There are a couple of remarks by Luigi Cozzi (I think) that I mention in my thesis, which I could remember well enough to paraphrase, but cannot remember their sources.
First, Cozzi remarking that a difference between Bava and Argento's films was that Bava's tended not to play in the first-run circuit (except maybe very briefly) whereas Argento's did.
Second, Cozzi remarking that in Italy producers did not want to know what a film was about, but what films it was like.
Thanks in advance
Showing posts with label Argento. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Argento. Show all posts
Monday, 10 December 2012
Saturday, 31 July 2010
Thomas De Quincey's grave
Despite living in Edinburgh almost all my life and knowing a bit about Thomas De Quincey on account of his Suspiria / Inferno connection, I had never realised he was buried here:
[ Picture copyright here: http://www.edinburghinpictures.co.uk/pages/pr/quinceythomasde.html ]
[ Picture copyright here: http://www.edinburghinpictures.co.uk/pages/pr/quinceythomasde.html ]
Friday, 29 January 2010
Suspiria homage in Hollyoaks
First scene, after the credits:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSliQ03NgMU
Thanks to Johnny Redman for pointing this out to me.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?
Thanks to Johnny Redman for pointing this out to me.
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:
Saturday, 7 November 2009
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
Some notes on Deep Red
Koven argues that the typical giallo set piece, with its self-conscious use of techniques, can be seen as a poetic interlude within an otherwise prosaic film. One issue with his use of Pasolini's concept is the different subjectivities that are implicated through visible and subjective camera. For Pasolini the camera consciousness of The Red Desert functioned as a reflection of Giulia's neurosis, which he felt was shared by director Antonioni himself and by the modern bourgeois audience. In the typical giallo set piece, however, Koven identifies the camera as expressing a psychotic rather than neurotic state. As such, it is less easy to see the camera as also articulating a wider shared consciousness, whether that of the director or of his audience.
While the Animal Trilogy certainly contains it share of “violence numbers” Cat o' Nine Tails and Four Flies on Grey Velvet also have poetic moments and representations apart from the obvious set pieces: In both cases these are connected with characters: In Cat o' Nine Tails key images are associated with Arno, reflecting his insight, and Casoni, reflecting his desire to be invisible or disembodied. In Four Flies on Grey Velvet circular camera movements are associated with Nina, reflecting her inability to escape from her traumatic past, while many of the scenes centring around Roberto have a distinct edginess to them, as a reflection of his mounting paranoia.
Where Deep Red represents an advance on its predecessors is in its still more pervasive poetic quality. Besides the general mise en scene and use of sound, this is related to doubling, foreshadowing and images of seemingly random violence and cruelty, like those of two dogs fighting or of the little girl, Olga (Nicoletta Elmi), torturing a lizard: These images are excessive, in the sense of having no obvious narrative purpose. But are not excessive in that they contribute to the film's overall tense and fearful atmosphere. This atmosphere is one that Argento has identified as a reflection of the situation in Italy at the time, with terrorist activity from left and right alike and a rise in crime and unrest. The difference between Argento and other filone directors such as Sergio Martino and Umberto Lenzi is again a poetic one: Argento chose to comment on this wider situation indirectly via a giallo-horror hybrid, whereas they preferred to make actual crime films, known generically as polizioteschi or poliziotti, or turned towards giallo-poliziotto hybrids which were more direct. Another difference, as far as Lenzi is concerned, is political. While the politics of Martino's Suspicious Death of a Minor and Secret Action / The Police Accuse, The Secret Service Kills (both 1975) are more complex, Lenzi's films tend to endorse a relatively straightforward right-wing position with policemen acting as Dirty Harry style vigilantes when they feel it necessary. The politics of Deep Red are, by contrast, more to the left.
The key aspect here is Helga Ulmann's Jewishness. In itself this is another seemingly excessive element. Unlike Antonio Bido's Deep Red and Suspiria inspired The Cat with the Eyes of Jade (1977), in which a Jewish killer seeks revenge upon those who were responsible for betraying his mother and sister to the Nazis, nothing within the narrative relies upon Helga being Jewish. But this fact allows for the inclusion of a clear subtexts about the Holocaust and Fascism, both of which would be further explored in Suspiria. Helga is, after all, murdered by Carlo's mother (Clara Calamai) because she threatens to reveal her crime, hitherto thought safely in the past, just as her husband's body is bricked up behind a wall. Or, we might venture to say, hidden in a “secret annexe” in reference to Anne Frank. There is also an intertextual connection here, in that Calamai's most famous role, at least outside Italy, is probably as Giovanna in Ossessione – a film made, of course, during the Fascist regime; when her character speaks of once being an actress and shows Marcus the pictures of her in various films, these are taken from films Calamai appeared in in the 1930s and 1940s. As such, Argento seems to be warning his Italian audience in particular that if they were not careful Fascism could, like any other repressed element, still return. If someone like Lenzi was not actually pro-Fascist, Argento thus nevertheless seems to be implicitly arguing that there was a danger the position taken by his films could help Fascism re-emerge. This is also reflected in the unimportance of the police within Deep Red. In films like Free Hand for a Tough Cop (1977) Lenzi emphasises the restrictions placed upon the police by corrupt and self-serving politicians and endorses the strong lawman who is willing to take a stand and do what needs to be done. In Deep Red, by contrast, the police are incapable of solving the crime even without having to deal with any obstacles in their way.
Argento's interest in Judaism around this time can be related to the influence of two collaborators. Production designer Guiseppe Bassan, who had first worked with Argento on Five Days of Milan and would also work on Suspiria (in which Hewbrew is among the various scripts seen on the walls of the witches' lair) and Tenebre was Jewish. Perhaps more importantly actress, muse and partner Daria Nicolodi has identified herself as being brought up in both Roman Catholic and Jewish faiths and as being especially close to her Jewish grandmother, whose experiences Nicolodi has said part-inspired Suspiria.
Another difference between Argento's gialli and those of most of his imitators is that they hold up better to repeat viewings. As Koven says, the majority of gialli have little to offer once we know whodunit. In contrast, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage can be watched again to see how Argento misdirects us at the crucial moment in the gallery scene. Deep Red is similar, but a richer and more confident text. In the first 'proper' scene, of Marcus at work with his students at the conservatory we are told, in overt reference to their jazz playing but also doubling as a remark on the film's own mise-en-scene, that it is “too formal, too precise” and needs to be “more trashy”. Immediately, that is, we are being told to question what we see and hear, along with the usual hierarchy by which the formal, precise work is valued over the trashy one. These are, of course, postmodern traits: Words are used “under erasure,” with the awareness that our writing and speech cannot communicate only what we want them to, while the art/trash binary opposition is decentred.
The single image which Argento's auto-critique most clearly alludes to is the film's central one, that of Carlo's mother's face amongst the faces in a painting, caught in the mirror opposite. But if this composite image is a central one in narrative terms it occupies a marginal position within the frame(s) in which it appears. It is positioned in the bottom-left hand corner, where the first-time viewer is unlikely to notice it. Yet the fact that it is there, to be noticed upon a repeat viewing, is crucial in relation to its Bird with the Crystal Plumage counterpart. There the misdirection prevents us from seeing what Sam Dalmas does, such that we have no way of solving the mystery for ourselves. Here the misdirection lets us recognise what Marcus does not at this point, but with Argento relying upon the position and brevity of this image, along with its complexity, to prevent us from so doing. The complexity of this image stems from what it depicts: Carlo's mother's face is the realistic component, something that is presented to us 'as is' without human intervention or intentionality coming into play. The painting in which she is framed is, however, Expressionistic in style, with the other faces resembling Munch's The Scream. As such, it is a formalist component, something in which human subjectivity and expressivity are paramount. This gestalt image is then seen via a mirror, as something which both doubles or copies the original image, but which also distorts it by reversing left and right. As such, it is a psychoanalytic component, something in which we misrecognise ourselves and which can be put to ideological ends. Finally, the value of Deleuze's notion of the frame as the boundary of an information system comes into play in relation to the “pedagogy” of this image. It is simply too complex a set of data to take in at once, especially when combined with everything else in the frame at the same time, or the other images. Like Marcus, we are thus presented with a Hitchcockian “demark”, something which is out of place in the image but which we are unlikely to ourselves be able to place.
In this regard, the preceding scenes, in which Helga is attacked and in which Marcus responds are also significant. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, Argento disrupts the otherwise linear chronology of the film with a moment of simultaneity in which time is made visible: Rather than joining Marcus at the moment when he becomes aware of the attack on Helga, the action within the plaza outside takes place at the same time. We jump back in time a few minutes, even though we may not notice this until Helga crashes through the window. It is possible that Carlo is present as a lookout for his mother – albeit one compromised by his drunkenness – and that she actually passes by her son and Marcus when they talking, out of frame. However, as Deleuze emphasises, out of frame does not mean out of mind: The images within the frame connect with the larger circuit, the infinite set of images from which they are drawn. The second reason is the way in which Helga and Marcus are connected together. Argento uses a sudden and extreme zoom out from the window of Helga's apartment to Marcus and Carlo in the square, soon followed by a cut to a close-up of Helga from Marcus's implied point of view. The zoom is not a device which Argento particularly uses, especially when compared to other filone directors including Mario Bava and Lucio Fulci. Both these directors would often use the zoom as alternative to conventional cutting or decoupage, zooming in or out on a character or detail within the scene. As such, whenever Argento uses the zoom, we may assume there is a specific reasoning behind it. The close-up of Helga, meanwhile, is too close to be an actual reflection of what Marcus sees, and thereby further reminds us of the distinctive abilities of the camera compared to the human eye as it also establishes a connection between the two characters.
While the Animal Trilogy certainly contains it share of “violence numbers” Cat o' Nine Tails and Four Flies on Grey Velvet also have poetic moments and representations apart from the obvious set pieces: In both cases these are connected with characters: In Cat o' Nine Tails key images are associated with Arno, reflecting his insight, and Casoni, reflecting his desire to be invisible or disembodied. In Four Flies on Grey Velvet circular camera movements are associated with Nina, reflecting her inability to escape from her traumatic past, while many of the scenes centring around Roberto have a distinct edginess to them, as a reflection of his mounting paranoia.
Where Deep Red represents an advance on its predecessors is in its still more pervasive poetic quality. Besides the general mise en scene and use of sound, this is related to doubling, foreshadowing and images of seemingly random violence and cruelty, like those of two dogs fighting or of the little girl, Olga (Nicoletta Elmi), torturing a lizard: These images are excessive, in the sense of having no obvious narrative purpose. But are not excessive in that they contribute to the film's overall tense and fearful atmosphere. This atmosphere is one that Argento has identified as a reflection of the situation in Italy at the time, with terrorist activity from left and right alike and a rise in crime and unrest. The difference between Argento and other filone directors such as Sergio Martino and Umberto Lenzi is again a poetic one: Argento chose to comment on this wider situation indirectly via a giallo-horror hybrid, whereas they preferred to make actual crime films, known generically as polizioteschi or poliziotti, or turned towards giallo-poliziotto hybrids which were more direct. Another difference, as far as Lenzi is concerned, is political. While the politics of Martino's Suspicious Death of a Minor and Secret Action / The Police Accuse, The Secret Service Kills (both 1975) are more complex, Lenzi's films tend to endorse a relatively straightforward right-wing position with policemen acting as Dirty Harry style vigilantes when they feel it necessary. The politics of Deep Red are, by contrast, more to the left.
The key aspect here is Helga Ulmann's Jewishness. In itself this is another seemingly excessive element. Unlike Antonio Bido's Deep Red and Suspiria inspired The Cat with the Eyes of Jade (1977), in which a Jewish killer seeks revenge upon those who were responsible for betraying his mother and sister to the Nazis, nothing within the narrative relies upon Helga being Jewish. But this fact allows for the inclusion of a clear subtexts about the Holocaust and Fascism, both of which would be further explored in Suspiria. Helga is, after all, murdered by Carlo's mother (Clara Calamai) because she threatens to reveal her crime, hitherto thought safely in the past, just as her husband's body is bricked up behind a wall. Or, we might venture to say, hidden in a “secret annexe” in reference to Anne Frank. There is also an intertextual connection here, in that Calamai's most famous role, at least outside Italy, is probably as Giovanna in Ossessione – a film made, of course, during the Fascist regime; when her character speaks of once being an actress and shows Marcus the pictures of her in various films, these are taken from films Calamai appeared in in the 1930s and 1940s. As such, Argento seems to be warning his Italian audience in particular that if they were not careful Fascism could, like any other repressed element, still return. If someone like Lenzi was not actually pro-Fascist, Argento thus nevertheless seems to be implicitly arguing that there was a danger the position taken by his films could help Fascism re-emerge. This is also reflected in the unimportance of the police within Deep Red. In films like Free Hand for a Tough Cop (1977) Lenzi emphasises the restrictions placed upon the police by corrupt and self-serving politicians and endorses the strong lawman who is willing to take a stand and do what needs to be done. In Deep Red, by contrast, the police are incapable of solving the crime even without having to deal with any obstacles in their way.
Argento's interest in Judaism around this time can be related to the influence of two collaborators. Production designer Guiseppe Bassan, who had first worked with Argento on Five Days of Milan and would also work on Suspiria (in which Hewbrew is among the various scripts seen on the walls of the witches' lair) and Tenebre was Jewish. Perhaps more importantly actress, muse and partner Daria Nicolodi has identified herself as being brought up in both Roman Catholic and Jewish faiths and as being especially close to her Jewish grandmother, whose experiences Nicolodi has said part-inspired Suspiria.
Another difference between Argento's gialli and those of most of his imitators is that they hold up better to repeat viewings. As Koven says, the majority of gialli have little to offer once we know whodunit. In contrast, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage can be watched again to see how Argento misdirects us at the crucial moment in the gallery scene. Deep Red is similar, but a richer and more confident text. In the first 'proper' scene, of Marcus at work with his students at the conservatory we are told, in overt reference to their jazz playing but also doubling as a remark on the film's own mise-en-scene, that it is “too formal, too precise” and needs to be “more trashy”. Immediately, that is, we are being told to question what we see and hear, along with the usual hierarchy by which the formal, precise work is valued over the trashy one. These are, of course, postmodern traits: Words are used “under erasure,” with the awareness that our writing and speech cannot communicate only what we want them to, while the art/trash binary opposition is decentred.
The single image which Argento's auto-critique most clearly alludes to is the film's central one, that of Carlo's mother's face amongst the faces in a painting, caught in the mirror opposite. But if this composite image is a central one in narrative terms it occupies a marginal position within the frame(s) in which it appears. It is positioned in the bottom-left hand corner, where the first-time viewer is unlikely to notice it. Yet the fact that it is there, to be noticed upon a repeat viewing, is crucial in relation to its Bird with the Crystal Plumage counterpart. There the misdirection prevents us from seeing what Sam Dalmas does, such that we have no way of solving the mystery for ourselves. Here the misdirection lets us recognise what Marcus does not at this point, but with Argento relying upon the position and brevity of this image, along with its complexity, to prevent us from so doing. The complexity of this image stems from what it depicts: Carlo's mother's face is the realistic component, something that is presented to us 'as is' without human intervention or intentionality coming into play. The painting in which she is framed is, however, Expressionistic in style, with the other faces resembling Munch's The Scream. As such, it is a formalist component, something in which human subjectivity and expressivity are paramount. This gestalt image is then seen via a mirror, as something which both doubles or copies the original image, but which also distorts it by reversing left and right. As such, it is a psychoanalytic component, something in which we misrecognise ourselves and which can be put to ideological ends. Finally, the value of Deleuze's notion of the frame as the boundary of an information system comes into play in relation to the “pedagogy” of this image. It is simply too complex a set of data to take in at once, especially when combined with everything else in the frame at the same time, or the other images. Like Marcus, we are thus presented with a Hitchcockian “demark”, something which is out of place in the image but which we are unlikely to ourselves be able to place.
In this regard, the preceding scenes, in which Helga is attacked and in which Marcus responds are also significant. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, Argento disrupts the otherwise linear chronology of the film with a moment of simultaneity in which time is made visible: Rather than joining Marcus at the moment when he becomes aware of the attack on Helga, the action within the plaza outside takes place at the same time. We jump back in time a few minutes, even though we may not notice this until Helga crashes through the window. It is possible that Carlo is present as a lookout for his mother – albeit one compromised by his drunkenness – and that she actually passes by her son and Marcus when they talking, out of frame. However, as Deleuze emphasises, out of frame does not mean out of mind: The images within the frame connect with the larger circuit, the infinite set of images from which they are drawn. The second reason is the way in which Helga and Marcus are connected together. Argento uses a sudden and extreme zoom out from the window of Helga's apartment to Marcus and Carlo in the square, soon followed by a cut to a close-up of Helga from Marcus's implied point of view. The zoom is not a device which Argento particularly uses, especially when compared to other filone directors including Mario Bava and Lucio Fulci. Both these directors would often use the zoom as alternative to conventional cutting or decoupage, zooming in or out on a character or detail within the scene. As such, whenever Argento uses the zoom, we may assume there is a specific reasoning behind it. The close-up of Helga, meanwhile, is too close to be an actual reflection of what Marcus sees, and thereby further reminds us of the distinctive abilities of the camera compared to the human eye as it also establishes a connection between the two characters.
Sunday, 5 July 2009
Tenebre / Giallo
Lara Wendel, in Tenebre:
Why don’t you say something?
Go fuck yourself!
Bastard! [Spits]
Emanuelle Seigner, in Giallo:
You’re so selfish!
You’re just like him! [repeat, ad nauseam]
What is the difference, quality of dialogue wise, other than the ad nauseum?
Do we just forgive Tenebre its faults and criticise the same in Giallo?
Why don’t you say something?
Go fuck yourself!
Bastard! [Spits]
Emanuelle Seigner, in Giallo:
You’re so selfish!
You’re just like him! [repeat, ad nauseam]
What is the difference, quality of dialogue wise, other than the ad nauseum?
Do we just forgive Tenebre its faults and criticise the same in Giallo?
Sunday, 31 May 2009
Replies to Orcival and Coffeebaker
Since I couldn't post these as comments....
orcival said...
Sorry, I decided to write while reading cause otherwise I would forget half of it, so please excuse if I'm being fragmentic here.
First great topic for an essay. I had the idea to try to write a paper on the use of dialects in italian cinema from the 30s to the mid-60s some time ago, so your paper comes handy to think about the topic:
With regard to your remarks to the fascist language politics I think stating that "Fascist's proscriptions were not absolute" is a little too much, as from 1935 onwards the use of dialects is forbidden and e.g. the screening of Ivo Perilli's "Ragazzo" was partly forbidden due to the usage of dialect to give the characters a greater depth. In addition the usage of language in film was - again especially before the 40s - a topic of intense debate.
Maybe 1860 was an exception given its past setting and the strong position of the film in relation to the regime - e.g. with the risorgimento / Mussolini connection implied at the end? I think it was also released just on the cusp of the 1935 laws. Whatever, there are subtleties here I'll need to consider.
I'm am not sure, whether the box-office loss of LA TERRA TREMA is really a point: as the film was part of the election campaign of 1948 it probably was shown not only in places where you had to pay for entrance. Seeing that Visconti often worked with the later director of L'unità and the cultural commission of the Pci Mario Alicata, who was one of the most important Pci politicians in the south, not finishing the initially planned triology may have had to do with the beginning of clear fronts in the cold-war south. You probably know this one, but if not: here's a scene from CINEMA PARADISO with a public watching LA TERRA TREMA: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1CZ5UIJ608 (especially from 1'20'' onwards).
I've dropped this part in the second draft, and just made it about quality vs quantity.
Thank you for stressing the difference between Visconti and Rossellini. That is something that is as often overseen as it is that Neorealism is not a phenomenon of the postwar and is not a political film form in itself. (Thinking e.g. of the propaganda stuff Rossellini did)
I just got this from Brunetta, though I don't think he mentions De Robertiis and Bava's remark that he was the true founder of neo-realism.
I was surprised to see you cite Fellini for the practice of doppaggio. I think Pasolini is even more interesting for that since he states in most interviews he gave in the 70s how much he liked the artificialness of the dubbing and how much in his usage of dialect its not about autheticity (is that the word) but about a certain impression. This is interesting - as the italian popular cinema of the 60s with its westerns, gialli and even the piratemovies may on of the cinemas with the most interesting soundtracks to it. Not only with regards to music but in general. I'm not an expert in music, but I don't think that the music in "The Bird with the Crystal Plumage" in the scene you described is really aleatory.
I used Fellini mainly because Chion refers to him. Pasolini does talk about that new scientific standard Italian in the 1960s, which I should maybe bring in. (Also interesting here, perhaps, is how Derek Jarman did Sebastiane in cod Latin with the characters swearing by saying Oedipus for motherfucker.) I probably should be more careful with the musical terminology. The Morricone cue was improvised, but around a framework. It has a chance element, but isn't totally free. It draws on the Cage-influenced work he was doing with the New Improvisation Group, I think.
Finally, I think it would be great if you would add some kind a closing paragraph summing up the special way in which Argento deals with sound. Up to now, I think the essay falls in two parts: one ending with the presentation of Michel Chion's theory and the second with the - very interesting and brilliantly observed - look at Argento's films.
Absolutely - I've since taken out the two voices / interlude part and tried to relate the halves and the theory a bit better in the conclusion.
This being said, I would like to congratulate: this is a nice essay, what are you writing it for? And maybe this is the right place to ask a question: do you know a good book about italian film music?
Partly for a journal article, partly for my thesis, partly just for practice / fun / expression.
I don't know any good books about Italian film music, at least in English. The Christof Spencer book I posted about a couple of weeks ago has a bit on Italian film music from 1950 to 1979 in genre films, but less on the likes of Giovanni Fusco in Antonioni.
25 May 2009 21:41:00 BST
Blogger coffeebaker said...
>What Sam had seen was an attempt by Monica's husband Alberto to shock her out of it.
Really? I'll be honest: as often as I've seen this film, I've never actually thought much about what _was_ going on at the top of those stairs, beyond the reveal of what _wasn't_ going on...
In other words, I thought that what we'd witnessed had been an abortive assault upon the husband (for whatever reason...after all, the woman is insane) that got turned back against her and resulted in the cuts.
If this were the case, it wouldn't explain why Alberto was wearing Monica's fetishised giallo killer outfit.
I probably made it more clear than it was - I've changed it to Alberto confonting Monica. But it's still ambiguous, one of those things that's maybe more a 'generator' than something to be logically worked through. I'd tend to place it like Scottie's hiring in Vertigo - a contrivance that sets things in motion, but which doesn't really make sense when you think about it
And while this probably isn't the place for it, I'll mention that the end of BIRD... has a couple of points that have always thrown me:
- the "explanation" at the end seems to raise the possibility that Monica was not responsible for all the murders...if not, which ones did she commit?
My sense would be that Alberto was responsible for the half-hearted attack on Sam and the phone call to him, whereas Monica was more likely to have made the one to the police. I don't think Alberto or the hit-man committed additional murders. But again these are things we're not supposed to think too much about.
- I've never understood the point of the plane-bound finale: it seems we're supposed to think they're not on the same plane...okay...but then Musante's movements are confusingly choreographed (obviously intentionally) at the same time we're hearing the voiceover. I've always found the sequence disorienting.
I would read this, as I think others have done, as suggesting that Giulia may have been affected by her traumatic experience and so could be a future Monica.
orcival said...
Sorry, I decided to write while reading cause otherwise I would forget half of it, so please excuse if I'm being fragmentic here.
First great topic for an essay. I had the idea to try to write a paper on the use of dialects in italian cinema from the 30s to the mid-60s some time ago, so your paper comes handy to think about the topic:
With regard to your remarks to the fascist language politics I think stating that "Fascist's proscriptions were not absolute" is a little too much, as from 1935 onwards the use of dialects is forbidden and e.g. the screening of Ivo Perilli's "Ragazzo" was partly forbidden due to the usage of dialect to give the characters a greater depth. In addition the usage of language in film was - again especially before the 40s - a topic of intense debate.
Maybe 1860 was an exception given its past setting and the strong position of the film in relation to the regime - e.g. with the risorgimento / Mussolini connection implied at the end? I think it was also released just on the cusp of the 1935 laws. Whatever, there are subtleties here I'll need to consider.
I'm am not sure, whether the box-office loss of LA TERRA TREMA is really a point: as the film was part of the election campaign of 1948 it probably was shown not only in places where you had to pay for entrance. Seeing that Visconti often worked with the later director of L'unità and the cultural commission of the Pci Mario Alicata, who was one of the most important Pci politicians in the south, not finishing the initially planned triology may have had to do with the beginning of clear fronts in the cold-war south. You probably know this one, but if not: here's a scene from CINEMA PARADISO with a public watching LA TERRA TREMA: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1CZ5UIJ608 (especially from 1'20'' onwards).
I've dropped this part in the second draft, and just made it about quality vs quantity.
Thank you for stressing the difference between Visconti and Rossellini. That is something that is as often overseen as it is that Neorealism is not a phenomenon of the postwar and is not a political film form in itself. (Thinking e.g. of the propaganda stuff Rossellini did)
I just got this from Brunetta, though I don't think he mentions De Robertiis and Bava's remark that he was the true founder of neo-realism.
I was surprised to see you cite Fellini for the practice of doppaggio. I think Pasolini is even more interesting for that since he states in most interviews he gave in the 70s how much he liked the artificialness of the dubbing and how much in his usage of dialect its not about autheticity (is that the word) but about a certain impression. This is interesting - as the italian popular cinema of the 60s with its westerns, gialli and even the piratemovies may on of the cinemas with the most interesting soundtracks to it. Not only with regards to music but in general. I'm not an expert in music, but I don't think that the music in "The Bird with the Crystal Plumage" in the scene you described is really aleatory.
I used Fellini mainly because Chion refers to him. Pasolini does talk about that new scientific standard Italian in the 1960s, which I should maybe bring in. (Also interesting here, perhaps, is how Derek Jarman did Sebastiane in cod Latin with the characters swearing by saying Oedipus for motherfucker.) I probably should be more careful with the musical terminology. The Morricone cue was improvised, but around a framework. It has a chance element, but isn't totally free. It draws on the Cage-influenced work he was doing with the New Improvisation Group, I think.
Finally, I think it would be great if you would add some kind a closing paragraph summing up the special way in which Argento deals with sound. Up to now, I think the essay falls in two parts: one ending with the presentation of Michel Chion's theory and the second with the - very interesting and brilliantly observed - look at Argento's films.
Absolutely - I've since taken out the two voices / interlude part and tried to relate the halves and the theory a bit better in the conclusion.
This being said, I would like to congratulate: this is a nice essay, what are you writing it for? And maybe this is the right place to ask a question: do you know a good book about italian film music?
Partly for a journal article, partly for my thesis, partly just for practice / fun / expression.
I don't know any good books about Italian film music, at least in English. The Christof Spencer book I posted about a couple of weeks ago has a bit on Italian film music from 1950 to 1979 in genre films, but less on the likes of Giovanni Fusco in Antonioni.
25 May 2009 21:41:00 BST
Blogger coffeebaker said...
>What Sam had seen was an attempt by Monica's husband Alberto to shock her out of it.
Really? I'll be honest: as often as I've seen this film, I've never actually thought much about what _was_ going on at the top of those stairs, beyond the reveal of what _wasn't_ going on...
In other words, I thought that what we'd witnessed had been an abortive assault upon the husband (for whatever reason...after all, the woman is insane) that got turned back against her and resulted in the cuts.
If this were the case, it wouldn't explain why Alberto was wearing Monica's fetishised giallo killer outfit.
I probably made it more clear than it was - I've changed it to Alberto confonting Monica. But it's still ambiguous, one of those things that's maybe more a 'generator' than something to be logically worked through. I'd tend to place it like Scottie's hiring in Vertigo - a contrivance that sets things in motion, but which doesn't really make sense when you think about it
And while this probably isn't the place for it, I'll mention that the end of BIRD... has a couple of points that have always thrown me:
- the "explanation" at the end seems to raise the possibility that Monica was not responsible for all the murders...if not, which ones did she commit?
My sense would be that Alberto was responsible for the half-hearted attack on Sam and the phone call to him, whereas Monica was more likely to have made the one to the police. I don't think Alberto or the hit-man committed additional murders. But again these are things we're not supposed to think too much about.
- I've never understood the point of the plane-bound finale: it seems we're supposed to think they're not on the same plane...okay...but then Musante's movements are confusingly choreographed (obviously intentionally) at the same time we're hearing the voiceover. I've always found the sequence disorienting.
I would read this, as I think others have done, as suggesting that Giulia may have been affected by her traumatic experience and so could be a future Monica.
Monday, 25 May 2009
Draft of an essay I am working on - comments requested
[A long, more academic piece I have been working on over the weekend; responses to its style, argument etc. welcome. This essay necessarily contains spoilers - don't read it if you've only just discovered Argento!]
Voice 1: The Voice in Italian Cinema, 1913-1985
Issues around the voice are of considerable importance in the history of the Italian cinema. During its first golden age, in the years immediately preceding the First World War, directors like Giovanni Pastrone with Cabiria (1913) made key contributions to cinematic vocabulary through innovations such as dollying the camera. In common with other European film industries the impact of the war was disastrous, paving the way for Hollywood to dominate screens and box-office earnings in a manner that continued, albeit intermittently interrupted, until today. European film-makers in the decade immediately following the war had one significant advantage over subsequent generations. Regardless of the spoken and written language(s) in which they worked, their films had an inherently pan-linguistic quality through being fundamentally based on visual images. While written language in Italian, German, Russian or other language was certainly present, in the form of the inter-title - sometimes representing paraphrased speech - these titles could usually be translated from one language into another without significant loss of meaning.i Even more important, film-makers were enthused by the possibilities for cinema as a universal language of images that might replace the babel of natural languages to establish a universal communications medium. With 1924's The Last Laugh, for instance, German expressionist film-maker Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau sought to tell a story entirely without recourse to words, using inter-titles on one occasion, and then in a highly ironic manner. Though Italian film-makers of the period failed to produce image-based works with comparable international impact as those of Murnau, Fritz Lang, Sergei Eisenstein or other major cinematic voices of the 1920s, the same ideals nevertheless prevailed. Inaugurating the International Institute for Cinema Education in 1928 Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini declared:
"Still in its first phase of development, cinema offers great advantages over newspapers and books: it speaks to the eyes; in doing so, it speaks a language comprehensible to all peoples of the earth. Herein lies its universal character. It offers innumerable possibilities for an educational collaboration of international breadth."ii
At almost exactly the same time cinema was at risk of losing these selfsame qualities. The success of Alan Crosland's The Jazz Singer (1927) and the dawning realisation that the spoken cinema represented the future (I refrain from using the more usual appellation of silent here inasmuch as films had long been accompanied by music) meant that new issues around language soon emerged. What sound techniques should be used? How should foreign language films be made available to Italian audiences? How far should Italian films speak official standard Italian or allow for the use of regional dialects like Friulian and languages like Sicilian and Sardinian?
Technically matters were decided in favour of post-synchronised sound. While actors might speak their lines while being filmed and/or have a guide track recorded to add post-synchronisation, the voices heard were recorded after filming had been completed. Sometimes these voices were not those of the actors themselves. Voices were thus doubled or dubbed, depending on how we wish to interpret the Italian doppiagio. Linguistically matters were decided in favour of the dubbing of imported and domestically produced films alike into standard Italian. This was obviously in accord with official Fascist doctrine. It helped make all subjects of the regime identify with the nation state and allowed greater official control over the messages communicated by foreign and indigenous films alike (Ricci, 2008: 60-65).
The major advantage that post-synchronised sound afforded Italian film-makers relative to their Hollywood counterparts was in camera mobility. The camera could still be used in the same ways as it had been during the silent era in the studio, and could be taken on location with relative ease. Alessandro Blasetti's 1860 (1933), with its boat-crossing to Sicily and exploration of the island's rugged landscapes, could not have been made with synchronised sound. The film also uses elements of dialect to add historical authenticity. This indicates that Fascist's proscriptions were not absolute. It also reminds us us of Italy's relative youth as a nation and that the Fascist Italianisation project was in many respects a continuation of pre-existing policies from the prior period of liberal government.
The exploration of the world outside the studio is however forever linked with the neo-realist movement of the immediate post-war years, as exemplified by the likes of Roberto Rossellini's Rome Open City (1945) and Paisan (1946), Luchino Visconti's La terra trema and Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (both 1948). These were films which found a receptive critical audience willing to ignore certain contradictions - most obviously the highly unrealistic use of non-diegetic music - and to place their non-realistic use of post-synchronised sound within a broader theoretical framework.
The key commentator here is Andre Bazin. Though Bazin valued the cinema for its realist qualities, he believed that it could never achieve perfect mimesis. Progressive technical developments, such as sound, colour, widescreen and deep focus cinematography did however have the capacity to bring cinema ever closer to this ideal in an asymptotic manner. The use of artifice was also encouraged if on balance the reality quotient of a film could be increased. If neo-realist film-makers still used post-synchronised sound, for instance, this was more than counter-weighed by the ways they used the camera to capture aspects of reality that dominant Hollywood practice did not. The neo-realists also raised voices that had been largely silenced during the fascist era, in engaging with the plights of the peasantry and proletariat and allowing non-standard dialects and even other languages to be heard. La Terra Trema indicates something of the difficulties that could be encountered here. Post-synchronised into the actual language of its Sicilian characters, the film had to be subtitled to be rendered intelligible to speakers of standard Italian. This badly impacted its box-office, forcing Visconti and his Italian Communist Party backers to abandon their plans for a Marxist trilogy. The choice, as so often, was between quantity and quality: reach a minority audience with a pure voice, or a majority with an impure one.
Neo-realism marked the first time for over 30 years that the Italian cinema was of international importance, even influencing Hollywood cinema as film-makers, like Elia Kazan with Boomerang (1947), began to move out of the studio and into the streets to shoot. Though neo-realist films certainly played to Italian diasporan audiences in the US and elsewhere, I would argue that most significant audience breakthrough was accomplished on the nascent international art-house circuit. As the name implies, art-house cinema-goers understood - and were educated to understand - cinema as an art form in its own right Two aspects of art-house discourse and practice, both related to authenticity, are particularly important. The first is that that the film-maker, as an artist or auteur, should be possessed of a recognisable and authentic voice. Thus, for example, although both Rossellini and Visconti were identifiable as neo-realists, their approaches towards it were distinct with no sense that one's voice was imitative or derivative of the other's. Whereas Rossellini's films opened themselves to contingencies, Visconti's left little to chance (Brunetta, 2003: 137). If Rossellini's practice was perhaps inherently truer to Bazin's understanding of reality, Visconti's could achieve equal reality effects through artifice. The second is that the film-maker's work should be seen in as close to its original form as possible. As such, re-dubbing the film text into another language was usually rejected in favour of sub-titling.
Although Italian cinema re-established its international prestige through the neo-realists, and their successors, such as Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Pier-Paolo Pasolini, over the course of the 1950s and 1960s and into the 1970s, it is probably fair to say that these art-house developments were of little help to Italian film-makers working in popular genres or filone during this period.iii
As international co-productions, made with actors from various different countries almost always lacking a lingua franca, filone films had to be post-synchronised both for international and Italian audiences. Since their producers sought wider popular and vernaculariv audiences internationally rather than narrower elite ones, films would almost always be post-synchronised into English, German, French or other language, not subtitled. This was fatal for their critical reputations and the extent to which they might also be taken seriously and as expressions of an artist's personal voice.
Here I have to be careful. As science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon famously proclaimed regarding his own much-maligned, marginalised form, "Ninety percent of SF [science fiction] is crud, but then, ninety percent of everything is crud."v Or, to put it another way, if 90 per cent of Italian popular films of this period circa were of little artistic value, the same might well be said of the classical Hollywood cinema often also enthusiastically taken up by critics and art-house audiences. The difference was in the reception and recognition usually accorded this top ten per cent.
Reading reviews in the Monthly Film Bulletin, an organ of the British Film Institute and thus a reflection of quasi-official attitudes, policy and discourse, the same refrain is repeated time and again. The Italian historical/mythological epic, western, horror, spy or thriller film is "badly" dubbed:
"Although banal dubbing and stiff acting are the rule rather than the exception in Italian spectacles, this one takes some beating for sheer ludicrousness."
"Sheer nonsense - and ineptly dubbed nonsense at that"
"Vilely dubbed as usual"
"The film suffers no more than usual from the haphazard dubbing process"
What is not discussed, however, is what bad dubbing really means. Rather, it is taken for granted, a common-sense assumption derived negatively from the notion that subtitling represented the correct approach to foreign voices. Given the importance of French cinema and criticism at this time, through the young critics turned film-makers whom Bazin had gathered around himself at Cahiers du Cinema, it was perhaps also the case that Italian dubbing seemed especially bad on account of not following French practice.vi As Michel Chion explains in The Voice in Cinema (1999), French and Italian dubbing differed in the location to which dubbing voice was to be synchronised. French dubbing emphasised tight synchronisation of the voice with a character's lip movements, Italian dubbing looser synchronisation of the voice with the character's bodily gestures (Chion, 1999: 65). Though neither practice was inherently superior, British critics perhaps placed them in an implicit hierarchy of French better/Italian worse.
A consideration of Fellini's 1972 film Roma is instructive here. As Chion notes, Fellini's films frequently feature particularly loose dubbing (??:??). Within Roma's polyphonic piazza sequences individual voices often cannot be assigned to individual bodies within the frame, instead floating free as separate presences without a definite source. They have what Chion elsewhere identifies as acousmatic and acousmetric characteristics. Acousmatic refers to sounds that are heard without their sources being seen, acousmetric to human voices not clearly attached to bodies or mouths. Needless to say, The Monthly Film Bulletin review of a English subtitled version of Roma does not mention these disembodied voices, nor critically address the Italian dubbing of the film, nor whether the subtitling process might have resulted in a loss of meaning. The point is not that Roma particularly deserved criticism on such grounds - indeed, those responsible for the English subtitles did a fine job with an unusually challenging film - as that most critics were silent on such issues.
There must have been some films that were badly subtitled, whether through being difficult to read (e.g. white subtitles on a near-white background), ill-synchronised with the visuals, or just poor translations of the original. There were certainly occasions on which Italian actors such as Claudia Cardinale and Sophia Loren were dubbed by other performers in the Italian versions of the films in which they appeared. All this, however, went without comment. A double standard towards voice-doubling (i.e. doppiaggio = doubling = dubbing) clearly pertained.
In the remainder of this paper I will explore the consequences of this double standard film via a more detailed analysis of the work of one specific Italian film-maker, Dario Argento, from 1970 and 1982. Argento is a film-maker whose work is popular but also also exhibits certain art-house and auteur characteristics, expressing a distinctive, personal voice that cannot be reduced to a function of the Italian thriller or giallo and fantasy-horror filone.
This crossover element also makes the absence of Argento's work in Chion's discussions particularly interesting. Many of Chion's examples are drawn from films by directors with whom Argento has been compared, including Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, Sergio Leone, and Brian De Palma. Likewise, if we would expect critics with an elitist bias against dubbing not to recognise Argento's work, this is not the case with Chion, who is clearly enthusiastic about popular cinema sound.
Interlude: Michel Chion's Audio-Vision and The Voice in Cinema
In Audio-Vision Chion argues that sound cinema is an essentially audio-visual form where sound provides "added value" to the image, "the expressive and informative value with which a sound enriches a given image so as to create the definite impression [...] that this information or expression 'naturally' comes from what is seen and is already contained in the image itself" (1994:5). Although sound thus appears supplementary, the specific sense of supplement invoked is a Derridean one, that if something (e.g. speech, image) were genuinely self-sufficient it would not need supplementation by something else (e.g. writing, sound).
For Chion the "naturalness" of the relationship between image and sound makes it difficult to separate out sense data. Instead, "what is rendered is a clump of sensations" where artifice is necessary to provide an experience that is true to life:
The cinema systematically exaggerates the contrast of intensity. This device of exaggerating constitutes a kind of white lie even in films that use direct sound. Sometimes a sound will be made to arise suddenly out of complete silence, at the exact moment of the window-opening or the car's passing. The point is that the sound here must tell the story of a whole rush of comoposite sensations and not just the auditory reality of the event. (1994: 112-113)
Chion demonstrates his points through the method of "audio-visual analysis" This entails watching a film sequence without sound; without image, listening to the sounds in a "reduced" manner, "the listening mode that focuses on the traits of the sound itself, independent of its cause and meaning" (1994: 29); and in combination. Together sound and image create a synthetic whole greater than the sum of their parts. If a comparison might thus be made here with Eisenstein's theories of dialectical montage, there is a significant difference. Sound and image function less as thesis and antithesis in a sequential manner, instead arising simultaneously.
In The Voice in Cinema, Chion concentrates on the cinematic voice and those figures and narratives that have developed around it. The key figures here are the acousmêtre and the mute. The acousmêtre, the voice that is heard without its source being seen, is a figure with an inherently uncanny quality. This is demonstrated by such films as Mervyn Leroy's The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Lang's The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1932). Lacking an body, the acousmêtre has potentially godlike capabilitie, "the ability to be everywhere, to see all; to know all, and to have complete power. In other words, ubiquity, panopticism, omniscience and omnipotence." (1999: 24). Narratives featuring an acousmêtre thus typically revolve around the need to bring it down to a more human level, through affixing the voice to a source:
"As long as the face and mouth have not been completely revealed, and as long as the spectator's eye has not 'verified' the co-incidence of the voice with the mouth (a verification which needs only to be approximate), de-acoustimisation is incomplete, and the voice retains its aura of invulnerability and magical power" (1994: 28)
Thus in looking behind the curtain despite "The great and mighty Oz"'s injunctions, Dorothy discovers that Oz is merely an ordinary man, "really a very good man, just a poor wizard"; Inspector Lohmann in The Testament of Dr Mabuse has a more difficult task on account of the multiplicity of Mabuse acousmêtres he faces. As a body without a voice, the mute functions as a kind of inverse acousmêtre. He or she again has uncanny qualities, whilst the narrative often hinges on determining whether the mute can be made to speak or otherwise vocalise.
A key trope is the idea of the "phone story". Separating the voice from the body producing it, the telephone is an acousmatic technology. If we typically do not see it as possessing uncanny qualities, this is because we have become accustomed to it along, alongside other technologies such as the radio and the record player. Nonetheless, this can easily change:
"The acousmatic phone caller, the threatening and perverse stranger (who in film narratives, and doubtless also in reality, is most often a man), can adopt the powers of the acousmêtre, telling you he can see everything, knows everything and is omnipotent. Inasmuch as you can't locate him, you can't figure out whether he's bluffing." (1999: 64)
A second key narrative trope around the voice, one less related to the acousmatic, is the "screaming point" This refers to a moment a film has been building towards where a female scream erupts to signal the utter breakdown of meaning:
"[L]et us define the screaming point in a cinematic narrative as something that generally gushes forth from the mouth of a woman, which by the way does not have to be heard, but which above all must fall at an appointed spot, explode at a precise moment, at the crossroads of converging plot lines, at the end of an often convoluted trajectory, but calculated to give this point a maximum impact. [...]
I use the expression screaming point to emphasise that it's not so much the sound quality of the scream that's important, but its placement. And this place could be occupied by nothing, a blank, an absence. The screaming point is a point of the unthinkable inside the thought, of unrepresentability inside representation. It occupies a point in time, but has no duration within. It suspends the time of its possible duration; it's a rip in the fabric of time" (1999: 76-77)
A key example for Chion here, one that may again be usefully compared to aspects of Argento's work, is De Palma's Blow Out (1980)
Voice 2: The Cinema of Dario Argento, 1970-1982
The voice is important to Argento's debut film The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) in various ways. The critic turned screenwriter found himself directing the film from his own script after concluding that none of the established directors initially associated with the project were likely to do it justice. It is a film which inherently engages with issues around authorship and authorial voice, presenting a number of key themes and motifs that would recur throughout Argento's subsequent work. For reasons of space, I will here concentrate upon those aspects of the film and its successors pertaining to the voice.
The centrepiece sequence of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage occurs early on and neatly introduces the importance of the voice and the audio-visual. Whilst walking home one evening Sam Dalmas, an American author resident in Rome, witnesses a struggle between a man and a woman in the open-plan glass fronted gallery opposite, and goes to assist. Trapped between the gallery's double doors by the fleeing man, Sam can only wait helplessly until help for the injured woman arrives. Questioned by the Inspector Morisini, Sam becomes convinced that some vital detail of the scene eluded him and begins his own investigation. The attacker, who had already struck three times before, continues their campaign of terror and makes threatening telephone calls to Sam and the police. Eventually Sam realises his mistake: it was the woman in the gallery, Monica Ranieri, who was wielding the knife. The victim of a similar attack in her youth, Monica's latent insanity had been triggered by a painting of the traumatic scene, but rather than identifying with herself as victim she instead adopted the attacker's persona and role. What Sam had seen was an attempt by Monica's husband Alberto to shock her out of it.
If we analyse the gallery sequence in audio-visual terms, the thing that becomes most apparent is the way Argento plays with sound. While the gallery space is designed to accentuate the visual, it accomplishes this at the expense of downplaying the aural. Most obviously, we do not hear the voices of Alberto and Monica, voices that can well be imagined to have presented vital information as to what was really going on (e.g. "Monica, put down the knife! You're insane!"). The instant when Sam is distracted by the sudden appearance of a car is a textbook example of exaggerated audio to make an effect, its engine and horn not audible until it nearly runs him down. As Sam becomes trapped between the double doors, Argento shifts his camera and our point of view between Sam, Monica and the street outside. He also plays with the levels of Sam's attempts to attract the attention of passers-by and Monica's distressed cries. The volume of their voices does not always according with the camera's position, however, thereby further reminding us that the co-incidence of sound and image in film is a convention. The Ennio Morricone cue that plays over this part of the sequence is also noteworthy. An atonal, abstract and aleatory piece of music, [??], makes prominent use of a female voice moaning in what could be taken as pleasure, pain or both. Besides this polyvalence, it is at times unclear whether the voice is diegetic, representative of Monica, or non-diegetic. If we cannot definitively position this voice, this ambiguity serves to position the film closer to the as art cinema in throwing into question conventionally fixed, taken for granted meanings.vii
Besides establishing The Bird with the Crystal Plumage as something of a "phone story," the threatening calls made to Sam and the police are audio-visually significant. Visualisation of their sound patterns on an oscilloscope by the police forensics men reveals that they were made by two callers. Their signatures, the literal "grain of the voice" - to invoke Roland Barthes' term from The Pleasures of the Text (1973) - are different. If this treatment might be read as subordinating the aural to the visual, in accord with theories of the time that privileged the visual as the source of truth within cinema, the way Argento presents the call to the police is worth noting by way of counterpoint. The caller is prompted by seeing Morisini on television in a shop window and goes into a phone booth. They are identifiable to the viewer via their iconic black leather gloves, but not to the others who were watching the television. These others could however see the caller's face, which we cannot. But we can also hear the caller's voice, which they cannot. The separation of audio and visual elements renders the scene less meaningful. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty remarks:
"[H]uman acts lose all their meaning when detached from their context and broken down into their component parts (like the gestures of the man I can see but do not hear through the window of the telephone booth), one concludes that all conduct is senseless." ((1964: 39)viii
Like their predecessor, the second and third films in Argento's retrospectively identified "Animal Trilogy," of giallo thrillers, Cat o' Nine Tails (1970) and Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971) make important use of the voice.
Cat o' Nine Tails is distinctive in featuring a killer, Casoni, who combines aspects of acousmetre and mute together. Represented until the denouement by an extreme close-up of a single eye, and as such lacking a bodyix, his voice is never heard. This representation can be related to the nature of the film's investigator Arno who, as a blind man, is a body with a voice but no eyes. It also reflects Casoni's identity as a young research scientist who had first killed to defend himself from a blackmailer who had threatened to reveal the fact that he suffers from a rare genetic abnormality; a revelation that would end his career. Casoni thus had good reason to desire to establish himself as a pure mind or cogito and, in this imaginary, ideal state, avoid raising the voice that could have helped bring him back down to earth were it to be heard by Arno.
As a further measure of the film's skilful combination of form and content, it is significant in the last regard that Casoni dies by falling down a lift shaft from a great height. Again, Merleau-Ponty's remarks provide useful insights, in recognising the limitations of the scientific world-view:
"Philosophy is not science, because science believes it can soar over its object and holds the correlation of knowledge with being as established, whereas philosophy is the set of questions wherein he who questions is himself implicated by the question." (1968: 27)
If Cat o' Nine Tails presents a man who would like to install himself in a god-like position, Four Flies on Grey Velvet presents a woman, Nina Tobias, who is the victim of just such a man, namely her father. In the film's ambiguous flashback sequences, in which Argento's camera performs disorienting rapid 360 degree pans around a padded cell, a disembodied voice repeatedly berates the unidentified Nina: "I wanted a son, not a weakling like you!" "You'll end up in an asylum, an asylum like your mother!" Seeking symbolic revenge on her father, who had died in the interim, Nina marries a young musician, Roberto, who is his spitting image, and begins to persecute him. As Roberto tries to make sense of what is going on around him, the family maid discovers Nina's culpability, and attempts to blackmail her. Here Argento tracks from the maid's end of the telephone call, following her voice through the cables and circuits of the telephone system to its eventual destination in Nina's secret apartment hideout.
Though otherwise the summation of Argento's cinema to that point in his career, Profondo Rosso (1975) is distinguished from its predecessors by a relative lack of voice-based figures and narrative elements. Argento does, however, pay attention to sound more generally as an important aspect of the film's hyper-realist aesthetic, in having each each murder scene play to Goblin's intense, progressive rock score, or by announcing the killer's presence diegetically through a nursery rhyme leitmotif.
Argento's next film, Suspiria (1977) is characterised by a shift into an even more intense, anti-realistic aesthetic and outright fantastical subject matter. It is also Argento's first film to feature a female protagonist, Suzy Banner. Significantly, however, she is also positioned very much as a child within the narrative, which sees her travels from the US to Germany to continue her ballet studies at the famous Tanzakademie.x Having arrived, Suzy discovers that the school is home to a coven of witches, led by the sinister Black Queen, Helena Markos. She represents the return of the acousmetre, in a monstrous feminine and more overtly uncanny/fantastical Mabuse type-form. Suzy and fellow student Sarah first encounter Helena on the opposite side of an Oz-like curtain, with Sarah recognising the ancient witch through the distinctive quality of her breathing, a "grain of the voice" that can be attributed to her other identity as Mater Suspiriorum or The Mother of Sighs. Eventually, Suzy manages to locate Helena and, striking at the witch's position after she turns invisible, manages to deacousmatise and kill her at the same time. This in turn causes the other members of Helena's coven, who had previously been cursing Suzy ("Helena: give me power! Away with trouble! Sickness! Death!") to die as the academy erupts into flames; another of those who dies is mute handyman cum assassin Pavlos.xi Suspiria's soundtrack, again by Goblin, also makes notable use of the voice, with the band's keyboard player and vocalist Claudio Simonetti uttering half-subliminal whispers ("There are three witches," "Sickness and perversity") over the circular compositions in a mantra-like manner.
Inferno (1980) continued to elaborate the mythology of the Three Mothers, explicitly linking it with Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater (18??), and to explore characters and states beyond those of the "Animal Trilogy". Once again the student protagonist, Marc Elliot, is placed in a child-like position as he attempts to make sense of the mysterious events centring around his sister's disappearance from her New York apartment. It eventually emerges that the building is home to the Mother of Darkness, Mater Tenebrarum. Like her sister in Suspiria she too must be situated within a specific body, which eventually turns out to be that of a friendly-seeming nurse. This nurse, meanwhile, tends to an old, mute man, who it transpires is the architect Varelli, the designer of the apartment block, the Tanzakademie and a third building in Rome for the Mothers, and the author of a volume on them which Marc's sister Rose had been reading prior to her murder. His own lair is hidden with his mistress in the apartment block, from where they secretly observe the other inhabitants and scheme against those who might discover their "filthy secrets". Again, the deacousmatisation of the mother, as she is located within her a body - albeit perhaps one that represents only a temporary home, akin to Lang's possessive Mabuse-spirit - leads to her ambiguous defeat, as Marc escapes the blazing building.
With its allusion to the Mother of Darkness and Rome setting, Tenebre (1982) sounded like a conclusion to Argento's second trilogy. In fact, however, it represented a return, after the two fantasy-horror films preceding it, to more realistic territory, albeit with the same hyper-realist aesthetic. It also represented a return to an adult male protagonist, in the form of giallo author Peter Neale. Travelling to Rome to promote his latest thriller, Neale finds himself threatened by a serial killer who is taking inspiration from his work. Answering critics who call his work sexist and discussing the distinctions between reality and fiction with Inspector Giermani, Neale functions as Argento's own voice within the diegesis to ironically highlight Barthesian distinctions between author and text, that their respective voices should not be conflated.
The denouement sees Neale revealed as an insane killer, who had killed the original maniac, a conservative television presenter, and embarked upon his own campaign of murder. What is significant about this revelation is that it provides for the first "screaming point" in Argento's career, as Neale's girlfriend Anne, responds to the carnage and horror around confronting her by screaming uncontrollably. As an ending, this "screaming point" is less jury-rigged and arbitrary than its counterpart in De Palma's Blow Out. The film and Argento's entire career to 1982 had been building towards this moment. His first four gialli had concentrated on masculine protagonists' experiences and understandings of the world. The two fantasy films that succeeded them had explored different possibilities through child-like figures. Now, with their respective limitations apparent and meaning concomitantly collapsing, the feminine voice was about to be raised.
This essay is dedicated to Oreste Lionello, the Italian dubbing-voice of Woody Allen, and the Godard-like professor in Four Flies on Grey Velvet.
Voice 1: The Voice in Italian Cinema, 1913-1985
Issues around the voice are of considerable importance in the history of the Italian cinema. During its first golden age, in the years immediately preceding the First World War, directors like Giovanni Pastrone with Cabiria (1913) made key contributions to cinematic vocabulary through innovations such as dollying the camera. In common with other European film industries the impact of the war was disastrous, paving the way for Hollywood to dominate screens and box-office earnings in a manner that continued, albeit intermittently interrupted, until today. European film-makers in the decade immediately following the war had one significant advantage over subsequent generations. Regardless of the spoken and written language(s) in which they worked, their films had an inherently pan-linguistic quality through being fundamentally based on visual images. While written language in Italian, German, Russian or other language was certainly present, in the form of the inter-title - sometimes representing paraphrased speech - these titles could usually be translated from one language into another without significant loss of meaning.i Even more important, film-makers were enthused by the possibilities for cinema as a universal language of images that might replace the babel of natural languages to establish a universal communications medium. With 1924's The Last Laugh, for instance, German expressionist film-maker Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau sought to tell a story entirely without recourse to words, using inter-titles on one occasion, and then in a highly ironic manner. Though Italian film-makers of the period failed to produce image-based works with comparable international impact as those of Murnau, Fritz Lang, Sergei Eisenstein or other major cinematic voices of the 1920s, the same ideals nevertheless prevailed. Inaugurating the International Institute for Cinema Education in 1928 Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini declared:
"Still in its first phase of development, cinema offers great advantages over newspapers and books: it speaks to the eyes; in doing so, it speaks a language comprehensible to all peoples of the earth. Herein lies its universal character. It offers innumerable possibilities for an educational collaboration of international breadth."ii
At almost exactly the same time cinema was at risk of losing these selfsame qualities. The success of Alan Crosland's The Jazz Singer (1927) and the dawning realisation that the spoken cinema represented the future (I refrain from using the more usual appellation of silent here inasmuch as films had long been accompanied by music) meant that new issues around language soon emerged. What sound techniques should be used? How should foreign language films be made available to Italian audiences? How far should Italian films speak official standard Italian or allow for the use of regional dialects like Friulian and languages like Sicilian and Sardinian?
Technically matters were decided in favour of post-synchronised sound. While actors might speak their lines while being filmed and/or have a guide track recorded to add post-synchronisation, the voices heard were recorded after filming had been completed. Sometimes these voices were not those of the actors themselves. Voices were thus doubled or dubbed, depending on how we wish to interpret the Italian doppiagio. Linguistically matters were decided in favour of the dubbing of imported and domestically produced films alike into standard Italian. This was obviously in accord with official Fascist doctrine. It helped make all subjects of the regime identify with the nation state and allowed greater official control over the messages communicated by foreign and indigenous films alike (Ricci, 2008: 60-65).
The major advantage that post-synchronised sound afforded Italian film-makers relative to their Hollywood counterparts was in camera mobility. The camera could still be used in the same ways as it had been during the silent era in the studio, and could be taken on location with relative ease. Alessandro Blasetti's 1860 (1933), with its boat-crossing to Sicily and exploration of the island's rugged landscapes, could not have been made with synchronised sound. The film also uses elements of dialect to add historical authenticity. This indicates that Fascist's proscriptions were not absolute. It also reminds us us of Italy's relative youth as a nation and that the Fascist Italianisation project was in many respects a continuation of pre-existing policies from the prior period of liberal government.
The exploration of the world outside the studio is however forever linked with the neo-realist movement of the immediate post-war years, as exemplified by the likes of Roberto Rossellini's Rome Open City (1945) and Paisan (1946), Luchino Visconti's La terra trema and Vittorio De Sica's Bicycle Thieves (both 1948). These were films which found a receptive critical audience willing to ignore certain contradictions - most obviously the highly unrealistic use of non-diegetic music - and to place their non-realistic use of post-synchronised sound within a broader theoretical framework.
The key commentator here is Andre Bazin. Though Bazin valued the cinema for its realist qualities, he believed that it could never achieve perfect mimesis. Progressive technical developments, such as sound, colour, widescreen and deep focus cinematography did however have the capacity to bring cinema ever closer to this ideal in an asymptotic manner. The use of artifice was also encouraged if on balance the reality quotient of a film could be increased. If neo-realist film-makers still used post-synchronised sound, for instance, this was more than counter-weighed by the ways they used the camera to capture aspects of reality that dominant Hollywood practice did not. The neo-realists also raised voices that had been largely silenced during the fascist era, in engaging with the plights of the peasantry and proletariat and allowing non-standard dialects and even other languages to be heard. La Terra Trema indicates something of the difficulties that could be encountered here. Post-synchronised into the actual language of its Sicilian characters, the film had to be subtitled to be rendered intelligible to speakers of standard Italian. This badly impacted its box-office, forcing Visconti and his Italian Communist Party backers to abandon their plans for a Marxist trilogy. The choice, as so often, was between quantity and quality: reach a minority audience with a pure voice, or a majority with an impure one.
Neo-realism marked the first time for over 30 years that the Italian cinema was of international importance, even influencing Hollywood cinema as film-makers, like Elia Kazan with Boomerang (1947), began to move out of the studio and into the streets to shoot. Though neo-realist films certainly played to Italian diasporan audiences in the US and elsewhere, I would argue that most significant audience breakthrough was accomplished on the nascent international art-house circuit. As the name implies, art-house cinema-goers understood - and were educated to understand - cinema as an art form in its own right Two aspects of art-house discourse and practice, both related to authenticity, are particularly important. The first is that that the film-maker, as an artist or auteur, should be possessed of a recognisable and authentic voice. Thus, for example, although both Rossellini and Visconti were identifiable as neo-realists, their approaches towards it were distinct with no sense that one's voice was imitative or derivative of the other's. Whereas Rossellini's films opened themselves to contingencies, Visconti's left little to chance (Brunetta, 2003: 137). If Rossellini's practice was perhaps inherently truer to Bazin's understanding of reality, Visconti's could achieve equal reality effects through artifice. The second is that the film-maker's work should be seen in as close to its original form as possible. As such, re-dubbing the film text into another language was usually rejected in favour of sub-titling.
Although Italian cinema re-established its international prestige through the neo-realists, and their successors, such as Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni and Pier-Paolo Pasolini, over the course of the 1950s and 1960s and into the 1970s, it is probably fair to say that these art-house developments were of little help to Italian film-makers working in popular genres or filone during this period.iii
As international co-productions, made with actors from various different countries almost always lacking a lingua franca, filone films had to be post-synchronised both for international and Italian audiences. Since their producers sought wider popular and vernaculariv audiences internationally rather than narrower elite ones, films would almost always be post-synchronised into English, German, French or other language, not subtitled. This was fatal for their critical reputations and the extent to which they might also be taken seriously and as expressions of an artist's personal voice.
Here I have to be careful. As science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon famously proclaimed regarding his own much-maligned, marginalised form, "Ninety percent of SF [science fiction] is crud, but then, ninety percent of everything is crud."v Or, to put it another way, if 90 per cent of Italian popular films of this period circa were of little artistic value, the same might well be said of the classical Hollywood cinema often also enthusiastically taken up by critics and art-house audiences. The difference was in the reception and recognition usually accorded this top ten per cent.
Reading reviews in the Monthly Film Bulletin, an organ of the British Film Institute and thus a reflection of quasi-official attitudes, policy and discourse, the same refrain is repeated time and again. The Italian historical/mythological epic, western, horror, spy or thriller film is "badly" dubbed:
"Although banal dubbing and stiff acting are the rule rather than the exception in Italian spectacles, this one takes some beating for sheer ludicrousness."
"Sheer nonsense - and ineptly dubbed nonsense at that"
"Vilely dubbed as usual"
"The film suffers no more than usual from the haphazard dubbing process"
What is not discussed, however, is what bad dubbing really means. Rather, it is taken for granted, a common-sense assumption derived negatively from the notion that subtitling represented the correct approach to foreign voices. Given the importance of French cinema and criticism at this time, through the young critics turned film-makers whom Bazin had gathered around himself at Cahiers du Cinema, it was perhaps also the case that Italian dubbing seemed especially bad on account of not following French practice.vi As Michel Chion explains in The Voice in Cinema (1999), French and Italian dubbing differed in the location to which dubbing voice was to be synchronised. French dubbing emphasised tight synchronisation of the voice with a character's lip movements, Italian dubbing looser synchronisation of the voice with the character's bodily gestures (Chion, 1999: 65). Though neither practice was inherently superior, British critics perhaps placed them in an implicit hierarchy of French better/Italian worse.
A consideration of Fellini's 1972 film Roma is instructive here. As Chion notes, Fellini's films frequently feature particularly loose dubbing (??:??). Within Roma's polyphonic piazza sequences individual voices often cannot be assigned to individual bodies within the frame, instead floating free as separate presences without a definite source. They have what Chion elsewhere identifies as acousmatic and acousmetric characteristics. Acousmatic refers to sounds that are heard without their sources being seen, acousmetric to human voices not clearly attached to bodies or mouths. Needless to say, The Monthly Film Bulletin review of a English subtitled version of Roma does not mention these disembodied voices, nor critically address the Italian dubbing of the film, nor whether the subtitling process might have resulted in a loss of meaning. The point is not that Roma particularly deserved criticism on such grounds - indeed, those responsible for the English subtitles did a fine job with an unusually challenging film - as that most critics were silent on such issues.
There must have been some films that were badly subtitled, whether through being difficult to read (e.g. white subtitles on a near-white background), ill-synchronised with the visuals, or just poor translations of the original. There were certainly occasions on which Italian actors such as Claudia Cardinale and Sophia Loren were dubbed by other performers in the Italian versions of the films in which they appeared. All this, however, went without comment. A double standard towards voice-doubling (i.e. doppiaggio = doubling = dubbing) clearly pertained.
In the remainder of this paper I will explore the consequences of this double standard film via a more detailed analysis of the work of one specific Italian film-maker, Dario Argento, from 1970 and 1982. Argento is a film-maker whose work is popular but also also exhibits certain art-house and auteur characteristics, expressing a distinctive, personal voice that cannot be reduced to a function of the Italian thriller or giallo and fantasy-horror filone.
This crossover element also makes the absence of Argento's work in Chion's discussions particularly interesting. Many of Chion's examples are drawn from films by directors with whom Argento has been compared, including Lang, Alfred Hitchcock, Sergio Leone, and Brian De Palma. Likewise, if we would expect critics with an elitist bias against dubbing not to recognise Argento's work, this is not the case with Chion, who is clearly enthusiastic about popular cinema sound.
Interlude: Michel Chion's Audio-Vision and The Voice in Cinema
In Audio-Vision Chion argues that sound cinema is an essentially audio-visual form where sound provides "added value" to the image, "the expressive and informative value with which a sound enriches a given image so as to create the definite impression [...] that this information or expression 'naturally' comes from what is seen and is already contained in the image itself" (1994:5). Although sound thus appears supplementary, the specific sense of supplement invoked is a Derridean one, that if something (e.g. speech, image) were genuinely self-sufficient it would not need supplementation by something else (e.g. writing, sound).
For Chion the "naturalness" of the relationship between image and sound makes it difficult to separate out sense data. Instead, "what is rendered is a clump of sensations" where artifice is necessary to provide an experience that is true to life:
The cinema systematically exaggerates the contrast of intensity. This device of exaggerating constitutes a kind of white lie even in films that use direct sound. Sometimes a sound will be made to arise suddenly out of complete silence, at the exact moment of the window-opening or the car's passing. The point is that the sound here must tell the story of a whole rush of comoposite sensations and not just the auditory reality of the event. (1994: 112-113)
Chion demonstrates his points through the method of "audio-visual analysis" This entails watching a film sequence without sound; without image, listening to the sounds in a "reduced" manner, "the listening mode that focuses on the traits of the sound itself, independent of its cause and meaning" (1994: 29); and in combination. Together sound and image create a synthetic whole greater than the sum of their parts. If a comparison might thus be made here with Eisenstein's theories of dialectical montage, there is a significant difference. Sound and image function less as thesis and antithesis in a sequential manner, instead arising simultaneously.
In The Voice in Cinema, Chion concentrates on the cinematic voice and those figures and narratives that have developed around it. The key figures here are the acousmêtre and the mute. The acousmêtre, the voice that is heard without its source being seen, is a figure with an inherently uncanny quality. This is demonstrated by such films as Mervyn Leroy's The Wizard of Oz (1939) and Lang's The Testament of Dr Mabuse (1932). Lacking an body, the acousmêtre has potentially godlike capabilitie, "the ability to be everywhere, to see all; to know all, and to have complete power. In other words, ubiquity, panopticism, omniscience and omnipotence." (1999: 24). Narratives featuring an acousmêtre thus typically revolve around the need to bring it down to a more human level, through affixing the voice to a source:
"As long as the face and mouth have not been completely revealed, and as long as the spectator's eye has not 'verified' the co-incidence of the voice with the mouth (a verification which needs only to be approximate), de-acoustimisation is incomplete, and the voice retains its aura of invulnerability and magical power" (1994: 28)
Thus in looking behind the curtain despite "The great and mighty Oz"'s injunctions, Dorothy discovers that Oz is merely an ordinary man, "really a very good man, just a poor wizard"; Inspector Lohmann in The Testament of Dr Mabuse has a more difficult task on account of the multiplicity of Mabuse acousmêtres he faces. As a body without a voice, the mute functions as a kind of inverse acousmêtre. He or she again has uncanny qualities, whilst the narrative often hinges on determining whether the mute can be made to speak or otherwise vocalise.
A key trope is the idea of the "phone story". Separating the voice from the body producing it, the telephone is an acousmatic technology. If we typically do not see it as possessing uncanny qualities, this is because we have become accustomed to it along, alongside other technologies such as the radio and the record player. Nonetheless, this can easily change:
"The acousmatic phone caller, the threatening and perverse stranger (who in film narratives, and doubtless also in reality, is most often a man), can adopt the powers of the acousmêtre, telling you he can see everything, knows everything and is omnipotent. Inasmuch as you can't locate him, you can't figure out whether he's bluffing." (1999: 64)
A second key narrative trope around the voice, one less related to the acousmatic, is the "screaming point" This refers to a moment a film has been building towards where a female scream erupts to signal the utter breakdown of meaning:
"[L]et us define the screaming point in a cinematic narrative as something that generally gushes forth from the mouth of a woman, which by the way does not have to be heard, but which above all must fall at an appointed spot, explode at a precise moment, at the crossroads of converging plot lines, at the end of an often convoluted trajectory, but calculated to give this point a maximum impact. [...]
I use the expression screaming point to emphasise that it's not so much the sound quality of the scream that's important, but its placement. And this place could be occupied by nothing, a blank, an absence. The screaming point is a point of the unthinkable inside the thought, of unrepresentability inside representation. It occupies a point in time, but has no duration within. It suspends the time of its possible duration; it's a rip in the fabric of time" (1999: 76-77)
A key example for Chion here, one that may again be usefully compared to aspects of Argento's work, is De Palma's Blow Out (1980)
Voice 2: The Cinema of Dario Argento, 1970-1982
The voice is important to Argento's debut film The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) in various ways. The critic turned screenwriter found himself directing the film from his own script after concluding that none of the established directors initially associated with the project were likely to do it justice. It is a film which inherently engages with issues around authorship and authorial voice, presenting a number of key themes and motifs that would recur throughout Argento's subsequent work. For reasons of space, I will here concentrate upon those aspects of the film and its successors pertaining to the voice.
The centrepiece sequence of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage occurs early on and neatly introduces the importance of the voice and the audio-visual. Whilst walking home one evening Sam Dalmas, an American author resident in Rome, witnesses a struggle between a man and a woman in the open-plan glass fronted gallery opposite, and goes to assist. Trapped between the gallery's double doors by the fleeing man, Sam can only wait helplessly until help for the injured woman arrives. Questioned by the Inspector Morisini, Sam becomes convinced that some vital detail of the scene eluded him and begins his own investigation. The attacker, who had already struck three times before, continues their campaign of terror and makes threatening telephone calls to Sam and the police. Eventually Sam realises his mistake: it was the woman in the gallery, Monica Ranieri, who was wielding the knife. The victim of a similar attack in her youth, Monica's latent insanity had been triggered by a painting of the traumatic scene, but rather than identifying with herself as victim she instead adopted the attacker's persona and role. What Sam had seen was an attempt by Monica's husband Alberto to shock her out of it.
If we analyse the gallery sequence in audio-visual terms, the thing that becomes most apparent is the way Argento plays with sound. While the gallery space is designed to accentuate the visual, it accomplishes this at the expense of downplaying the aural. Most obviously, we do not hear the voices of Alberto and Monica, voices that can well be imagined to have presented vital information as to what was really going on (e.g. "Monica, put down the knife! You're insane!"). The instant when Sam is distracted by the sudden appearance of a car is a textbook example of exaggerated audio to make an effect, its engine and horn not audible until it nearly runs him down. As Sam becomes trapped between the double doors, Argento shifts his camera and our point of view between Sam, Monica and the street outside. He also plays with the levels of Sam's attempts to attract the attention of passers-by and Monica's distressed cries. The volume of their voices does not always according with the camera's position, however, thereby further reminding us that the co-incidence of sound and image in film is a convention. The Ennio Morricone cue that plays over this part of the sequence is also noteworthy. An atonal, abstract and aleatory piece of music, [??], makes prominent use of a female voice moaning in what could be taken as pleasure, pain or both. Besides this polyvalence, it is at times unclear whether the voice is diegetic, representative of Monica, or non-diegetic. If we cannot definitively position this voice, this ambiguity serves to position the film closer to the as art cinema in throwing into question conventionally fixed, taken for granted meanings.vii
Besides establishing The Bird with the Crystal Plumage as something of a "phone story," the threatening calls made to Sam and the police are audio-visually significant. Visualisation of their sound patterns on an oscilloscope by the police forensics men reveals that they were made by two callers. Their signatures, the literal "grain of the voice" - to invoke Roland Barthes' term from The Pleasures of the Text (1973) - are different. If this treatment might be read as subordinating the aural to the visual, in accord with theories of the time that privileged the visual as the source of truth within cinema, the way Argento presents the call to the police is worth noting by way of counterpoint. The caller is prompted by seeing Morisini on television in a shop window and goes into a phone booth. They are identifiable to the viewer via their iconic black leather gloves, but not to the others who were watching the television. These others could however see the caller's face, which we cannot. But we can also hear the caller's voice, which they cannot. The separation of audio and visual elements renders the scene less meaningful. As Maurice Merleau-Ponty remarks:
"[H]uman acts lose all their meaning when detached from their context and broken down into their component parts (like the gestures of the man I can see but do not hear through the window of the telephone booth), one concludes that all conduct is senseless." ((1964: 39)viii
Like their predecessor, the second and third films in Argento's retrospectively identified "Animal Trilogy," of giallo thrillers, Cat o' Nine Tails (1970) and Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971) make important use of the voice.
Cat o' Nine Tails is distinctive in featuring a killer, Casoni, who combines aspects of acousmetre and mute together. Represented until the denouement by an extreme close-up of a single eye, and as such lacking a bodyix, his voice is never heard. This representation can be related to the nature of the film's investigator Arno who, as a blind man, is a body with a voice but no eyes. It also reflects Casoni's identity as a young research scientist who had first killed to defend himself from a blackmailer who had threatened to reveal the fact that he suffers from a rare genetic abnormality; a revelation that would end his career. Casoni thus had good reason to desire to establish himself as a pure mind or cogito and, in this imaginary, ideal state, avoid raising the voice that could have helped bring him back down to earth were it to be heard by Arno.
As a further measure of the film's skilful combination of form and content, it is significant in the last regard that Casoni dies by falling down a lift shaft from a great height. Again, Merleau-Ponty's remarks provide useful insights, in recognising the limitations of the scientific world-view:
"Philosophy is not science, because science believes it can soar over its object and holds the correlation of knowledge with being as established, whereas philosophy is the set of questions wherein he who questions is himself implicated by the question." (1968: 27)
If Cat o' Nine Tails presents a man who would like to install himself in a god-like position, Four Flies on Grey Velvet presents a woman, Nina Tobias, who is the victim of just such a man, namely her father. In the film's ambiguous flashback sequences, in which Argento's camera performs disorienting rapid 360 degree pans around a padded cell, a disembodied voice repeatedly berates the unidentified Nina: "I wanted a son, not a weakling like you!" "You'll end up in an asylum, an asylum like your mother!" Seeking symbolic revenge on her father, who had died in the interim, Nina marries a young musician, Roberto, who is his spitting image, and begins to persecute him. As Roberto tries to make sense of what is going on around him, the family maid discovers Nina's culpability, and attempts to blackmail her. Here Argento tracks from the maid's end of the telephone call, following her voice through the cables and circuits of the telephone system to its eventual destination in Nina's secret apartment hideout.
Though otherwise the summation of Argento's cinema to that point in his career, Profondo Rosso (1975) is distinguished from its predecessors by a relative lack of voice-based figures and narrative elements. Argento does, however, pay attention to sound more generally as an important aspect of the film's hyper-realist aesthetic, in having each each murder scene play to Goblin's intense, progressive rock score, or by announcing the killer's presence diegetically through a nursery rhyme leitmotif.
Argento's next film, Suspiria (1977) is characterised by a shift into an even more intense, anti-realistic aesthetic and outright fantastical subject matter. It is also Argento's first film to feature a female protagonist, Suzy Banner. Significantly, however, she is also positioned very much as a child within the narrative, which sees her travels from the US to Germany to continue her ballet studies at the famous Tanzakademie.x Having arrived, Suzy discovers that the school is home to a coven of witches, led by the sinister Black Queen, Helena Markos. She represents the return of the acousmetre, in a monstrous feminine and more overtly uncanny/fantastical Mabuse type-form. Suzy and fellow student Sarah first encounter Helena on the opposite side of an Oz-like curtain, with Sarah recognising the ancient witch through the distinctive quality of her breathing, a "grain of the voice" that can be attributed to her other identity as Mater Suspiriorum or The Mother of Sighs. Eventually, Suzy manages to locate Helena and, striking at the witch's position after she turns invisible, manages to deacousmatise and kill her at the same time. This in turn causes the other members of Helena's coven, who had previously been cursing Suzy ("Helena: give me power! Away with trouble! Sickness! Death!") to die as the academy erupts into flames; another of those who dies is mute handyman cum assassin Pavlos.xi Suspiria's soundtrack, again by Goblin, also makes notable use of the voice, with the band's keyboard player and vocalist Claudio Simonetti uttering half-subliminal whispers ("There are three witches," "Sickness and perversity") over the circular compositions in a mantra-like manner.
Inferno (1980) continued to elaborate the mythology of the Three Mothers, explicitly linking it with Thomas De Quincey's Confessions of an English Opium Eater (18??), and to explore characters and states beyond those of the "Animal Trilogy". Once again the student protagonist, Marc Elliot, is placed in a child-like position as he attempts to make sense of the mysterious events centring around his sister's disappearance from her New York apartment. It eventually emerges that the building is home to the Mother of Darkness, Mater Tenebrarum. Like her sister in Suspiria she too must be situated within a specific body, which eventually turns out to be that of a friendly-seeming nurse. This nurse, meanwhile, tends to an old, mute man, who it transpires is the architect Varelli, the designer of the apartment block, the Tanzakademie and a third building in Rome for the Mothers, and the author of a volume on them which Marc's sister Rose had been reading prior to her murder. His own lair is hidden with his mistress in the apartment block, from where they secretly observe the other inhabitants and scheme against those who might discover their "filthy secrets". Again, the deacousmatisation of the mother, as she is located within her a body - albeit perhaps one that represents only a temporary home, akin to Lang's possessive Mabuse-spirit - leads to her ambiguous defeat, as Marc escapes the blazing building.
With its allusion to the Mother of Darkness and Rome setting, Tenebre (1982) sounded like a conclusion to Argento's second trilogy. In fact, however, it represented a return, after the two fantasy-horror films preceding it, to more realistic territory, albeit with the same hyper-realist aesthetic. It also represented a return to an adult male protagonist, in the form of giallo author Peter Neale. Travelling to Rome to promote his latest thriller, Neale finds himself threatened by a serial killer who is taking inspiration from his work. Answering critics who call his work sexist and discussing the distinctions between reality and fiction with Inspector Giermani, Neale functions as Argento's own voice within the diegesis to ironically highlight Barthesian distinctions between author and text, that their respective voices should not be conflated.
The denouement sees Neale revealed as an insane killer, who had killed the original maniac, a conservative television presenter, and embarked upon his own campaign of murder. What is significant about this revelation is that it provides for the first "screaming point" in Argento's career, as Neale's girlfriend Anne, responds to the carnage and horror around confronting her by screaming uncontrollably. As an ending, this "screaming point" is less jury-rigged and arbitrary than its counterpart in De Palma's Blow Out. The film and Argento's entire career to 1982 had been building towards this moment. His first four gialli had concentrated on masculine protagonists' experiences and understandings of the world. The two fantasy films that succeeded them had explored different possibilities through child-like figures. Now, with their respective limitations apparent and meaning concomitantly collapsing, the feminine voice was about to be raised.
This essay is dedicated to Oreste Lionello, the Italian dubbing-voice of Woody Allen, and the Godard-like professor in Four Flies on Grey Velvet.
Saturday, 13 December 2008
Another 'genealogical' thought on Deep Red
Another element Deep Red takes and expands upon from Four Flies on Grey Velvet is the importance of theatricality. In Four Flies it is highly significant that the key incident which propels the action forward, the protagonist's confrontation and apparent accidental killing of the man who has been following him around and concomitant assumption of his intended role in his persecutors' psychodrama, should take place in a theatre.
Though it is again a visit to the theatre that puts events in motion here, the investigation also sees the others reconstruct the scene for the absent Marc's benefit, a detail which also reminds us of co-investigator Gianna Brezzi's at times curious role in the proceedings. Does she knows more than she is letting on? Here we can also note the moment when Marc awakens having been rescued from the blazing remains of House of the Screaming Child. To simply there would have been simply too mundane and ignominious an end for Argento, Marc having to know the identity of his nemesis, even if “only at the moment of dying” like Frank in Once Upon a Time in the West
As further emerges with the likes of his unofficial (i.e. Opera) and official adaptations of The Phantom of the Opera, the theatre is fundamentally a haunted place in Argento's universe, with this being expressed here by the solidified / sedimented murderous thoughts Helga detects and the way the camera cranes in dramatically on her as if it were an invisible, assaultive presence.
Though it is again a visit to the theatre that puts events in motion here, the investigation also sees the others reconstruct the scene for the absent Marc's benefit, a detail which also reminds us of co-investigator Gianna Brezzi's at times curious role in the proceedings. Does she knows more than she is letting on? Here we can also note the moment when Marc awakens having been rescued from the blazing remains of House of the Screaming Child. To simply there would have been simply too mundane and ignominious an end for Argento, Marc having to know the identity of his nemesis, even if “only at the moment of dying” like Frank in Once Upon a Time in the West
As further emerges with the likes of his unofficial (i.e. Opera) and official adaptations of The Phantom of the Opera, the theatre is fundamentally a haunted place in Argento's universe, with this being expressed here by the solidified / sedimented murderous thoughts Helga detects and the way the camera cranes in dramatically on her as if it were an invisible, assaultive presence.
Thursday, 2 October 2008
Paper on Opera wot I wrote
Recently I wrote a paper on the theme of haunting in Dario Argento's Opera, which can be found here:
http://forum.llc.ed.ac.uk/issue7/brown.html
It might be a bit theory-heavy compared to the usual posts here, but feel free let me know what you think.
http://forum.llc.ed.ac.uk/issue7/brown.html
It might be a bit theory-heavy compared to the usual posts here, but feel free let me know what you think.
Tuesday, 8 July 2008
Two new Argento books
Two new books on Argento in French, although one, the Jean-Baptiste Thoret one, looks to be an updated edition of a 2002 volume.
More information here:
http://www.amazon.fr/Dario-Argento-Vivien-Villani/dp/8873016170/
http://www.amazon.fr/Dario-Argento-Magicien-Jean-Baptiste-Thoret/dp/2866425197
Wednesday, 4 June 2008
Mother of Tears in Denver
Thanks to Alexis at Trashwire.com for alerting me to screenings of Mother of Tears in Denver, June 27 - July 3.
Details are here: http://www.denverfilm.org/filmcenter/detail.aspx?id=21787
Details are here: http://www.denverfilm.org/filmcenter/detail.aspx?id=21787
Thursday, 22 November 2007
A Cat o' Nine Tails question
How do people understand Braun's murder and the discovery of his body by Manuel and Giordani in Cat o' Nine Tails.
Did Manuel's ex- kill Braun and send Giordani there in the hope of implicating him in the crime, or was Braun killed by Casoni because he knew too much / was a threat?
I guess the vagueness here reflects the way in which throughout the film no-one really knows much about the others' motives, as with the not quite intersecting blackmail and industrial espionage conspiracies; well, that and the need to fit a German guest star into the film for the co-production partners and their krimi audience...
Did Manuel's ex- kill Braun and send Giordani there in the hope of implicating him in the crime, or was Braun killed by Casoni because he knew too much / was a threat?
I guess the vagueness here reflects the way in which throughout the film no-one really knows much about the others' motives, as with the not quite intersecting blackmail and industrial espionage conspiracies; well, that and the need to fit a German guest star into the film for the co-production partners and their krimi audience...
Tuesday, 13 November 2007
Two new acquisitions
The locandina version of this - in this size like this I just thought it was that bit too big
And this
Now all I have to do is get frames...
Friday, 26 October 2007
La Terza madre trailer
Dopo Suspiria, dopo Inferno...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDEaff-gc1g
Mother of Tears
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cmsq1jr8NMw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TOjHDEMQqc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDEaff-gc1g
Mother of Tears
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cmsq1jr8NMw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TOjHDEMQqc
Sunday, 30 September 2007
An Italian / English difference
In his useful summary Italian Cinema 1896-1996, Pierre Sorlin makes the point that Italian and non-Italian audiences not only experience Italian films differently, but also often actually experience different films:
“A movie, once it is dubbed, is a new product, akin to its master and at the same time significantly different from it. Every translation is an invention, the substitution of one sign for another, a new performance of a previous text which, as such, constitutes an original text.” (1996: 11)
A good illustration of this point in Argento's work comes from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and the exchange between Sam Dalmas and Inspector Morisini after the former has just survived an assassination attempt by the gunman, Needles:
In the English version their exchange runs thus:
Morisini: “Do you think you could recognise him?”
Dalmas: “I didn't see his face clearly”
In the Italian version it is different:
Morisini: “Do you think you could recognise him?”
Dalmas: “It's impossible to forget a face like that”
In the English version, is it that Dalmas is increasingly uncertain of the evidence presented by his own eyes? Is it that he is reluctant to tell Morisini the truth, because this may compromise his own investigations? A bit of both? The first interpretation certainly seems to fit with the film's problematic of reversing our perceptual expectations, the most recent example of which the way in which Needles, in his distinctive yellow jacket, was easily recognisable until the moment he entered a room full of identically dressed individuals, at which point Dalmas became the one who stood out; it is also worth noting, however, that the jump cuts within the cut-in on Needles serves to destablise our / Dalmas's vision of the scene, regardless of the dialogue:
Re or de-cadrage; an unstable perception
“A movie, once it is dubbed, is a new product, akin to its master and at the same time significantly different from it. Every translation is an invention, the substitution of one sign for another, a new performance of a previous text which, as such, constitutes an original text.” (1996: 11)
A good illustration of this point in Argento's work comes from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and the exchange between Sam Dalmas and Inspector Morisini after the former has just survived an assassination attempt by the gunman, Needles:
In the English version their exchange runs thus:
Morisini: “Do you think you could recognise him?”
Dalmas: “I didn't see his face clearly”
In the Italian version it is different:
Morisini: “Do you think you could recognise him?”
Dalmas: “It's impossible to forget a face like that”
In the English version, is it that Dalmas is increasingly uncertain of the evidence presented by his own eyes? Is it that he is reluctant to tell Morisini the truth, because this may compromise his own investigations? A bit of both? The first interpretation certainly seems to fit with the film's problematic of reversing our perceptual expectations, the most recent example of which the way in which Needles, in his distinctive yellow jacket, was easily recognisable until the moment he entered a room full of identically dressed individuals, at which point Dalmas became the one who stood out; it is also worth noting, however, that the jump cuts within the cut-in on Needles serves to destablise our / Dalmas's vision of the scene, regardless of the dialogue:
Re or de-cadrage; an unstable perception
Friday, 21 September 2007
List of Argento books
Found whilst searching for a graphic of the I colori del buio book: a listing of books on Argento and related topics, in Italian.
http://www.darioargentoproject.com/livresitaliens.htm
http://www.darioargentoproject.com/livresitaliens.htm
Sunday, 22 July 2007
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