L'Occhio del testimone / Operazione Paura

I picked up these two books on Ebay, intrigued to see what they had to say about Fulci and Italian horror from an insider's perspective. What follows are some not necessarily coherent, but hopefully interesting remarks...

Published in 1992 when Fulci was still alive but his career effectively over, Michele Romagnoli's L'Occhio del testimone is presented as a series of short, impressionistic chapters on a variety of key Fulcean themes – Life and Death; Time; influences such as Artaud, Poe and Lovecraft; women, relationships and love; rivalry with Dario Argento etc – interspersing Fulci's own remarks and reminiscences with Romagnoli's commentary and contextualisation.

The main weakness of the book stems from the circumstances of its production, with Fulci's identification as a horror auteur by this time meaning that there isn't terribly much about his earlier work in other genres; indeed, the filmography at the end splits into two, only providing detailed credits and synopses beginning with One on Top of the Other and omitting anything that doesn't fall into the horror-giallo-fanatasy fantasy spectrum.

This is a omission insofar as one of the points Fulci makes about his career when comparing his work his his arch-rival Argento is his greater versatility: if those taking Argento's side – and taking a side was what it was often about for close on 25 years prior to Wax Mask – might argue that he had the greater depth within the giallo and horror filone, those taking Fulci's could counter that Argento never made a western like Four of the Apocalypse or a comedy like The Senator Likes Women nor managed Fulci's level of productivity.

It's also somewhat odd insofar as another point which emerges through the likes of Fulci's comments on bringing Artaud into a sequence in an earlier western, Massacre Time, is the importance in seeing his work in more holistic terms: I wanted to know which sequence Fulci was referring to and how his application of Artaud here might have differed from, say, The Beyond.

In other ways the book is more successful in contexualising Fulci, however: The very inclusion of references to Artaud, Visconti, Lang, Ford, Elio Petri, Rene Clair, Steno and so on alongside the likes of Argento, D'Amato and De Angelis indicate – if anyone still doubted it – that he was a culturally and cinematically literate figure, with some of these figures remarks also suggesting how he wanted his own work to be understood.

Tellingly in this regard the chapter on Fulci's “factory” period for De Angelis, which saw him work prolifically with a regular team of collaborators like Vincenzo Tomassi, Sergio Salvati and Massimo Lentini, is headed up by a quote from Fritz Lang: roughly translated “I made the Blue Gardenia for the same reason I made Metropolis and others: because I have to eat.”

To paraphrase Marx, men make cinema, but not in circumstances of their own choosing? Or, more critically, that Fulci certainly also had to eat and support his family but perhaps could have gone without, say, his yacht, and might have enjoyed a better reputation had he made fewer films and more of an effort to present himself as an artist in the approved manner?


Artaud


Fulci on the set of Zombi 3

Even if one has the same limited understanding of the language as I do, there are still the behind the scenes and personal pictures to look at. One I found especially touching is that Fulci on the set of Zombi 3 (a film he describes as “a trap [...] into which I fell), finding it eerily reminiscent of those pictures of Artuad shortly before his death.



Published in 1997 and with a very brief preface by Pupi Avati, Antonios Bruschini and Tentori's Operazione Paura – i.e. the Italian title for Kill Baby Kill – presents profiles of ten key “Italian gothic” directors along with an overview of important contributions made by other filmmakers less associated with the form and a filmography of essential works.

The ten key men are Freda, Mario Bava, Margheriti, Argento, Fulci, Avati, Lamberto Bava, Massaccessi and Soavi – in other words, the usual suspects. Presented sequentially rather than alphabetically, each filmmaker gets the same basic treatment: a bit of background on who they are and why they are important, followed by an overview of their career focussing on their major contributions to the horror genre, with each key work getting a synopsis followed by a commentary.

Thus, for example, Freda matters for inaugurating the entire cycle with I Vampiri and for giving Bava the opportunity to direct, with the other key films in his filmography being identified as Caltiki – the Immortal Monster, Maciste in Hell, The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock, The Ghost and Murder Obsession, though I suspect the under-rated Tragic Ceremony would have been given more attention had it been more readily available to the authors.

While the choices thus tend to be fairly safe, this works to the book's advantage as a introductory overview, with films like Freda's disowned Iguana with a Tongue of Fire certainly having their moments and points of interest, but being better approached once the reader/viewer has an idea of where to situate them generically.

Anyone who has the Glittering Images Horror all'italiana volume or Louis Paul's Italian Horror Film Directors probably won't find terribly much new information here, however.

There is more of a sense of discovery in other cases, like Lamberto Bava and Avati, given the relative unavailability of the former's highly successful TV work for Italian television and the latter's films away from The House with the Windows that Laughed and Zeder.

Much the same can be said of the final chapter on other directors and titles, with a useful list of names and titles to check out should the opportunity ever present itself – Byleth, il demone dell'incesto, anyone? (Actually, I've recently downloaded that one, but just haven't had time to watch it yet.)

The thing that really makes one wish some material from the book were available in English translation is that the authors actually have an enthusiasm for the films they are writing about, without being blind to their shortcomings. This may seem a minor point, but when faced with something like of McCallum's Italian Horror Film of the 1960s, in which the author dismisses just about every title under discussion in a way that makes you wonder why he actually decided to write the book the first place, it's an important one.

La Pretora / My Sister in Law

There are two reasons why this is the best of Edwige Fenech’s comedies. The first, and most obvious, is that there’s more of her on display than in any of the others. The second, is that by playing a dual role of two ill-matched identical sisters she also gets a chance to show more of her comedic talents than would otherwise be the case.

The story is simple: Viola is the young, ambitious and, above all, beyond reproach prosecutor in a provincial Italian town. Rosa is her identical sister.


Rosa


Viola

Con-artist Esposito, the victim of one of Viola’s most recent judgement, meets and beds Rosa, and decides to extract his revenge; one of the film’s weak points in this regard is that Rosa’s character is not terribly well developed, in that we don’t really know why she has it in for her sister, beyond hints of resentment at their different upbringings and life chances. (Though she plays dumb, there’s the definite sense that Rosa is far smarter than she’s letting on; certainly she’s far smarter than the men around her, though as ever in the world of Italian sex comedy that doesn't necessarily say terribly much...)


Fulci's cameo

Rosa impersonates her sister and take bribes from some local businessmen. Viola guesses that something is up, causing her fiancé Alteri to go see Rosa in an attempt to get her to see the error of her ways, only to easily succumb to her seductive wiles.




Rosa as Biancaneve




Trivia fans may care to note that the evil queen is played by Marina Frajese

Next Rosa appears in a pornographic fumetti strip as Biancaneve, copies of which are distributed to the public during an obscenity case Viola is presiding over in her other capacity as film censor for the town. (An earlier scene featuring the unseen but heard film’s screening is another highlight, with what seems like the entirety of the town’s respectable male population sneaking into the projection booth to see all the good bits before they are cut out.)




The fumetti image

Then Rosa seduces Viola’s long besotted assistant, resulting in some compromising sex in the office photographs courtesy of Esposito and his lawyer Bortolon that soon find their way into the chief prosecutor’s hands.


Rosa or Viola?


Rosa or Viola – and yet another forbidden photo of a lady above suspicion...

Mercifully for Viola a small giallo-esque detail in one of the images provides the opportunity to extricate herself from the messy situation and turn the tables on Esposito and company…

Though Rosa and Viola are given different dubbing voices they aren’t really necessary to disambiguate the characters, with their facial expressions, movements and demeanours enough if the viewer is paying sufficient attention – which, given that the initial distinction between them might well be summed up as close to ‘one wears clothes, the other doesn’t,’ can probably be more or less assumed anyway when the target vernacular audience is concerned…

The other reason for the device, besides its inherent comedic contribution, becomes clearer later on, however, as the difference between the characters and their voices is then confused just at the point when we – and our on screen counterparts – start to think we have a handle on who is who.

At first glance Lucio Fulci’s contribution to the film is somewhat limited, with the direction functional, establishing and breaking up each scene in an anonymous, classical, degree zero style. Paradoxically, however, the lack of Fulci’s usual signatures – zooms, close-ups of eyes, rack focus between planes of action – arguably becomes a signifier of another characteristic of his work, namely his sheer professionalism. One suspects he understood that this was a Fenech vehicle (the end credits include her shoe and lingerie suppliers, to whom credit must go) and as a director for hire willingly subordinated his contributions to hers, whilst also enjoying the opportunity to again aim some well-placed jabs at the powers that be. (Fulci once remarked that censors should be shot in the head; the problem was that their brains were obviously such small targets…)

I suspect that there was also a fair bit of wordplay that I didn’t quite get, though references to sodomy and fellatio prove easy enough to decipher even with my rather limited knowledge of Italian…

Recommended for fans of Fenech and Fulci alike.

Some giallo posters

All these are currently on Ebay at the moment, if anyone is interested:

Fulci posters

I like these posters for The House by the Cemetery and The Beyond, even though the things with the knife menacing Maccoll has absolutely no relation whatsoever to what is actually in the films...

Lucio Fulci Remembered Volume 1

This disc presents interviews with nearly 90 of Lucio Fulci’s cast, crew and contemporaries. Each was asked one simple question: what was their favourite memory of Fulci and allowed to expound as much or as little as they wanted, without further prompting or interjections from the interviewer.

The aim, according to the project mastermind Mike Baronas, was to try to find out what Fulci was really like, presenting a complement to the films and to the kind of detailed analyses of them provided by Stephen Thrower in Beyond Terror.

Baronas makes it clear in his liner notes that he appreciates what Thrower did, but that Thrower’s textual focus – and, one suspects, more distanced and theoretical approach – didn’t tell him what, as a fan, he really wanted to know about Fulci himself. (It’s worth noting also here that Thrower’s more recent Nightmare USA is less reliant on theory and functions more as an oral history of the US horror independents of the 70s and early 80s.)

The responses, totalling over three hours of material, vary in length from around half a minute (Claudio Ailiotti) to over eight minutes (Beatrice Ring), depending on what someone has to say. Ailiotti, for instance, simply thanks Fulci for giving him a job whereas Ring, who worked under extremely trying circumstances on Zombi 3, finds it difficult to produce any fond memories of Fulci but graciously forgives and strives to understand what made him the way he was.

Some memories are sad, like the tales of Fulci’s long battle with illness, or the will-sapping delays that were to prevent him from realising his comeback with Wax Mask. Others are funny, such as the stories of bets on how often he would change his socks during a production; his nickname of Lucio Pulci (i.e. fleas). Others, like Dakar’s playing on his guitar and singing in lieu of offering his actual memories, are simply touching.

Crucially, there are also moments of insight, such as Catriona MacColl’s reading of that famous picture of Fulci sitting, arms folded, in the middle of the Lake Pontchartrain Causeway: a man between two worlds, isolated and defiant. (The image is on the back cover of the DVD.)

Overall, the picture that emerges is of someone who had a difficult life and was at times certainly a difficult person to get on with. Everyone also agrees that Fulci was an intelligent and cultured man, knowledgeable about the cinema and a solid professional.

Beyond this the picture gets more complicated.

Many actors indicate that Fulci could be a bully, with a tendency to pick out victims. Others, however, also indicate that he was surprisingly patient with them, apparently understanding of their lack of experience. Trying to square these conflicting accounts, the impression is that of a professional who expected the same professionalism from his actors and didn’t suffer fools gladly; Sasha Maria Darwin talks about a 'Jekyll and Hyde' aspect to Fulci – Jekyll being Fulci the man and Hyde Fulci the director.

Another area where opinions differ is whether Fulci’s talents deserved better than the B- movies that constitute his filmography, or if his willingness to take on just about any paying job that came his way rather than waiting for the right moment and taking the time to make the A- film that could have boosted his reputation as a serious filmmaker was itself partly to blame for his failure to attain mainstream recognition.

Of the interviewees, one I would really like to heard more from is Jean Sorel, who was unique in working with Fulci before and after his wife’s suicide, on the films Perversion Story (1969) and Lizard in a Woman’s Skin (1971), and is perhaps thus best placed to shed some light on the impact of this event on the director.

One thing that shines out from the disc is just how important a service Baronas and others like him are doing in putting the pieces in place for an oral history of the filone cinema and its personalities; of those interviewed, at least five – Bruno Mattei, Fernando Di Leo, Renato Polselli, Dakar and Jenny Tamburi – have died in the years between their interviews and the release of the disc.

The disc is labelled as volume one. Here’s hoping that interest is sufficient for not only volume two, hopefully featuring contributions from some of those who slipped through the net this time round – Edwige Fenech, Lando Buzzanca and Dario Argento would be three obvious candidates I can think of, the first two also perhaps helping shed some light on whether Fulci was different when working as a comedy director – but also for Baronas to resume his Fulci book project as well.

Mention must also be made of Dave Neabore's music, which captures the sound of Fabio Frizzi, Walter Rizzati and company so well you could almost believe you were hearing previously unreleased tracks from City of the Living Dead or The House by the Cemetery.

Paura Productions' website

The Good, the Bad and the Dolce Vita

This was a book I had wanted to read since reading a review of it in Video Watchdog shortly after its 2004 publication.

Mickey Knox, for those unfamiliar with him, is the American actor who, finding himself greylisted by the McCarthyite witch hunts relocated to Europe to ultimately spend 35 years as an expat in Rome, where he came to present a key point of contact between the host and expatriate film communities.

He was the man whose dialogue coaching of Anna Magnani in The Rose Tattoo helped the Italian actress win an Oscar for her performance in a Hollywood film, and who was behind the English-language version of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Covering over half a century from the 1940s in short, easy to read chapters centred around a particular year and occasion, what it comes down to is mass of fascinating name-dropping anecdotes about both international names and films like Orson Welles and Once Upon a Time in the West and local and cult heroes such as Duccio Tessari, Damiano Damiani and Fabio Testi – the last one character in a particularly scurrilous story involves Andrea Occhipinti and an apparent rash of herpes cases during the production of John Derek's vehicle for his wife Bo, Bolero.

While it's sometimes difficult to know how representative Knox's experiences of a particular individual were or whether someone might just have had an off-day or film – if Tessari was a party-hearty drunk, as he implies, this doesn't appear to have negatively impacted upon the director's other films too far from what I've seen, suggesting that Knox's negative evaluation of Turn the Other Cheek might also be attributable to his unhappy and expensive venture into production on the film with the otherwise unidentified 'Luigi' – his picture of Sergio Leone as a great filmmaker but something of a manipulative son of a bitch in business and personal matters has a longer-term basis and accords with that painted by almost all his other collaborators.

Those whose interests are more narrowly Eurocult may find that the balance of the book isn't quite what they would ideally want, with more on Hollywood and Broadway in the 1940s and nothing on the making of Stagefright, for instance, but it's easy going, entertaining and certainly leaves you wanting to know more.

If only Nick Alexander had written his memoirs as well...

Today's obscure question

Can anyone recommend any books or articles dealing with the ways in which Hollywood's back catologue from 1940-45, or thereabouts, was presented and received in Italy and/or France in the immediate post-war years?

I'm especially interested in anything about the extent to which films were subjected to the usual processes of dubbing, or were subtitled or even screened without subtitles, and of the extent to which, for example, the emergence of the whole kind of 1950s Cahiers du Cinema style emphasis on the visual over the verbal can be traced back to seeing films in a context which encouraged readings in terms of mise-en-scene (or the director) rather than the screenwriter.