Shocking Representation

Much like Joan Hawkins's Cutting Edge, this is one of those academic studies of the horror film that seeks to position the genre in a more central, less peripheral position within film studies and to challenge some commonly held distinctions around high and low cinemas.

Whereas Hawkins focused on the intersection between horror and avant-garde cinemas, Lowenstein's focus is simultaneously both broader and narrower, insofar as he is looking specifically at moments of historical trauma within horror cinema but thereby engaging with the distinct field of trauma studies.

The intersection between his selection of films – Franju's Eyes Without a Face, Powell's Peeping Tom, Shindo's Onibaba, Craven's Last House on the Left and Cronenberg's Shivers, each the subject of one chapter – and trauma studies comes through a dissatisfaction with the kind of binaries that pertain in both disciplines and the desire to seek an alternative approach that goes beyond the limitations of this kind of thinking.

In trauma studies, the key binaries are identified as those of melancholia and mourning, acting out and working through, historically irresponsible and responsible, and of the realist and modernist representational modes. In each case the former part of the pairing is ascribed a negative value and the latter a positive one.

In film the corresponding binaries are those of genre and art cinema and of popular and national cinema. Here Lowenstein notes the tendency for certain art house directors and movements to come to represent their nation internationally with a concomitant marginalisation of the actual popular (we might also say vernacular) cinema that the majority of cinema-goers within the nation actually go to see.

Something of the intersection of the two discourses is represented by serious critical reactions to Lanzmann's Shoah compared to Spielberg's Schindler's List. The representational strategies of the former mean that it is an authentic work that demands to be taken seriously, whereas those of the latter render it less authentic, incapable of being taken as seriously as its director would like.

Lowenstein's key alternative to the binaries that have come to dominate trauma studies and which have hitherto limited its application within the cinema to canonical art cinemas is the notion of the shocking allegorical moment, derived from the German-Jewish thinker Walter Benjamin, that exists as an image without a fixed meaning and between poles.

One weakness in Lowenstein's argument is that at times he introduces binaries similar to those he critiques earlier, albeit at a considerably more specific level. This is most evident in discussion of Eyes Without a Face where, again drawing from Benjamin, he develops the idea of two somewhat distinct surrealisms, one associated with Breton and tending towards the interior world of dreams and the other, which he favours, associated with Bataille and emphasizing towards the external material world; in his earlier discussion of Benjamin, Lowenstein likewise emphasizes the baroque allegory over the romantic symbol and historical materialism over historicism.

This said, it can also be noted that the background against which Lowenstein situates the film is in terms of its own impurity at a time when the Gaullist project was one of reconstructing a true, authentic, pure vision of French national identity as a means of overcoming the historical trauma of occupation in World War II.

Crucially, this project found its cinematic analogue in Truffaut’s manifesto cum essay A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema, in which he argued for the essential / existential falsity of the existing Tradition of Quality and the need for a new true, genuine national cinema to replace it – a cinema which he and his New Wave colleagues would soon supply.

Though Lowenstein’s discussion here gets a bit muddled, insofar as he sometimes situates Franju with the Left Bank filmmakers against the New Wave and at others separates Franju out from both movements – movements which are often, we must note, frequently amalgamated into one, thus minimizing their differences – the basic point that Franju offered a challenge to the New Wave’s ideals in his impure, mixed cinema, is well made.

If Lowenstein makes no mention of Bazin’s writings in defence of a mixed cinema, perhaps because Bazin here represents the negative side of realist theory against Benjamin’s friend Siegfried Kracauer, the contrasts he makes between Franju’s disturbing, disquieting, decentring representation of Paris and Truffaut’s far more reassuring one is also well made. (I also suspect here that a detailed consideration of Bazin’s The Cinema of Cruelty, with its Artauldian title, might add further complications here as well.)

A similar pattern is evident in Lowenstein’s readings of Peeping Tom in relation to The British New Wave, specifically Room at the Top, in relation to post-war class anxieties, and Onibaba in relation to the Japanese New Wave and the legacy of Hiroshima: The analyses of the films are hard to fault, though one feels that there is the occasional striking omission. Thus, being more familiar with the British than the Japanese cinematic context here, I noted that whilst Lowenstein comments on Hammer and the figure of the Teddy Boy, he fails to note their conflation in the studio's The Ugly Duckling, with its Teddy Hyde figure.

A difficulty some horror fans may have is that the horror films Lowenstein discusses, while perhaps marginal in relation to the non-horror national cinema type films they are paired with, occupy rather more central positions in relation to the genre itself.

A notable point of contrast in this regard is Bob Clark's Death Dream, which Lowenstein uses to further illustrate the idea of an allegorical moment that crosses and confuses conventional categorisations, but then passes over in favour of Last House on the Left in relation to Vietnam-era trauma in the USA in his fourth chapter.

While his analysis of the marketing of Craven's film is illuminating – I had never realised that the “It's just across the street from Joe” line on the famous poster referenced another film of the period dealing with the gap between the dominant and counter-cultures – there can be few horror fans unawares of Last House's relationship to Bergman’s The Virgin Spring.

Similarly, while it is true that Deliverance is a respectable, non-horror, rape-revenge and culture-clash film, it is also rather closer to mainstream Hollywood than the three films discussed in the previous chapters. The issue, one feels, is that the US lacks a national cinema in the same way as other nations, as its national cinema is in fact Hollywood.

The final chapter is also different in this regard, though more satisfactory. Lowenstein presents Croneberg as something of an exception to the general divisions found in the previous discussions of trauma cinema, highlighting the way in which he has become internationally recognised as an auteur and as the most famous and influential director to come from Canada's despite the consistently trangsressive qualities of his films. Here Lowenstein compares critical reaction to Shivers, Night of the Living Dead and Crash, noting how Robin Wood's contrasting evaluation of Night as a progressive text and Shivers as a regressive one might be challenged, in suggesting that it is precisely Cronenberg's embrace of radical possibilities inherent in his 'new flesh' and transgression of the art/genre and national/popular cinema distinctions that represents his greatest challenge.

Though this review has perhaps accentuated the negative somewhat, I must conclude that Shocking Representations is a thought provoking book and one that I can see influencing my own readings of certain Italian films by Argento and Leone in my academic work.

Yet, insofar as I am opting for these filmmakers over the less respectable / more obscure / cult likes of Fulci, Di Leo, Bava and Lenzi as providing allegorical moments within Italian cinema, it could be argued that I will end up similarly rescuing some popular, genre filmmakers whilst condemning others to underserved obscurity.

My defence would be that one has to start somewhere, with the relatively low-hanging fruit, before moving on to them pair the Nazisploitation film with its more respectable – if still transgressive – Salo. In the spirit of self-criticism, however, one does wonder if the greatest challenge would be to begin rather than end with the apparently indefensible, and that Leone and Argento just represent a pragmatic choice of far enough out there to shock dominant sensibilites, but not so far as to seem completely other.

Action

Directed by Tinto Brass in the wake of the Caligula debacle and prior to his reinvention as a purveyor of sophisticated erotica, Action comes across in the main as something of a throwback to his more pop / avant-garde films of the 1960s such as Yankee and Cul cuore in gola.

The main difference, however, is that whereas those films engaged with genre and filone cinema in the form of the Italian style western and thriller, Action seems more of an attempt to respond to the such art films of the time as Bertolucci's Partner, Godard's Weekend and Pasolini's Uccellacci e uccellini, infused with a touch of 1970s punk spirit reminiscent – if almost certainly not consciously derived from – Jarman's Jubilee.


Anarchy in the UK

As such, the results are something of a deliberate mess, albeit an intermittently entertaining and provocative one.

Luc Merenda plays Bruno Martel, an idealistic young actor working on a curious looking gangster movie – curious insofar as he dresses and acts like an American gangster whilst the cops pursuing him are London bobbies – who walks off the set and goes wandering through the literal and metaphorical wasteland, searching for existential meaning.

In the course of this ballade or bildungsroman – choose your frame of reference – he encounters Garibaldi; his co-star Doris and her double Ofelia; a group of menacing punks; the inhabitants of a Snake Pit style madhouse; witnesses his co-star being forced to defecate on cue and on camera; and, possibly most memorable of all as an image, a decidedly surrealistic and oneiric group of formally attired men and women with penises and vaginas for noses and mouths respectively.




Brass's genital faced figures


Rene Magritte's Le Viol




Two of the Chapman Brothers' figures

The presence of Adriana Asti references another likely source of inspiration in Bunuel's The Phantom of Liberty – and thus, perhaps, a further vague justification / rationale for the sadistic defecation scene, given its memorable vignette where defectation is public and eating is private – whilst genre fans will delight in John Steiner's appearance as Merenda's manager and the casting of Suspiria's Susanna Javicoli as Doris / Ofelia.

That the viewer must endeavour to tease out such meanings is, of course, the whole crux of how he or she is likely responds to Action beyond simple knee jerk reactions that it is misogynistic or tasteless, as the feminist and bourgeois responses respectively.

Is it just bad?

Is it only bad by the selfsame conventional standards Brass wants his audience to (re-)(re-)re-examine?

Is it a bad example of its particular type of filmmaking, inasmuch as it seems to have little that is particularly insightful or original to actually say?

And then, if the last of these – not entirely incommensurable – possibilities is the case, could this potentially be the point, as a joke targeted at contemporary avant-garde types?

A couple more sites

A couple more sites that cult movie fans may find worth a look:

The Drive-in Connection (how many of the starlets along the top can you name?)

Only the Cinema (now reviewing Privilege, a film by one of my favourite non-Euro cult directors, Peter Watkins)

Follie di notte / Crazy Nights / Notti pazze della Amanda Lear

Given Joe D'Amato's prodigious work-rate and his willingness to engage with just about any filone, it comes as little surprise that he should have made a mondo film, Follie di Notte.

The closest points of comparison are probably the two Jimmy Matheus / Bruno Mattei entries hosted by Laura Gemser and released about the same time, Le Notti porno nel mondo and the self-explanatory Emanuelle e le porno notti nel mondo n. 2, the latter co-scripted by Mattei and D’Amato.

Though Gemser is absent here, her stand in being Amanda Lear – a popular singer of the time, who book-ends proceedings with performances of a couple of her songs in a nightclub – it’s otherwise largely business as usual:

A touch of stock footage of Brazil in an unsuccessful attempt to convince us that the routine there, featuring a panther woman and some J&B bottles, wasn't conveniently filmed in Rome; voice-over documentary type scenes of highly dubious authenticity, such as a black mass cum orgy and a look inside a S&M club filmed with a rather noisy ‘hidden’ camera where outwardly respectable men enjoy being whipped and humiliated; doubts over that Lear knew what she was actually commenting on in her bridging scenes; and the overlaying of the mass of dialogue-free material with stock library music, much of it forming a Piero Umiliani greatest hits collection.

Being a D'Amato production, it's also a touch more sexually explicit than Mattei's films and others of the time, with brief masturbation and fellatio shots amongst the simulated fumblings between the likes of two 'primitive' dancers and a couple of 'lesbian' ‘ballerinas’.








The Amanda Lear variety hour?

There’s even a touch of reflexive self-justification as one segment sees a reporter interview a porn actress, who remarks that there’s no essential difference between porn and other types of cinema and discusses her unusual relationship with her impotent, voyeuristic husband, as clips from one of her movies – or maybe another of D’Amato’s– play on the screen before her and the interviewer. (There is no doubt that Marina Frajese / Hedman appeared in several porn films, including many for D’Amato, more that she is really representing herself here rather than a character.)

The thing that is lacking about this supposedly shocking material is, however, its ability to actually shock anyone who has sat through the full version of the director’s Emanuelle in America – as a film whose fake snuff scenes are far more disturbing than the S&M here, in diegetically going beyond the safe, sane and consensual – or any of the sex and horror themed crossovers he would soon engage in.

On the plus side, D’Amato’s presence as cinematographer under his real name, Aristide Massaccessi, grants proceedings a touch more visual dynamism as he attempts to mimic and further embody the performers delirium rather than just record it.

The film may also encourage us to think about the longer history of the mondo film, as a continuation of the hitherto repressed anti-narrative, exhibitionistic, spectacular and shocking tradition of the early “cinema of attractions”.

Yes, trash meets the avant-garde yet again...

Die Bande des Schrekens / The Terrible People

The second krimi to be made for Rialto by director Harald Reinl, Die Bande des Schrekens / The Terrible People begins much where his first, The Fellowship of the Frog, had ended, as the mysterious master criminal Shelton who has hitherto run rings around the police is captured at last.






In case anyone doubts that we're really in London, England

Gunning down a policeman in a desperate bid to escape Shelton is sentenced to death by hanging. Facing the executioner in prison, Shelton seems remarkably calm, indicating that he will have his revenge on those present and the others he holds responsible for his death.




The hanged man's revenge?

Believing Shelton's warnings to be nothing more than an idle threat, Inspector Long (Joachim Fuchsberger) is about to resign from the force and take up a job in his father's Lord Long's bank.

Two things put paid to this plan.

The first is the Inspector's promotion to Chief Inspector, received on account of his bringing Shelton to justice. The second – far more important – is the question of whether Shelton, who apparently took his own life with poison to cheat the hangman, is in fact dead as a series of apparitions and accidents ensue.

Not believing in ghosts, Long orders the exhumation of Shelton's body, revealing a coffin filled with bricks and a hit list of targets, some already effectively crossed off and the remainder including himself and beautiful young bank worker Nora Sanders (Karin Dor, Reinl's wife at the time).

Though things get somewhat bogged down at this point with a confusing number of characters and subplots and a locked room mystery as another victim is somehow shot in the head in his hotel room – the various individuals having been gathered there to better allow Long to protect them whilst contuining the investigation – they pick up for the third act with a suspenseful game of cat and mouse between hero and villain(s) in the latter's trap-laden hideout.






Shelton's appearances and disappearances are well executed

If there is perhaps already a sense of deja vu about some of the characters and situations, the more Mabuse-like figure of Shelton provides Reinl more scope to play Langian games than the Frog did, pointing the way towards his actual Mabuse films, whilst the introduction of Eddi Arent's soon to be patented comic relief figure – here a police photographer who habitually faints at the sight of blood or a corpse – points the way forward for the Rialto series as a whole. (Arent had appeared in Der Racher, but it was not a Rialto production and proved to be a one-off from Kurt Ulrich Studios.)

Visually the film presents an advance on its predecessor, with some pronounced expressionist touches around the phantom Shelton's brief appearances in the shadows and / or fog, various chiaroscuro effects and some attention-grabbing but nevertheless restrained compositions alongside the elegant dolly work.




The good-humoured Long responds to the phantom's note by correcting his rank to Chief Inspector

There are also some repeated visual motifs such as the frequent Langian clocks – Reinl tellingly overlaying the first with his credit and cutting away from it at the exact moment of Shelton's intended execution – and the sudden appearance of a noose before the hangman in an ironic reprise of the noose he had placed before Shelton. (Reinl's way of introducing the nooses into the frame is also somewhat reminiscent of Leone's in The Good, The Bad and the Ugly)

The process shots, featuring racing cars and speedboats, are less satisfactory unless we work on the possible but unlikely seeming premise that this was intentional on Reinl's part, as a way of giving the film more of a 1920s or 30s feel, or of further drawing attention to its filmic nature beyond Arent's character. (Here it's worth remembering, however, that some of critics who would likely have taken Reinl to task here may well have been more sympathetic to the equally obvious process work in Hitchcock's Marnie, indicating the difficulty of drawing a clear distinction between bad filmmaking and Brechtian distanciation.)






Shelton as Mabuse

Heinz Funk's score is more experimental than its immediate crime-jazz predecessors, featuring some suitably disquietingly weird timbres and effects alongside the more usual suspense cues.

There is no ende gag yet, nor any Hier Spricht Edgar Wallace, though the Goldmann's novel is specified – nummer 11 in the series.

Polish Once Upon a Time in America poster

Gli Amici di Nick Hezard / Nick the Sting

Here's an interesting one: crime auteur Fernando Di Leo directing a script by Alberto Silvestri that seems less written for him than as an obvious imitation of The Sting for whomever happened to be available to take on the project.

The closest point of comparison amongst Di Leo's own films as a writer-director – and sometimes producer– is probably probably Colpo in canna, as another relatively light-hearted entry where the cat and mouse games are more for fun than keeps.

The story is simple: Nick Hezard, played with winning charm by Luc Merenda, wants to avenge the dead of one of his friends at the hands of Robert Clark, played by Lee J. Cobb, and plans an elaborate con to achieve this end.

While Clark is a more or less direct stand in for the Robert Shaw character in The Sting, there is perhaps also a Di Leo element in that he has clearly transgressed against the kind of rogue's code often found in the director's work. Killing someone because they successfully conned you and thereby demonstrated themselves to be a better player of the game than you is fundamentally 'against the rules' that these men (and occasionally women) live by.


Umberto Raho and Tom Felleghy


Lassander and Merenda, in exaggerated form

The most pronounced departure from The Sting is that the film is less a buddy movie than a buddies movie, as highlighted by the alternative The Friends of Nick Hezard title. There is no figure comparable to Paul Newman's character in George Roy Hill's film, but rather a host of endearing supporting characters ranging from Valentina Cortese's eccentric mother to Luciana Paluzzi's jealous girlfriend to Gabrielle Ferzetti's fellow professional.

Besides the already formidable array of talent already mentioned, the cast also includes the likes of Dagmar Lassander, William Berger, Umberto Raho and Fulvio Mingozzi to make for arguably the best ensemble Di Leo would ever work with and a virtual who's who of Italian popular cinema around this time.

Di Leo's regular composer Bacalov contributes a score that is by turns suspenseful and whimsical, demonstrating his versatility by avoiding more contemporary instrumentation and stylings – this despite the film's present day setting – in favour of jazzy clarinet, oboe and so on.






Split screens

Di Leo's own work is replete with gimmicks both old and new, such as irising, wipes, split screens and multiple images. If this proves a combination that at times feels a touch schizophrenic as a mix of 1920s and 1960s idioms, it also helps further distance the film from its sepia-toned period inspiration and, with the split screens recalling the original version of The Thomas Crowne Affair and thereby highlighting another possible caper film inspiration.

Importantly, however, sometimes this technology amount to more than a gimmick, as when the fragmentation of the characters' spatial relations during a car journey hints of Nick's closeness to his mother in one frame within the frame and his relative distance from girlfriend in another in a way a conventional two or three shot perhaps couldn't.


Nick and his friends

Likewise these constant reminders that we are watching a film – as another carefully orchestrated performance – neatly c(l)ue us in to the film-within-the-film finale, where Nick plays a role comparable to Di Leo's own.

A welcome further demonstration of Di Leo's talents and versatility.