Steele and Harriet White and again featuring a character by the name of Dr Hichcock, Lo Spettro / The Ghost is a not so much a sequel to The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock as a reconfiguration.








Compare to the barbershop sequence in The Cat o' Nine Tails

With White again playing the sinister housekeeper that was her stock-in-trade, the main difference lies in Steele's role, less the innocent victim than her more usual victim-or-victimiser role.


The moment of decision – the two lovers' hands and the syringe

The model in this instance, given the Scottish setting, the recurring motif of bloodstains and references into the dialogue to “what's done cannot be undone” would seem to be Lady MacBeth, with Margaret the one who first takes the initiative and makes the fateful decision, but then finding having the greater difficulty in coming to terms with the deed – as much because she is our main point of identification and the primary target of Hichcock's wrath as anything else.


La vedova

While the visible manifestations of Hichcock – the figure at the window that then slowly advances on Margaret, the drops of blood that lead Livingstone to his hanging form and so on – convince, those in which only his voice is heard are less so. This is not, however, perhaps so much a failing of the filmmakers themselves, each manifestation being suitably uncanny / unheimlich, as a combination of the technological limitations upon them at the time and the phenomenological perspective I tend to take here.

In terms of the former, it is the way in which Hichcock's booming voice seemingly emanating from Catherine's mouth as she seemingly speaks in a trance really needs that 5.1 Dolby mix, even as the inclusion of such would then result in further complications if it in fact turns out that Hitchcock's ghost is not “for real” precisely because of the absence of such technology at the time the film it set.










Manifestations of Hichcock's ghost

One point of comparison here is Argento's Trauma, with its exposing the machinery by which medium Aura Petrescu invokes the spirits, as a complex, modern machinery of tape recorders and speakers capable of deceiving the ear in a way that wax cyliners and horns perhaps could not.

Then again, the extent to which we experience sound as naturalistic or artificial is also highly contingent, with it certainly within the realms of possibility that the uncanny nature of the acousmatic voice would be enough of a shock to the Victorian or Edwardian hearing it for the first time for other matters not to enter the equation. One also thinks here of the stories of audiences recoiling in terror from the Lumiere's L'Arrivée d'un train à La Ciotat. The flatness of and absence of colour and sound from the image evidently did not prevent it from seeming real, an indication of the importance of belief that is all the more significant in a fantastique narrative such as the one presented here. (To introduce another relevant Shakespearean reference point, Hamlet, the issue is that of distinguishing between the real and that which only seems to be such, a situation inevitably complicated by the power of belief to here make the supernatural real and / or real in its consequences.)

In terms of the latter, it is all the other sensory information that is not quite brought into play, in that Margaret would presumably have some notion of where Hichcock's voice was emanating from by virtue of her embodiment and the information coming from her entire sensorium – a multi-sensory, cinesthetic approach that the filmmakers elsewhere succeed in evoking / invoking, not least in Margaret and Livingstone's visible and palpable revulsion at the sight and, perhaps just as importantly, smell of Hichcock's decaying flesh.

This is also, however, about the only thing I can really find to criticise about the film.

Production values and performances are good, even with the usual limitations of dubbing, and the filmmakers' evocation of small town Scotland, 1910, surprisingly effective, the shift in locale making it easier for them to convince us of its reality as compared to the London metropolis of The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock or the Paris of I Vampiri.

The character of Canon Owens, the voice of presbyterian morality and a consistent chorus on the action, voicing his and / or the community's disapproval at Hichcock's unorthodox beliefs and experiments prior to his demise, and at Livingstone's staying at the house subsequently, is particularly convincing in this regard.

True, the professional historian could probably find little details that don't quite ring true, but in this it's no different from a Hammer horror film of the same time (are Dracula's Holmwoods in mittel Europe or middle England?), with the general look of the film, with lavish on a budget production design and expressive use of colour and lighting, serving to further strengthen the comparison.





Harriet White's housekeeper creeps up on Barbara Steele yet again

One significant difference, however, is that the physicality of the Hammer gothic would seem to have largely precluded uncanny scenarios. Hammer monsters tended to be (corpo)real and dealt with as such by the savants (i.e. the palpable sexual threat Dracula represents is countered by the prophylactics of stake and crucifix), it being their mechanical thrillers such as Taste of Fear or Paranoiac that are of more interest as a point of comparison for the ontological and epistemological questions of the sort found here.










Do you remember? Is it real or all in her mind?

More importantly for the typical viewer less concerned with such theoretical and metaphysical speculations, there's a care evident in the writing and direction, with scarcely a line or shot being wasted. Note, for instance, how Margaret's admonition to her hisband whilst performing the daily ritual of shaving him, “Don't move darling, or I'll cut you,” prefigures a later razor slashing that still has the capacity to shock. Or take the way in which the opening credits, playing out over a séance, finish up on a skull, as the naturalistic introduction of a symbolic memento mori that will recur, along with a number of other key fetish objects, like the bottle of Dutch gin and the music box, to “bring back memories” in an almost Proustian way.

Again it is not hard to see Freda's influence on Argento, even if the way in which the two filmmakers approach these fetish objects is somewhat different, Freda more inclined to establish significance through words what Argento does through images, the kind of hyper-realistic defamiliarisations found in Deep Red have no obvious counterpart here.




“Out out, damned spot” – will Margaret's hands ever be free of blood?

One question remains: when Canon Owens offers his summing up, that “the Devil is a very real person,” to whom might he be referring amongst the protagonists? Specifically, is the Devil incarnate as woman or man?

The film is available on US NTSC DVD from Retromedia, and comes double billed with Alfred Vohrer's Dead Eyes of London.

Florinda Bolkan's website

Florinda Bolkan's official website: http://florindabolkan.com/

Thanks to Eugene for the link.

Found on ebay

Giallo / noir or Noir / giallo

One issue I’m sure everyone interested in the giallo film has encountered at some point is that of trying to explain exactly what it is to a friend, colleague or random encounter at a party.

There’s a good chance that, drawing on the fact that the term, like noir, derives from literature, one will invoke the idea of film noir.

While certainly useful, I sometimes think that a problem in doing this is that it lead us onto a path where noir is the ideal and model by which giallo is measured and found wanting, that rather than having a free play of terms, we end up still with the noir as the positive norm from which the giallo then negatively deviates.

It was interesting, then, to discover that David Bordwell has remarked to the effect that noir cannot not truly be called a genre because at the time of the original noir cycle of the 1940s the term was not in popular use within the USA: “nobody set out to make or see a film noir in the sense that people deliberately chose to make a western, a comedy or a musical.”

Recognition of noir as a genre by this criteria was thus a later phenomenon, occurring after the fact at that point when film-makers and audiences alike began to be aware of this French term.

What I’m wondering, then, is if the giallo film could in a sense be said to pre-date the (American, if not French) noir, insofar as the first generally accepted, unequivocal example of the form, The Girl Who Knew Too Much, would seem to have been clearly understood as a giallo by Italian producers and consumers alike circa 1963. Yes, this is partly because the remit of the term giallo has tended to allow for a wider range of product than noir (i.e. giallo equals just about any mystery or thriller, noir equals a specific type of hard boiled thriller) and, yes, the giallo film would quickly develop a more distinctive identity of its own, but isn’t this is a significant difference, that the Italian giallo film was first of all an emic phenomenon, and the American noir an etic one?

And, going beyond this, whether we could say something similar about filone and genre, given that the latter is again a French import into English, perhaps simply our way of saying type in accord with film studies shibboleths?

Los Ojos azules de la muñeca rota / The Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll

This 1973 Spanish amarillo – i.e. giallo in all but name – sees weightlifter turned one-man horror factory Paul Naschy play a mysterious, evidently troubled drifter, Gilles, who takes a job as handyman to a trio of sisters on their farmhouse high the the French Pyrenees.

Soon after his arrival, a local girl is murdered. Soon after this the killer strikes again, this time also mutilating their victim by removing her eyes.




Who is the real auteur here – star Paul Naschy / Jacinto Molina or director Carlos Aured?

Needless to say, Gilles is immediately under suspicion – especially seeing as the local chief of police is sure he recalls seeing his face somewhere before and his doctor colleague suggests that “the killer possesses uncommon strength,” having “ran her through with a single blow.”

Given the deserved reputation the three sisters have amongst the local populace – the alternative English title for the film House of Psychotic Women is only a slight piece of exploitation cinema hyperbole – he is hardly the only suspect, however.


As the title suggests, both eyes and broken doll motifs prove significant to the maniac's psychosis

Given the generic rules, coupled with numerous flashbacks type sequences showing a traumatic scene in Gilles’ past, in which he strangles a woman, perhaps Gilles is in any case too obvious a culprit.

Then again, perhaps the sisters – one scarred and sans some digits following an accident; another wheelchair bound yet apparently devoid of actual physical symptoms and the third a jealous, possessive nymphomaniac; the mother was committed to an asylum while their father, suffering from an incurable disease, committed suicide – could also be red herrings, such that detectives and viewers should be searching elsewhere, perhaps in the direction of to the new nurse who arrived unexpectedly, say...


A photo hides a clue

Though the contribution of director Carlos Aured cannot be ignored, there seems little doubt that Los Ojos azules de la muñeca rota / The Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll is really first and foremost the product of its star and co-writer, Naschy. The character of Gilles comes across as very much a naturalised / thriller version of his most famous creation, the werewolf Waldemar Daninsky, as a tragic, romantic figure who is the victim of bestial impulses he cannot fully control, the connection being made almost explicit in a sequence near the end where a posse, led by the police chief, chase Gilles across snowy, mountainous terrain, only managing to catch up with him when he inadvertently gets his foot caught in a jawed trap evidently left by a hunter.



Obligatory moments in a Paul Naschy film #1 – he gets his kit off


Obligatory moments in a Paul Naschy film #1 – she gets her kit off


Obligatory moments in a Paul Naschy film #3 – he gets in a fight and turns the tables on his better armed assailant through his superior physical prowess

The problem as far as reading the character goes is, however, that while Naschy hardly provides an uncritical endorsement of machismo and misogyny here or elsewhere his explorations of gender politics, much like those of Dario Argento and Jesus Franco, equally fail to provide the (too) neat, comfortable, unequivocal, politically correct, mainstream feminist message some would look for, whilst the more naturalistic setting here also removes something of the comfortable distance of fantasy as seen in the Daninsky films.

A key scene in this regard is that where a frustrated Gilles confronts one of the sisters in the house's barn, throwing her against the hay and remarking “You don't have to go anywhere to look for a man – you’ve got one right here,” only for a(nother) traumatic flashback to cause him to recoil, such that the object of his attentions – not particularly appreciating them, no clearly meaning no – is not required to fend him off with the farm implement she had reached out for a few seconds previously...


The obligatory enigmatic flashback / dream sequence

Likewise while elsewhere we certainly get the obligatory scenes where Naschy takes his shirt off to display his physique, engages in some mano a mano action with a rival – his predecessor as the handyman, as it turns out, and thus another potential suspect – and indulges himself with the ladies, there’s always something not quite right about the way these scenes come across such that they cannot simply be read as wish fulfilment fantasies on the part of either actor or (male) viewer who (mis)identify with the character, something more complex that requires a double-take.

Much the same can be said of the filmmakers' deployment of popular psychoanalytic discourses around such themes as trauma, mind-body dualism and fetishism. They do not do so uncritically, evincing what the non-believer would probably identify as a healthy degree of scepticism, and the acolyte as yet further demonstration of deeper repression in a refusal to confront the Freudian / Lacanian capital-T Truth. To say much more could spoil things, so we will simply cite that old Biblical chestnut of “physician, heal thyself...” (what was that about the Law of the Father again?)

Aured's direction tends towards the over-emphatic, too many scenes breaking down into zoom, close-up, zoom, close-up, whether anything is being signified thereby or not. The stalk and slash set pieces are well executed, however, minimising the killer's physical presence to prevent us from being able to see whether the shape is that of Naschy or another and thus sustaining the mystery and suspicion surrounding the characters.

Likewise, while there is a sense that other techniques, including Dutch angles, freewheeling hand-held camera and even some slow-motion and step printing are being deployed more on the basis that they can than as fully worked through instances of form expressing content or vice-versa (nevermind their becoming indistinguishable) one can at least thereby see that the director was making the effort.

It's a quality that is a consistent feature of Naschy's oeuvre as a whole and, in the end, one of its most endearing qualities. For while may not be able to take a film like Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll entirely seriously – and indeed much of the pleasure we derive from it likely to be other than that the filmmakers themselves intended, with then-fashionable trappings that now seem the very epitome of 70s kitsch very much in evidence – the very fact that they themselves took what they were doing seriously and did their best deserves our respect and recognition.


More Italian-style black glove fetishism


Another young, attractive victim dies like a pig, as her throat is unceremoniously slit

The thing that many are likely to find most problematic about the film is the unexpected inclusion of some real life animal killing, a pig having its throat slit on camera. While this scene is gratuitous, in the sense that it could be excised without affecting the overall meaning of the piece too much – i.e. if you watched a cut version without the pig slaughtering you wouldn’t necessarily be aware that it had been cut – it can also be justified as another quotidian detail that helps establish the reality of the rural milieux.

Likewise the very juxtaposition of the real animal and faked human killings again serves, intentionally or not, to raise the kind of questions of representation that the uninitiated might not expect of a genre film like this; if this kind of thing again seems odd, recall that the theme of the hunt was one often used by Spanish film-makers around this time to make a coded point against the Franco regime, Carlos Saura’s La Caza and Jesus Franco’s La Comtesse Perverse thus having more in common than many of the former’s art-house fans might care to admit...

Those familiar with Deep Red, with its nursery rhyme playing killer, may also want to note that the maniac here has a similar leitmotif, specifically Frere Jacques...

La Commare secca / The Grim Reaper

This was Bertolucci’s debut feature, made when he was barely into his 20s from a scenario by Pier Paolo Pasolini, with whom he had worked as assistant on Accatone. It’s perhaps best summarised as a version of Rashomon set in the universe of Accatone, a deconstructive take on the crime film or detective story; hence its inclusion here in relation to the giallo.




Strong geometric arrangements


The discovery of the body

The film opens with the discovery of a prostitute’s body by the banks of the Tiber and proceeds, through the at times interlocking flashback accounts of five potential suspects / witnesses to the crime, to reveal what happened and whodunnit. In truth, however, this aspect is never really that important compared to the exploration of character, environment and their interaction, along with formal experimentation.


All roads lead to Rome, specifically a river-side park – the sleeping soldier in the foreground, the two youths and the prostitute in the background.

In particular we never actually see the detectives whose voices we intermittently hear within the interrogations, the film-makers instead letting the interviewees speak for themselves, in their own language, with minimal interruptions. The crucial point, of course, is the disjunctions and discrepancies that emerge between the spoken and visual accounts of the same scene, as the character’s monologue or dialogue suggests one thing and the mise-en-scene another, or those between different depictions of / perspective on the same scene.




The interrogation scenes are characterised by an expressionistic rather than neo-realistic mise-en-scene


Sometimes the two aesthetics are combined, however, as in this fragmented, mirrored composition

One consequence of this, however, is also that it’s more difficult to really empathise or identify with the characters to the same extent as in a more conventional narrative. While this doesn’t prevent one from enjoying or appreciating a film – after all, something similar could be said of Bava’s Blood and Black Lace or Bay of Blood and Questi’s Death Laid an Egg, for instance, the important thing is the different social positions of their respective protagonists. In Bava and Questi’s films, we are invited to look on with a detached, critical eye as supposedly civilised bourgeois men and women reveal their material baseness and spiritual bankruptcy. Here, however, we are presumably supposed to feel sympathy for the poor and disadvantaged types, but may find ourselves conflicted as when, for example, an evidently gay character attempts to pick up two youths, who in turn plan to rob him. Then again, part of Pasolini’s brilliance (like that of Hubert Selby Jr.) always lay in making us think about our own reactions to characters and worlds we would likely not want to visit in our real lives.




Shadows on the wall; the platonic myth of the cave is a theme that recurs in The Conformist, although perhaps via Moravia rather than Bertolucci himself.

At times the camera attains its own presence and consciousness, as when a tracking shot starts with the point of view of a character only to end with their inclusion within the same shot (this character being the one ultimately revealed as the murderer, thus possibly connoting their fragmented “self”), or the observation of two girls dancing back and forth left to right, moving in and out of the frame; “poetic” elements not surprising if we again consider the influence of Pasolini, but forging perhaps unexpected connections with more obviously generic gialli.




The dancing girls and the exploration of screen space – presently invisible does not mean absent

Fans of the filone cinema may also want to note that Jimmy the Phenomenal has a blink and you’ll miss him appearance in a café near the end, while Nico Fidenco is credited as the vocalist on one of the diegetic musical numbers.


Jimmy

La Commare secca is available on NTSC DVD as part of The Criterion Collection.

Neo-realism as filone?

I’ve been reading the collection on neo-realism Springtime in Italy. While on the surface it’s pretty distant from the filone cinema that I tend to discuss here, neo-realism being an art rather than a popular cinema that tended to have more success internationally and with the critics than domestically and with a mass audience, whereas for the filone cinema the reverse tends to be the case, some of what Franco Venturini says in his essay on The Origins of Neo-realism seems to suggest that we could almost talk of it as a filone phenomenon:

“In the genesis of neo-realism, a decisive and unilateral contribution does not exist; it did not arise from a single factor, but from a sum of factors which influenced the movement in a complex way.

To understand this I must refer to the provincial condition of the Italian cinema [...] whose various channels remained in a a fluid state, not quite materialising into a solidified, concrete tradition. [...] Due to their very state of fluidity and lack of tradition, there was never a question of a limitation of growth. The substance of neo-realism and its rapid development are linked to the provincial condition of Italian cinema.”

Was Rome Open City the surprise hit that encouraged the production of films in a similar style, quickly leading to their meeting with more commercial cinema, such as Giuseppe De Santis’s crime melodrama Bitter Rice, paralleling the way as the early 1970s saw both popular and art films using the giallo / thriller mode?