I am a mechanical man
A mechanical man
And I do the best I can
Because I have my family
I am a mechanical boy
I am my mother's toy
- Charles Manson, Mechanical Man
The dummy, or Carlo?
Monday, 9 November 2009
Mechanical Man
I am a mechanical man
A mechanical man
And I do the best I can
Because I have my family
I am a mechanical boy
I am my mother's toy
- Charles Manson, Mechanical Man
The dummy, or Carlo?
More doubling and foreshadowing in Deep Red
When Amanda Righetti is killed, her assassin first terrorises her with a classic giallo doll, held in place by a noose around its neck:
The doll then loses its head (or the head loses its body), just as will Carlo's mother in the finale:
The doll then loses its head (or the head loses its body), just as will Carlo's mother in the finale:
Notes on the cinematographer, as done by Argento rather than Bresson
My mind wanders; the camera wanders
Power in Four Flies on Grey Velvet and Once Upon a Time in the West
Nina's conception of power can be understood can be understood, in Deleuze and Guattari's terms as a negative one. This concept of power is inspired by Spinoza and Nietzsche (Colebook in Parr, 2005: 215-217). From Spinoza they take the idea of power as potential and of joy the result of fulfilling this potential: “Joy, as the realisation of power, is therefore different from the moral opposition of good and evil, an opposition that impedes power by constraining it within some already given norm.” (215). In itself, this formulation might imply that Nina's murderous activities and desire for revenge are themselves neither good nor evil. Such a reading could accord with a more relativist reading of Nietzsche, insofar as the Christian virtue of forgiveness is read as a slave morality inversion of the preceding master morality of vengeance. This would also accord with the ethics of the Italian western and the vendetta, which Argento has spoken of favourably on occasion [quote from John Martin]. However, Deleuze here emphasises an equally Nietzschean distinction between active and reactive powers: “An active power maximises its potential, pushes itself to its limit and reaffirms the life of which it is but one expression. A reactive power, by contrast, turns back on itself.” (216) Cast in these terms, we may thus distinguish between the positive power of Leone, Bertolucci and Argento's avenger, Harmonica, and the one seeks vengeance upon, Frank, in Once Upon a Time in the West, and Nina and Roberto here.
Harmonica accepts that he is merely one expression of the old west, part of “an ancient race” whose role is now to helps bring into existence a new, feminine, west in which he knows and fully accepts that he has no place. Although Frank initially attempts to use his powers negatively to establish a place for himself in this coming world as a businessman like Morton, this reactive power turns back upon itself. For eventually he positively accepts of his equal obsolescence as one of the ancient race as he and Harmonica finally face off: “The future don't matter to us. Nothing matters now – not the land, not the money, not the woman. I came here to see you. 'Cause I know that now, you'll tell me what you're after.” Regardless of the which man wins this duel, the wider outcome, the birth of the new west, is assured. Their “large form” binominal leads to a new situation. The elegiac qualities of the film depend upon its ambiguity here, as to what this new situation represents: improvement, degeneration or an admixture of both. Cast in these terms, Harmonica and to a lesser extent Frank's becomings, like that of the west itself, are of a deterritorialising, becoming-woman type.
Nina's desire for vengeance upon her father is, by contrast, entirely reactive and negative. As we have seen, she is never positioned as looking towards the future, only the past, through the circling camera work. We get no sense of what her plans for life without her father and/or Roberto are, if any. As such, it makes sense that Nina should die rather than escape when her plans fail. Nina's becoming is of a territorialising, masculine, reactive type, one that can only turns back on itself in a destructive manner.
Harmonica accepts that he is merely one expression of the old west, part of “an ancient race” whose role is now to helps bring into existence a new, feminine, west in which he knows and fully accepts that he has no place. Although Frank initially attempts to use his powers negatively to establish a place for himself in this coming world as a businessman like Morton, this reactive power turns back upon itself. For eventually he positively accepts of his equal obsolescence as one of the ancient race as he and Harmonica finally face off: “The future don't matter to us. Nothing matters now – not the land, not the money, not the woman. I came here to see you. 'Cause I know that now, you'll tell me what you're after.” Regardless of the which man wins this duel, the wider outcome, the birth of the new west, is assured. Their “large form” binominal leads to a new situation. The elegiac qualities of the film depend upon its ambiguity here, as to what this new situation represents: improvement, degeneration or an admixture of both. Cast in these terms, Harmonica and to a lesser extent Frank's becomings, like that of the west itself, are of a deterritorialising, becoming-woman type.
Nina's desire for vengeance upon her father is, by contrast, entirely reactive and negative. As we have seen, she is never positioned as looking towards the future, only the past, through the circling camera work. We get no sense of what her plans for life without her father and/or Roberto are, if any. As such, it makes sense that Nina should die rather than escape when her plans fail. Nina's becoming is of a territorialising, masculine, reactive type, one that can only turns back on itself in a destructive manner.
Sunday, 8 November 2009
Mondo Candido
As with the better-known Candy (1968) scripted by Terry Southern, this is an adaptation of Voltaire's Candide, although one that adheres to the source text as far as the title character's gender and the (vague) historical setting are concerned.
Nonetheless, as with filmmaker's Franco Prosperi and Gualtiero Giacopetti's earlier Farewell Uncle Tom, faithfulness to the original texts (there, the actual testimonies of pro-slavery and abolitionists commentators) is combined with numerous anachronistic elements and a decidedly formalist approach, with freewheeling camerawork, exaggerated angles, kaleidoscopic images and slow-motion amongst other devices.
We begin with Candido and his mentor Dr Pangloss as part of a Royal Court. Unfortunately Candido's relationship with princess Cunegonde leads to his exile from this paradise, separation from his mentor, and drafting into the Bulgarian army.
Cunegonde
Equipped with muskets, cannons and exaggeratedly large triangular hats bearing the symbol of the illuminati, the Bulgarian forces march into battle for the glory of their king, against 20th century forces, equipped with tanks and automatic rifles.
The result is a predictable massacre, with the Bulgarian troops – now replaced by cardboard cut outs – being mown down in their tens of thousands, until the painter appointed to document the battle resorts to covering his canvas with red paint.
Candido, one of the few survivors of the massacre, then meets up with Pangloss, following an encounter with a brutish and decidedly ignoble savage, played by Sal Boris./Baccaro It seems that the kingdom was attacked by demons (later in flashback these will be revealed as knights on motorcycles, a la Knightriders) who killed the king and queen and raped Cunegonde no less than 126 times. Pangloss himself was saved on account of his syphilis, one of the various benefits that had necessitated the discovery of the Americas in this “best of all possible worlds”. Without the Americas, after all, we would not have potatoes, tomatoes or turnips either...
Some naught nuns
They soon encounter the inquisition, an element which strengthens what is by now a strong sense that the filmmakers have here made something akin to an Italian version of Monty Python's Quest for the Holy Grail or Jabberwocky, perhaps not as funny but arguably more grotesque.
The inquisitor disapproves of Pangloss's discussion of freedom and necessity, that it is necessary we be free, and orders them taken before the inquisition, which features some seriously funky grooves and nuns naked but for their hoods and figleafs.
Some Klansman like inquisitors who would not have been out of place in Farewell Uncle Tom
Candido acquires a freed slave called Cacambo and meets Cunegonde once more, while Pangloss is sentenced to death for his heresies. It emerges that Cunegonde has many lovers, including the inquisitor, whom Candido attempts to rescue her from.
Then Cundegonde is then taken to the new world, leading Candido and Cacambo to follow her; also on board their ship are Columbus, Vespucci, Davy Crockett, Marilyn Monroe, Al Capone, Neil Armstrong and Henry Kissinger.
They arrive in present day New York, where Pangloss is in charge of a TV crew. As Columbus is used to advertise coca cola, Candide learns that Cunegonde has gone to fight with the IRA in Northern Ireland, only to then find that she has left there for Israel, where (female) Israeli soldiers and unspecified Arabs gun one another down much like their counterparts in the Bulgarian army episode 200 years earlier; fans of the filmmakers work, will of course here recall that Israeli women soldiers had been featured in one of the segments of their earlier Women of the World.
The multiple images neatly reflect the multiplication of lovers and of possible best worlds
Given this kind of intertextuality, we might the following: If Mondo Cane presents a proposition, that this might be a Dog's World, then Mondo Candido presents more of a fact, that this is Candido's world and also ours.
Where Prosperi and Gualtiero's approach coincides with their source material is in their decidedly anti-Panglossian position, that this is quite emphatically not the best of all possible worlds. Moreover, between the Voltaire was writing and the time they were filming, things seem to have improved hardly any. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, to quote Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr...
Riz Ortolani's score is a pleasure, especially the cuts featuring positively orgasmic female vocalism. Christopher Brown, Michelle Miller and Jacques Herlin acquit themselves nicely as the three leads, with Miller at times reminding one of Edwige Fenech in her looks and mannerisms.
The production clearly had a decent budget, although one wonders how many places the film was denied distribution in on account of its excesses, unpleasantries and political aspects, and of how many viewers were simply weirded out.
Nonetheless, as with filmmaker's Franco Prosperi and Gualtiero Giacopetti's earlier Farewell Uncle Tom, faithfulness to the original texts (there, the actual testimonies of pro-slavery and abolitionists commentators) is combined with numerous anachronistic elements and a decidedly formalist approach, with freewheeling camerawork, exaggerated angles, kaleidoscopic images and slow-motion amongst other devices.
We begin with Candido and his mentor Dr Pangloss as part of a Royal Court. Unfortunately Candido's relationship with princess Cunegonde leads to his exile from this paradise, separation from his mentor, and drafting into the Bulgarian army.
Cunegonde
Equipped with muskets, cannons and exaggeratedly large triangular hats bearing the symbol of the illuminati, the Bulgarian forces march into battle for the glory of their king, against 20th century forces, equipped with tanks and automatic rifles.
The result is a predictable massacre, with the Bulgarian troops – now replaced by cardboard cut outs – being mown down in their tens of thousands, until the painter appointed to document the battle resorts to covering his canvas with red paint.
Candido, one of the few survivors of the massacre, then meets up with Pangloss, following an encounter with a brutish and decidedly ignoble savage, played by Sal Boris./Baccaro It seems that the kingdom was attacked by demons (later in flashback these will be revealed as knights on motorcycles, a la Knightriders) who killed the king and queen and raped Cunegonde no less than 126 times. Pangloss himself was saved on account of his syphilis, one of the various benefits that had necessitated the discovery of the Americas in this “best of all possible worlds”. Without the Americas, after all, we would not have potatoes, tomatoes or turnips either...
Some naught nuns
They soon encounter the inquisition, an element which strengthens what is by now a strong sense that the filmmakers have here made something akin to an Italian version of Monty Python's Quest for the Holy Grail or Jabberwocky, perhaps not as funny but arguably more grotesque.
The inquisitor disapproves of Pangloss's discussion of freedom and necessity, that it is necessary we be free, and orders them taken before the inquisition, which features some seriously funky grooves and nuns naked but for their hoods and figleafs.
Some Klansman like inquisitors who would not have been out of place in Farewell Uncle Tom
Candido acquires a freed slave called Cacambo and meets Cunegonde once more, while Pangloss is sentenced to death for his heresies. It emerges that Cunegonde has many lovers, including the inquisitor, whom Candido attempts to rescue her from.
Then Cundegonde is then taken to the new world, leading Candido and Cacambo to follow her; also on board their ship are Columbus, Vespucci, Davy Crockett, Marilyn Monroe, Al Capone, Neil Armstrong and Henry Kissinger.
They arrive in present day New York, where Pangloss is in charge of a TV crew. As Columbus is used to advertise coca cola, Candide learns that Cunegonde has gone to fight with the IRA in Northern Ireland, only to then find that she has left there for Israel, where (female) Israeli soldiers and unspecified Arabs gun one another down much like their counterparts in the Bulgarian army episode 200 years earlier; fans of the filmmakers work, will of course here recall that Israeli women soldiers had been featured in one of the segments of their earlier Women of the World.
The multiple images neatly reflect the multiplication of lovers and of possible best worlds
Given this kind of intertextuality, we might the following: If Mondo Cane presents a proposition, that this might be a Dog's World, then Mondo Candido presents more of a fact, that this is Candido's world and also ours.
Where Prosperi and Gualtiero's approach coincides with their source material is in their decidedly anti-Panglossian position, that this is quite emphatically not the best of all possible worlds. Moreover, between the Voltaire was writing and the time they were filming, things seem to have improved hardly any. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, to quote Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr...
Riz Ortolani's score is a pleasure, especially the cuts featuring positively orgasmic female vocalism. Christopher Brown, Michelle Miller and Jacques Herlin acquit themselves nicely as the three leads, with Miller at times reminding one of Edwige Fenech in her looks and mannerisms.
The production clearly had a decent budget, although one wonders how many places the film was denied distribution in on account of its excesses, unpleasantries and political aspects, and of how many viewers were simply weirded out.
Saturday, 7 November 2009
Today's Deep Red Notes #2
The interrelated themes of doubling and foreshadowing in the film have been independently identified and discussed by Tim Lucas (200?) and Aaron Smuts (2002). Insofar as Smuts's is the more extended and academic commentary it is the one I will focus upon here. To Smuts, Deep Red employs what he terms “principles of association” and “association provocation” between images, with these being concepts he draws from David Hume. There are two main ways in which Deep Red does this: By “encouraging viewers to pair disparate elements” and by “using pairings established within the film and in normal everyday experience to provoke and heighten the viewers' response.”.
These associations begin with the enigmatic vignette which interrupts the credits. In this one shadowy figure stabs another, then a knife is dropped at the feet of a child. This image, which has no direct bearing upon Marcus's investigation, exists solely in the past and minds of Carlo – the child – and his mother. However, the nursery rhyme which plays over is reprised prior to Helga's murder and elsewhere, establishes associations for the viewer, as does the image of the scene drawn by Carlo as a child when Marcus finds it on the wall of the House of the Screaming Child. (After the house burns down Marcus discovers that Olga has copied this image – or, rather, the other original that is in the Leonardo Da Vinci School archives. (Again, issues around the original and the copy are not significant in meaning or auratic effect here, to once more suggest Argento's postmodernism.)
Other associations are more subtle. For instance, the close-up of water spilling from Helga's mouth as she senses a malevolent presence in the theatre is reprised in the spittle and foam coming from Carlo's mother's mouth as she is decapitated in the climax. Likewise, the attention paid to the image of a road maintenance truck makes no obvious sense until we can relate it to the similar truck which accidentally catches Carlo and drags him to his death. As viewers we might also notice the discrepancy between the image of the House of the Screaming Child Marcus takes from Amanda's book and the House, that there is a bricked up window, before Marcus does. If so, then we might also retrospective realise an association with the image of Carlo's mother in the hallway of Helga's apartment.
Elsewhere it is the dialogue that creates associations. For example, Marcus tells Gianna that his analyst might suggest his choice of occupation is psychoanalytically (over-)determined: When playing the piano he is “really bashing [his] father's teeth in”. Later, Giordani has his teeth bashed in.
In each of these cases, it might be argued that we have the completion of a circuit between two images. The difference from Deleuze would perhaps be that both images are actual, rather than one initially appearing as virtual and the other actual, before they then become indiscernible.
Giordani's fate exemplified the other aspect of Deep Red's associational strategies, that of basing the most of the violence inflicted upon its characters on the intensification of routine rather than exceptional experiences. As Argento notes in an interview featured on the Anchor Bay DVD of the film, few of us know what it feels like to be shot. However, we all know what it is like to be cut with a piece of broken glass, be scalded by too hot water or bump our teeth on a glass. When we see Helga's throat sliced to ribbons by the plate glass window; Amanda Righetti having her head forced into a bath full of boiling water, or Giordani's teeth being bashed in, we thus have a more visceral response. Rather than being just a conceptual shock, that it cannot feel good to be shot, it is an experiential grounded one as well, something that is felt in our bodies. The “cinema of the mind” and the “cinema of the body” are brought closer together, their differences downplayed by situations that are a combination of “everyday banality” (a little cut, a too hot bath) and “extremes” (crashing through a window, being immersed in boiling water).
Another way in which Deep Red is a more complex film than its predecessors is in its narrative structure. As McDonagh (1992) has noted, the film's opening scenes present us with a disorienting series of disconnected fragments: the vignette that interrupts the credits, jazz musicians at a conservatory and a parapsychology conference. What is lacking is the clear introduction of protagonist and narrative, with these only emerging once Helga has been murdered and Marcus has been identified as the eye-witness to the crime. Such an approach was likely to frustrate the terza visione viewer, especially as he might well still be settling into his seat or not even in the auditorium for the vignette and thus be miss out on it.
If this fragmentation is more indicative of the international art cinema, or the modernist time-image, this is again countered by more popular, vernacular or movement-image elements elsewhere. One of the most notable of these, in its excesses, is the screwball comedy and commedia dell'arte styled exchanges between Marcus and Gianna. Equally, however, the more substantive content of these scenes, with their positive commentary on the emergence of Italian feminism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was probably somewhat alien to the typically traditionally-minded terza visione male.
Comparisons with other filmmakers gialli and the Decamerotic filone are useful here. Marcus and Gianna's relationship lacks any displays of physical intimacy or nudity from Nicolodi. As Nicolodi had been naked through much of Carmelo Bene's experimental adaptation of Salome (1972) and in some of her stage roles, it seems safe to say that this was not down to prudishness on her part. Rather, in combination with the sex scene in The Cat o' Nine Tails between Giordani and Anna Terzi, and the bath scene in Four Flies on Grey Velvet between Roberto and Daria, it appears that Argento was basically uncomfortable with displays of nudity and intimacy and sublimated them, with conscious awkwardness, into violent set pieces: The only bare breasts we see in Deep Red are those of Helga, after her clothes have been ripped falling through the window.
Though this approach, Argento was refusing to give terza visione viewers what they would have found in many of his imitators' gialli. The obvious examples here would be just about any film starring either Edwige Fenech, such as Andrea Bianchi's self-explanatory Strip Nude for Your Killer (1975). If the giallo is essentially a kind of exploitation cinema, as Koven contends, not all gialli are equally exploitative, or exploitative in the same ways. (Some gialli, like Massimo Dallamano's What Have You Done to Solange (1972), present a curious combination of female nudity for the male gaze but incorporate this same gaze into their diegesis in a somewhat self-critical manner.)
The Decamerotic, meanwhile, often presented women getting the better of men in the battle of the sexes, but rarely before they had shed their clothes for the delectation of the male viewer. Moreover their medieval settings meant that were engaged with gender politics at a historical remove, while their straightforwardly comedic nature made them inherently less challenging. The Fenech vehicle Ubalda, All Naked and Warm (Dir: Mariano Laurenti, 1972) is an obvious case in point.
Smuts, Aaron. 'The principles of association' http://www.kinoeye.org/02/11/smuts11.php vol2 no. 11. 2002.
These associations begin with the enigmatic vignette which interrupts the credits. In this one shadowy figure stabs another, then a knife is dropped at the feet of a child. This image, which has no direct bearing upon Marcus's investigation, exists solely in the past and minds of Carlo – the child – and his mother. However, the nursery rhyme which plays over is reprised prior to Helga's murder and elsewhere, establishes associations for the viewer, as does the image of the scene drawn by Carlo as a child when Marcus finds it on the wall of the House of the Screaming Child. (After the house burns down Marcus discovers that Olga has copied this image – or, rather, the other original that is in the Leonardo Da Vinci School archives. (Again, issues around the original and the copy are not significant in meaning or auratic effect here, to once more suggest Argento's postmodernism.)
Other associations are more subtle. For instance, the close-up of water spilling from Helga's mouth as she senses a malevolent presence in the theatre is reprised in the spittle and foam coming from Carlo's mother's mouth as she is decapitated in the climax. Likewise, the attention paid to the image of a road maintenance truck makes no obvious sense until we can relate it to the similar truck which accidentally catches Carlo and drags him to his death. As viewers we might also notice the discrepancy between the image of the House of the Screaming Child Marcus takes from Amanda's book and the House, that there is a bricked up window, before Marcus does. If so, then we might also retrospective realise an association with the image of Carlo's mother in the hallway of Helga's apartment.
Elsewhere it is the dialogue that creates associations. For example, Marcus tells Gianna that his analyst might suggest his choice of occupation is psychoanalytically (over-)determined: When playing the piano he is “really bashing [his] father's teeth in”. Later, Giordani has his teeth bashed in.
In each of these cases, it might be argued that we have the completion of a circuit between two images. The difference from Deleuze would perhaps be that both images are actual, rather than one initially appearing as virtual and the other actual, before they then become indiscernible.
Giordani's fate exemplified the other aspect of Deep Red's associational strategies, that of basing the most of the violence inflicted upon its characters on the intensification of routine rather than exceptional experiences. As Argento notes in an interview featured on the Anchor Bay DVD of the film, few of us know what it feels like to be shot. However, we all know what it is like to be cut with a piece of broken glass, be scalded by too hot water or bump our teeth on a glass. When we see Helga's throat sliced to ribbons by the plate glass window; Amanda Righetti having her head forced into a bath full of boiling water, or Giordani's teeth being bashed in, we thus have a more visceral response. Rather than being just a conceptual shock, that it cannot feel good to be shot, it is an experiential grounded one as well, something that is felt in our bodies. The “cinema of the mind” and the “cinema of the body” are brought closer together, their differences downplayed by situations that are a combination of “everyday banality” (a little cut, a too hot bath) and “extremes” (crashing through a window, being immersed in boiling water).
Another way in which Deep Red is a more complex film than its predecessors is in its narrative structure. As McDonagh (1992) has noted, the film's opening scenes present us with a disorienting series of disconnected fragments: the vignette that interrupts the credits, jazz musicians at a conservatory and a parapsychology conference. What is lacking is the clear introduction of protagonist and narrative, with these only emerging once Helga has been murdered and Marcus has been identified as the eye-witness to the crime. Such an approach was likely to frustrate the terza visione viewer, especially as he might well still be settling into his seat or not even in the auditorium for the vignette and thus be miss out on it.
If this fragmentation is more indicative of the international art cinema, or the modernist time-image, this is again countered by more popular, vernacular or movement-image elements elsewhere. One of the most notable of these, in its excesses, is the screwball comedy and commedia dell'arte styled exchanges between Marcus and Gianna. Equally, however, the more substantive content of these scenes, with their positive commentary on the emergence of Italian feminism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was probably somewhat alien to the typically traditionally-minded terza visione male.
Comparisons with other filmmakers gialli and the Decamerotic filone are useful here. Marcus and Gianna's relationship lacks any displays of physical intimacy or nudity from Nicolodi. As Nicolodi had been naked through much of Carmelo Bene's experimental adaptation of Salome (1972) and in some of her stage roles, it seems safe to say that this was not down to prudishness on her part. Rather, in combination with the sex scene in The Cat o' Nine Tails between Giordani and Anna Terzi, and the bath scene in Four Flies on Grey Velvet between Roberto and Daria, it appears that Argento was basically uncomfortable with displays of nudity and intimacy and sublimated them, with conscious awkwardness, into violent set pieces: The only bare breasts we see in Deep Red are those of Helga, after her clothes have been ripped falling through the window.
Though this approach, Argento was refusing to give terza visione viewers what they would have found in many of his imitators' gialli. The obvious examples here would be just about any film starring either Edwige Fenech, such as Andrea Bianchi's self-explanatory Strip Nude for Your Killer (1975). If the giallo is essentially a kind of exploitation cinema, as Koven contends, not all gialli are equally exploitative, or exploitative in the same ways. (Some gialli, like Massimo Dallamano's What Have You Done to Solange (1972), present a curious combination of female nudity for the male gaze but incorporate this same gaze into their diegesis in a somewhat self-critical manner.)
The Decamerotic, meanwhile, often presented women getting the better of men in the battle of the sexes, but rarely before they had shed their clothes for the delectation of the male viewer. Moreover their medieval settings meant that were engaged with gender politics at a historical remove, while their straightforwardly comedic nature made them inherently less challenging. The Fenech vehicle Ubalda, All Naked and Warm (Dir: Mariano Laurenti, 1972) is an obvious case in point.
Smuts, Aaron. 'The principles of association' http://www.kinoeye.org/02/11/smuts11.php vol2 no. 11. 2002.
Today's Deep Red notes #1
These images also suggest transference from Helga to Marcus: She has seen the face of the killer, just as he will do. In typical Argento fashion, however, Marcus does not realise what he has seen, though he is immediately aware that there is something missing or different about Helga’s apartment as he revisits it with the police.
Another element which adds credence to this interpretation is the introduction of reporter Gianna Brezzi (Dario Nicolodi) as the scene progresses. Identifying Marcus as the eye-witness, the one who saw everything, she photographs him. This image, besides showing a reversal of the gaze, is also the thing which, when reproduced in the newspaper, allows Carlo’s mother to know who now threatens her secrets, that Marcus is now confirmed as Helga’s double. (Given the film’s excesses, however, it is also possible that she may know via her son, especially if he was indeed a lookout.)
Deep Red can also be considered a poetic film in the manner proposed by Edgar Allan Poe, a strong influence upon Argento and his co-screenwriter Bernardino Zapponi, who had earlier worked with Fellini on his free adapation of Poe in Spirits of the Dead (196?). The key text here is Poe’s essay The Philosophy of Composition (1846), in which he analyses his earlier poem The Raven (1845). In this essay Poe argues that texts should have what he terms “unity of effect”. The emotional response or affect that the author desires to produce in his reader ought to dictate his aesthetic decisions. In Deep Red, as we have seen, everything is orchestrated to produce feelings of unease and dread in characters and audience alike.
The theme of doubling is most obviously seen in the characters of Marcus and Carlo. When we first see them together, they are dressed in similar but contrasting outfits: Carlo wears a dark suit and a light shirt, Marcus a light suit and a dark shirt. As Carlo and Marcus discuss Helga’s murder, they are then positioned identically to the extreme right and left of the frame, which is dominated by the statue in its centre, as if mirror images. Another image sees Marcus holding up his hand, while Carlo has his back to the camera, with the composition such that they again look like near reflections of one another. Later, the two men perform a duet on the piano. Yet there are also crucial differences between the two men: Marcus may have a sensitive, “artistic temperament” and suffer from claustrophobia, but he is not the drunken, self-destructive mess that Carlo is. Marcus is straight, Carlo gay. And, in relation to the film’s politics, Marcus is pointedly described by his friend as “the bourgeois of the piano” who plays for art, whereas he self-identifies as the “proletarian,” playing for survival. The extent to which this is true is questionable, with Carlo’s mother seemingly wealthy and respectable enough, but it again contributes to the fact that the film is more than a regular giallo.
Another important other aspect of Deep Red’s doubling relates to this. This is its double or hybrid nature as a giallo and as a fantasy-horror film. As we saw, the Animal Trilogy basically presented a rational, non-supernatural worldview. Though the films were critical of the way science was used, none really presented any radically different alternatives. In Deep Red, by contrast, certain images hint at the co-existence of natural and supernatural worlds. This is seen at the parapsychology conference, where a number of images suggest something beyond Helga’s assertion her powers have nothing to do with the occult or magic. There are the false point-of-view shots from high up in the auditorium, which are never resolved to be incorporated into the set, by showing someone there. Then there is the shot from behind Helga, Bardi and Giordani, which cannot be from any human character’s position, as they would be obvious from the reverse angle. Then we have the assaultive camera movement which sweeps over Helga as she senses a murderous presence amongst her audience, who will kill again. Finally, as they leave the theatre and Helga announces that she knows the killer’s identity and senses something, the point-of-view camera is positioned where Carlo’s mother would be visible to the others.
Another of Deep Red’s major differences from its predecessors is the way Argento uses music. Goblin’s progressive rock styled score is considerably more intense than those provided by Morricone. As it plays in murders of Helga, Giordani and Amanda Righetti, it is also decidedly anamepathetic towards them. Indeed, if this cue empathises with anyone it seems more Carlo’s mother than her victims, with percussive stabs corresponding to some of the blows she inflicts upon them in manner perhaps derived ultimately from the stabbing strings of Psycho’s shower scene cue. Tellingly the cue usually preceding these murder set pieces is the children’s song first heard in the fragment that interrupts the credits and Goblin’s theme music, which has become part of the scene that Carlo’s mother must replicate to perform the murders. As such, it seems that one diegetic cue is replaced by another, non-diegetic one. There is not one “leitmotif of the crime,” as Bardi remarks, but two.
Given the complexity of its central images, Deep Red presents a different kind of situation to the Bird with the Crystal Plumage: There the triggering image, of the struggle in the gallery, was sufficiently clear for Sam Dalmas to make an immediate sensory-motor response. It was only when he became trapped that we began to become aware of the action-image breaking down into component opsigns and sonsigns. While the initial image of Helga crashing through the window performs a similar triggering function for Marcus, nothing stops him from reaching Helga, even although he is unable to prevent her death. But in blindly passing by the composite image of the framed and mirrored Carlo’s mother, he is confronted with something that he cannot respond to. There is too much to this image in its formalist, realist and psychoanalytic facets, each in turn contained in the Deleuzean frame as opsigns. Here it is important to also remember that Marcus has not yet seen the full extent of the damage inflicted upon Helga. As such, it seems that he is shocked by an image that is excessive, but not simply in conventionally violent erms:
“A purely optical and sound situation does not extend into action, any more than it is induced by an action. It makes us grasp, it is supposed to make us grasp, something untolerable and unbearable. Not a brutality as nervous aggression, an exaggerated violence that can always be extracted from the sensory-motor relations of the action-image. Nor is it a matter of scenes of terror, although there are sometimes corpses and blood. It is a matter of something too powerful, or too unjust, but sometimes also too beautiful.” (2005b: 17)
http://www.eapoe.org/works/essays/philcomp.htm
Another element which adds credence to this interpretation is the introduction of reporter Gianna Brezzi (Dario Nicolodi) as the scene progresses. Identifying Marcus as the eye-witness, the one who saw everything, she photographs him. This image, besides showing a reversal of the gaze, is also the thing which, when reproduced in the newspaper, allows Carlo’s mother to know who now threatens her secrets, that Marcus is now confirmed as Helga’s double. (Given the film’s excesses, however, it is also possible that she may know via her son, especially if he was indeed a lookout.)
Deep Red can also be considered a poetic film in the manner proposed by Edgar Allan Poe, a strong influence upon Argento and his co-screenwriter Bernardino Zapponi, who had earlier worked with Fellini on his free adapation of Poe in Spirits of the Dead (196?). The key text here is Poe’s essay The Philosophy of Composition (1846), in which he analyses his earlier poem The Raven (1845). In this essay Poe argues that texts should have what he terms “unity of effect”. The emotional response or affect that the author desires to produce in his reader ought to dictate his aesthetic decisions. In Deep Red, as we have seen, everything is orchestrated to produce feelings of unease and dread in characters and audience alike.
The theme of doubling is most obviously seen in the characters of Marcus and Carlo. When we first see them together, they are dressed in similar but contrasting outfits: Carlo wears a dark suit and a light shirt, Marcus a light suit and a dark shirt. As Carlo and Marcus discuss Helga’s murder, they are then positioned identically to the extreme right and left of the frame, which is dominated by the statue in its centre, as if mirror images. Another image sees Marcus holding up his hand, while Carlo has his back to the camera, with the composition such that they again look like near reflections of one another. Later, the two men perform a duet on the piano. Yet there are also crucial differences between the two men: Marcus may have a sensitive, “artistic temperament” and suffer from claustrophobia, but he is not the drunken, self-destructive mess that Carlo is. Marcus is straight, Carlo gay. And, in relation to the film’s politics, Marcus is pointedly described by his friend as “the bourgeois of the piano” who plays for art, whereas he self-identifies as the “proletarian,” playing for survival. The extent to which this is true is questionable, with Carlo’s mother seemingly wealthy and respectable enough, but it again contributes to the fact that the film is more than a regular giallo.
Another important other aspect of Deep Red’s doubling relates to this. This is its double or hybrid nature as a giallo and as a fantasy-horror film. As we saw, the Animal Trilogy basically presented a rational, non-supernatural worldview. Though the films were critical of the way science was used, none really presented any radically different alternatives. In Deep Red, by contrast, certain images hint at the co-existence of natural and supernatural worlds. This is seen at the parapsychology conference, where a number of images suggest something beyond Helga’s assertion her powers have nothing to do with the occult or magic. There are the false point-of-view shots from high up in the auditorium, which are never resolved to be incorporated into the set, by showing someone there. Then there is the shot from behind Helga, Bardi and Giordani, which cannot be from any human character’s position, as they would be obvious from the reverse angle. Then we have the assaultive camera movement which sweeps over Helga as she senses a murderous presence amongst her audience, who will kill again. Finally, as they leave the theatre and Helga announces that she knows the killer’s identity and senses something, the point-of-view camera is positioned where Carlo’s mother would be visible to the others.
Another of Deep Red’s major differences from its predecessors is the way Argento uses music. Goblin’s progressive rock styled score is considerably more intense than those provided by Morricone. As it plays in murders of Helga, Giordani and Amanda Righetti, it is also decidedly anamepathetic towards them. Indeed, if this cue empathises with anyone it seems more Carlo’s mother than her victims, with percussive stabs corresponding to some of the blows she inflicts upon them in manner perhaps derived ultimately from the stabbing strings of Psycho’s shower scene cue. Tellingly the cue usually preceding these murder set pieces is the children’s song first heard in the fragment that interrupts the credits and Goblin’s theme music, which has become part of the scene that Carlo’s mother must replicate to perform the murders. As such, it seems that one diegetic cue is replaced by another, non-diegetic one. There is not one “leitmotif of the crime,” as Bardi remarks, but two.
Given the complexity of its central images, Deep Red presents a different kind of situation to the Bird with the Crystal Plumage: There the triggering image, of the struggle in the gallery, was sufficiently clear for Sam Dalmas to make an immediate sensory-motor response. It was only when he became trapped that we began to become aware of the action-image breaking down into component opsigns and sonsigns. While the initial image of Helga crashing through the window performs a similar triggering function for Marcus, nothing stops him from reaching Helga, even although he is unable to prevent her death. But in blindly passing by the composite image of the framed and mirrored Carlo’s mother, he is confronted with something that he cannot respond to. There is too much to this image in its formalist, realist and psychoanalytic facets, each in turn contained in the Deleuzean frame as opsigns. Here it is important to also remember that Marcus has not yet seen the full extent of the damage inflicted upon Helga. As such, it seems that he is shocked by an image that is excessive, but not simply in conventionally violent erms:
“A purely optical and sound situation does not extend into action, any more than it is induced by an action. It makes us grasp, it is supposed to make us grasp, something untolerable and unbearable. Not a brutality as nervous aggression, an exaggerated violence that can always be extracted from the sensory-motor relations of the action-image. Nor is it a matter of scenes of terror, although there are sometimes corpses and blood. It is a matter of something too powerful, or too unjust, but sometimes also too beautiful.” (2005b: 17)
http://www.eapoe.org/works/essays/philcomp.htm
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