Managed to get the Plucked one on Ebay; now want the other one to go alongside it and the Italian locandina
Showing posts with label Giulio Questi. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Giulio Questi. Show all posts
Tuesday, 19 June 2012
A couple of Death Laid an Egg posters
Two US one-sheets for Giulio Questi and Franco Arcalli's Death Laid an Egg, one under the original title and the other as Plucked.
Managed to get the Plucked one on Ebay; now want the other one to go alongside it and the Italian locandina
Managed to get the Plucked one on Ebay; now want the other one to go alongside it and the Italian locandina
Tuesday, 6 October 2009
Arcana
Is there anyone out there who has a copy of Guilio Questi's Arcana? If so, please get in touch.
Tuesday, 15 September 2009
Thesis work #1
Paola Marrati – Gilles Deleuze: Cinema and Philosophy (2008)
Paola Marrati’s key idea is that the Cinema books are as concerned with politics as aesthetics. In particular, they introducing new ideas of action and agency that Deleuze would further develop in What is Philosophy? – a book that, significantly, takes up the question and its title from the closing lines of Cinema 2 (x, 89).
Within What is Philosophy, co-authored with Guattari, Deleuze develops a notion of immanence diverging from that found in earlier works, such as Difference and Repetition. In these, Deleuze had characterised immanence as a marginal tradition, practiced by occasional figures like Duns Scotus, Spinoza and Nietzsche. In What is Philosophy? he argues that immanence is in fact more prevalent, but that the historically tendency for it to be subordinated time and again to transcendence has prevented us from seeing this (90-91).
Relating this back to the Cinema books, Marrati emphasises that the idea of immanence is also central to the notion of the time-image advanced in Cinema 2, such that filmmakers in the post-war period were (asymptotically) in advance of their philosopher and political theorist counterparts (xv).
This claim is founded upon a series of distinctions between the movement-image and the time-image, which might be summarised as follows: The movement-image cinema was based upon 19th century understandings that were transcendental and historicist. Filmmakers such as Griffith and Eisenstein believed in a world to come and the effectiveness of human agency, as epitomised by the sensory motor schema of the action-image and the large SAS’ form, to actualise this world. Compared to these common elements the differences between them, of Griffith’s emphasis upon the individual and the US as Christian utopia, and Eisenstein’s emphasis upon the collective and the USSR as Communist utopia, were unimportant:
If Griffith and Eisenstein privilege the active form of montage, it is because they share a faith in human agency and in history. However different their conceptions of history might be, they share the belief that history is made through humans’ actions, and in this respect it matters little whether what triggers the events is the passions of a traitor, the love of a woman, or class struggle. The form of classical cinema – American cinema, doubtless, but not only American – is constructed around the action-image. (51)
Belief in transcendence, historical telos and the efficacy of human action were then shattered by the Second World War, clearing the way for the emergence of the time-image cinema based upon immanence. The breakdown of the action-image and the concomitant emergence of the seer, the long take and other new figures and concepts in the time-image allowed filmmakers to explore new ways of thinking about our place in this world: “The greatness of the filmmakers of time is that they were able to create other livable [sic] configurations of thought in images themselves; this is how they attained a force comparable to the now failing force of the action-image.” (79)
Though Marrati does not specifically mention him, there are possible affinities here with Siegfried Kracauer’s (1960) notion of cinema as the “redemption of physical reality,” albeit taking place within a specifically time-image understanding of ‘reality’.
More important for my purposes, however, is to relate Marrati’s reading of Deleuze to modernity and post-modernity. The issues here is that, like Deleuze, Marrati uses the former term but not the latter. I would contend, however, that her analysis, as it implicates a single meta-narrative within the movement-image followed by a multiplicity of language games within the time-image, can be understood in postmodern terms. What we have, that is, are a ‘classical’ cinema of the movement-image which is (19th century) ‘modern’ insofar as it believes in a transcendent Truth and a ‘modern’ cinema of the time-image which is (post World War II) ‘postmodern’ insofar as it denies this in favour of immanence and localised, performative, contingent truths.
Relating Maretti’s analysis to my filmmakers would seem to have differing implications. Leone,
as an Italian pessimist sceptical about the “American dream,” would seem presents an obvious modern/postmodern/time-image counterpart to the classical/movement-image John Ford, with his optimistic belief in this dream.
While Ford himself admittedly became more questioning of the US utopia in his later films such as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”) and Cheyenne Autumn, it is significant that these were the films Leone felt came closer to his own understanding of the west. As Neil Campbell (2008) summarises Leone’s remarks on Once Upon a Time in the West:
My version of the story of the birth of a nation” acted by “the most worn-out of stereotypes: the pushy whore, the romantic bandit, the avenger, the killer who is about to become a businessman, the industrialist who uses the methods of a bandit. These “worn-out” figures exit the stage to leave the whore to be transformed and transforming, to symbolize this “birth” of a new nation and the end of another world—“the beginning of a world without balls,” […]The “ancient race” (as the film calls them) of mythic men linked in chains of brutality is “worn-out”
As I will also argue Leone’s ‘America’ trilogy thereby provide different, immanent, alternatives to a faith in a transcendent utopia.
For Argento’s gialli thrillers the obvious point of comparison is Antonioni’s anti-gialli, most notably Blow-Up. The apparent problem here, besides the near-unassailable position of Antonioni as one of the masters of the time-image/postmodernist cinema, is that Argento’s films tend to present a re-engagement with action following a period of becoming seer: Whereas Blow-Up’s Thomas is witness to a murder and proves unable to act, his Deep Red double/virtual image Marcus (both characters being played by the same actor, David Hemmings) resolves to solve the case and as such becomes (something of) an agent again. Argento’s own journalistic criticism of Blow-Up, as Antonioni’s “abandonment” of his “duty” towards the audience, is instructive: The two filmmakers would seem implicated in different language games here. Blow-Up suggests a lack of faith in any truth (there is no body and thus no murder...), Deep Red a faith in a “will to truth” (there was murder, as demonstrated by this body...). The point, of course, is that Antonioni and Argento’s language games can only be judged in their own (performative) terms, of what works best in their particular contexts, not by some universal criteria. What worked for Antonioni’s arthouse audience (along with the mass audience brought in by the promise of a flash of pubic hair, as first for 1967; we must not forget the exploitation cinema and its configurations of "sex and violence") was not necessarily what worked for Argento’s crossover audience in 1975.
Crucially Marrati also suggests that the time-image itself allows for action, so long as it was sufficiently considered, rather than automatic, and geared towards immanence rather than utopia:
It is not out of passivity, powerlessness, or resignation that one is no longer capable of immediately and “appropriately” responding to a given situation or event. It is quite the opposite: the response is suspended because one has become aware that certain actions are powerless. Habits of conduct, patterns of behaviour, are deemed to express weakness or strength, love or contempt, indignation or revolt. Not to engage in the appropriate response, not to express the appropriate affect may seem to imply passivity, or worse. Deleuze’s point, though, is that sometimes, perhaps even often, “acting in the appropriate way” is precisely the lack of response and the refusal to acknowledge our helplessness. (xii)
The issue then becomes that of interpretation, of one filmmaker’s time-image formulation against that of another, alongside the point at which a refusal to act, or the apparent inaction, paradoxically itself constitutes a form of action.
In Leone’s cinema we may think, for example, of Noodles’ refusal to accept the role of assassin-avenger than Max assigns him in Once Upon a Time in America, and of whether this refusal occurs in actuality or virtuality. We might also consider the likes of Dr Villega’s refusal to jump from the explosives-loaded train in Duck You Sucker, despite the forgiving Sean’s imploring that he do so, along with the alternatives of desperately trying to escape versus stoically facing death that are presented to other revolutionaries as they face firing squad. In Questi’s cinema, meanwhile, we might think of the passivity of Tomas Milian’s unnamed protagonist in Django Kill, his refusal to act for gold/dollars or revenge, as would conventionally provide the spaghetti western protagonist, as seen in Leone’s films, amongst others, with ample motivation. (Perhaps Deleuze’s anti-phenomenological, post-modern, existentialism does not provide us with the clear guide to action that Sartre’s ‘no excuses’ phenomenological, modern, existentialism did? The limit situation of facing an executioner, of giving a gaze of defiance or attempting to escape at the likely cost of others’ lives, would presumably represent the test case here.) This combination of classical movement-image generic situation, that Django Kill is a western which should present a clear SAS’ narrative as Milian’s character gets his revenge and/or the gold, followed by a time-image development, as he passively observes, might also help explain the film’s and Questi’s marginality relative to Leone and Argento: As a postmodernist avant la lettre who refused the high/low, art/popular, time-image/movement-image binaries still extant in a structuralist 1960s, Questi made films which confounded audiences on both sides of each binary. Leone and Argento by contrast were less extreme in their images and more adroit at performing a balancing act on these either/or binaries.
Related to this, the problem is perhaps that we cannot use postmodern in brackets: If we say ‘postmodern’, in whatever formulation, we immediately bring into play a set of assumptions about what this ‘postmodern’ is, with these inevitably defined positively or negatively in relation to the ‘modern’. We lack a vocabulary which is both/and or neither/nor, that something may be ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’, or neither of these, depending on how we define our terms. In relation to Deleuze’s Cinema theories, this is compounded by his movement-image/time-image distinction, as one which he identifies as being about the ‘classical’ and ‘modern’ cinema rather than, for example, the ‘modern’ (1920s) and the ‘neo-modern’ (1960s), as in Orr (1993).
[Let me know if you want more, as I can happily post one or two thousand words a day of this stuff; apart from anything else I would like comments from the ordinary and academic audiences.]
Paola Marrati’s key idea is that the Cinema books are as concerned with politics as aesthetics. In particular, they introducing new ideas of action and agency that Deleuze would further develop in What is Philosophy? – a book that, significantly, takes up the question and its title from the closing lines of Cinema 2 (x, 89).
Within What is Philosophy, co-authored with Guattari, Deleuze develops a notion of immanence diverging from that found in earlier works, such as Difference and Repetition. In these, Deleuze had characterised immanence as a marginal tradition, practiced by occasional figures like Duns Scotus, Spinoza and Nietzsche. In What is Philosophy? he argues that immanence is in fact more prevalent, but that the historically tendency for it to be subordinated time and again to transcendence has prevented us from seeing this (90-91).
Relating this back to the Cinema books, Marrati emphasises that the idea of immanence is also central to the notion of the time-image advanced in Cinema 2, such that filmmakers in the post-war period were (asymptotically) in advance of their philosopher and political theorist counterparts (xv).
This claim is founded upon a series of distinctions between the movement-image and the time-image, which might be summarised as follows: The movement-image cinema was based upon 19th century understandings that were transcendental and historicist. Filmmakers such as Griffith and Eisenstein believed in a world to come and the effectiveness of human agency, as epitomised by the sensory motor schema of the action-image and the large SAS’ form, to actualise this world. Compared to these common elements the differences between them, of Griffith’s emphasis upon the individual and the US as Christian utopia, and Eisenstein’s emphasis upon the collective and the USSR as Communist utopia, were unimportant:
If Griffith and Eisenstein privilege the active form of montage, it is because they share a faith in human agency and in history. However different their conceptions of history might be, they share the belief that history is made through humans’ actions, and in this respect it matters little whether what triggers the events is the passions of a traitor, the love of a woman, or class struggle. The form of classical cinema – American cinema, doubtless, but not only American – is constructed around the action-image. (51)
Belief in transcendence, historical telos and the efficacy of human action were then shattered by the Second World War, clearing the way for the emergence of the time-image cinema based upon immanence. The breakdown of the action-image and the concomitant emergence of the seer, the long take and other new figures and concepts in the time-image allowed filmmakers to explore new ways of thinking about our place in this world: “The greatness of the filmmakers of time is that they were able to create other livable [sic] configurations of thought in images themselves; this is how they attained a force comparable to the now failing force of the action-image.” (79)
Though Marrati does not specifically mention him, there are possible affinities here with Siegfried Kracauer’s (1960) notion of cinema as the “redemption of physical reality,” albeit taking place within a specifically time-image understanding of ‘reality’.
More important for my purposes, however, is to relate Marrati’s reading of Deleuze to modernity and post-modernity. The issues here is that, like Deleuze, Marrati uses the former term but not the latter. I would contend, however, that her analysis, as it implicates a single meta-narrative within the movement-image followed by a multiplicity of language games within the time-image, can be understood in postmodern terms. What we have, that is, are a ‘classical’ cinema of the movement-image which is (19th century) ‘modern’ insofar as it believes in a transcendent Truth and a ‘modern’ cinema of the time-image which is (post World War II) ‘postmodern’ insofar as it denies this in favour of immanence and localised, performative, contingent truths.
Relating Maretti’s analysis to my filmmakers would seem to have differing implications. Leone,
as an Italian pessimist sceptical about the “American dream,” would seem presents an obvious modern/postmodern/time-image counterpart to the classical/movement-image John Ford, with his optimistic belief in this dream.
While Ford himself admittedly became more questioning of the US utopia in his later films such as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (“This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”) and Cheyenne Autumn, it is significant that these were the films Leone felt came closer to his own understanding of the west. As Neil Campbell (2008) summarises Leone’s remarks on Once Upon a Time in the West:
My version of the story of the birth of a nation” acted by “the most worn-out of stereotypes: the pushy whore, the romantic bandit, the avenger, the killer who is about to become a businessman, the industrialist who uses the methods of a bandit. These “worn-out” figures exit the stage to leave the whore to be transformed and transforming, to symbolize this “birth” of a new nation and the end of another world—“the beginning of a world without balls,” […]The “ancient race” (as the film calls them) of mythic men linked in chains of brutality is “worn-out”
As I will also argue Leone’s ‘America’ trilogy thereby provide different, immanent, alternatives to a faith in a transcendent utopia.
For Argento’s gialli thrillers the obvious point of comparison is Antonioni’s anti-gialli, most notably Blow-Up. The apparent problem here, besides the near-unassailable position of Antonioni as one of the masters of the time-image/postmodernist cinema, is that Argento’s films tend to present a re-engagement with action following a period of becoming seer: Whereas Blow-Up’s Thomas is witness to a murder and proves unable to act, his Deep Red double/virtual image Marcus (both characters being played by the same actor, David Hemmings) resolves to solve the case and as such becomes (something of) an agent again. Argento’s own journalistic criticism of Blow-Up, as Antonioni’s “abandonment” of his “duty” towards the audience, is instructive: The two filmmakers would seem implicated in different language games here. Blow-Up suggests a lack of faith in any truth (there is no body and thus no murder...), Deep Red a faith in a “will to truth” (there was murder, as demonstrated by this body...). The point, of course, is that Antonioni and Argento’s language games can only be judged in their own (performative) terms, of what works best in their particular contexts, not by some universal criteria. What worked for Antonioni’s arthouse audience (along with the mass audience brought in by the promise of a flash of pubic hair, as first for 1967; we must not forget the exploitation cinema and its configurations of "sex and violence") was not necessarily what worked for Argento’s crossover audience in 1975.
Crucially Marrati also suggests that the time-image itself allows for action, so long as it was sufficiently considered, rather than automatic, and geared towards immanence rather than utopia:
It is not out of passivity, powerlessness, or resignation that one is no longer capable of immediately and “appropriately” responding to a given situation or event. It is quite the opposite: the response is suspended because one has become aware that certain actions are powerless. Habits of conduct, patterns of behaviour, are deemed to express weakness or strength, love or contempt, indignation or revolt. Not to engage in the appropriate response, not to express the appropriate affect may seem to imply passivity, or worse. Deleuze’s point, though, is that sometimes, perhaps even often, “acting in the appropriate way” is precisely the lack of response and the refusal to acknowledge our helplessness. (xii)
The issue then becomes that of interpretation, of one filmmaker’s time-image formulation against that of another, alongside the point at which a refusal to act, or the apparent inaction, paradoxically itself constitutes a form of action.
In Leone’s cinema we may think, for example, of Noodles’ refusal to accept the role of assassin-avenger than Max assigns him in Once Upon a Time in America, and of whether this refusal occurs in actuality or virtuality. We might also consider the likes of Dr Villega’s refusal to jump from the explosives-loaded train in Duck You Sucker, despite the forgiving Sean’s imploring that he do so, along with the alternatives of desperately trying to escape versus stoically facing death that are presented to other revolutionaries as they face firing squad. In Questi’s cinema, meanwhile, we might think of the passivity of Tomas Milian’s unnamed protagonist in Django Kill, his refusal to act for gold/dollars or revenge, as would conventionally provide the spaghetti western protagonist, as seen in Leone’s films, amongst others, with ample motivation. (Perhaps Deleuze’s anti-phenomenological, post-modern, existentialism does not provide us with the clear guide to action that Sartre’s ‘no excuses’ phenomenological, modern, existentialism did? The limit situation of facing an executioner, of giving a gaze of defiance or attempting to escape at the likely cost of others’ lives, would presumably represent the test case here.) This combination of classical movement-image generic situation, that Django Kill is a western which should present a clear SAS’ narrative as Milian’s character gets his revenge and/or the gold, followed by a time-image development, as he passively observes, might also help explain the film’s and Questi’s marginality relative to Leone and Argento: As a postmodernist avant la lettre who refused the high/low, art/popular, time-image/movement-image binaries still extant in a structuralist 1960s, Questi made films which confounded audiences on both sides of each binary. Leone and Argento by contrast were less extreme in their images and more adroit at performing a balancing act on these either/or binaries.
Related to this, the problem is perhaps that we cannot use postmodern in brackets: If we say ‘postmodern’, in whatever formulation, we immediately bring into play a set of assumptions about what this ‘postmodern’ is, with these inevitably defined positively or negatively in relation to the ‘modern’. We lack a vocabulary which is both/and or neither/nor, that something may be ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’, or neither of these, depending on how we define our terms. In relation to Deleuze’s Cinema theories, this is compounded by his movement-image/time-image distinction, as one which he identifies as being about the ‘classical’ and ‘modern’ cinema rather than, for example, the ‘modern’ (1920s) and the ‘neo-modern’ (1960s), as in Orr (1993).
[Let me know if you want more, as I can happily post one or two thousand words a day of this stuff; apart from anything else I would like comments from the ordinary and academic audiences.]
Tuesday, 10 February 2009
Col cuore in gola / With Heart in Mouth / Dead stop - Le coeur aux lèvres / Deadly Sweet / En cinquième vitesse / I am What I Am
What are the chances: two avant-garde gialli, sharing the same core cast of Jean-Louis Trintignant and Ewa Aulin, being released in the same year?
But if it's inevitable that some comparisons are thus drawn between Death Laid and Egg and With Heart in Mouth, the two films are also distinct enough to also warrant consideration in their own right.
Whereas Questi's film has a small town / rural setting, Brass's is set in swinging London, a location that server to foreground its indebtedness to Blow Up even before we get a photo-shoot turned nude romp scene; a shot of a poster for Antonioni's film, and the actual quotation of the director's words on colour and modern consciousness in relation to The Red Desert.
Then there is the narrative approach taken by the two films. Death Laid an Egg is the more detached, with the viewer being placed on the outside as an observer on the four central characters and their various conspiracies with and against one another. With Heart in Mouth is more conventional, with the viewer being placed with Trintignant's protagonist, Bernard, as he investigates a murder-mystery.
This mystery is also conventionally embodied in the person of a woman, namely Aulin's character, Jane Burroughs. We are first introduced to her, her half-brother Jerome and their (step-)mother in the pre-credits sequence as they identify Jane’s father, the apparent victim of a hit-and-run.
The narrative ‘proper’ starts later, as Bernard and Jane encounter one another in a nightclub, following which Bernard discovers the body of its owner, Mr Prescott and Jane, who proclaims her innocence of the crime.
Doing the heroic cum fall guy thing, Bernard rescues Jane from Prescott’s men and thus finds himself in turn pursued by them– including a cigar-chomping dwarf and a guy with a penchant for Nazi uniforms – and generally wondering what he has gotten himself into…
So too might the viewer, as Brass uses a dazzling array of techniques including ultra-rapid fire montage editing; multiple split screens; seemingly random shifts from colour to black and white; incorporation of newsreel and documentary footage, the latter showcasing a wide gamut of London culture, subculture and counterculture of the time; pop-art graphics and comic book intertitles (some drawn by Guido Crepax); colour filters; mirror-based compositions; extreme spaghetti western style close-ups; Godardian jump cuts; quotations from Lao Tse and Mao; frames within frames; accelerated motion; self-referential remarks from Bernard/Trintignant about being an actor, and just about anything else you care to think of.
Unfortunately it’s also a case of less is more when compared to Death Laid an Egg. Though Questi’s film also indulged in some of the above, most notably through co-author Franco Arcalli’s jarring editing, the general impression one got there was of something which had actually been thought through, where form and content were intertwined in a chiasmatic, poetic manner.
Here, by contrast, it seems like Brass has simply opted to throw everything he can at the screen in the hope that some of it sticks.
Undoubtedly some of it does and the results are always interesting to look at, if ultimately something approaching “a tale of sound and fury, told by a madman, signifying nothing.”
Still, Brass’s enthusiasm, energy and courage are to be commended, along with his admirable lack of pretense, that sense that he isn’t taking it too seriously and that it would thus be wrong for the critic to do so.
But, again, Death Laid an Egg proves the more successful film here. To invoke some other filmmakers – and ones who obviously influenced the directors – it is as if Brass is doing black comedy via Godard, with the results feeling somewhat forced, whereas Questi and Arcalli are doing comparable grotesqueries via Bunuel, with the results more natural(istic).
And then there is the music: whereas Questi and Arcalli’s film has a suitably avant-garde score by Bruno Maderna, Brass opts for jazz rock with Hammond organ freakouts, generally deployed in a relatively unironic way.
Not that in itself the music is bad, being by none other than Armando Trovajoli. Nevertheless, that he is the father of Italian film music rather than an out-and-out modernist composer again suggests a relative willingness to compromise, even if a precedent here could also be discerned by comparing the unsettling sounds of Giovanni Fusco on Antonioni’s The Red Desert with the rather more audience and market-friendly ones of Herbie Hancock and The Yardbirds on Blow Up.
Still, it’s all good music, if we want to invoke the only distinction that arguably matters…
In sum, a frustrating yet rewarding experience that, alas, isn’t quite as rewarding as its closest counterpart but which can still be recommended to anyone still uncertain of whether the giallo film could be art.
Tuesday, 29 May 2007
La Donna del lago / The Lady in the Lake
Following a terse telephone call to his girlfriend in which he tells her they can no longer be together, writer Bernard retreats to an isolated, perpetually gray and windswept town dominated by the lake at its centre – hardly the kind of place to go get away from it all.
Requesting the same room as last year from the hotel manager, it soon becomes apparent that Bernard has unfinished business in the place in the form of hotel chambermaid Tilde. The sight of her coat triggers pleasant memories – think Proustian madeleine – but she herself proves to be curiously, conspicuously absent in the flesh.
Bernard's inquiries as to her whereabouts produce non-committal answers from the hotel manager that sustain his dreams, until the town chemist, a hunchback, reveals the truth – Tilde is dead, an apparent suicide drowned in the lake.
Haunted by this revelation of loss, Bernard has the sense that something about it does not ring true. The Tilde he remembers was vivacious, hardly inclined to suicide. Digging deeper against the marked hostility of most of the townsfolk, but aided by the hunchback – who may of course have an agenda all of his own – Bernard gradually unearths the truth about his lost love and what befell her...
The graveyard in the woods
During the interregnum between Bava's Blood and Black Lace and Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage a number of directors tried their hands at the giallo. Most approached it squarely as a popular genre, seeking to put a new yellow gloss on old noir and Hitchcock models. A few however veered into more modernist and arthouse territory, most notably Luigi Bazzoni and Franco Rossellini here and Giulio Questi – who actually also has a co-writing credit – with Death Laid an Egg.
The funeral procession
Unlike Antonioni's more determinedly anti-giallo Blow Up from the same period, 1966-1967, these are, however, films which have never received much attention from the critical establishment, with what recognition there exists coming from some of more adventurous and discerning cult scholars like Craig Ledbetter and Adrian Luther-Smith and his Italian collaborators.
Examples of the Bazzoni and Rossellini's absolute control over their medium - everything is in here, with a purpose
If then, to paraphrase Ledbetter, Death Laid an Egg is Godard had directed a giallo while on acid, La Donna del lago / Lady in the Lake might be similarly glossed as the filone's riposte to Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad with a soupçon of Dreyer's Vampyr thrown in. In other words, it's a challenge to the unprepared viewer in its refusal to provide any easy ontology of images / clues with past, present, real and imaginary states co-existing on the same plane and intermingling seamlessly.
A black glove moment in a non-black glove example of the form
Although the film-makers use the voice-over extensively in adapting what one assumes must have been a relatively interior source novel by Giovanni Comisso the device never feels heavy-handed. Rather, what Bernard does not say / think proves as important as what he does, with both also contributing to the totality of a mise-en-scene with which what we don't see at all or are given a partial view of are as important / significant as anything else.
Note, for instance, the parallel between the opening shots of Bernard, back to us and mirrored in the glass so as to be almost a ghostly superimposition, and of the figure he sees wearing Tilde's distinctive chequered coat through a shop window.
Through / in a glass, darkly
Or take the way in which the vital reason behind Tilde's disappearance and the silence surrounding it is revealed not by one of the photographs Bernard scrutinises endlessly but by the hunchback's suggestively negative image of her, against which the two men are then themselves almost silhouetted.
The rhetoric of the image
Or the distaste that Bernard develops for the fish he is served – fish from the lake that trigger too many uncomfortable thoughts, poisoned as they are by Tilde's death.
An astonishingly beautiful and rich film that rewards every viewing with new subtleties and nuances, La Donna del lago lives up to its billing in Luther-Smith's Blood and Black Lace book as “a masterpiece” and demonstrates once more just what could be done with the form if more serious critics and popular audiences were willing to truly attempt to engage without prejudice.
Thanks to Paul for enabling me to see this rare classic, and for doing such a good job on the subtitles as well.
Requesting the same room as last year from the hotel manager, it soon becomes apparent that Bernard has unfinished business in the place in the form of hotel chambermaid Tilde. The sight of her coat triggers pleasant memories – think Proustian madeleine – but she herself proves to be curiously, conspicuously absent in the flesh.
Bernard's inquiries as to her whereabouts produce non-committal answers from the hotel manager that sustain his dreams, until the town chemist, a hunchback, reveals the truth – Tilde is dead, an apparent suicide drowned in the lake.
Haunted by this revelation of loss, Bernard has the sense that something about it does not ring true. The Tilde he remembers was vivacious, hardly inclined to suicide. Digging deeper against the marked hostility of most of the townsfolk, but aided by the hunchback – who may of course have an agenda all of his own – Bernard gradually unearths the truth about his lost love and what befell her...
The graveyard in the woods
During the interregnum between Bava's Blood and Black Lace and Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage a number of directors tried their hands at the giallo. Most approached it squarely as a popular genre, seeking to put a new yellow gloss on old noir and Hitchcock models. A few however veered into more modernist and arthouse territory, most notably Luigi Bazzoni and Franco Rossellini here and Giulio Questi – who actually also has a co-writing credit – with Death Laid an Egg.
The funeral procession
Unlike Antonioni's more determinedly anti-giallo Blow Up from the same period, 1966-1967, these are, however, films which have never received much attention from the critical establishment, with what recognition there exists coming from some of more adventurous and discerning cult scholars like Craig Ledbetter and Adrian Luther-Smith and his Italian collaborators.
Examples of the Bazzoni and Rossellini's absolute control over their medium - everything is in here, with a purpose
If then, to paraphrase Ledbetter, Death Laid an Egg is Godard had directed a giallo while on acid, La Donna del lago / Lady in the Lake might be similarly glossed as the filone's riposte to Resnais's Last Year at Marienbad with a soupçon of Dreyer's Vampyr thrown in. In other words, it's a challenge to the unprepared viewer in its refusal to provide any easy ontology of images / clues with past, present, real and imaginary states co-existing on the same plane and intermingling seamlessly.
A black glove moment in a non-black glove example of the form
Although the film-makers use the voice-over extensively in adapting what one assumes must have been a relatively interior source novel by Giovanni Comisso the device never feels heavy-handed. Rather, what Bernard does not say / think proves as important as what he does, with both also contributing to the totality of a mise-en-scene with which what we don't see at all or are given a partial view of are as important / significant as anything else.
Note, for instance, the parallel between the opening shots of Bernard, back to us and mirrored in the glass so as to be almost a ghostly superimposition, and of the figure he sees wearing Tilde's distinctive chequered coat through a shop window.
Through / in a glass, darkly
Or take the way in which the vital reason behind Tilde's disappearance and the silence surrounding it is revealed not by one of the photographs Bernard scrutinises endlessly but by the hunchback's suggestively negative image of her, against which the two men are then themselves almost silhouetted.
The rhetoric of the image
Or the distaste that Bernard develops for the fish he is served – fish from the lake that trigger too many uncomfortable thoughts, poisoned as they are by Tilde's death.
An astonishingly beautiful and rich film that rewards every viewing with new subtleties and nuances, La Donna del lago lives up to its billing in Luther-Smith's Blood and Black Lace book as “a masterpiece” and demonstrates once more just what could be done with the form if more serious critics and popular audiences were willing to truly attempt to engage without prejudice.
Thanks to Paul for enabling me to see this rare classic, and for doing such a good job on the subtitles as well.
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