I Malamondo

Having collaborated with Prosperi and Jacopetti on Mondo Cane and Women of the World, Paolo Cavara here struck out on his own with another entry in the then-popular mondo filone.

It is hard to accurately compare the film with his previous work on account of the Something Weird version under review running 80 minutes against the IMDB’s listed runtime of 100.

What is clear, however, is that at this stage Cavara was still playing it comparatively straight and concentrating on delivering the generic goods.

He was not interested in giving the kind of self-referential critique of the genre and its ethics – or rather lack thereof – that would form the core of The Savage Eye three years later.

Stylistically the film emphasises a formalist rather than a realist approach. Rather than the use of the long take and the camera as a device to record reality, it is all about fast cutting, extreme close ups, crash zooms, whip pans, hand-held work and, above all, near constant music and/or commentary.

The last is designed more to entertain than edify, of course, expressing a supercilious superiority alongside opinions and facts that sometimes manage to be near laughable a half-century or so on, as when we visit a club catering to “The Third Sex” – i.e. homosexuals.

Thematically the film is closest to Women of the World, except that its focus is upon Baby Boom-era youth rather than women. This partially explains the relatively narrow geographical focus, with all the segments coming from western Europe – Italy itself, France, the Netherlands, West Germany, Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, and the UK.

Budget probably also played a role, however, in that there is nothing comparable depicting US youth. Nor is there the kind of modern/primitive juxtaposition that is otherwise a staple of the filone.

We do however get a repeated contrasting of contemporary and traditional values and practices.

For example, with ‘Prussian’ students having been banned from duelling we are told that they now have their Mensur scar, or schmiss, inflicted by a razor.

Or, in Leicester, England, a mod and a rocker race around town on their motorbikes to see who will win the hand of the women they both court. This becomes moot when the rocker ‘accidentally’ crashes into a delivery lorry with ‘fatal’ results, all this ‘coincidentally’ recorded by a camera that ‘just happened’ to be there at the right moment.


No, not a Black Flag gig circa 1981 but a Dutch student hazing ritual

The shock aspect of the film’s images is relatively muted. There’s a segment early on where a group of bored Italian ‘hippies’ decide to kill and roast a pig. As one of them kills it a young woman ‘faints’ at the shock whilst more generally “no one feels like eating any more”. What we do not see, however, is anything to convincingly demonstrate that the pig has indeed been killed. (Coincidentally or otherwise, the butchering of a pig had also been the subject of a short actuality by the young Bernardo Bertolucci. There, however, the animal's death had a purpose inasmuch as it was consumed.)

Elsewhere another segment shows German youth visiting Dachau. Apparently unsure that mere black and white stills of the camp’s victims will have the desired impact, Cavara repeatedly frames their emaciated and decaying faces of these victims with those of the well-fed sons and daughters (as the voice-off identifies them) of those responsible for their deaths and uses a crash zoom for good measure. Nothing succeeds like excess.


Given what Cahiers du Cinema's critics said about Pontecorvo's Kapo, wonder what they would have made of this segment?

Ennio Morricone provides the score, a mixture of spaghetti western, jazz, experimental classical and Euro-pop cues (one sung by Catherine Spaak). How far these were composed especially for the film or just culled from library and other pre-existing sources is debatable. That the soundtrack ‘works’ is not.

Worth a look for fans of the form.

L'Occhio selvaggio / The Wild Eye

Before Cannibal Holocaust there was The Wild Eye.

For this 1967 films presents an indictment of the mondo film-makers mentality but, like its later counterpart, uncomfortably sometimes comes perilously close to becoming what it seeks to condemn – albeit with this also having the effect of implicitly asking the audience to question their own motives in viewing such material.

Director Paolo Cavara was certainly well-placed to make the film, having served as assistant to Prosperi and Jacopetti. Having become increasingly dissatisfied with their methods he attempted to put his past behind him, here presenting several scenarios and situations clearly derived from the Mondo Cane films and Africa Addio to illustrate his former colleagues working methods.

The film opens in the savannah, with a scene that could almost have been taken from a behind-the-scenes or making-of type documentary on Africa Addio.

The filmmaking crew, comprising director Paolo (Philippe Leroy) and cameraman Valentino (Gabriele Tinti) relentlessly pursue a gazelle in their jeep with the intention of making its heart burst, much to the distress of Barbara (Delia Boccardo).

Barbara: “I can't stand to see that poor animal suffer.”
Paolo: “Then shut your eyes.”

While Prosperi and Jacopetti's film doesn't feature the exact same image, it is full of hunting and safari sequences where the coincidental presence of the filmmakers as yet another slaughter takes place cumulatively emerges as contrived.

It becomes apparent, however, that Paolo – the match with the director's own forename almost too obvious to be worth mentioning, though his own role in relation to his former colleagues films would seem to have been more like that of Valentino, the hired hand doing what he is told in an only obeying orders way – is focussed less on cruelty to animals than mankind, as he then stages the jeep's running out of petrol to make the safari party endure a dangerous trek through the drylands with inadequate supplies of water to add a bit more drama to the material, filming at opportune moments along the way.

With some of the party fearing imminent death, Paolo even tries to persuade them to make last confessions to the camera. “If any of you, in this extremely dramatic moment – you must realise the predicament we're in – would care to record a statement of any sort, you can do it now.”



A multiplicity of wild / savage eyes

Already, however, we have also got an indication of where the filmmakers cannot go, insofar as the mise en scène within the chase sequence contained shots taken from multiple points of view to indicate that there was in fact a second jeep and camera crew always present at the scene but unacknowledged, namely that of Cavara and company, recording Paolo.

The film's limit point is thus established: if The Wild Eye proceed to present the diegetic Paolo's Nietzschean “gaze into the abyss,” his extra-diegetic counterpart does not allow us a gaze into the film's own potential mise-en-abyme. Situated at the crossover between popular and critical cinemas, we are not about to get a more thoroughgoing examination of the roles played by editing, post-synchronised sound and the addition of empathetic musical cues in the construction of the film expeience. Dziga-Vertov Group era Godard it is not.

Having gotten this criticism out of the way – and admittedly only a criticism if one takes an ultramontane view of critical cinema, taking a preaching to the converted film like Wind from the East as the ideal over a mass appeal one like A Bullet for the General – it has to be acknowledged that The Wild Eye works well both as expose of Jacopetti and Prosperi's practices and as thought-provoking entertainment, not least for making us think about exactly what the term entertainment means when the mondo film and its offshoots, all the way down to today's 'reality television' are considered.

After the group have been rescued – as Paolo and Valentino always knew they would – the episodic, travelogue nature of the narrative is established, along with a romantic subplot between the Paolo and Barbara, with whom he has become obsessed in an otherwise uncharacteristic display of emotion and lack of professionalism. (One wonders if there's here a roman a clef element to the piece, that Barbara might represent Belinda Lee to Paolo's Jacopetti.)

Paolo pursues Barbara and her husband to Egypt and soon persuades Barbara, who still has not realised that he staged the desert incident, to come with him to Singapore and continue to appear in episodes of his documentary, as “the straight-laced English woman, who is always being shocked at the same time as she is succumbing to the so-called lure of the orient.”


An 'exotic,' 'oriental' image

After a spot of sightseeing in Singapore, Paolo is soon back at work, having Valentino film scenes of mute prostitutes negotiating with their clients using sign before then deciding that no-one would believe the footage – “Reality is boring, lies are entertaining,” as he later summarises – and finding a drugs rehabilitation program that can be more readily sensationalised:

“What means have you to help these opium addicts?”

“With whatever little charity we receive.”

“Look I'm ready to make charity enough to get these gentlemen fat as Buddhas. Of course, I'll have to make some changes when I shoot, if you agree. But you'll be satisfied.”

This cues in a nightmarish scene of the men, lying on the floor, having their cravings whipped out of them as the still-credulous Barbara looks on in horror. (“Take Barbara as a contrast now and then,” instructs Paolo to Valentino, ever-alert to the cinematic possibilities of getting “a good scene.”)

The rest of the film continues in much the same way, as we witness – amongst other scenes – Paolo trying to persuade a Buddhist priest to immolate himself for the camera in what is likely a reference to Mondo Cane 2's reconstruction of the same famous image; negotiating with a group of soldiers to have them execute their prisoners against a wall where the composition is more photogenic, implying the degree to which Jacopetti and Prosperi may have been complicit in a similar scene in Africa Addio; and, as the grand finale, withholding knowledge of a terrorist bombing so that he can have his camera set up beforehand to capture the carnage as it happens.

Within the parameters outlined, the filmmakers scarcely put a foot wrong, the mise en scène convicingly conveying the anti-mondo message. The dialogue, however, is perhaps a touch heavy at times, over-stating what we have already obtained via the camera, editing and scoring. (Interestingly the highly-regarded Italian author and intellectual Alberto Moravia has a credit for contributing to the writing.)

The uniformly solid performances help to get round this didactic element somewhat. Leroy and Tinti could always be relied upon when playing cynical or jaded characters, with the former, much like in Femina Ridens, making his more excessive lines that bit more credible than they would otherwise be by convincing us that they are expressions of his more extreme character. (“I have decided for once and for all where my place in life is – with the bosses. And I'm not ashamed of it like many others.”) Boccarro delivers a remarkly assured, mature performance given her age at the time, 19, giving Barbara an adult understanding of interpersonal relationships and a youthful idealism and naïvete as to how the world as a whole tends to work.

Recommended; hopefully someone will put out a proper DVD version.

E Tanta Paura / Plot of Fear

Two murders, those of well-known sexual deviant Mattia Grandi and a middle-aged woman, Laura Falconieri, occur on the same night in Milan, a connection between them established through what is soon to become the killer's calling card: illustrations from Pierino Porcospino / Shock Headed Peter, a tale by E T A Hoffmann.


Mattia's apartment


Complete with a representation of lion, subtly introducing a plot point


The man with the worst anglicised pseudonym, Franco Fumigalli alias Frank Smokecocks

Lieutenant Lomenzo (Michele Placido), a progressive-minded Neapolitan cop transferred up to Milan and determined to do his best to disprove Northern Italian stereotypes of their Southern countrymen is assigned the case.


One of the killer's calling cards

His investigations soon reveal that both victims were members of a group known as the Wildlife Friends. Though their name sounds innocent, their activities were decidedly less so, involving orgies at the Villa Hoffmann. Then again, immorality and illegality are not the same thing – unless you happen to be of a more conservative mindset than Lomenzo who, when asked why he doesn't arrest a couple making love in public, replies that he's “on their side.” More importantly, the group split up years ago, however, following the death of its founder and the villa's owner, Hoffmann (John Steiner) himself.





An example of the film's pervasive wit

As the “cartoon killer” continues to murder, Lomenzo makes the acquaintance of Jeanne (Corrine Clery), an associate of his girlfriend Ruth, who provides some futher clues in the case.


The first encounter between Lomenzo and Jeanne, in the lift

She confesses to Lomenzo that she was present at the Villa Hoffman on the night a prostitute, Rosa Catena, died of a heart attack at one of the Wildlife Friends' orgies after the Friends acted as if they were going to feed the girl to a tiger.


Riccio expounds his philosophy

A number of things do not make sense, however. Isn't it somewhat out of character for Rosa's former pimp, Agostino, to be seeking revenge on the remaining members of the Wildlife Friends as Jeanne contends – especially after four years have passed since her death. Wouldn't a tiger have been sent from Asia and not Africa, to which it is not a native species? Why should a vagrant glimpsed on the grounds of the villa be wearing nearly new, obviously expensive shoes? What motivates the enigmatic private investigator Pietro Riccio (Eli Wallach), who seems to have just about everyone of importance in the city – including the killers' victims – under surveillance, in providing advice and assistance to Lomenzo? Is Jeanne implicated in more than she lets on – and, if so, will the clearly infauated Lomenzo be able to separate out his professonial and the personal involments with her?


The Biancaneve style sexy cartoon

E Tanta Paura / Plot of Fear's Writer-director Paulo Cavara only made two gialli, this and the earlier Black Belly of the Tarantula, but they are enough to mark him out as someone with a distinctive take on the form. While he foregrounds the official police investigator above the conventional amateur sleuth here, this cannot entirely be explained away as a consession to the poliziotto audience insofar as the earlier film, made at the height of the post-Bird with the Crystal Plumage, used the same device.

In both cases, moreover, the cop and the mystery he investigates retain a distance from the polziotto act first, think later approach. It is not that Michele Placido or Giancarlo Giannini are incapable of doing the action man thing when required, as envinced here by the lengthy chase and fight that leads to the apprehension of Agostini, more that Cavara seems to prefer more sensitive, introspective and downright quirky cop figures above one dimensional displays of crowd-pleasing macho bullheadedness.

Put another way, it's hard to imagine Maurizio Merli entertaining the thought of eating macrobiotic food in preference to spaghetti and sugo or referencing positivist criminologist Cesare Lombroso by way of criticising his partners' common-sense approach to policework as Placido does here.










Politics and mirrors

Although such moments lighten the mood they are never allowed to dominate, with the audience constantly being reminded of the deadly serious nature of the game: No sooner have we been introduced to Grandi in his garishly decorated apartment and Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band reject outfit and his particular sexual peccadilloes (“Did you ever have him?” “No, I'm in the lesbian department. He hung out at the S&M fetish area in Porta Volta”) than he is strangled to death. The Amuck-like pornographic cartoon that plays in Jeanne's account of activities at the Villa Hoffmann likewise raises a smile, but were's soon dragged back down to reality as the luckless, soon to be dead, Rosa is called upon to service one of the guests with a blow-job under the table while the others attempt to guess who the lucky man is from the expression on his face. Then there's the moment when one of the rapidly dwindling number of Wildlife Friends, having decided to get out of Milan before it is too late, gives the finger to a hitchhiker on the autostrada only for his own car to break down and the driver of the passing lorry he tries to flag down give him the same treatment, after which he is then run down by the next vehicle...

The film was co-scripted by frequent Fellini collabotor and Deep Red co-writer Bernardino Zapponi, with a sense of connection to the Argento film through the haunted house, children's story and return of the past motifs. At the same time, however, one also wonders if Argento was thinking of Plot of Fear's use of Hoffman when he made Sleepless, with its nursery-rhyme killer also leaving distinctive calling cards with each victim.

Steiner is amusingly typecast, with his character at one point admitting to having a father in the SS. While obviously cast for her physical assets and willingness to display them, Clery again impresses by making something more enigmatic of her character, making you wonder whether she is expressing her genuine feelings or putting on a very good performance. Placido and Wallach are even better, the former trying too hard to live up to an impossible ideal and the latter by turns impish, deadly earnest and simply enigmatic, someone who may be a Mabuse but not necessarily an entirely malign one.

If the film has a weakness, it is that it raises more questions than it can hope to answer on the incommensurability of law and order and the fixedness versus changeability of human nature, with the ambiguous denoument being likely to disappoint more mainstream audiences wanting to see something more traditional and unequivocal by which the bad guy(s) are unmasked and punished and the good guy(s) triumphant. It does work out that way, but only in an approximate, so-so way at best...




More reflections

Cavara's direction is effective, drawing us in to the mystery and providing enough hints as to what might be going on without being so obvious as to overdo things. Thus, for example, while the climax foregrounds the role of mirrors, their deploymenpt through the course of the narrative is more subtle, seen in the likes of repeated shots of the Placido and company driving around, the streets above them frequently reflected on their windscreens, or in opening a shot with an image on a surface. Vision, or its obscuring, are pivotal.




Men are pigs?

When he goes for the jugular he can also provide effective shocks as well, as when a pan along a row of gutted pigs in a slaughterhouse ends with one of cartoon killer's victims on a meathook, or the burning alive of another, “Joan of Arc” style.

Daniele Patucchi's music is less satisfactory, though the fuzz guitar driven main theme is endearingly trashy and very catchy. The suspense cues could be better, however.

The film is available on R0 DVD from Raro.

The Black Belly of the Tarantula / La Tarantola dal ventre nero

Watching this 1971 giallo from Paolo Cavara hot on the heels of Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion makes for an interesting contrast, in that its opening gambit – a husband confronts his (recent ex) wife over some compromising photographs of her with another man – could easily have been the turning point of Luciano Ercoli's film.

The similarities end at this point, however, as Maria Zani (Barbara Bouchet) is brutally murdered shortly afterwards. While we saw her husband Paolo (Silvano Tranquilli) beating her, he seems genuinely shocked and co-operates with Inspector Tellini (Giancarlo Giannini), but also fails to tell the truth as to when he last saw Maria nor reveal that he has the other half of the ripped photograph.

Taking this, Paolo - whose job is that of the ever-suspect insurance salesman - hires a private investigator, the ironically named Speedy. to see if he can find the blackmailer himself.

A second murder then occurs with the same modus operandi as the first, the killer paralysing their victim with a poisoned needle, then fatally stabbing them while they are conscious but helpless – apparently akin to the way a wasp might kill the titular spider. Another clue / complicating factor is the discovery of extensive traces of cocaine at the crime scene.

The two investigations continue along their separate lines, then intersect as Paolo arranges a rendezvous with one of the blackmailers only to go for a fatal dive off a roof, following which his contact / assassin is himself run over before he can be questioned.

As Tellini gets closer to the heart of the conspiracy, he and his wife Anna (Stefania Sandrelli) find themselves threatened by the blackmailers...


In a glass darkly


Behind the glass

Along with I Tanto Paura / Plot of Fear, The Black Belly of the Tarantula was one of two gialli directed by Paolo Cavara, a relatively obscure figure about whom one admits to knowing little about.

Starting with contributions to a some of Franco Prosperi and Gualtiero Jacopetti's mondo films he then seems to have reacted against this in The Wild Eye, an anti-mondo film that predates the better known Cannibal Holocaust by more than a decade in its use of the form against itself. (Mark Goodall's book Sweet and Savage contains a good discussion of the film, and is recommended for anyone interested in mondo more generally.)






Some classic giallo imagery, albeit with the unusual feature of the brown surgical gloves

Although his spaghetti westerns remain to be explored, this appears to suggest a seriousness and self-consciousness of approach that – with a few noteworthy exceptions - might well be considered the kiss of death for the giallo. Thankfully, however, this proves not to be the case, as Cavara delivers a film which manages both to deliver as entertainment while also hinting at something more beneath its slickly directed surface, with generally effective use of zooms, whip pans and hand-held camera.

The editing exhibits some nice cuts between scenes, from the hands of the killer to the hands of those investigating, and one almost Eisensteinian moment where a falling dummy is juxtaposed with the killer's descending knife.






The forbidden photo of a lady above suspicion (by dint of being dead)

As befits the nature of the conspiracy, the viewer's voyeurism is also continually being brought into the equation, whether the credits sequence that cuts from figures obscured by distorting glass to the exploitation goods of the naked Bouchet being massaged, or our point-of-view positioning one of the blackmailers covertly filming the Tellinis as they make love.

The plotting is suitably convoluted, with plenty of suspects and red herrings. Though some may feel that the killer's identity is either too obvious or not obvious enough (following the usual filone heuristics that the most and least likely suspects can be ruled out for this reason) the nastiness of the murder method goes some way to offsetting this.

There is also plenty of eye- and ear-candy for the viewer, Ennio Morricone's top notch score with vocalism from the inimitable Edda Dell'Orso helping make up for the brevity of Bouchet's get naked and die near cameo.




Some classic mannequin action in the second murder set-piece

As Tellini, Giancarlo Giannini delivers a performance of considerable sensitivity and depth. While arguably as much a testament to Giannini's acting abilities as anything else it is also worth noting how these characteristics seem to position his character with the giallo against the poliziotto, with its preference for a more talk and less action.

Though Plot of Fear certainly leans more towards the poliziotto side of things, with more emphasis on the crime plot and less on the black gloved killer, it is again characterised by an unusually well-developed police protagonist, possibly hinting at an emergent auteur personality.

Indeed, considering the giallo-poliziotto in relation to the two pure filone (though in truth no filone could ever be called “pure” in the sense that, say, a 1930s Hollywood western is pure) one also wonders if a consideration of matters beyond the nature of the protagonist(s) as private or public investigators is needed, encompassing the investigators' personalities; the nature of the crime; and the methods deployed investigating it.

Making a very broad assertion, I would speculate that the key difference is that the typical poliziotto is more direct in each case. The poliziotto cop - think Maurizio Merli - basically knows who the bad guys are and that if he confronts them directly they will respond in a way that gives him evidence / cause to dispense violent judgement / justice, whereas his giallo counterpart is far less sure.

Speculations aside, The Black Belly of the Tarantula is a quality example of the genre; I know that when finances allow I will be upgrading my pan and scan Alfa Digital disc for Blue Underground's 1.85:1 OAR version that also runs approximately five minutes longer, at 89 minutes.

Tellingly, there are some abrupt transitions in the Alfa release: visiting the boyfriend of the second victim, Tellini discovers some incriminating evidence yet we never see what happens to the character, who disappears thereafter.

Whether Blue Underground's is the definitive version is perhaps another matter, with the IMDB entry – again never the best source of information when it comes to films like this – indicating that the uncut Italian version runs 98 minutes, a difference greater than could be explained away by format conversion; as ever your contributions and clarifications would be welcomed.