The Serial Killer in an Italian Context

One of the more contentious aspects of Mikel J. Koven's reading of the giallo film is the question of whether the concept of the serial killer is relevant in the Italian context. It was thus interesting to happen across this Dario Argento presentation, originally published in physical form in the mid-1990s:

Film, Folklore and Urban Legends - some thoughts

In Mikel Koven's latest book, Film, Folklore and Urban Legends, he applies folkloristic methods and readings to a variety of films including The Wicker Man, the zombie film and Weekend at Bernies and its sequel.

As a book for the folklorist, I found it relatively hard going compared to his more film studies based analysis of the giallo as a vernacular cinema, though his references to Walter Ong's work provide something of route in.

In again referencing Ong, I think Koven also inadvertently point to one of the differences between the Argento giallo and many of its imitators, namely the extent to which we can engage with the text multiple times:

'Films that demand rewatching, rewinding, and replaying are more “literary” in that in order to experience the narrative to its fullest, one needs to understand its overall structure. From a literary perspective, this demand is more “sophisticated,” more like “quality literature.”'

Again, however, this is also something which makes the Argento text less vernacular, or at least more open to different reading strategies. It also, I think, points to a difference between the more successful early Argento gialli – here I would include The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, Deep Red and Tenebre – and the less satisfactory Cat o' Nine Tails. This is that Cat lacks many moments that require a re-reading or re-viewing in the same way as Bird's Gallery scene or Peter Neal's remarks in Tenebre.

As to the book itself, I found the chapter on The Wicker Man to be more successful than that on the zombie film, largely because the former is clearer in its focus.

Koven emphasises the way in which, in using J G Fraser's The Golden Bough, or at least a specific earlier version of it, as the source for The Wicker Man's mythology, Schaffer and Hardy took second-hand conjectures and commentary as truth. The result is something unsatisfactory from a folkloristic perspective, even if it may make for good cinema. Whilst there is perhaps nothing particularly revelatory here, inasmuch as the combination of pagan – or neo-pagan – practices depicted within the film has long been recognised as somewhat syncretic, Koven's analysis is impressive in its specifics and detail.

The chapter on the zombie film, by comparison, seems to suffer somewhat from an uncertainty over exactly what the zombie is and represents, specifically around the distinction between the traditional voodoo zombie and the Romero / post-Romero flesh eater, and what seems an – admittedly necessarily – selective reading of the corpus of films.

In a way, however, this also emerges as part of the point when we also consider Koven's analysis of the Weekend at Bernies films. It is more convincing in showing the value of Koven's vernacular approach when dealing with genuinely vernacular cinema that lacks a degree of self-consciousness about what it is doing. To put it another way, whereas Fulci and his collaborators on Zombie likely had voodoo in mind as a means of distinguishing their film from Romero's – even if maybe somewhat post-hoc and selectively, depending on who was asking – the authors of Weekend at Bernies were operating at a less conscious level, using folkloristic tropes without necessarily being aware of so doing.

An interesting read thus far...

Flaneur / Detective / Analyst

One of the topics that Mikel Koven discusses in La Dolce Morte is whether the amateur detective of the giallo might also be considered as a flâneur. Koven suggests that in reading the flâneur as a detective its most influential 20th century theorist, Walter Benjamin, unfortunately tended to move from the metaphorical – the flâneur is like a detective – to the literal – the flaneur is a detective. Moreover, many of those who have subsequently taken up Benjamin's theories have failed to recognise this crucial distinction.

This got me thinking about another favourite – and perhaps more common – comparison, that between the detective and the psychoanalyst, or the detective-as-analyst and the analyst-as-detective, raised by Gary Needham in his giallo primer and deployed in a more thoroughgoing manner by Xavier Mendik in his monograph on Tenebre.

There, seeking to explain hostile critical reactions to Argento's film, Mendik posits that the problems with Dario Argento's film are not so much on the surface, such as its alleged misogyny and spectacular representations of “violence against women”, but more with its deeper structures. Specifically, the film embodies what he terms “deviant detection” by invoking the ratiocinative classical detective model in a giallo world where it ceases to apply, thereby misleading (mainstream) viewers and critics and incurring their hostility.

Mendik's argument is based heavily on psychoanalytic theory, particularly Slavoj Zizek and Jacques Lacan, and the comparisons they have made between the role of the detective and their own as analyst, in their readings of Edgar Allan Poe's The Purloined Letter and Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes in relation to Freud's “Wolf Man” case respectively. As Mendik explains:

“[T]he analyst's adoption of the role of detective, scrutinising the clues that will reconstitute totality and meaning to a scene, is pertinent. Both the detective and the analyst are forced to piece together the truth from a series of fragments or clues which predate the investigation and point to a criminal or transgressive act that has been (unsuccessfully) concealed in the past.”

What seems, to me, to be lacking here is not just an adequate awareness of the recognition that we might be dealing with a metaphoric description rather than a reality, but also – ironically – how the specifics of giallo film detection complicate the detective-analyst analogy.

Though Tenebre foregrounds “deviant detection” to a greater extent than most gialli – although Renato Polselli's Delirium would certainly give it a run for its money, in having three murderers; one of whom, an analyst himself, is actually also aiding the police in their investigations – it is not an isolated case. As the paradigmatic giallo detective is an amateur who finds personally involved with a case that continues to develop as he investigates - i.e. further crimes are committed – Mendik's “deviant” seems more like “the norm”. Put another way, the giallo film seems to have more in common with the hard boiled world of film noir than it does that of classical Poe/Holmes style mysteries.

In the end, somehow one doubts that a figure like Four Flies on Grey Velvet's Roberto Tobias is an ideal self-portrait / mirror image for the detective-analyst. But, of course, in psychoanalytic theory any recognition of oneself in the mirror is also a misrecognition. I just think that's also what's happened with the detective-as-analyst in the Italian giallo...

The electrocardiogram and the attraction

Another useful thing in Koven's study, which he quotes by way of Christopher Wagstaff's work on the Italian western, is Anthony Mann's critique of their “electrocardiogram” dynamics:

“The shoot-outs every five minute reveal the director's fear that the audience get bored because they do not have a character to follow. In a tale you may not put more than five or six minutes of 'suspense': the diagram of the emotions must be ascending and not a kind of electrocardiogram for a clinical case”

What Mann was perhaps not aware of, however, was the way in which Italian westerns would sometimes be re-edited by their international distributors. Thus, for instance, whereas the Italian La Resa dei conti runs 105 minutes, its English counterpart The Big Gundown runs only 84. This is also evident with many Italian thriller and horror films, with one of the most striking examples here actually being Argento's own Profondo Rosso. Alan Jones notes how Nick Alexander, the man responsible for preparing the English-language versions of countless genre films over the course of more than 30 years, argued with the director that his edit of the film, running over two hours, was too long for English audiences and markets. While the film was never releated theatrically in the UK, its US version, with the more exploitative and less enigmatic title of The Deep Red Hatchet Murders, only ran 98 minutes, suggestive of Alexander's commercial imperatives outweighing Argento's artistic ones. Perhaps tellingly, Argento's subsequent film Suspiria – still his greatest box-office success worldwide – runs around 98 minutes in all its versions, with only minor variations due to national censorship / classification standards.

What is also interesting here, beyond demonstrating that different vernacular audiences would often be given different films tailored to their specific tastes and interests, is that the Italian versions were also often the longer ones, perhaps implying more of a balance between action, spectacle and set pieces on the one hand and plot, character and conventional narrative on the other.

Perhaps more important for my own purposes, however, is the way in which this electrocardiogram approach might be related to the “cinema of attractions”, in which the experiential dimension of a pre-reflective Piercean “firstness“ or the phenomenological “natural attitude” that things are what they appear to be unless and until demonstrated otherwise, are paramount. Here is is also worth recalling what John Carpenter says about Halloween – a film he acknowledges as having been strongly influenced by Suspiria – functioning like a "rollercoaster" and the line of descent that this suggests from the early "cinema of attractions" through to the assaultive "attraction"/"repulsion" shock tactics of the Soviet montage filmmakers and the Surrealists (Eisenstein, for instance, wanting to glue spectators into their seats, while Artaud fantasised settings of bombs beneath them) all the way to something like the pins-over-the-eyes scenario within Opera.

Initial thoughts on La Dolce Morte

With most of the available English language work on the giallo genre, such as Adrian Luther-Smith's Blood and Black Lace and Craig Ledbetter's European Trash Cinema special issue having the function of consumer guide, Mikel J Koven's new book La Dolce Morte, subtitled Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film, marks the first - but hopefully not last - serious book-length discussion of the form.

In the preface Koven helpfully identifies three key aims for his study:

"The first, obviously, is an exploration of the giallo, albeit from a synchronic, rather than diachronic, perspective, with particular attention to some of the thematic concerns that arise from a textual study of these films. This book is categorically not a review of the films, debating whether or not they are good or bad; nor does it fall into the "cult of the auteur," helping to establish a pantheon of "rediscovered" Italian horror cinema artistes, putting Lucio Fulci, Sergio Martino, and Aldo Lado into the same revered echelons as Dario Argento and Mario Bava.

Second, this book aims to refocus the discussion of genre (particularly "subgenre") into the Italian concept of the filone. Seeing the interrelationships between films, how one influences others, how certain filmmakers take ideas and build off them, and then how those ideas are further transformed by other filmmakers, is an underdeveloped aspect in genre study. [...]

Third, this book situates the discussion of the giallo within what I call "vernacular cinema" as a replacement for the term "popular cinema". To look at films from a vernacular perspective removes the a priori assumption about what constitutes a "good" film, how a particular film is, in some way, artistic. Vernacular cinema seeks to look at subaltern cinema not for how it might (or might not) conform to the precepts of high-art/modernist cinema, but for what it does in its own right." (v)

Taken in these terms, the book is a success. Koven convincingly demonstrates that the dominant theme of the giallo film is an ambivalence towards post-war modernity and all that comes with it - La Dolce Morte as counterpoint to La Dolce Vita - while his discussions of the filone and of vernacular cinema give them a broader applicability and should inspire future research into the area, not least for providing another alternative to overly analytic psychoanalytic readings of horror-related forms.

The main difficulties I have with its thesis is really where it leaves its most prominent and influential practitioner, Argento. (And here I have to acknowledge my own biases, as someone who is writing his thesis on Argento and for whom Argento's status as auteur thereby has a significance different from Koven's project here.)

The first problem is that Argento is, I would argue, a self-conscious auteur who, rather than simply deciding high-art/modernist cinema is irrelevant in the manner of Koven's vernacular cinema, instead engages with it within the framework of a popular genre. As such I think he probably managed to connect with both prima and terza visione audiences at some points early in his career, even if the ways they engaged with his films were likely rather different.

Another issue is the duration of Argento's engagement with the giallo, with more than thirty years between The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Sleepless is perhaps difficult to accommodate within the synchronic filone framework and needs more of a diachronic genre or auteur based analysis. Certainly, as far as the period from Tenebre, Phenomena or Opera onwards is concerned, I am not sure if there was such a thing as the vernacular terza visione audience any longer, and would speculate that Argento was only able to survive as a filmmaker precisely because he had earlier managed to establish himself as a brand in his own right with the giallo as his specific domain. Put another way, I suspect that many of those Italians who went to see Opera did so because it was an Argento film or they wanted to see a giallo and Argento was by this stage pretty much the only game in town.

In the end, I'm left with the feeling that in avoiding the kind of trap that befell the likes of Christopher Frayling's Spaghetti Westerns (with its tension between auteur and genre only resolved when Frayling later made clear, via his biography of Sergio Leone, where his true interest lay), and instead drawing upon Christopher Wagstaff's work, Koven has maybe swung a bit too far in an anti-auteurist, anti-aesthetic direction. Though I would not dispute his statement that "approaching the giallo as one would other kinds of Italian cinema, such as that of Fellini or Antonioni, is not productive, as this genre was never intended for the art house," (19) fits perfectly with films like Bay of Blood or Eyeball, his alternative itself feels like something of a square peg when faced with a Deep Red or - to introduce a thoroughly modernist giallo that, unfortunately, Koven does not discuss, Death Laid an Egg.

What is unquestionably valuable, however, is that in establishing a framework for taking the giallo seriously - even if I personally might be reacting against certain aspects of this framework - Koven has given us something new to think, talk and write about.

La Dolce Morte

Mikel J. Koven's new study of the giallo, La Dolce Morte, billed as the first academic study of the genre in English, arrived this morning. Expect some more detailed comments in a few days once I have had a chance to digest it properly.