I watched the Franco and Ciccio giallo spoof Two Cats of Nine and a Half Tails in Amsterdam last night. While I haven't yet formulated my thoughts on the film itself, it did occur to me that for the period in Italian cinema when they were active it would potentially be possible to chart the contours of the what was currently popular at the box-office by charting what they were making.
Like later porn titles that reference a commercially successful mainstream film, theirs is in certain ways a stamp of approval and a sign of success, of sufficiently penetrating the wider public consciousness.
Tuesday, 9 December 2008
Monday, 8 December 2008
Some thoughts on Deep Red, as a precursor to continued exploration of the Another World Entertainment DVD
Insofar as Deep Red is widely acknowledged as a giallo masterpiece, one of the first examples of the form that the interested should seek out, we need only give the briefest of synopses:
At a parapsychology conference in Rome, psychic Helga Ullman announces the presence of a murderer in the audience. That night she is murdered in her apartment. Alerted by her scream, Marc Daly, an English jazz pianist, rushes to the scene. Unable to save Helga or prevent the killer from escaping, Marc soon becomes convinced that some vital detail about the crime scene has changed and thus embarks upon his own unofficial investigation...
If this plot derives primarily from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and can thus in turn be traced back to Bava’s The Girl Who Saw Too Much, Argento’s aesthetic approach emerges as the fulfilment of the poetics intermittently present in Cat o' Nine Tails and Four Flies on Grey Velvet.
By poetic I mean two interconnected ideas, the first coming from Edgar Allan Poe and the latter from Pier Paolo-Pasolini. For Poe, a key principle in creating a composition was that of unity of effect: the author should determine the overall effect he wanted to have on his audience and then, working backwards, gear his aesthetic choices to this end. For Pasolini, the cinema was poetic rather than prosaic when it used technique expressively, as a means of articulating and embodying the consciousness of its characters and author beyond a mundane narrative mise-en-scene. Mikel Koven uses this idea in relation t the vernacular poetry of the giallo set piece, but I would argue that here Argento goes further towards the intertwining of narrative and set piece, approaching the point where they becoming indistinguishable.
In Cat o' Nine Tails, Argento's direction is at its most poetic in his representation of the insane killer as an disembodied eye. Excepting the sight of the killer disappearing into the shadows as they make good their escape from the Terzi Institute, we never actually see them as possessing a body. All the murders take place almost as if through some supernatural force – a garrotte extends around one victim's neck, a knife slashes the face of another – rather than through the usual black-gloved hands trope of other gialli. This, I would argue, expresses the killer's position as a scientist whose future is compromised by a genetic flaw. The killer's insane desire, I would argue, it to be a disembodied consciousness, a brain without a body.
In Four Flies on Grey Velvet, this poetic aspect is evident in the recurring use of circular and meandering camera movements. The former are particularly associated with the killer, expressing their psychotic inability to overcome the past trauma that has determined their present and – in the film's final scene, in which a last look back precipitates their death – ultimate future. The latter are associated with their persecuted victim, expressing his paranoiac difficulties in finding a line that makes sense: why are they, whoever they may be, doing this to me?
But, if Cat expresses a character's insane desires and Four Flies madness and paranoia in a poetic way, they do so intermittently, with less sense that the whole film has been constructed backwards, orchestrated with a single idea or effect in mind as Poe argued for.
In contrast everything in Deep Red seems to function to unsettle the viewer, inviting him or her to make connections between seemingly irrelevant details – why bring attention to a road repair truck, for example – to get the sense of another terrifying, irrational, illogical world subsisting alongside this one, a world of ghosts, doubles / shadows and other things existing beneath, between and behind the seen / scene.
The film is also replete with unmotivated camera movements and retrospectively false POV shots, beginning with the camera that tracks in on Daly to then – as his voice fades out on the soundtrack – continue on past him into the auditorium of the conference, travelling across time and space, before successive shots and movements position us with what can only be read as an invisible, haunting, presences.
Another key element here is the use of Gaslini and Goblin's music, which goes beyond that provided by Morricone for the Animal Trilogy to increasingly lead rather than supplement the visuals, with a more successful integration of the diegetic and non-diegetic than Four Flies on Grey Velvet and a greater kinetic intensity/affect. Indeed, as with Suspiria and Inferno, some passages within the film, most notably Marc's investigation of the haunted house of the screaming child, are almost free from dialogue - if not music.
In returning to certain themes from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage the film also goes beyond its immediate model in a way that demonstrates just how far Argento had come in his filmmaking since his already audacious debut.
Two things immediately come to mind.
The first is the presence of David Hemmings as Marc, with the intertextual allusions this establishes in relation to Blow-Up. Blow-Up is, as many commentators have indicated, an anti-giallo, a deconstruction of the thriller that ends with Hemmings' protagonist possessed of a new understanding of the world but essentially unable to function. A man has been murdered, but there is nothing he can do.
Argento was famously dissatisfied with this irresolution and, having skirted around the issue in his earlier gialli, finally responds to Antonioni directly in having Hemming's character doggedly refuse to give up in existential despair and solving the mystery, albeit with considerable irony in terms of the additional deaths his involvement could be argued to have precipitated.
The second is the way in which Argento handles the central scene in which the identity of the killer is revealed and concealed. Whereas in Bird the vital use of a reverse angle prevents the viewer from seeing whose hand is grasping the knife and thus splits us from the detective protagonist, within Deep Red Argento allows us to see, however fleetingly, the face of his killer, confident that, like Marc, we will not recognise this image within the frame. Watching the film a second, third or even twentieth time, one can never fail to be astonished at his misdirecting sleight-of-hand here.
Another vital way in which Deep Red presents an advance on its predecessors is its engagement with history. While personal history had long been an Argento theme, in terms of the traumatic incidents in the past that, hitherto repressed, erupt into the present, his attempt at engaging with its collective counterpart in Le Cinque giornate had been less successful. Though I would actually recommend that fans see the film, with its allusions to Soviet Montage and Chaplin's Modern Times by way of the cynicism of Leone's Duck You Sucker, it remains perhaps a step too far away from the earlier gialli with which he had made his name.
History emerges within the film in the form of a Fascist / Holocaust subtext also found in Suspiria, Tenebre and Phenomena. Though Deep Red is certainly far less explicit in this regard than the contemporaneous likes of The Night Porter, Salon Kitty, Salo, something is nevertheless there if we consider the use of Christian and Jewish iconography in the representation of a traumatic domestic scene from the killer’s past, complete with Christmas tree, and the Menorah and Magen David figures in Helga’s apartment, and the absence of issues of religious difference from the Animal Trilogy; here we can also note that the killer’s distinctive pendant in Four Flies on Grey Velvet was originally going to be a cross, and that within the mise-en-scene a number of cruciform shapes do remain, but denuded of wider associative meanings.
(If Four Flies' killer’s circular pendant, with trapped fly, re-iterates the theme of circular entrapment in time, a cross might have made the theme of death that bit stronger given comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell’s identification of the cross as the ultimate symbol of death in The Hero with the Thousand Faces.)
That the traumatic nature of 20th century history should emerge in Argento’s cinema around this time can be ascribed to both personal and political factors. In terms of the former, it is noticeable that this period in his work coincides with his relationship with Daria Nicolodi, who has identified her own upbringing as both Catholic and Jewish, with her maternal grandmother being of the latter religion. In terms of the latter, it is again Italy’s struggling to come to terms with its past around this time, as the return of those aspects of history like collaboration and complicity with rather than resistance to fascism which necessarily had to be suppressed and repressed in the immediate post-war reconstruction of the body social and politic.
At a parapsychology conference in Rome, psychic Helga Ullman announces the presence of a murderer in the audience. That night she is murdered in her apartment. Alerted by her scream, Marc Daly, an English jazz pianist, rushes to the scene. Unable to save Helga or prevent the killer from escaping, Marc soon becomes convinced that some vital detail about the crime scene has changed and thus embarks upon his own unofficial investigation...
If this plot derives primarily from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and can thus in turn be traced back to Bava’s The Girl Who Saw Too Much, Argento’s aesthetic approach emerges as the fulfilment of the poetics intermittently present in Cat o' Nine Tails and Four Flies on Grey Velvet.
By poetic I mean two interconnected ideas, the first coming from Edgar Allan Poe and the latter from Pier Paolo-Pasolini. For Poe, a key principle in creating a composition was that of unity of effect: the author should determine the overall effect he wanted to have on his audience and then, working backwards, gear his aesthetic choices to this end. For Pasolini, the cinema was poetic rather than prosaic when it used technique expressively, as a means of articulating and embodying the consciousness of its characters and author beyond a mundane narrative mise-en-scene. Mikel Koven uses this idea in relation t the vernacular poetry of the giallo set piece, but I would argue that here Argento goes further towards the intertwining of narrative and set piece, approaching the point where they becoming indistinguishable.
In Cat o' Nine Tails, Argento's direction is at its most poetic in his representation of the insane killer as an disembodied eye. Excepting the sight of the killer disappearing into the shadows as they make good their escape from the Terzi Institute, we never actually see them as possessing a body. All the murders take place almost as if through some supernatural force – a garrotte extends around one victim's neck, a knife slashes the face of another – rather than through the usual black-gloved hands trope of other gialli. This, I would argue, expresses the killer's position as a scientist whose future is compromised by a genetic flaw. The killer's insane desire, I would argue, it to be a disembodied consciousness, a brain without a body.
In Four Flies on Grey Velvet, this poetic aspect is evident in the recurring use of circular and meandering camera movements. The former are particularly associated with the killer, expressing their psychotic inability to overcome the past trauma that has determined their present and – in the film's final scene, in which a last look back precipitates their death – ultimate future. The latter are associated with their persecuted victim, expressing his paranoiac difficulties in finding a line that makes sense: why are they, whoever they may be, doing this to me?
But, if Cat expresses a character's insane desires and Four Flies madness and paranoia in a poetic way, they do so intermittently, with less sense that the whole film has been constructed backwards, orchestrated with a single idea or effect in mind as Poe argued for.
In contrast everything in Deep Red seems to function to unsettle the viewer, inviting him or her to make connections between seemingly irrelevant details – why bring attention to a road repair truck, for example – to get the sense of another terrifying, irrational, illogical world subsisting alongside this one, a world of ghosts, doubles / shadows and other things existing beneath, between and behind the seen / scene.
The film is also replete with unmotivated camera movements and retrospectively false POV shots, beginning with the camera that tracks in on Daly to then – as his voice fades out on the soundtrack – continue on past him into the auditorium of the conference, travelling across time and space, before successive shots and movements position us with what can only be read as an invisible, haunting, presences.
Another key element here is the use of Gaslini and Goblin's music, which goes beyond that provided by Morricone for the Animal Trilogy to increasingly lead rather than supplement the visuals, with a more successful integration of the diegetic and non-diegetic than Four Flies on Grey Velvet and a greater kinetic intensity/affect. Indeed, as with Suspiria and Inferno, some passages within the film, most notably Marc's investigation of the haunted house of the screaming child, are almost free from dialogue - if not music.
In returning to certain themes from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage the film also goes beyond its immediate model in a way that demonstrates just how far Argento had come in his filmmaking since his already audacious debut.
Two things immediately come to mind.
The first is the presence of David Hemmings as Marc, with the intertextual allusions this establishes in relation to Blow-Up. Blow-Up is, as many commentators have indicated, an anti-giallo, a deconstruction of the thriller that ends with Hemmings' protagonist possessed of a new understanding of the world but essentially unable to function. A man has been murdered, but there is nothing he can do.
Argento was famously dissatisfied with this irresolution and, having skirted around the issue in his earlier gialli, finally responds to Antonioni directly in having Hemming's character doggedly refuse to give up in existential despair and solving the mystery, albeit with considerable irony in terms of the additional deaths his involvement could be argued to have precipitated.
The second is the way in which Argento handles the central scene in which the identity of the killer is revealed and concealed. Whereas in Bird the vital use of a reverse angle prevents the viewer from seeing whose hand is grasping the knife and thus splits us from the detective protagonist, within Deep Red Argento allows us to see, however fleetingly, the face of his killer, confident that, like Marc, we will not recognise this image within the frame. Watching the film a second, third or even twentieth time, one can never fail to be astonished at his misdirecting sleight-of-hand here.
Another vital way in which Deep Red presents an advance on its predecessors is its engagement with history. While personal history had long been an Argento theme, in terms of the traumatic incidents in the past that, hitherto repressed, erupt into the present, his attempt at engaging with its collective counterpart in Le Cinque giornate had been less successful. Though I would actually recommend that fans see the film, with its allusions to Soviet Montage and Chaplin's Modern Times by way of the cynicism of Leone's Duck You Sucker, it remains perhaps a step too far away from the earlier gialli with which he had made his name.
History emerges within the film in the form of a Fascist / Holocaust subtext also found in Suspiria, Tenebre and Phenomena. Though Deep Red is certainly far less explicit in this regard than the contemporaneous likes of The Night Porter, Salon Kitty, Salo, something is nevertheless there if we consider the use of Christian and Jewish iconography in the representation of a traumatic domestic scene from the killer’s past, complete with Christmas tree, and the Menorah and Magen David figures in Helga’s apartment, and the absence of issues of religious difference from the Animal Trilogy; here we can also note that the killer’s distinctive pendant in Four Flies on Grey Velvet was originally going to be a cross, and that within the mise-en-scene a number of cruciform shapes do remain, but denuded of wider associative meanings.
(If Four Flies' killer’s circular pendant, with trapped fly, re-iterates the theme of circular entrapment in time, a cross might have made the theme of death that bit stronger given comparative mythologist Joseph Campbell’s identification of the cross as the ultimate symbol of death in The Hero with the Thousand Faces.)
That the traumatic nature of 20th century history should emerge in Argento’s cinema around this time can be ascribed to both personal and political factors. In terms of the former, it is noticeable that this period in his work coincides with his relationship with Daria Nicolodi, who has identified her own upbringing as both Catholic and Jewish, with her maternal grandmother being of the latter religion. In terms of the latter, it is again Italy’s struggling to come to terms with its past around this time, as the return of those aspects of history like collaboration and complicity with rather than resistance to fascism which necessarily had to be suppressed and repressed in the immediate post-war reconstruction of the body social and politic.
Sunday, 7 December 2008
The Italian Gothic, 1956-66, as Transcultural Gothic
Part of the reason for my relative lack of updates over the past week or so is that I was preparing for and then away at a two-day symposium on The Global Gothic, at which I did a presentation on The Italian Gothic, 1956-66, as Transcultural Gothic.
It was basically about I Vampiri as the first modern Gothic horror film, its failure relative to The Curse of Frankenstein; the subsequent emergence of Italian Gothic in the films of Bava, Freda, Margheriti and company where they passed their work off as that of English or Americans, and the distinctively Italian characteristics that could nevertheless be discerned in terms of the aesthetics and thematics.
I've uploaded the Powerpoint I used here for anyone interested:
http://rapidshare.com/files/171254256/The_Italian_Gothic_1956-66_as_Transnational_Gothic.pptIt may help to supplement it with the clips of Dracula arriving at Lucy's bedroom window in Fisher's Dracula and Kurt Menliffe's appearance before Nevenka at night in The Whip and the Body, along with the sequence in Kill Baby Kill where Dr Eswai ends up chasing and catching up with his double...
The panel I was on also had a very good presentation on Coffin Joe :-)
It was basically about I Vampiri as the first modern Gothic horror film, its failure relative to The Curse of Frankenstein; the subsequent emergence of Italian Gothic in the films of Bava, Freda, Margheriti and company where they passed their work off as that of English or Americans, and the distinctively Italian characteristics that could nevertheless be discerned in terms of the aesthetics and thematics.
I've uploaded the Powerpoint I used here for anyone interested:
http://rapidshare.com/files/171254256/The_Italian_Gothic_1956-66_as_Transnational_Gothic.pptIt may help to supplement it with the clips of Dracula arriving at Lucy's bedroom window in Fisher's Dracula and Kurt Menliffe's appearance before Nevenka at night in The Whip and the Body, along with the sequence in Kill Baby Kill where Dr Eswai ends up chasing and catching up with his double...
The panel I was on also had a very good presentation on Coffin Joe :-)
Profondo Rosso / Deep Red - Another World Entertainment DVD
The obvious question many giallo and / or Argento fans are likely to ask when confronted with this new DVD release of Deep Red from Another World Entertainment is whether it is really necessary: aren't there already perfectly adequate releases out there?
Well, besides that choice is a good thing in itself, there are a number of reasons for getting this disc.
The first, for those in Europe and elsewhere whose players support the format is that the film is presented in PAL rather than NTSC format and, as such, represents both a subjective and objective improvement on the likes of the old Anchor Bay release, fine though it was in its day, in visual quality.
The second, for those in the Scandinavian countries, is that the release allows the opportunity to watch the film in the original Italian with subtitles in their language and, beyond this, to generally support the indigenous DVD industry.
The third, for the fan who wants the most authentic version of the film, is that this Deep Red corrects a couple of issue in the presentation of some previous releases.
While perhaps not as significant as the correction in Another World's release of Fulci's The New York Ripper – where a scene previously included as a coda on the Anchor Bay disc was correctly re-inserted into the main body of the narrative with the effect of making a character into more of a suspect / red herring as the filmmakers had intended – in being confined to the start and end of Deep Red, they are nevertheless very welcome.
The first, more minor correction, is the use of the original typeface for the opening credits. It is thinner than the one used by Anchor Bay, which now seems like a retrospective post-Suspiria creation. As such, it establishes Deep Red as less a predecessor to Suspiria than a successor to the Animal Trilogy or a film very much in its own right. A minor semiotic point, some may say, but a stimulating one that could be taken further nonetheless.
The second, which will likely provoke more discussion in fan circles, is that the closing credits no longer entail a false freeze-framing of the image and instead see a character continuing the gaze actively into a pool of blood. If some critics may say “so what” here, I can only reply that for fans, long used to suffering through cut and otherwise compromised versions during the days of video and even into the DVD era, this is somewhat equivalent to having a version of Truffaut's The 400 Blows which for some reason did not end on the famous freeze frame of Antoine Donael replaced by one which does, to preserve its author's intentions, however unfashionable these may be as a mode of analysis that may be in certain circles.
If I haven't yet had time to get onto the extras yet, it should already be clear that even if you have Deep Red already, you really need this new DVD as well...
Well, besides that choice is a good thing in itself, there are a number of reasons for getting this disc.
The first, for those in Europe and elsewhere whose players support the format is that the film is presented in PAL rather than NTSC format and, as such, represents both a subjective and objective improvement on the likes of the old Anchor Bay release, fine though it was in its day, in visual quality.
The second, for those in the Scandinavian countries, is that the release allows the opportunity to watch the film in the original Italian with subtitles in their language and, beyond this, to generally support the indigenous DVD industry.
The third, for the fan who wants the most authentic version of the film, is that this Deep Red corrects a couple of issue in the presentation of some previous releases.
While perhaps not as significant as the correction in Another World's release of Fulci's The New York Ripper – where a scene previously included as a coda on the Anchor Bay disc was correctly re-inserted into the main body of the narrative with the effect of making a character into more of a suspect / red herring as the filmmakers had intended – in being confined to the start and end of Deep Red, they are nevertheless very welcome.
The first, more minor correction, is the use of the original typeface for the opening credits. It is thinner than the one used by Anchor Bay, which now seems like a retrospective post-Suspiria creation. As such, it establishes Deep Red as less a predecessor to Suspiria than a successor to the Animal Trilogy or a film very much in its own right. A minor semiotic point, some may say, but a stimulating one that could be taken further nonetheless.
The second, which will likely provoke more discussion in fan circles, is that the closing credits no longer entail a false freeze-framing of the image and instead see a character continuing the gaze actively into a pool of blood. If some critics may say “so what” here, I can only reply that for fans, long used to suffering through cut and otherwise compromised versions during the days of video and even into the DVD era, this is somewhat equivalent to having a version of Truffaut's The 400 Blows which for some reason did not end on the famous freeze frame of Antoine Donael replaced by one which does, to preserve its author's intentions, however unfashionable these may be as a mode of analysis that may be in certain circles.
If I haven't yet had time to get onto the extras yet, it should already be clear that even if you have Deep Red already, you really need this new DVD as well...
Friday, 5 December 2008
Some nice Edwige Fenech pictures
Thanks for all the kind words about the blog and apologies for the paucity of updates this week. By way of compensation, here are some nice pictures of Edwige Fenech, looking glamorous as always...
Saturday, 29 November 2008
Giallo Fever is two years old
Just noticed that I started this blog two years ago. As long as you keep reading it, I'll keep writing it...
Immagini di un convento / Images in a Convent
With the titles proclaiming Images in a Convent to be an adaptation of Denis Diderot's La Religeuse, Joe D'Amato/Aristide Massaccesi's 1979 naughty nun entry initially suggests that it may be offering something a touch classier than his usual fare; the novel having previously been adapted most notably by Jacques Rivette in 1965.
The Diderot reference, however, soon proves little more than pretext or justification for that familiar D'Amato melange of sex, sleaze and sadism, though proceedings remain comparatively tame, tasteful and softcore until a gratuitous hardcore porno-rape sequence relatively late on.
The action centres round a convent built upon pagan ruins, whose legacy remains in the form of a horned statue that some believe to exert a malefic influence, and the impact of two new arrivals upon its inhabitants.
The first of these, Isabella, played by D'Amato regular Paola Senatore, is a rebellious young noblewoman whose wealthy and influential uncle wants her safely out of the way for less than spiritually pure reasons.
The second is a mysterious young man, found wounded in the grounds one day, who may or may not be the devil himself.
Under the influence of this unholy trinity events quickly get out of hand until it is time to call in the exorcist, as incarnated by Eurotrash stalwart Donal(d) O'Brien.
While not quite reaching the high standards set by Walerian Borowczyk's Behind Convent Walls or Gilberto Martínez Solares's Satánico pandemonium, Images in a Convent emerges as a superior example of nunsploitation, benefitting in particular from an effective score by frequent D'Amato collaborator Nico Fidenco that merges quasi-religious chanting with eerie synthesiser drones, attractive cinematography by Massaccesi anduninhibited performances by a cast who just about manage to be convincing as nuns with their abundant pubic bushes and natural breasts.
Released by Shriek Show on R1 NTSC DVD a few years back, Images in a Convent looks and sounds pretty decent overall, although the company's quality control problems continued to haunt them somewhat in the form of a straight 1.85:1 presentation instead of the 16x9 indicated on the case.
Likewise, while the notion of an authentic version of a D'Amato film may be somewhat oxymoronic given his penchant for inserting or excising material in accord with audience and other requirements, it can be noted that a short sequence around quarter of an hour in, where the horned statue takes possession of Sister Lacinia before she visits and makes love to Isabelle appears to be missing, according to Midnight Video ( http://www.midnight1.com/dvd.asp.)
These minor flaws are almost compensated for by the presence of an edited version of Roger Fratter's 1999 documentary Joe D'Amato: Totally Uncut on the second disc of the set. Running just over an hour, it charts the progression of D'Amato's career from his early days as a stills photographer (his first credit was on Jean Renoir's Le Carrosse d'or) to camera operator (including work on Mario Bava's Hercules in the Haunted World) and in-demand cinematographer to director and producer, with the genial, forthright and self-deprecating D'Amato's direct-to-camera observations on his business - focus on the audience and the box office, not the critics his essential mantra - illustrated by numerous excerpts from his extensive filmography.
With the rough look of the documentary excusable on budgetary grounds my only criticism - speaking here as a Eurotrash more than a porn aficionado - is that it gives more attention to the latter and less to the former.
Completists will thus also want the other part of the documentary to give a fuller picture; thankfully it is included on the Anthropophagous DVD.
The Diderot reference, however, soon proves little more than pretext or justification for that familiar D'Amato melange of sex, sleaze and sadism, though proceedings remain comparatively tame, tasteful and softcore until a gratuitous hardcore porno-rape sequence relatively late on.
The action centres round a convent built upon pagan ruins, whose legacy remains in the form of a horned statue that some believe to exert a malefic influence, and the impact of two new arrivals upon its inhabitants.
The first of these, Isabella, played by D'Amato regular Paola Senatore, is a rebellious young noblewoman whose wealthy and influential uncle wants her safely out of the way for less than spiritually pure reasons.
The second is a mysterious young man, found wounded in the grounds one day, who may or may not be the devil himself.
Under the influence of this unholy trinity events quickly get out of hand until it is time to call in the exorcist, as incarnated by Eurotrash stalwart Donal(d) O'Brien.
While not quite reaching the high standards set by Walerian Borowczyk's Behind Convent Walls or Gilberto Martínez Solares's Satánico pandemonium, Images in a Convent emerges as a superior example of nunsploitation, benefitting in particular from an effective score by frequent D'Amato collaborator Nico Fidenco that merges quasi-religious chanting with eerie synthesiser drones, attractive cinematography by Massaccesi anduninhibited performances by a cast who just about manage to be convincing as nuns with their abundant pubic bushes and natural breasts.
Released by Shriek Show on R1 NTSC DVD a few years back, Images in a Convent looks and sounds pretty decent overall, although the company's quality control problems continued to haunt them somewhat in the form of a straight 1.85:1 presentation instead of the 16x9 indicated on the case.
Likewise, while the notion of an authentic version of a D'Amato film may be somewhat oxymoronic given his penchant for inserting or excising material in accord with audience and other requirements, it can be noted that a short sequence around quarter of an hour in, where the horned statue takes possession of Sister Lacinia before she visits and makes love to Isabelle appears to be missing, according to Midnight Video ( http://www.midnight1.com/dvd.asp.)
These minor flaws are almost compensated for by the presence of an edited version of Roger Fratter's 1999 documentary Joe D'Amato: Totally Uncut on the second disc of the set. Running just over an hour, it charts the progression of D'Amato's career from his early days as a stills photographer (his first credit was on Jean Renoir's Le Carrosse d'or) to camera operator (including work on Mario Bava's Hercules in the Haunted World) and in-demand cinematographer to director and producer, with the genial, forthright and self-deprecating D'Amato's direct-to-camera observations on his business - focus on the audience and the box office, not the critics his essential mantra - illustrated by numerous excerpts from his extensive filmography.
With the rough look of the documentary excusable on budgetary grounds my only criticism - speaking here as a Eurotrash more than a porn aficionado - is that it gives more attention to the latter and less to the former.
Completists will thus also want the other part of the documentary to give a fuller picture; thankfully it is included on the Anthropophagous DVD.
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