While characterising Argento's cinema in the whole as one of excess, Maitland McDonagh (1992) argues that the concept only becomes truly relevant to his films beginning from Four Flies on Grey Velvet onwards. Although the preceding analysis of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and The Cat o' Nine Tails would lead me to question whether excess is truly absent from these films, I would agree with McDonagh that Four Flies on Grey Velvet is certainly more pronounced in its excesses. In particular, I will argue the following points. First, that it sees Argento's approach become still more poetic, with an increasing number of images articulating a double consciousness of character and camera. As with its predecessor, these images go beyond the violent set-pieces and centre around the protagonist and antagonist, Roberto and Nina Tobias (Michael Brandon and Mimsy Farmer). Second, that it again sees Argento pursuing his postmodernist strategy of eclectically drawing from both movement-image and time-image cinemas. This time, however, the distinction between the two types of image is more clearly gendered. The male is associated with the movement-image, the female with the time-image. Third, that through the film Argento again makes an implicit, or immanent, critique of dominant models of understanding, associated with science and masculinity in particular. Finally, that in addition to presenting increasingly familiar Argento themes and motifs, such as the irruption of a past trauma into the present; the puzzling aural or visual fragment; the acousmetre; and homosexual characters; the film also introduces some new ones, most notably theatricality.
As noted earlier, Colette Balmain considers all of Argento's gialli of the 1970s, 80s and 90s, along with the filone in general, to be a time-image cinema. Her basic method is taking each film in turn and demonstrating how it incorporates time-image concepts. If I agree with Balmain's method, I obviously disagree with her positioning of Argento as a modernist, time-image film-maker. I would agree, however, with Balmain's key point about Four Flies on Grey Velvet and the time-image, namely that it is a film in which “the powers of the false” are particularly important.
Protagonist Roberto Tobias is the drummer in a rock band. As such, he might be understood as an artist of sorts, and thus the most exalted of the four figures Deleuze considers in relation to the creative powers of the false. However, Roberto's approach to the truth within the film is again a banal one, particularly when he is contrasted with his immediate predecessor, the insightful and imaginative Franco Arno. This also marks out the distinction between Argento as the film-maker-artist and the first of his characters with whom he has been compared by commentators and critics: If Roberto is something of a critical self-portrait of the director, who at the time of the production was involved in a messy separation from his wife, this portrayal relies upon an creative capacity upon Argento's part that his character/creation singularly lacks.
Roberto's predictable responses to images are evident from the ease within which he falls into his wife's trap. This, I think, also helps explain one of the criticisms levelled at the film, that it really does not work terribly well as a whodunit. For example, to David Pirie:
“Full of slick visual conceits and glossy set-pieces, this is clearly Argento's most expensive and ambitious thriller yet. It's the more surprising, therefore, to find that - apart from the ingenious idea of the retinal image which gives the film its title - the script remains as flat and predictable as that of the most meagre Italian 'B' feature. The twist at the climax must be obvious, even to non-specialists in detective fiction, after about the first ten minutes, and it's the makers' apparent unawareness of this which makes much of the action so irritating, since the repeated use of subjective shots, shadows, oblique angles and other assorted devices to cover up the killer's identity slows the proceedings down to a snail's pace. […] The climax, considering how long it has been expected, is […] surprisigly effective [...] The power of the scene confirms that Argento's thriller would have worked much better if he had abandoned his painstaking attempts to disguise the obvious, and concentrated instead on heightening the atmosphere of hysteria and menace which he is clearly quite capable of sustaining.” (1973: ??)
I would argue that Pirie fails to adequately account for the differences between our position as viewer and that of Roberto himself: We may read the clues within the mise-en-scene that Roberto cannot. We may also approach the film with some familiarity with its predecessors, particularly The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and the surprise of its having a female rather than male killer. Nonetheless, it must also be re-iterated that at this point in Argento's career this trope still had a critical edge to it and has not yet degenerated into self-parody or pastiche.
Pirie perhaps also occupies a different position from that of the typical audience member, especially as he was here writing for a relatively elite audience. The Monthly Film Bulletin, in which his review appeared, at the time divided films into two categories: Those films deemed to be of especial interest to its readership and everything else. It goes without saying that European genre films were invariably placed in the latter, inferior, category. Related to this there is perhaps also here an implicit positioning of suspense above shock, or of the Hitchcockian “image of mental relations” over the alternatives employed by other directors.
What Pirie's criticisms, along with these possible responses to them, cumulatively suggest is that Four Flies on Grey Velvet pushes many of the creative tensions in Argento's cinema further than its predecessors. It short circuits the whodunit aspect that bit further. The titular fragment, this time a purely visual opsign, of the last image imprinted on the retina of one of Nina's victims, is introduced late on in the narrative. Moreover it does not appear again until the denouement, at which point Nina also explains why she has been persecuting her husband; it is vital that he know why before he dies. Roberto, it turns out, is the spitting-image of Nina's abusive father, who had wanted a son rather than a daughter and had raised her as if she were a boy. Unfortunately for Nina, her father died before she could extract her revenge. She married Roberto with the intention of accomplishing a symbolic revenge upon her father through him, beginning with his persecution and culminating in his murder.
As such, Nina can be positioned as a combination of two other figures who represent the powers of the false. These are the seeker of vengeance and the forger, both of whom we have already seen in different guises within Leone's cinema. Besides being less developed examples of the creative will to power than the artist (or indeed, the philosopher) there are other issues here: Nina's becoming, like that of Monica Ranieri in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, is more negative than positive. While she may be more of a becoming-woman figure than Monica, given her early life as a boy (if we assume her revenge is not also thereby becoming-man) she is unable to go beyond an ultimately destructive need for revenge. Her line of flight, that is, is again blocked.
Wednesday, 21 October 2009
Tuesday, 20 October 2009
And some more thesis...
The film's position as antithesis to The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is evident from its opening scene, as blind ex-reporter Franco Arno (Karl Malden) and his ward Lori (Cinzia de Carolis) pass a parked car on their way home. Inside the car a man is talking, sotto voce. With his (cliche) sensitive hearing Arno realises the discussion implies blackmail, and accordingly asks Lori to take a look while he ties his shoelace. Though Lori can make out one of the men in the car, the other is in shadow; as she looks back Argento cuts to the reverse angle while on the soundtrack a jarring chord, soon to be identified with the blackmail victim cum killer, Dr Casoni (Aldo Reggiani) is heard. Just as in its predecessor, Argento is thus consciously presenting an initial situation in which the action-image breaks down into opsigns and sonsigns. This time, however, aural rather than visual data are to the fore. Additionally, unlike Dalmas, Arno and Lori are in no position to act. As a child Lori is subject to what Deleuze, in relation to the Italian and French time-image cinemas refers to as “motor helplessness”: “The role of the child has been pointed out, notably in De Sica (and later in France with Truffaut); this is because, in the adult world, the child is affected by a certain motor helplessness, but one which makes him all the more capable of seeing and hearing.” (2005b: 3) Arno, meanwhile, is a “seer” figure, albeit a decidly ironic one on account of his blindness.
Arno's position is further signalled by the next scene, in which Casoni breaks into the Terzi Institute in order to substitute a fake, clean genetic profile for his real, incriminating one. Arno is intimated as having a kind of second sight, sixth sense or intuition that something is happening outside through the way the scene is edited. As Casoni knocks a watchman unconscious, the scene seems to be taking place simultaneously within the real world and within Arno's mind. As the sequence continues and Casoni enters the institute proper, his position does become somewhat more independent and detached. Nevertheless, it is also noticeable that Argento continues to represent him in a different manner than Monica Ranieri in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. She and her husband double were always physically present in the frame, whether as the dark-clad silhouette or metonymic gloved hands. Casoni, by contrast, is only seen as a shadowy figure when he is seen fleeing the institute from an observer's point of view. Otherwise, Argento goes to considerable lengths to absent his body from the frame. For example, when Casoni later kills Bianca Merusi (Rada Rassimov), it is almost as if the garrotte goes around her neck by itself, as if it animated by supernatural force. This, of course, is something that would not be out of place in one of Argento's later fantasy-horror films, with their 'Gothic' or 'Expressionist' animate (animistic?) worlds. For, as Deleuze says: “The non-organic life of things, a frightful life, which is oblivious to the wisdom and limits of the organism, is the first principle of Expressionism, valid for the whole of Nature, that is, for the unconscous spirit, lost in darkness, light which has become opaque, lumen opacatum. From this point of view natural substances and artificial creations, candelabras and trees, turbine and sun are no longer any different. A wall which is alive is dreadful; but utensils, furniture, houses and their roofs also lean, crowd around, lie in wait, or pounce.” (2005a: 52)
Whilst The Cat o' Nine Tails is a giallo and, as such, eschews outright fantasy, it is nevertheless more open to such possibilities compared to its predecessor. That this is so is, I would argue, most evident in the poetic way Argento depicts his protagonist and antagonist, which I will now continue to explore.
The one thing we do see of Casoni repeatedly throughout the film is the extreme close-up of one of his eyes. It is a peculiar, shocking image: As a deterritorialisation of the eye from the face, it refuses “faciality”. But, if is thereby not a conventional affection-image, it also undeniably has an intense affect, the characteristic of the affection-image. Arguably it thereby presents a fusion of the intensive and extensive and organic and inorganic poles of the affection-image, one that takes a part of the machine assembladge of the body, the eye, and presents it in an unfamilar, machinic context: What does an eye actually do? Deleuze's answer is that, by itself, an eye does not do very much. Rather, the eye only gains its conventional, biological function in conjunction with the other parts of an organic body - other eyes, ears, a brain etc. The cinematic body, that of the shots on strips of film (or latterly frames on a computer disc), is not an organic body. It is purely machinic (or electronic). Within the classical cinema of the movement-image, however, most of the assemblages made were organic, or “rational”. One image (or body part) was joined to another in a way that made sense, both at the level of these parts and of the whole. For instance, for Bazin (195?), John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) was like a wheel. Each part was perfectly in accord with the others. In the modern cinema of the time-image, by contrast, the assemblages of parts are inorganic (“crystalline”) or “irrational”. One image may be joined to another in any manner that the filmmaker sees fit; as previously discussed this was a key part of Leone's way of working. As such, whereas the logic of the movement-image is primarily arborescent, that of the time-image is primarily rhizomatic. From one movement-image we can predict the next, whereas from one time-image we cannot. (In this respect a Markovian analysis of corpuses drawn from these cinemas, of which shots or images follow which, probabilistically or stochastically, might be informationally useful.)
I have already mentioned the way Casoni's eye seems to capture the same visions as Arno witnesses on his mindscreen. In moving between these positions, the cut is “irrational,” making the rhizomatic and arbitrary aspects of editing (or montage) evident. As such, it is another time-image irruption, or instance of becoming time-image, within a primarily movement-image film.
It is also perhaps no coincidence here that Argento has referred to Dziga Vertov as being his favourite amongst the Soviet directors. For, as Deleuze shows, Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929) is precisely a film which exploits the power of cinema's machinic, technological body (albeit one within the context of the movement-image cinema) to go beyond the human. As we shall see, the ability of cinema to present inhuman perceptions through the use of technology is something that Argento will increasingly turn to in Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Deep Red and Tenebre.
Another key aspect of the way Argento depicts Casoni is through his silence, as the killer. While the same was basically true of Monica Ranieri in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, there is a difference in the way the two figures function: When Monica makes a telephone call, we hear her (or a) voice. When Casoni does, after abducting Lori, we do not hear his voice. In combination with his relative disembodiment, I would thus argue that The Cat o' Nine Tails is more an exploration of the acousmetre and the mute than a “telephone story”. This again marks it out as a more uncanny film than its predecessor, as one in which “weird science of the most egregious kind” (Koven, 2006: ??), namely the currently discredited idea that an individual's predisposition towards violence is genetic, has a place, even if outright 'magic' does not. The thing that is particularly uncanny about Casoni is his combination of characteristics of acousmetre and mute. On the one hand, he is presented as all but invisible, only appearing as an eye. Insofar as the eye is itself arguably emblematic of the acousmetre, as something potentially all seeing, all knowing and all powerful, or godlike, this is not itself a problem. On the other hand, he is silent. This invokes the figure of the mute, whose uncanny powers depend upon not speaking. As such, Casoni is an in-between, hybrid figure, neither quite voice without body nor body without voice. This position is not necessarily one that can be related to the movement-image and time-image. One of the most complex uses of the voice in cinema identified by Chion (and glossed by Deleuze) is, after all, that of Lang's The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1932). What might be said, however, is that it is a post-modern hybridity, as something that refuses the either/or of acousmetre or mute in favour of their combination.
Insofar as neither the combination of Expressionism and Montage nor the use of the acousmetre directly position The Cat o' Nine Tails as a more Hitchcockian or Langian film (Lang's Metropolis, for instance, using montage contrasts of rich and poor, even as then-wife Thea von Harbou's script rejected revolution) it is worth considering other possible intertextual influences upon the film.
The most important of these, I would argue, is a surprising one: James Whale's 1933 adaptation of H. G Wells's 18?? novel The Invisible Man. The similarities between the two texts are manifold: Both feature mad scientists, or more specifically scientists who are drive mad by their discoveries. Both revolve around invisibility, with the unnamed scientist in Wells's text becoming invisible and Casoni here wishing to become so. Finally, both characters are first partially deacousmatised by being wounded, causing them to leave a trail of blood, then completely deacousmatised and defeated.
Beyond this, there is also the fact that around this time Argento and frequent collaborator Luigi Cozzi had mooted the idea of doing a version of the Frankenstein myth set against the backdrop of 1930s fascism; Paul Morrisey and Antonio Margheriti's 1974 Flesh for Frankenstein perhaps gives some hints of what the resulting film might have been like, featuring as it does a Frankenstein intent on creating a new Serbian “master race” through his experiments.
Unlike his counterpart in Whale's film, Casoni is not, however, truly invisible. Instead, it is only implied that he would like to be through the way he is poetically represented, as a fusion of character and camera consciousness. It is this visibility that appears to account for his muteness: Faced with the extra-sensitive Arno as nemesis, Casoni cannot afford to say anything that might lead to his identification, via the bringing together of opsign and sonsign, or body and voice emanating from it. As further proof of this, we may note the close encounter between the two men. Casoni has just murdered the photographer who inadvertently captured him pushing the blackmailing Dr Calabresi (Carlo Alighiero) in front of a train, As he approaches Arno and Lori, his sound (or leitmotif) plays. He and Arno momentarily pause. It is as if the blind man somehow had an intuition of his presence and the murder that fellow-investigator Carlo Giordani (James Franciscus) is discovering at that very moment.
By the time of this scene, Argento has given us other instances of Arno's insight: When he and Lori go to visit Giordani, Argento cuts back and forth between their home and the newspaper where Giordani works, much as in the opening break-in, although far more rapid-fire. If the assemblage of shots or images here does not entail irrational cuts of a time-image type, it nevertheless makes the cutting visible rather than invisible, or presents (European) montage rather than (Hollywood) editing. If this is again not strictly speaking movement-image against time-image, that all the forms of montage Deleuze discusses fall within the former cinema, it is again hybrid in character: Hollywood cinema relied upon organic editing to a far greater than its European counterparts, where other approaches, including Soviet visible montage, predominated.
Arno's visit to Giordani, and their subsequent race (or “binominal”/“duel”) with Casoni to get to the photographs first, also relies upon his ability to perceive what others do not: Arno is the one who asks if the photograph of the falling Calabresi was cropped, revealing the pushing hand. This image, along with the scenes in which it figures, serves to further develop Argento's critique of Blow-Up. But whereas the loss of the photographic evidence was a devastating blow to Antonioni's protagonist, Argento's investigators again carry on, determined to find the truth. Compared to his predecessor Dalmas, however, Arno is less wedded to dominant models of truth. His blindness has led him towards insight, or an inner truth.
The scene at the railway station is also of importance in relation to Argento's influences and interlocutors. It is not as visually striking as its set-piece counterparts in the other parts of the Animal Trilogy though its minimal rather than excessive/maximal approach. Nevertheless it shows the ability of the director and his regular editor Franco Fraticelli to construct a concise and effective montage sequence. Eight shots in eight seconds present an impressionistic survey of the murder-as-accident. Besides featuring an average shot length equivalent to the (admittedly more elaborate and extended) shower murder in Psycho, the power of the scene comes as much from combination of the shots as what they contain informationally, or from form rather than content.
Another scene of note here is the encounter between Giordani and Anna Terzi, the adopted daughter of the institute's director and his quasi-incestuous lover. Immediately prior to their meeting, Casoni has poisoned the milk left on Giordani's doorstep. As such, it occupies a privileged position with Argento's frame, one clearly inpired by Hitchcock's Suspicion (1941) or Spellbound (1946) and which can be initially discussed in the same terms as Deleuze's analysis of the similar image in the latter film (2005a: 14). But beyond this Argento uses the scene, in which Giordani and Anna awkwardly consummate their relationship, to comment upon the poisoned nature of the inter-personal relationships between most of the film's characters: Far from showing us intimacy, or images codified as intimate in dominant cinema circa 1971, the camera remains at the same distance with the milk still in the forefront. Moreover, a cut glosses over the sexual act itself. Anna, we are invited to understand, has no real feelings for Giordani. Rather, she just wants to know where the investigation is leading. Giordani, meanwhile, is an opportunist, a man taking what he can get. The critical question is clear: What sort of society reduces relationships to such terms?
Arno's position is further signalled by the next scene, in which Casoni breaks into the Terzi Institute in order to substitute a fake, clean genetic profile for his real, incriminating one. Arno is intimated as having a kind of second sight, sixth sense or intuition that something is happening outside through the way the scene is edited. As Casoni knocks a watchman unconscious, the scene seems to be taking place simultaneously within the real world and within Arno's mind. As the sequence continues and Casoni enters the institute proper, his position does become somewhat more independent and detached. Nevertheless, it is also noticeable that Argento continues to represent him in a different manner than Monica Ranieri in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. She and her husband double were always physically present in the frame, whether as the dark-clad silhouette or metonymic gloved hands. Casoni, by contrast, is only seen as a shadowy figure when he is seen fleeing the institute from an observer's point of view. Otherwise, Argento goes to considerable lengths to absent his body from the frame. For example, when Casoni later kills Bianca Merusi (Rada Rassimov), it is almost as if the garrotte goes around her neck by itself, as if it animated by supernatural force. This, of course, is something that would not be out of place in one of Argento's later fantasy-horror films, with their 'Gothic' or 'Expressionist' animate (animistic?) worlds. For, as Deleuze says: “The non-organic life of things, a frightful life, which is oblivious to the wisdom and limits of the organism, is the first principle of Expressionism, valid for the whole of Nature, that is, for the unconscous spirit, lost in darkness, light which has become opaque, lumen opacatum. From this point of view natural substances and artificial creations, candelabras and trees, turbine and sun are no longer any different. A wall which is alive is dreadful; but utensils, furniture, houses and their roofs also lean, crowd around, lie in wait, or pounce.” (2005a: 52)
Whilst The Cat o' Nine Tails is a giallo and, as such, eschews outright fantasy, it is nevertheless more open to such possibilities compared to its predecessor. That this is so is, I would argue, most evident in the poetic way Argento depicts his protagonist and antagonist, which I will now continue to explore.
The one thing we do see of Casoni repeatedly throughout the film is the extreme close-up of one of his eyes. It is a peculiar, shocking image: As a deterritorialisation of the eye from the face, it refuses “faciality”. But, if is thereby not a conventional affection-image, it also undeniably has an intense affect, the characteristic of the affection-image. Arguably it thereby presents a fusion of the intensive and extensive and organic and inorganic poles of the affection-image, one that takes a part of the machine assembladge of the body, the eye, and presents it in an unfamilar, machinic context: What does an eye actually do? Deleuze's answer is that, by itself, an eye does not do very much. Rather, the eye only gains its conventional, biological function in conjunction with the other parts of an organic body - other eyes, ears, a brain etc. The cinematic body, that of the shots on strips of film (or latterly frames on a computer disc), is not an organic body. It is purely machinic (or electronic). Within the classical cinema of the movement-image, however, most of the assemblages made were organic, or “rational”. One image (or body part) was joined to another in a way that made sense, both at the level of these parts and of the whole. For instance, for Bazin (195?), John Ford's Stagecoach (1939) was like a wheel. Each part was perfectly in accord with the others. In the modern cinema of the time-image, by contrast, the assemblages of parts are inorganic (“crystalline”) or “irrational”. One image may be joined to another in any manner that the filmmaker sees fit; as previously discussed this was a key part of Leone's way of working. As such, whereas the logic of the movement-image is primarily arborescent, that of the time-image is primarily rhizomatic. From one movement-image we can predict the next, whereas from one time-image we cannot. (In this respect a Markovian analysis of corpuses drawn from these cinemas, of which shots or images follow which, probabilistically or stochastically, might be informationally useful.)
I have already mentioned the way Casoni's eye seems to capture the same visions as Arno witnesses on his mindscreen. In moving between these positions, the cut is “irrational,” making the rhizomatic and arbitrary aspects of editing (or montage) evident. As such, it is another time-image irruption, or instance of becoming time-image, within a primarily movement-image film.
It is also perhaps no coincidence here that Argento has referred to Dziga Vertov as being his favourite amongst the Soviet directors. For, as Deleuze shows, Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1929) is precisely a film which exploits the power of cinema's machinic, technological body (albeit one within the context of the movement-image cinema) to go beyond the human. As we shall see, the ability of cinema to present inhuman perceptions through the use of technology is something that Argento will increasingly turn to in Four Flies on Grey Velvet, Deep Red and Tenebre.
Another key aspect of the way Argento depicts Casoni is through his silence, as the killer. While the same was basically true of Monica Ranieri in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, there is a difference in the way the two figures function: When Monica makes a telephone call, we hear her (or a) voice. When Casoni does, after abducting Lori, we do not hear his voice. In combination with his relative disembodiment, I would thus argue that The Cat o' Nine Tails is more an exploration of the acousmetre and the mute than a “telephone story”. This again marks it out as a more uncanny film than its predecessor, as one in which “weird science of the most egregious kind” (Koven, 2006: ??), namely the currently discredited idea that an individual's predisposition towards violence is genetic, has a place, even if outright 'magic' does not. The thing that is particularly uncanny about Casoni is his combination of characteristics of acousmetre and mute. On the one hand, he is presented as all but invisible, only appearing as an eye. Insofar as the eye is itself arguably emblematic of the acousmetre, as something potentially all seeing, all knowing and all powerful, or godlike, this is not itself a problem. On the other hand, he is silent. This invokes the figure of the mute, whose uncanny powers depend upon not speaking. As such, Casoni is an in-between, hybrid figure, neither quite voice without body nor body without voice. This position is not necessarily one that can be related to the movement-image and time-image. One of the most complex uses of the voice in cinema identified by Chion (and glossed by Deleuze) is, after all, that of Lang's The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1932). What might be said, however, is that it is a post-modern hybridity, as something that refuses the either/or of acousmetre or mute in favour of their combination.
Insofar as neither the combination of Expressionism and Montage nor the use of the acousmetre directly position The Cat o' Nine Tails as a more Hitchcockian or Langian film (Lang's Metropolis, for instance, using montage contrasts of rich and poor, even as then-wife Thea von Harbou's script rejected revolution) it is worth considering other possible intertextual influences upon the film.
The most important of these, I would argue, is a surprising one: James Whale's 1933 adaptation of H. G Wells's 18?? novel The Invisible Man. The similarities between the two texts are manifold: Both feature mad scientists, or more specifically scientists who are drive mad by their discoveries. Both revolve around invisibility, with the unnamed scientist in Wells's text becoming invisible and Casoni here wishing to become so. Finally, both characters are first partially deacousmatised by being wounded, causing them to leave a trail of blood, then completely deacousmatised and defeated.
Beyond this, there is also the fact that around this time Argento and frequent collaborator Luigi Cozzi had mooted the idea of doing a version of the Frankenstein myth set against the backdrop of 1930s fascism; Paul Morrisey and Antonio Margheriti's 1974 Flesh for Frankenstein perhaps gives some hints of what the resulting film might have been like, featuring as it does a Frankenstein intent on creating a new Serbian “master race” through his experiments.
Unlike his counterpart in Whale's film, Casoni is not, however, truly invisible. Instead, it is only implied that he would like to be through the way he is poetically represented, as a fusion of character and camera consciousness. It is this visibility that appears to account for his muteness: Faced with the extra-sensitive Arno as nemesis, Casoni cannot afford to say anything that might lead to his identification, via the bringing together of opsign and sonsign, or body and voice emanating from it. As further proof of this, we may note the close encounter between the two men. Casoni has just murdered the photographer who inadvertently captured him pushing the blackmailing Dr Calabresi (Carlo Alighiero) in front of a train, As he approaches Arno and Lori, his sound (or leitmotif) plays. He and Arno momentarily pause. It is as if the blind man somehow had an intuition of his presence and the murder that fellow-investigator Carlo Giordani (James Franciscus) is discovering at that very moment.
By the time of this scene, Argento has given us other instances of Arno's insight: When he and Lori go to visit Giordani, Argento cuts back and forth between their home and the newspaper where Giordani works, much as in the opening break-in, although far more rapid-fire. If the assemblage of shots or images here does not entail irrational cuts of a time-image type, it nevertheless makes the cutting visible rather than invisible, or presents (European) montage rather than (Hollywood) editing. If this is again not strictly speaking movement-image against time-image, that all the forms of montage Deleuze discusses fall within the former cinema, it is again hybrid in character: Hollywood cinema relied upon organic editing to a far greater than its European counterparts, where other approaches, including Soviet visible montage, predominated.
Arno's visit to Giordani, and their subsequent race (or “binominal”/“duel”) with Casoni to get to the photographs first, also relies upon his ability to perceive what others do not: Arno is the one who asks if the photograph of the falling Calabresi was cropped, revealing the pushing hand. This image, along with the scenes in which it figures, serves to further develop Argento's critique of Blow-Up. But whereas the loss of the photographic evidence was a devastating blow to Antonioni's protagonist, Argento's investigators again carry on, determined to find the truth. Compared to his predecessor Dalmas, however, Arno is less wedded to dominant models of truth. His blindness has led him towards insight, or an inner truth.
The scene at the railway station is also of importance in relation to Argento's influences and interlocutors. It is not as visually striking as its set-piece counterparts in the other parts of the Animal Trilogy though its minimal rather than excessive/maximal approach. Nevertheless it shows the ability of the director and his regular editor Franco Fraticelli to construct a concise and effective montage sequence. Eight shots in eight seconds present an impressionistic survey of the murder-as-accident. Besides featuring an average shot length equivalent to the (admittedly more elaborate and extended) shower murder in Psycho, the power of the scene comes as much from combination of the shots as what they contain informationally, or from form rather than content.
Another scene of note here is the encounter between Giordani and Anna Terzi, the adopted daughter of the institute's director and his quasi-incestuous lover. Immediately prior to their meeting, Casoni has poisoned the milk left on Giordani's doorstep. As such, it occupies a privileged position with Argento's frame, one clearly inpired by Hitchcock's Suspicion (1941) or Spellbound (1946) and which can be initially discussed in the same terms as Deleuze's analysis of the similar image in the latter film (2005a: 14). But beyond this Argento uses the scene, in which Giordani and Anna awkwardly consummate their relationship, to comment upon the poisoned nature of the inter-personal relationships between most of the film's characters: Far from showing us intimacy, or images codified as intimate in dominant cinema circa 1971, the camera remains at the same distance with the milk still in the forefront. Moreover, a cut glosses over the sexual act itself. Anna, we are invited to understand, has no real feelings for Giordani. Rather, she just wants to know where the investigation is leading. Giordani, meanwhile, is an opportunist, a man taking what he can get. The critical question is clear: What sort of society reduces relationships to such terms?
Just some more thesis...
The giallo's deterritorialisation of the Hollywood thriller is, however, less pronounced than the spaghtti western's deterritorialisation of the Hollywood western. The obvious explanation for this is that whereas the thriller was indigenous to most countries in one form or another, the western was more exclusively American. It it is true that the figure of the cowboy has been compared with the European knight or the Japanese samurai. There were also, for instance, French Carmargue westerns. However, the connections to the US western in each case are less obvious than those between different thriller types: A French polar, such as Jules Dassin's Rififi (1955), is more obviously comparable to a Hollywood crime film like John Huston's The Asphalt Jungle (1950) than a samurai film is to a western; indeed, the US-born Dassin clearly had no difficulty in reworking Huston's “perfect heist” gone wrong film within a French context. As such, whereas it is relatively easy to enumerate the differences between Ford and Leone's westerns, those between the Argento's and Hitchcock's thrillers are harder to itemise. Moreover, these differences, such as Argento's use of the whodunit form, inevitably bring Argento closer to other Hollywood thriller filmmakers.
This, indeed, lies behind Argento's subsequent repudiation of The Cat o' Nine Tails as a film which is “too American” in its approach and insufficiently personal or auteurist. A similar line of argument has been taken up by Gary Needham (2002). Comparing and contrasting the film with its immediate predecessor and successor, Needham argues that it is a failure for two main reasons. First, The Cat o' Nine Tails eschews psychoanalytic trauma in favour of more mundane motivations. Its killer is the victim of blackmail, with this intersecting with a subplot around industrial espionage. Second, it lacks a central set-piece featuring a visual “punctum”. This is a concept Needham takes from Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida (1980) and which refers to a point that 'pierces' the viewer. In my view The Cat o' Nine Tails has more to offer than Needham recognises. I will argue three main points. First, it is a film which makes a challenges to the dominant psychoanalytic theories upon which Needham's reading relies. Second, by foregrounding the opsign and the sonsign, alongside with a seer figure (albeit a blind one), the film presents another hybrid of movement-image and time-image. Finally, through its representations of the protagonist and antagonist, the film presents a poetic advance upon its predecessor.
As we saw earlier, Needham astutely recognises a key difference between Argento's gialli and those of his imitators: Argento's films tend to focus equally upon male and female neuroses and psychoses. Given the corresponding questioning, queering or decentring of the male norm, against which the female is negatively defined, that this implies, it is conspicuous that Needham does not go further. He does not, for instance, address Deleuze's aforementioned critique of psychoanalytic film theory, that all it ever gives us is one image, that of the traumatic primal scene. Staying within this framework, meanwhile, another problem is evident if we consider Barthes's “punctum” in more detail. Barthes worked through his concepts around the visual image in a series of essays. In The Third Meaning (1970) he considered the notion of excess, or the third, unquantifiable, meaning in relation to a number of photographs, including stills from Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible (1944/1946). At this point Barthes did not draw a firm distinction between photographic and film images. But Camera Lucida is specifically about photography. Moreover, it is questionable whether the studium can be used intersubjectively in the way Needham's analysis suggests: Within his discussion, Barthes distinguishes between the punctum and the studium. The studium is the broader social meaning that can be read into a photograph. The punctum is the narrower, personal, non-social meaning for an individual with a specific, personal connection to the photograph. Thus, for example, Barthes describes his feelings in relation to the punctum of photographs of his mother. However, this punctum is unavailable to us directly. Instead, we see only the studium, images of a French woman of a particular background at a particular point in time. The studium is thus contestably the Benjaminian “aura” of the photograph, albeit as an aura that is inherently personal rather than collective (religious) and which is not necessarily diminished by mechanical or other reproduction. Cast in these terms, every (commercially produced) film lacks the punctum, their images instead being of a studium type; if Barthes' concept could here be extended to the film, by implication this would be to the home movie, or to a commercial film as it appears to the individuals involved in its production.
As Needham recognises, Cat o' Nine Tails lacks a central set-piece. I would argue it goes some way towards compensating for this with a widely dispersed set of scenes in which the mise-en-scene is more conciously expressive than was the case in its predecessor.
This, indeed, lies behind Argento's subsequent repudiation of The Cat o' Nine Tails as a film which is “too American” in its approach and insufficiently personal or auteurist. A similar line of argument has been taken up by Gary Needham (2002). Comparing and contrasting the film with its immediate predecessor and successor, Needham argues that it is a failure for two main reasons. First, The Cat o' Nine Tails eschews psychoanalytic trauma in favour of more mundane motivations. Its killer is the victim of blackmail, with this intersecting with a subplot around industrial espionage. Second, it lacks a central set-piece featuring a visual “punctum”. This is a concept Needham takes from Roland Barthes' Camera Lucida (1980) and which refers to a point that 'pierces' the viewer. In my view The Cat o' Nine Tails has more to offer than Needham recognises. I will argue three main points. First, it is a film which makes a challenges to the dominant psychoanalytic theories upon which Needham's reading relies. Second, by foregrounding the opsign and the sonsign, alongside with a seer figure (albeit a blind one), the film presents another hybrid of movement-image and time-image. Finally, through its representations of the protagonist and antagonist, the film presents a poetic advance upon its predecessor.
As we saw earlier, Needham astutely recognises a key difference between Argento's gialli and those of his imitators: Argento's films tend to focus equally upon male and female neuroses and psychoses. Given the corresponding questioning, queering or decentring of the male norm, against which the female is negatively defined, that this implies, it is conspicuous that Needham does not go further. He does not, for instance, address Deleuze's aforementioned critique of psychoanalytic film theory, that all it ever gives us is one image, that of the traumatic primal scene. Staying within this framework, meanwhile, another problem is evident if we consider Barthes's “punctum” in more detail. Barthes worked through his concepts around the visual image in a series of essays. In The Third Meaning (1970) he considered the notion of excess, or the third, unquantifiable, meaning in relation to a number of photographs, including stills from Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible (1944/1946). At this point Barthes did not draw a firm distinction between photographic and film images. But Camera Lucida is specifically about photography. Moreover, it is questionable whether the studium can be used intersubjectively in the way Needham's analysis suggests: Within his discussion, Barthes distinguishes between the punctum and the studium. The studium is the broader social meaning that can be read into a photograph. The punctum is the narrower, personal, non-social meaning for an individual with a specific, personal connection to the photograph. Thus, for example, Barthes describes his feelings in relation to the punctum of photographs of his mother. However, this punctum is unavailable to us directly. Instead, we see only the studium, images of a French woman of a particular background at a particular point in time. The studium is thus contestably the Benjaminian “aura” of the photograph, albeit as an aura that is inherently personal rather than collective (religious) and which is not necessarily diminished by mechanical or other reproduction. Cast in these terms, every (commercially produced) film lacks the punctum, their images instead being of a studium type; if Barthes' concept could here be extended to the film, by implication this would be to the home movie, or to a commercial film as it appears to the individuals involved in its production.
As Needham recognises, Cat o' Nine Tails lacks a central set-piece. I would argue it goes some way towards compensating for this with a widely dispersed set of scenes in which the mise-en-scene is more conciously expressive than was the case in its predecessor.
Monday, 19 October 2009
Sartana - The Complete Saga
Another budget spaghetti box set, and another release which, from initial impressions, will appeal more if you have a tolerance for bad transfers.
Ten films across three discs, with all that implies for image quality - or lack thereof - and Django vs Sartana, for one, actually showing the imprinted logo of the TV station it has been sourced from, 7 Gold.
It's debatable whether these ten films represent the "Complete Saga" because of retitlings and cash-ins - the 'official' Sartana, Gianni Garko, as seen on the cover, isn't in all the films.
Ten films across three discs, with all that implies for image quality - or lack thereof - and Django vs Sartana, for one, actually showing the imprinted logo of the TV station it has been sourced from, 7 Gold.
It's debatable whether these ten films represent the "Complete Saga" because of retitlings and cash-ins - the 'official' Sartana, Gianni Garko, as seen on the cover, isn't in all the films.
Wednesday, 14 October 2009
Spaghetti Western Collection
This arrived today. 20 films for £6 or so, including postage. It's the sort of price that you can't go wrong with, unless you care about the quality of the presentations. (Oddly it has a different cover, though still with Van Cleef.)
So far I've only watched two of the films contained within, neither of which I had seen before: Gunfight at Red Sands and Apache Blood. Both are very much AVI from video quality transfers, which is to be expected given that there are four films to a disc: Acceptable on a small laptop screen, or on a larger screen from a distance, but far from showcasing the format or more expensive equipment.
The two films provide an intriguing contrast, Gunfight coming before the boom, in 1963, and Apache Blood after it, in 1975.
Gunfight stars Richard Harrison as the avenging hero and Giacomo Rossi-Stuart as the sheriff/villain, with other prominent contributors including Morricone and, perhaps, Nicolai as Dan Savio and Lee Nichols, along with Massimo Dalamano, as Max Dalmas. The negative portrayal of the sheriff, along with the Mexican frontier setting, mark it out as a spaghetti, but otherwise its relatively conventional.
Apache Blood stars Ray Danton as the Apache seeking vengeance upon the cavalry. If it's unusual as a spaghetti by focusing on the Native American rather than the Mexican, it's also more conventional for a 1975 western through its more complex portrayal of the relationships between the redskin and the white man, as one which is not simply good and bad, or vice-versa.
The films:
1. Apache Blood
2. Between God, the Devil and a Winchester
3. Beyond the Law
4. China 9, Liberty 37
5. Death Rides a Horse
6. Fighting Fists of Shanghai Joe, The
7. Find a Place to Die
8. Fistful of Lead
9. God's Gun
10. Grand Duel, The
11. Gunfight at Red Sands
12. It Can Be Done Amigo
13. Johnny Yuma
14. Man from Nowhere
15. Minnesota Clay
16. Sundance and the Kid
17. This Man Can't Die
18. Trinity and Sartana
19. Twice a Judas
20. White Comanche
More Delezean analysis of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
The first issue that must be addressed is Argento’s use of the ‘whodunit’ form, particularly in relation to his frequent labelling in the wake of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, and its “Animal Trilogy” successors, as “The Italian Hitchcock”. Whilst this label was arguably beneficial to Argento from a career perspective, especially initially, it is also something he has sought to play down, after becoming established in his own right. This distinguishes him from De Palma, who has always emphasised himself as heir to Hitchcock. Argento, by contrast, has claimed, like Chabrol, to be more of a Langian than a Hitchcockian. The giallo as a whole, meanwhile, arguably has more connections to film noir, through the similar origins of the terms noir and giallo to describe a particular literary form, and the wider thriller. In particular most gialli, including all of Argento’s films excepting The Stendhal Syndrome and Giallo (both of which fall outside the time-period of this thesis) are whodunits: The identity of the killer or killers is not known to the detective protagonist nor the audience until the denouement. Hitchcock, meanwhile, disliked the whodunit and its dynamic of surprise, that the killer was typically someone we never would have suspected. Instead he preferred the audience to know more than his characters, to place us in a position of suspense: We know who the killer is and that the protagonist is in danger, even if he does not yet know: “What matters is not who did the action – what Hitchcock calls with contempt the whodunit, but neither is it the action itself: it is the set of relations in which the action and the one who did it are caught.” (2005a: 204)
This dynamic of the “relation-image” or the “image of mental relations” is the essential component within Hitchcock’s cinema, the image that makes him a singular auteur positioned between the movement-image and the time-image:
In the history of the cinema Hitchcock appears as one who no longer conceives of the constitution of the film as a function of two terms – the director and the film to be made – but as a function of three: the director, the film and the public which must come into the film, or whose reactions must for an integrating part of the film (this is the explicit sense of suspense, since the spectator is the first to ‘know’ the relations. (2005a: 206)
By incorporating the audience into his films, Hitchcock led to the culmination of the movement-image:
[O]ne might say that Hitchcock accomplishes and brings to completion the whole of the cinema by pushing the movement-image to its limit. Including the spectator in the film, and the film in the mental image, Hitchcock brings the cinema to completion. (2005a: 209)
However, to Deleuze, Hitchcock himself was unable to go beyond the movement-image into the time-image:
If one of Hitchcock’s innovations was to implicate the spectator in the film, did not the characters themselves have to be capable – in a more or less obvious way – of being assimilated to spectators? But then it may be that one consequence appears inevitable: the mental image would then be less a bringing to completion of the action-image, and of the other images, than a re-examination of their nature and status, moreover, the whole movement-image which would be re-examined through the rupture of the sensory-motor links in a particular character. What Hitchcock had wanted to avoid, a crisis in the traditional image of the cinema, would nevertheless happen in his wake, and in part as a result of his innovations. (2005a: 209)
The key film-makers here are, of course, the neo-realists, in whose work Deleuze detects the first failings of the action-image. For my purposes, however, Antonioni is more important, via his anti-thrillers or anti-gialli Story of a Love Affair, L’Avventura and Blow-Up: In Story the investigation of a virtual crime in the past, leads to its becoming actual in the present. In L’Avventura the investigation of ??’s disappearance by her fiancé and friend discovers nothing. In Blow-Up the body and the photographs disappear, and thus all evidence that there was actually a murder. In each case, that is, the action-image sensory-motor schema of the movement-image, and the boundary between protagonist and audience break down completely. The character within the film is reduced to the same helplessness as their viewer observing them.
As we saw earlier, as a critic Argento was vocal in his dislike for Blow-Up. I would argue that this distaste may be related to Argento’s inherent postmodern position, of denying the implicit hierarchy of modernist art cinema over classical genre cinema, or the time-image over the movement-image. Furthermore, I would contend that The Bird with the Crystal Plumage sees him beginning to work through his postmodern response to Antonioni modernist classic. Where Antonioni presents the time-image as a fully fledged thing within the context of the art cinema, Argento here gives us the movement-image as it is caught in the process of becoming time-image within the context of filone cinema. In particular, Bird is concerned with exposing and exploring the cliché, along with the breakdown of the action-image into opsigns and sonsigns that require active interpretation, or “attentive” rather than “habitual” recognition in Deleuze’s Bergsonian framework. Crucially, however, the movement-image re-asserts itself through protagonist Sam Dalmas’s dogged determination to find out the truth behind what he saw. If Dalmas’s notion of the truth is a banal one, the truth his investigation unveils is (or was) a more shocking one: The structures of capitalism and patriarchy are destructive and negative. The division here is between the mass and the elite, or the movement-image and the time-image cinemas. One issue here is stepping back in time, in considering the film in its context, of Italy in 1970, rather than today, and in another country, forty years on. Another is that of different audiences and cinemas: What was perhaps banal for the elite, or the prima visione audience, was still shocking for the ordinary viewer, or the terza vision audience. This ‘whydunit’ aspect, of the exploration of the origins of Monica’s psychosis, also provides something of a counter to the whodunit element. Emphasising the ‘why’ as well as the ‘who’ is something that distinguishes Argento’s gialli from those of many of his filone imitators, who are often more interested in the ‘how’, in the form of the bizarre murder methods employed by their killers. Sergio Pastore’s The Crimes of the Black Cat (1972) is a prime example here, particularly since its blind investigator protagonist and titular animal are clear references to The Cat o’ Nine Tails. The film’s killer has a cat whose claws have been dipped in poison attack her victims, with the cat having been trained to respond to a particular perfume on the yellow silk shawls that the victims are sent.
Argento’s use of the whodunit and greater emphasis upon shock than suspense compared to Hitchcock might also be justified in relation to his postmodern position: Postmodernism and poststructuralism, with their challenge to binaries and hierarchies, would deny the inherent superiority of the non-whodunit over the whodunit and of suspense over shock. Instead, they might be considered as different, somewhat incommensurable language games with their own performative criteria. A whodunit or a shock must thereby be evaluated in their own terms, as good or bad examples of their type, rather than as, at best, good examples of an inferior type. Or, to cast this in a more directly Deleuzean framework, they are alternative “lines of flight,” with the whodunit and the shock also possibly “deterritorialising” the non-whodunit and suspense respectively.
One way in which The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is a Hitchcockian film is its use of the theme of exchange or transference, as first identified by Eric Rohmer and Chabrol (195?) and subsequently endorsed by Deleuze (2005a: 205): Monica Ranieri exchanges the role of victim for that of victimiser. Her husband Alberto exchanges the role of murderer with his wife, attempting to cover up for her crimes by confounding the police investigation with his telephone call and then confessing to his wife’s crimes as he dies. Another is the importance of interpretation. Deleuze identifies Hitchcock’s cinema as one in which the interpretation of the image is paramount: “In Hitchcock, actions, affections, perceptions, all is interpretation, from beginning to end.” (2005a: 204). In particular, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage features a key image which is out of place, or a Hitchcockian “demark,” as will be seen in my analysis of the pivotal gallery sequence. This distinguishes it from Four Flies on Grey Velvet, a more Langian film in which the “powers of the false,” of a “Protagoras-style relativism where judgement expresses the ‘best’ point of view, that is, the relation under which appearances have the best chance of being turned around to the benefit of an individual or of a humanity of higher value” (2005b: 134) are to the fore. In combination, meanwhile, the two films further expose Argento’s becoming Langian rather than Hitchcockian, or the shift in the proportion of movement-images and time-images in his work.
This dynamic of the “relation-image” or the “image of mental relations” is the essential component within Hitchcock’s cinema, the image that makes him a singular auteur positioned between the movement-image and the time-image:
In the history of the cinema Hitchcock appears as one who no longer conceives of the constitution of the film as a function of two terms – the director and the film to be made – but as a function of three: the director, the film and the public which must come into the film, or whose reactions must for an integrating part of the film (this is the explicit sense of suspense, since the spectator is the first to ‘know’ the relations. (2005a: 206)
By incorporating the audience into his films, Hitchcock led to the culmination of the movement-image:
[O]ne might say that Hitchcock accomplishes and brings to completion the whole of the cinema by pushing the movement-image to its limit. Including the spectator in the film, and the film in the mental image, Hitchcock brings the cinema to completion. (2005a: 209)
However, to Deleuze, Hitchcock himself was unable to go beyond the movement-image into the time-image:
If one of Hitchcock’s innovations was to implicate the spectator in the film, did not the characters themselves have to be capable – in a more or less obvious way – of being assimilated to spectators? But then it may be that one consequence appears inevitable: the mental image would then be less a bringing to completion of the action-image, and of the other images, than a re-examination of their nature and status, moreover, the whole movement-image which would be re-examined through the rupture of the sensory-motor links in a particular character. What Hitchcock had wanted to avoid, a crisis in the traditional image of the cinema, would nevertheless happen in his wake, and in part as a result of his innovations. (2005a: 209)
The key film-makers here are, of course, the neo-realists, in whose work Deleuze detects the first failings of the action-image. For my purposes, however, Antonioni is more important, via his anti-thrillers or anti-gialli Story of a Love Affair, L’Avventura and Blow-Up: In Story the investigation of a virtual crime in the past, leads to its becoming actual in the present. In L’Avventura the investigation of ??’s disappearance by her fiancé and friend discovers nothing. In Blow-Up the body and the photographs disappear, and thus all evidence that there was actually a murder. In each case, that is, the action-image sensory-motor schema of the movement-image, and the boundary between protagonist and audience break down completely. The character within the film is reduced to the same helplessness as their viewer observing them.
As we saw earlier, as a critic Argento was vocal in his dislike for Blow-Up. I would argue that this distaste may be related to Argento’s inherent postmodern position, of denying the implicit hierarchy of modernist art cinema over classical genre cinema, or the time-image over the movement-image. Furthermore, I would contend that The Bird with the Crystal Plumage sees him beginning to work through his postmodern response to Antonioni modernist classic. Where Antonioni presents the time-image as a fully fledged thing within the context of the art cinema, Argento here gives us the movement-image as it is caught in the process of becoming time-image within the context of filone cinema. In particular, Bird is concerned with exposing and exploring the cliché, along with the breakdown of the action-image into opsigns and sonsigns that require active interpretation, or “attentive” rather than “habitual” recognition in Deleuze’s Bergsonian framework. Crucially, however, the movement-image re-asserts itself through protagonist Sam Dalmas’s dogged determination to find out the truth behind what he saw. If Dalmas’s notion of the truth is a banal one, the truth his investigation unveils is (or was) a more shocking one: The structures of capitalism and patriarchy are destructive and negative. The division here is between the mass and the elite, or the movement-image and the time-image cinemas. One issue here is stepping back in time, in considering the film in its context, of Italy in 1970, rather than today, and in another country, forty years on. Another is that of different audiences and cinemas: What was perhaps banal for the elite, or the prima visione audience, was still shocking for the ordinary viewer, or the terza vision audience. This ‘whydunit’ aspect, of the exploration of the origins of Monica’s psychosis, also provides something of a counter to the whodunit element. Emphasising the ‘why’ as well as the ‘who’ is something that distinguishes Argento’s gialli from those of many of his filone imitators, who are often more interested in the ‘how’, in the form of the bizarre murder methods employed by their killers. Sergio Pastore’s The Crimes of the Black Cat (1972) is a prime example here, particularly since its blind investigator protagonist and titular animal are clear references to The Cat o’ Nine Tails. The film’s killer has a cat whose claws have been dipped in poison attack her victims, with the cat having been trained to respond to a particular perfume on the yellow silk shawls that the victims are sent.
Argento’s use of the whodunit and greater emphasis upon shock than suspense compared to Hitchcock might also be justified in relation to his postmodern position: Postmodernism and poststructuralism, with their challenge to binaries and hierarchies, would deny the inherent superiority of the non-whodunit over the whodunit and of suspense over shock. Instead, they might be considered as different, somewhat incommensurable language games with their own performative criteria. A whodunit or a shock must thereby be evaluated in their own terms, as good or bad examples of their type, rather than as, at best, good examples of an inferior type. Or, to cast this in a more directly Deleuzean framework, they are alternative “lines of flight,” with the whodunit and the shock also possibly “deterritorialising” the non-whodunit and suspense respectively.
One way in which The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is a Hitchcockian film is its use of the theme of exchange or transference, as first identified by Eric Rohmer and Chabrol (195?) and subsequently endorsed by Deleuze (2005a: 205): Monica Ranieri exchanges the role of victim for that of victimiser. Her husband Alberto exchanges the role of murderer with his wife, attempting to cover up for her crimes by confounding the police investigation with his telephone call and then confessing to his wife’s crimes as he dies. Another is the importance of interpretation. Deleuze identifies Hitchcock’s cinema as one in which the interpretation of the image is paramount: “In Hitchcock, actions, affections, perceptions, all is interpretation, from beginning to end.” (2005a: 204). In particular, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage features a key image which is out of place, or a Hitchcockian “demark,” as will be seen in my analysis of the pivotal gallery sequence. This distinguishes it from Four Flies on Grey Velvet, a more Langian film in which the “powers of the false,” of a “Protagoras-style relativism where judgement expresses the ‘best’ point of view, that is, the relation under which appearances have the best chance of being turned around to the benefit of an individual or of a humanity of higher value” (2005b: 134) are to the fore. In combination, meanwhile, the two films further expose Argento’s becoming Langian rather than Hitchcockian, or the shift in the proportion of movement-images and time-images in his work.
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