The first issue that must be addressed is Argento’s use of the ‘whodunit’ form, particularly in relation to his frequent labelling in the wake of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, and its “Animal Trilogy” successors, as “The Italian Hitchcock”. Whilst this label was arguably beneficial to Argento from a career perspective, especially initially, it is also something he has sought to play down, after becoming established in his own right. This distinguishes him from De Palma, who has always emphasised himself as heir to Hitchcock. Argento, by contrast, has claimed, like Chabrol, to be more of a Langian than a Hitchcockian. The giallo as a whole, meanwhile, arguably has more connections to film noir, through the similar origins of the terms noir and giallo to describe a particular literary form, and the wider thriller. In particular most gialli, including all of Argento’s films excepting The Stendhal Syndrome and Giallo (both of which fall outside the time-period of this thesis) are whodunits: The identity of the killer or killers is not known to the detective protagonist nor the audience until the denouement. Hitchcock, meanwhile, disliked the whodunit and its dynamic of surprise, that the killer was typically someone we never would have suspected. Instead he preferred the audience to know more than his characters, to place us in a position of suspense: We know who the killer is and that the protagonist is in danger, even if he does not yet know: “What matters is not who did the action – what Hitchcock calls with contempt the whodunit, but neither is it the action itself: it is the set of relations in which the action and the one who did it are caught.” (2005a: 204)
This dynamic of the “relation-image” or the “image of mental relations” is the essential component within Hitchcock’s cinema, the image that makes him a singular auteur positioned between the movement-image and the time-image:
In the history of the cinema Hitchcock appears as one who no longer conceives of the constitution of the film as a function of two terms – the director and the film to be made – but as a function of three: the director, the film and the public which must come into the film, or whose reactions must for an integrating part of the film (this is the explicit sense of suspense, since the spectator is the first to ‘know’ the relations. (2005a: 206)
By incorporating the audience into his films, Hitchcock led to the culmination of the movement-image:
[O]ne might say that Hitchcock accomplishes and brings to completion the whole of the cinema by pushing the movement-image to its limit. Including the spectator in the film, and the film in the mental image, Hitchcock brings the cinema to completion. (2005a: 209)
However, to Deleuze, Hitchcock himself was unable to go beyond the movement-image into the time-image:
If one of Hitchcock’s innovations was to implicate the spectator in the film, did not the characters themselves have to be capable – in a more or less obvious way – of being assimilated to spectators? But then it may be that one consequence appears inevitable: the mental image would then be less a bringing to completion of the action-image, and of the other images, than a re-examination of their nature and status, moreover, the whole movement-image which would be re-examined through the rupture of the sensory-motor links in a particular character. What Hitchcock had wanted to avoid, a crisis in the traditional image of the cinema, would nevertheless happen in his wake, and in part as a result of his innovations. (2005a: 209)
The key film-makers here are, of course, the neo-realists, in whose work Deleuze detects the first failings of the action-image. For my purposes, however, Antonioni is more important, via his anti-thrillers or anti-gialli Story of a Love Affair, L’Avventura and Blow-Up: In Story the investigation of a virtual crime in the past, leads to its becoming actual in the present. In L’Avventura the investigation of ??’s disappearance by her fiancé and friend discovers nothing. In Blow-Up the body and the photographs disappear, and thus all evidence that there was actually a murder. In each case, that is, the action-image sensory-motor schema of the movement-image, and the boundary between protagonist and audience break down completely. The character within the film is reduced to the same helplessness as their viewer observing them.
As we saw earlier, as a critic Argento was vocal in his dislike for Blow-Up. I would argue that this distaste may be related to Argento’s inherent postmodern position, of denying the implicit hierarchy of modernist art cinema over classical genre cinema, or the time-image over the movement-image. Furthermore, I would contend that The Bird with the Crystal Plumage sees him beginning to work through his postmodern response to Antonioni modernist classic. Where Antonioni presents the time-image as a fully fledged thing within the context of the art cinema, Argento here gives us the movement-image as it is caught in the process of becoming time-image within the context of filone cinema. In particular, Bird is concerned with exposing and exploring the cliché, along with the breakdown of the action-image into opsigns and sonsigns that require active interpretation, or “attentive” rather than “habitual” recognition in Deleuze’s Bergsonian framework. Crucially, however, the movement-image re-asserts itself through protagonist Sam Dalmas’s dogged determination to find out the truth behind what he saw. If Dalmas’s notion of the truth is a banal one, the truth his investigation unveils is (or was) a more shocking one: The structures of capitalism and patriarchy are destructive and negative. The division here is between the mass and the elite, or the movement-image and the time-image cinemas. One issue here is stepping back in time, in considering the film in its context, of Italy in 1970, rather than today, and in another country, forty years on. Another is that of different audiences and cinemas: What was perhaps banal for the elite, or the prima visione audience, was still shocking for the ordinary viewer, or the terza vision audience. This ‘whydunit’ aspect, of the exploration of the origins of Monica’s psychosis, also provides something of a counter to the whodunit element. Emphasising the ‘why’ as well as the ‘who’ is something that distinguishes Argento’s gialli from those of many of his filone imitators, who are often more interested in the ‘how’, in the form of the bizarre murder methods employed by their killers. Sergio Pastore’s The Crimes of the Black Cat (1972) is a prime example here, particularly since its blind investigator protagonist and titular animal are clear references to The Cat o’ Nine Tails. The film’s killer has a cat whose claws have been dipped in poison attack her victims, with the cat having been trained to respond to a particular perfume on the yellow silk shawls that the victims are sent.
Argento’s use of the whodunit and greater emphasis upon shock than suspense compared to Hitchcock might also be justified in relation to his postmodern position: Postmodernism and poststructuralism, with their challenge to binaries and hierarchies, would deny the inherent superiority of the non-whodunit over the whodunit and of suspense over shock. Instead, they might be considered as different, somewhat incommensurable language games with their own performative criteria. A whodunit or a shock must thereby be evaluated in their own terms, as good or bad examples of their type, rather than as, at best, good examples of an inferior type. Or, to cast this in a more directly Deleuzean framework, they are alternative “lines of flight,” with the whodunit and the shock also possibly “deterritorialising” the non-whodunit and suspense respectively.
One way in which The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is a Hitchcockian film is its use of the theme of exchange or transference, as first identified by Eric Rohmer and Chabrol (195?) and subsequently endorsed by Deleuze (2005a: 205): Monica Ranieri exchanges the role of victim for that of victimiser. Her husband Alberto exchanges the role of murderer with his wife, attempting to cover up for her crimes by confounding the police investigation with his telephone call and then confessing to his wife’s crimes as he dies. Another is the importance of interpretation. Deleuze identifies Hitchcock’s cinema as one in which the interpretation of the image is paramount: “In Hitchcock, actions, affections, perceptions, all is interpretation, from beginning to end.” (2005a: 204). In particular, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage features a key image which is out of place, or a Hitchcockian “demark,” as will be seen in my analysis of the pivotal gallery sequence. This distinguishes it from Four Flies on Grey Velvet, a more Langian film in which the “powers of the false,” of a “Protagoras-style relativism where judgement expresses the ‘best’ point of view, that is, the relation under which appearances have the best chance of being turned around to the benefit of an individual or of a humanity of higher value” (2005b: 134) are to the fore. In combination, meanwhile, the two films further expose Argento’s becoming Langian rather than Hitchcockian, or the shift in the proportion of movement-images and time-images in his work.
Showing posts with label The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. Show all posts
Wednesday, 14 October 2009
Saturday, 10 October 2009
Deluezean analysis of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage's opening sequence
Dario Argento's eclectic and excessive approach to the image is evident from the opening scene of his debut film, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. The information conveyed by the scene and its successor are straightforward: Rome is in the grip of what we would now term a serial killer. The images themselves, however, are anything but, as Argento jumbles chronology, juxtaposes moving and static images and colour and black and white (both via the technology of optical printing, a recurring element within the film) and plays with the frame. The most straightforward images are those of the (presumed male) killer and his weapons: These are affection-images, close-ups of objects, of knives in their red/velvet lined box and of the killer's black/leather encased hands, especially when caressing the photographic image. But even here there is an added complexity, in that Argento is playing upon cliché. The functional, fashionable garb of Bava's Blood and Black Lace is here fetishised (Needham: ??:??), as a “vurt” or bad object/fetish. We are also encouraged to read the killer as male. Faciality is key here: Though Argento does not present this figure, or her (male) gallery counterpart, as explicitly masked, as in Bava, the implications are equally clear. Man is the aggressor, woman the victim. The “cliché,” a key element of the film, is thereby foregrounded, to be subsequently explored, emphasised and deconstructed. The more complex images are those which present the victim-to-be. A more conventional, less imaginative approach would have been to show her being photographed by the killer and then the killer preparing to strike. Argento's use of moving and static images, along with moving images caught in the act of becoming static, and of colour and monochrome, complexifies this. In particular it is neither movement-image nor time-image. On the one hand these images suggest an action-image relationship, that the killer will act, or has to/should be stopped. On the other hand they imply the breakdown of the action-image and the sensory-motor relationship underpinning it: What has already happened, is in the past? What is still to come?
The final image in this scene, that of a black screen and a scream, is equally significant. It is an image which shows up one of Deleuze's weaknesses, namely his emphasis upon the visual image (thing) at the expense of other images (things). Deleuze presents this image, that of a black screen, as an “empty” set. But, in conjunction with the scream, it is emphatically not. Rather, it is a set which conveys death; indeed, were the sound to be absent, this image in conjunction with its successor (starting with a newspaper hoarding reading the third death of a woman in a month) would still say the same thing, for the viewer (particularly Italian) who can read the image. This is a frequent aspect of Leone, Argento and Questi's images. The sound image, which is unbounded, does not overlap or accord with the visual image, which us bounded by the frame. All three directors thereby go beyond the movement-image, where the frame/set incorporates sound and image, with the former a duplicate and supplement to the latter, towards the time-image, with its separate, non-commensurable opsigns and sonsigns.
The final image in this scene, that of a black screen and a scream, is equally significant. It is an image which shows up one of Deleuze's weaknesses, namely his emphasis upon the visual image (thing) at the expense of other images (things). Deleuze presents this image, that of a black screen, as an “empty” set. But, in conjunction with the scream, it is emphatically not. Rather, it is a set which conveys death; indeed, were the sound to be absent, this image in conjunction with its successor (starting with a newspaper hoarding reading the third death of a woman in a month) would still say the same thing, for the viewer (particularly Italian) who can read the image. This is a frequent aspect of Leone, Argento and Questi's images. The sound image, which is unbounded, does not overlap or accord with the visual image, which us bounded by the frame. All three directors thereby go beyond the movement-image, where the frame/set incorporates sound and image, with the former a duplicate and supplement to the latter, towards the time-image, with its separate, non-commensurable opsigns and sonsigns.
Wednesday, 11 July 2007
The Screaming Mimi and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage – some comparisons
[Note that this contains spoilers]
The novel The Screaming Mimi, by pulp author Fredric Brown, was first published in 1949 and proved to be a popular seller. It inspired a 1958 film adaptation of the same name, directed by Gerd Oswald and starring Anita Ekberg, notable primarily for pre-dating Psycho by two years in featuring a shower attack scene. It would, however, seem that Bernardo Bertolucci was not aware of Oswald's film when he presented Dario Argento with the book with a view to having his friend prepare a screenplay which he would then direct.
In the event, however, Bertolucci became interested in other projects; interestingly both The Spider's Stratagem and The Conformist, although adapted from rather more culturally respectable sources than Brown, in the form of Jorge Luis Borges and Alberto Moravia, also have mystery-thriller elements. Moreover, whilst clearly taken by the novel, fragments of which would also find their way into his second and third films, Argento eventually produced a screenplay, ultimately to become his debut film, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, that was less a straight adaptation of The Screaming Mimi than a new work inspired by it.
The first difference is simply one of setting. Brown's novel takes place in his native Chicago and makes considerable use of its locations (“He turned north on State Street. Past Erie. Huron” (p. 7)) whereas Argento's film is set in Rome. While he not go out of his way to defamiliarise the city, as he would later do in, he present it in the more touristic manner of Mario Bava's The Girl Who Knew Too Much.
It is not a case of any of these films' approaches being better or worse than the others with each rather being appropriate to the world of their respective protagonists.
In the case of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, our protagonist is Sam Dalmas, an American author who has been living in Rome for the past few years, soaking up the culture but failing to find the inspiration that will overcome his writers' block. He is, that is, someone for whom touristic images no longer have any great significance. They are just part of the everyday background. In Brown's novel, meanwhile, our protagonist is William Sweeney, an Irish newspaperman coming off one of his periodic drinking binges. Both men are presented as needing something to happen to get themselves out of their respective ruts, a conscious or unconscious desire expressed in Brown's novel through Sweeney's friend God, that “you can get anything you want if you want it badly enough” (p. 5). With this need, both men then find something.
In the case of Sweeney, walking along in an alcoholic haze late at night, it is a small crowd gathered around a glass doors of an apartment building. Inside are a large, fearsome looking dog (“Dog? It must have been a dog, here in Chicago; if you'd seen it out in the woods you'd have taken it for a wolf”) and a prone woman whose white dress, as she gets up, is revealed to be bloodied. Sweeney, however, barely has time to register this before the dog leaps at the woman and somehow contrives to unfasten her dress, leaving her naked but for white gloves. After a moment of indecision / inaction (“For what seemed like minutes, but was probably about ten seconds, nobody moved, nothing moved”) a couple of the other onlookers take the initiative and manage to incapacitate the dog and send for an ambulance. Dalmas is also walking along at night, but in a normal perceptual state, when he notices a commotion in a glass fronted building opposite: a figure in black and a woman in white, struggling. He races into the building, a gallery, but finds himself trapped between its outer and inner doors by the figure in black, who escapes. Managing to raise the alarm with a passer-by, Dalmas can do nothing except endure an anguished wait until the police and ambulance arrive.
Whereas Dalmas's positioning within the scene immediately makes him a suspect to the police if not the audience, Sweeney's investigation into the “ripper” case – in both film and novel, three women have been murdered over the previous few weeks – continues without their path crossing his until considerably later. The two men's initial motives for investigating the case thus differ. Going over what he witnessed again and again in his head, Dalmas is tormented by the fact that there is something in the scene that does not make sense, that he cannot quite place. Solving the mystery becomes something of a matter of intellectual pride, a series of threats and attacks serving only to convince him that he is definitely on to something even after his passport has been returned and he is free to leave Italy. Sweeney is more interested in the opportunity the incident affords him for a juicy scoop – not least because of having been assent without leave as far as his employers at The Blade newspaper are concerned. But, as Brown's example of the wolf-dog – what is it, how is either meaning and understanding affected by the context in which it is situated – suggests, he too is also to find himself faced with the problem of recalcitrant data as his investigation progresses, of those things that simply do not fit into the pattern as he would like them to.
Indeed, in this regard both Brown and Argento are really dealing with the same theme, albeit in ways more appropriate to their respective media. Thus, whereas it the way Argento puts together the aforementioned gallery sequence which conveys this as much, if not more, than what Dalmas says by way of making it something entre nous, that “There was something wrong in that scene,” in The Screaming Mimi it is Brown's first-person opening address to his reader, one of a number that punctuate the narrative:
“You can never tell what a drunken Irishman will do. You can make a flying guess; you can make a lot of flying guesses.
You can list them in order of their probability. The likely ones are easy [...] You can work on down and down to things that get less and less likely, and eventually you might hit the rock bottom of improbability: He might make a resolution and stick to it.
I know that's incredible, but it happened. A guy named Sweeney did it, once, in Chicago. He made a resolution, and he had to wade through blood and black coffee to keep it, but he kept it. Maybe, by most people's standards it wasn't a good resolution, but that's aside from the point. The point is that is really happened.
Now we'll have to hedge a bit, for truth is an elusive thing. It never quite fits a pattern. Like – well, “a drunken Irishman named Sweeney”; that's a pattern, if anything is. But truth is seldom that simple.
His name really was Sweeney, but he was only five-eights Irish and he was only three-quarters drunk. But that's about as near as truth ever approximates a pattern, and if you won't settle for that, you'd better quit reading.” (pp. 3-4)
Likewise both Brown's and Argento's protagonists become increasingly involved with the respective victims of the attacks, Monica Ranieri and Yolanda Lang. But whereas it is Sweeney's desire for Yolanda that encourages him to think her manager, the ex-psychiatrist Doctor Greene, is in fact the ripper – a will-to-believe that ultimately proves to have clouded his judgement – Dalmas's interest in Monica and concomitant suspicion that her husband Alberto is the killer is less clearly sexual in nature. There are, inevitably, a number of reasons why this may be. First, Dalmas's intellectual detachment against Sweeney's pragmatic engagement. Second, that unlike the unattached Sweeney, Dalmas is in a long-term relationship – indeed, he is planning to take his Italian girlfriend Giulia “back to the States.” Third, and perhaps most importantly, the matter of the two authors' personalities and / or audiences, with the sense of a certain salaciousness in Brown's pulp against a sexual unease in Argento's giallo. (In the case of Argento, I would content that this discomfort is more specific to his gialli of this period, being less apparent in the contemporaneous work of Umberto Lenzi, for instance. And, as with the different uses of location discussed above, it is not a case of one approach being preferable to the other, but rather of each being suited to its film-maker's universe and / or the specific film text.)
Investigating the previous murders, Sweeney's first port of call is the Chicago jail, where Sammy Cole, the con-artist boyfriend of the first victim, Lola Brent, is being held. Confessing to a number of other crimes, he was in prison at the time of the second murder. Following this Sweeney visits the curiosity shop where Lola had worked on the day she was killed, Cole having explained how she was supporting him financially at the time through a little grift that they had worked out together: she would apply for a job in a small store, he would provide the impeccable references, and she would then surreptitiously sell stock or else leave it for him to secretly pick up for selling on. On the day Lola was murdered the owner, a homosexual named Raoul, noticed that a distinctive statuette, known as the Screaming Mimi, was missing and thus that his new employee had sold it off the books. Raoul has another copy of the statuette at home, which Sweeney persuades him to sell. “Made of a new plastic that can't be told from ebony unless you pick it up,” it is of a naked woman, “mouth [...] wide open in a soulless scream. [...] hands thrust out, palms forward, to hold off some approaching horror.” (p. 47)
Dalmas's investigations – preceded by an apparent attempt on his life and a fruitless police line-up that have no counterparts in Brown's novel – takes him on a similar path here. Rather than a con-artist, however, the Sammy Cole figure he questions is a pimp, Garullo. While his stutter, which he can only suppress by the ritualistic appending of “so long” to nearly every utterance, could be read as an example of Argento's penchant for quirky characterisations by way of Brown, this particular configuration feels unique to the director: Brown presents us with a smooth talker who momentarily said too much when under pressure, Argento with a man whose (male) authority is immediately undermined by his own lack of command over the “symbolic order” of language in the first place. This sense continues in a somewhat similar fashion as Dalmas then turns his attention to the curiosity shop where the first victim, identified as lesbian by her employer, had worked. Dalmas learns that she had sold a painting on the evening she was murdered, “a naïve yet macabre” scene of a black clad figure, dressed much like Monica Ranieri's attacker, stabbing a woman. The man, himself coded as gay, attempt to hit on to Dalmas, who manoeuvres the situation to his advantage to obtain a black and white reproduction of the painting before making a swift exit.
Sweeney then follows up on the manufacturer of the statue, learning the artist's name, Chapman Wilson – a factor which Dalmas will not consider until later in Argento's narrative, at almost the exact same point as Brown does in Sweeney's – and that only two were distributed in the Chicago area, both to Raoul's store. Both investigators realise they have one copy of the highly distinctive art object somehow crucial to their respective cases, the other likely as not in the killer's possession.
Whereas Dalmas barely manages to evade an assassin presumably sent by the killer – whose depredations also continue throughout the narrative – Sweeney is only momentarily concerned that he is the recipient of similar attentions, as he returns to his lodgings to find his straight-razor and knife missing; oddly his few more valuable possessions have not been touched. He soon discovers that the items were taken by by the police for testing and to see how he would react to their absence. That he did not flee and furthermore is happy to discuss the case with Captain Bline, who is leading the investigation, whilst visiting the El Madhouse strip club at which Yolanda performs with her dog, Devil, suggests his innocence. The equivalent scenes in Argento's film, meanwhile, sees Dalmas pay a return visit to the Ranieri gallery where Monica and Alberto are preparing a new exhibition. Cumulatively we thus also get a sense of the different social and economic positions of Brown's and Argento's characters. For Brown's money is always an issue, whereas with the exception of Needles, the assassin whom Dalmas tracks down only to find dead from an apparent drugs overdose, Argento's characters do not really need to concern themselves with such to quotidian concerns. Thus, whereas Dalmas simply gets the train to go visit the artist responsible for the painting – an admittedly shorter journey given the difference in size between Italy and the USA – Sweeney must first work some deals of his own to raise the money he needs.
In both cases the encounter with the eccentric artist responsible for the work seems a dead end. Dalmas learns that the painting was inspired by something Berto Consalvi was witness to, but that the maniac who attacked the girl is now in an institution. In Sweeney's case the story behind the Screaming Mimi is more personal and traumatic for its creator, Charlie / Chapman Wilson, being inspired by the sight of his sister, Bessie, terrified before the blood-soaked figure of an escaped lunatic. Though he killed the man with his shotgun, his sister's mind was shattered, with the result that she died soon after having had to be placed in an institution herself.
In Dalmas's case a parallel investigation conducted by a friend, with further complications arising through the recognition that the killer's voice recorded off the telephone is in fact that of two individuals, leads him to the zoo beneath the Ranieri's apartment, from which the sound of a commotion issues forth. He is thus on hand to witness a struggle between Monica and Alberto, which leads, with his direct involvement, in Alberto going out the window. Before dying Alberto confesses that he was the killer. In contrast Sweeney only hears of the parallel encounter between Yolanda and Greene. All that then remains is for both men to find the missing woman, a task each accomplishes without undue difficulty.
It is at this point that each man finally realises the truth and puts the pieces of the puzzle together correctly. The woman in the painting is Monica Ranieri. Bessie and Yolanda are one and the same. In each instance the encounter with the artwork modelled on the traumatic scene triggered a latent madness, in which they identified with their attacker. Alberto and Greene – Bessie's psychiatrist and the one responsible for sending Charlie the falsified death certificate – realised this truth, and attempted to shock their respective beloved out of this state by staging an attack themselves – the aftermath of which Sweeney was witness to and which Dalmas interrupted into the middle of, but failed to realise that it was Monica who was holding the knife because this piece of data did not fit with his or the police's interpretive schema.
The way Sweeney manages to extricate himself from his situation, facing both a now evidently insane Yolanda and Devil ready to attack him at the merest signal from his mistress, proves more heroic than the helpless Dalmas's last-minute rescue by the police. Realising that so long as he speaks Yolanda is unable to do anything except listen to the sound of his voice, he talks and talks through the night until, finally, morning and the police arrive to take Yolanda away.
The novel The Screaming Mimi, by pulp author Fredric Brown, was first published in 1949 and proved to be a popular seller. It inspired a 1958 film adaptation of the same name, directed by Gerd Oswald and starring Anita Ekberg, notable primarily for pre-dating Psycho by two years in featuring a shower attack scene. It would, however, seem that Bernardo Bertolucci was not aware of Oswald's film when he presented Dario Argento with the book with a view to having his friend prepare a screenplay which he would then direct.
In the event, however, Bertolucci became interested in other projects; interestingly both The Spider's Stratagem and The Conformist, although adapted from rather more culturally respectable sources than Brown, in the form of Jorge Luis Borges and Alberto Moravia, also have mystery-thriller elements. Moreover, whilst clearly taken by the novel, fragments of which would also find their way into his second and third films, Argento eventually produced a screenplay, ultimately to become his debut film, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, that was less a straight adaptation of The Screaming Mimi than a new work inspired by it.
The first difference is simply one of setting. Brown's novel takes place in his native Chicago and makes considerable use of its locations (“He turned north on State Street. Past Erie. Huron” (p. 7)) whereas Argento's film is set in Rome. While he not go out of his way to defamiliarise the city, as he would later do in, he present it in the more touristic manner of Mario Bava's The Girl Who Knew Too Much.
It is not a case of any of these films' approaches being better or worse than the others with each rather being appropriate to the world of their respective protagonists.
In the case of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, our protagonist is Sam Dalmas, an American author who has been living in Rome for the past few years, soaking up the culture but failing to find the inspiration that will overcome his writers' block. He is, that is, someone for whom touristic images no longer have any great significance. They are just part of the everyday background. In Brown's novel, meanwhile, our protagonist is William Sweeney, an Irish newspaperman coming off one of his periodic drinking binges. Both men are presented as needing something to happen to get themselves out of their respective ruts, a conscious or unconscious desire expressed in Brown's novel through Sweeney's friend God, that “you can get anything you want if you want it badly enough” (p. 5). With this need, both men then find something.
In the case of Sweeney, walking along in an alcoholic haze late at night, it is a small crowd gathered around a glass doors of an apartment building. Inside are a large, fearsome looking dog (“Dog? It must have been a dog, here in Chicago; if you'd seen it out in the woods you'd have taken it for a wolf”) and a prone woman whose white dress, as she gets up, is revealed to be bloodied. Sweeney, however, barely has time to register this before the dog leaps at the woman and somehow contrives to unfasten her dress, leaving her naked but for white gloves. After a moment of indecision / inaction (“For what seemed like minutes, but was probably about ten seconds, nobody moved, nothing moved”) a couple of the other onlookers take the initiative and manage to incapacitate the dog and send for an ambulance. Dalmas is also walking along at night, but in a normal perceptual state, when he notices a commotion in a glass fronted building opposite: a figure in black and a woman in white, struggling. He races into the building, a gallery, but finds himself trapped between its outer and inner doors by the figure in black, who escapes. Managing to raise the alarm with a passer-by, Dalmas can do nothing except endure an anguished wait until the police and ambulance arrive.
Whereas Dalmas's positioning within the scene immediately makes him a suspect to the police if not the audience, Sweeney's investigation into the “ripper” case – in both film and novel, three women have been murdered over the previous few weeks – continues without their path crossing his until considerably later. The two men's initial motives for investigating the case thus differ. Going over what he witnessed again and again in his head, Dalmas is tormented by the fact that there is something in the scene that does not make sense, that he cannot quite place. Solving the mystery becomes something of a matter of intellectual pride, a series of threats and attacks serving only to convince him that he is definitely on to something even after his passport has been returned and he is free to leave Italy. Sweeney is more interested in the opportunity the incident affords him for a juicy scoop – not least because of having been assent without leave as far as his employers at The Blade newspaper are concerned. But, as Brown's example of the wolf-dog – what is it, how is either meaning and understanding affected by the context in which it is situated – suggests, he too is also to find himself faced with the problem of recalcitrant data as his investigation progresses, of those things that simply do not fit into the pattern as he would like them to.
Indeed, in this regard both Brown and Argento are really dealing with the same theme, albeit in ways more appropriate to their respective media. Thus, whereas it the way Argento puts together the aforementioned gallery sequence which conveys this as much, if not more, than what Dalmas says by way of making it something entre nous, that “There was something wrong in that scene,” in The Screaming Mimi it is Brown's first-person opening address to his reader, one of a number that punctuate the narrative:
“You can never tell what a drunken Irishman will do. You can make a flying guess; you can make a lot of flying guesses.
You can list them in order of their probability. The likely ones are easy [...] You can work on down and down to things that get less and less likely, and eventually you might hit the rock bottom of improbability: He might make a resolution and stick to it.
I know that's incredible, but it happened. A guy named Sweeney did it, once, in Chicago. He made a resolution, and he had to wade through blood and black coffee to keep it, but he kept it. Maybe, by most people's standards it wasn't a good resolution, but that's aside from the point. The point is that is really happened.
Now we'll have to hedge a bit, for truth is an elusive thing. It never quite fits a pattern. Like – well, “a drunken Irishman named Sweeney”; that's a pattern, if anything is. But truth is seldom that simple.
His name really was Sweeney, but he was only five-eights Irish and he was only three-quarters drunk. But that's about as near as truth ever approximates a pattern, and if you won't settle for that, you'd better quit reading.” (pp. 3-4)
Likewise both Brown's and Argento's protagonists become increasingly involved with the respective victims of the attacks, Monica Ranieri and Yolanda Lang. But whereas it is Sweeney's desire for Yolanda that encourages him to think her manager, the ex-psychiatrist Doctor Greene, is in fact the ripper – a will-to-believe that ultimately proves to have clouded his judgement – Dalmas's interest in Monica and concomitant suspicion that her husband Alberto is the killer is less clearly sexual in nature. There are, inevitably, a number of reasons why this may be. First, Dalmas's intellectual detachment against Sweeney's pragmatic engagement. Second, that unlike the unattached Sweeney, Dalmas is in a long-term relationship – indeed, he is planning to take his Italian girlfriend Giulia “back to the States.” Third, and perhaps most importantly, the matter of the two authors' personalities and / or audiences, with the sense of a certain salaciousness in Brown's pulp against a sexual unease in Argento's giallo. (In the case of Argento, I would content that this discomfort is more specific to his gialli of this period, being less apparent in the contemporaneous work of Umberto Lenzi, for instance. And, as with the different uses of location discussed above, it is not a case of one approach being preferable to the other, but rather of each being suited to its film-maker's universe and / or the specific film text.)
Investigating the previous murders, Sweeney's first port of call is the Chicago jail, where Sammy Cole, the con-artist boyfriend of the first victim, Lola Brent, is being held. Confessing to a number of other crimes, he was in prison at the time of the second murder. Following this Sweeney visits the curiosity shop where Lola had worked on the day she was killed, Cole having explained how she was supporting him financially at the time through a little grift that they had worked out together: she would apply for a job in a small store, he would provide the impeccable references, and she would then surreptitiously sell stock or else leave it for him to secretly pick up for selling on. On the day Lola was murdered the owner, a homosexual named Raoul, noticed that a distinctive statuette, known as the Screaming Mimi, was missing and thus that his new employee had sold it off the books. Raoul has another copy of the statuette at home, which Sweeney persuades him to sell. “Made of a new plastic that can't be told from ebony unless you pick it up,” it is of a naked woman, “mouth [...] wide open in a soulless scream. [...] hands thrust out, palms forward, to hold off some approaching horror.” (p. 47)
Dalmas's investigations – preceded by an apparent attempt on his life and a fruitless police line-up that have no counterparts in Brown's novel – takes him on a similar path here. Rather than a con-artist, however, the Sammy Cole figure he questions is a pimp, Garullo. While his stutter, which he can only suppress by the ritualistic appending of “so long” to nearly every utterance, could be read as an example of Argento's penchant for quirky characterisations by way of Brown, this particular configuration feels unique to the director: Brown presents us with a smooth talker who momentarily said too much when under pressure, Argento with a man whose (male) authority is immediately undermined by his own lack of command over the “symbolic order” of language in the first place. This sense continues in a somewhat similar fashion as Dalmas then turns his attention to the curiosity shop where the first victim, identified as lesbian by her employer, had worked. Dalmas learns that she had sold a painting on the evening she was murdered, “a naïve yet macabre” scene of a black clad figure, dressed much like Monica Ranieri's attacker, stabbing a woman. The man, himself coded as gay, attempt to hit on to Dalmas, who manoeuvres the situation to his advantage to obtain a black and white reproduction of the painting before making a swift exit.
Sweeney then follows up on the manufacturer of the statue, learning the artist's name, Chapman Wilson – a factor which Dalmas will not consider until later in Argento's narrative, at almost the exact same point as Brown does in Sweeney's – and that only two were distributed in the Chicago area, both to Raoul's store. Both investigators realise they have one copy of the highly distinctive art object somehow crucial to their respective cases, the other likely as not in the killer's possession.
Whereas Dalmas barely manages to evade an assassin presumably sent by the killer – whose depredations also continue throughout the narrative – Sweeney is only momentarily concerned that he is the recipient of similar attentions, as he returns to his lodgings to find his straight-razor and knife missing; oddly his few more valuable possessions have not been touched. He soon discovers that the items were taken by by the police for testing and to see how he would react to their absence. That he did not flee and furthermore is happy to discuss the case with Captain Bline, who is leading the investigation, whilst visiting the El Madhouse strip club at which Yolanda performs with her dog, Devil, suggests his innocence. The equivalent scenes in Argento's film, meanwhile, sees Dalmas pay a return visit to the Ranieri gallery where Monica and Alberto are preparing a new exhibition. Cumulatively we thus also get a sense of the different social and economic positions of Brown's and Argento's characters. For Brown's money is always an issue, whereas with the exception of Needles, the assassin whom Dalmas tracks down only to find dead from an apparent drugs overdose, Argento's characters do not really need to concern themselves with such to quotidian concerns. Thus, whereas Dalmas simply gets the train to go visit the artist responsible for the painting – an admittedly shorter journey given the difference in size between Italy and the USA – Sweeney must first work some deals of his own to raise the money he needs.
In both cases the encounter with the eccentric artist responsible for the work seems a dead end. Dalmas learns that the painting was inspired by something Berto Consalvi was witness to, but that the maniac who attacked the girl is now in an institution. In Sweeney's case the story behind the Screaming Mimi is more personal and traumatic for its creator, Charlie / Chapman Wilson, being inspired by the sight of his sister, Bessie, terrified before the blood-soaked figure of an escaped lunatic. Though he killed the man with his shotgun, his sister's mind was shattered, with the result that she died soon after having had to be placed in an institution herself.
In Dalmas's case a parallel investigation conducted by a friend, with further complications arising through the recognition that the killer's voice recorded off the telephone is in fact that of two individuals, leads him to the zoo beneath the Ranieri's apartment, from which the sound of a commotion issues forth. He is thus on hand to witness a struggle between Monica and Alberto, which leads, with his direct involvement, in Alberto going out the window. Before dying Alberto confesses that he was the killer. In contrast Sweeney only hears of the parallel encounter between Yolanda and Greene. All that then remains is for both men to find the missing woman, a task each accomplishes without undue difficulty.
It is at this point that each man finally realises the truth and puts the pieces of the puzzle together correctly. The woman in the painting is Monica Ranieri. Bessie and Yolanda are one and the same. In each instance the encounter with the artwork modelled on the traumatic scene triggered a latent madness, in which they identified with their attacker. Alberto and Greene – Bessie's psychiatrist and the one responsible for sending Charlie the falsified death certificate – realised this truth, and attempted to shock their respective beloved out of this state by staging an attack themselves – the aftermath of which Sweeney was witness to and which Dalmas interrupted into the middle of, but failed to realise that it was Monica who was holding the knife because this piece of data did not fit with his or the police's interpretive schema.
The way Sweeney manages to extricate himself from his situation, facing both a now evidently insane Yolanda and Devil ready to attack him at the merest signal from his mistress, proves more heroic than the helpless Dalmas's last-minute rescue by the police. Realising that so long as he speaks Yolanda is unable to do anything except listen to the sound of his voice, he talks and talks through the night until, finally, morning and the police arrive to take Yolanda away.
Sunday, 1 April 2007
Words and (no) pictures #5
A little exercise:
Take the same set of pictures as below, or subsitute any other image of Sam Dalmas trapped in between the doors of the gallery, unable to intervene and forced to reflect upon what he has just witnessed and apply the following:
"Hymen
The word hymen comes for the Greek for skin, membrane or the vaginal hymen.
In deconstruction it is used to refer to the interplay between, the normally considered mutually exclusive terms of, inside and outside. The hymen is the membrane of intersection where it becomes impossible to distinguish whether the membrane is on the inside or the outside. And in the absence of the complete hymen, the distinction between inside and outside disappears. Thus, in a way, the hymen defies formal logic and is neither outside nor inside, and after penetration, is both inside and outside.
Showing the problematics of a simple word like hymen questions what "is inside" and "is outside" mean, they cannot here be considered in the usual logic of mutual exclusion (sometimes called law of excluded middle). Thus we get a contrast to formal logic, and especially the ancient and revered principle of non-contradiction, which from Aristotle says "one cannot say of something that it is and that it is not in the same respect and at the same time". Yet, the hymen is inside and is not inside in the same respect and at the same time (ie, using a formal logic tranlation of "inside" to "not outside")."
- From the wikipedia entry on deconstruction
Or, what do those images of the man-in-black and the woman-in-white mean when read through the colour codes, conventions and symbolisms of film noir and spaghetti western? Was Monica attacking Alberto or defending herself against what she thought was his attack? What do the labels of victim and victimiser really mean in a case like this, of a woman who misidentifies with her attacker and a husband who "loved not wisely but too well" and will kill and if need be die for her?
Take the same set of pictures as below, or subsitute any other image of Sam Dalmas trapped in between the doors of the gallery, unable to intervene and forced to reflect upon what he has just witnessed and apply the following:
"Hymen
The word hymen comes for the Greek for skin, membrane or the vaginal hymen.
In deconstruction it is used to refer to the interplay between, the normally considered mutually exclusive terms of, inside and outside. The hymen is the membrane of intersection where it becomes impossible to distinguish whether the membrane is on the inside or the outside. And in the absence of the complete hymen, the distinction between inside and outside disappears. Thus, in a way, the hymen defies formal logic and is neither outside nor inside, and after penetration, is both inside and outside.
Showing the problematics of a simple word like hymen questions what "is inside" and "is outside" mean, they cannot here be considered in the usual logic of mutual exclusion (sometimes called law of excluded middle). Thus we get a contrast to formal logic, and especially the ancient and revered principle of non-contradiction, which from Aristotle says "one cannot say of something that it is and that it is not in the same respect and at the same time". Yet, the hymen is inside and is not inside in the same respect and at the same time (ie, using a formal logic tranlation of "inside" to "not outside")."
- From the wikipedia entry on deconstruction
Or, what do those images of the man-in-black and the woman-in-white mean when read through the colour codes, conventions and symbolisms of film noir and spaghetti western? Was Monica attacking Alberto or defending herself against what she thought was his attack? What do the labels of victim and victimiser really mean in a case like this, of a woman who misidentifies with her attacker and a husband who "loved not wisely but too well" and will kill and if need be die for her?
Words and pictures #4
“Scholars are only now beginning to work their way into its [Benjamin’s Arcades project’s] labyrinthine structure, a structure Adorno claimed only Benjamin himself could fully explain. Let us simply note two important aspects of this project. The first is that Benjamin based it on the revolution in architecture that the use of iron and glass had made possible. Here, commentators have noted in particular than Benjamin was fascinated by the new spatial relationships between interior and exterior that the use of glass made possible: the street could be brought inside, and the inside was opened up to the public. The difference between private and public was thus becoming problematic...”
From John Lechte's entry on Walter Benjamin in Fifty Key Contemporary Thinkers
Saturday, 20 January 2007
Some thoughts on the first two sequences of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage
The impact of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage's gallery sequence is such that commentators often begin their discussion of the film at this point. I would argue, however, that the general excessiveness of the film – an excess which, as we will see, takes a different form from that of the director's later films – means that the two sequences which precede it do more than just introduce the two main characters, the killer and amateur detective Sam Dalmas.
In the first sequence, which plays over the film's credits, the killer prepares for the murder of 'his' next victim, who is also seen being stalked and photographed, neatly signifying the camera as assaultive weapon. The sequence introduces Argento's characteristic emphasis on textures through the shine of the black gloves and raincoat, photographs and knives; a shine that also, by happy coincidence, further foregrounds the director's introduction of a heightened fetish element to the giallo film killer's accoutrements in relation to Freud's famous formulation of fetishism in relation to the “Glanz auf der Nase” or “shine on the nose”. Nevertheless, although agreeing with Needham's assertion that the film sees what was primarily a fashionable disguise in Blood and Black Lace transform into something more replete with fetishistic meanings here, one also feels that his analysis perhaps neglects to consider the longer history of black gloves and raincoats in films such as M, where they are not particularly fetishised, and Death Laid an Egg, where they are.
Le mani sulla citta - the black gloves as normal attire in Fritz Lang's M and within the krimi tradition
The black glove and blade fetish combination in Death Laid an Egg (1967) prefiguring The Bird with the Crystal Plumage by three years.
In other regards, however, this sequence is less successful. Whilst the unclear chronology, superimposition of the camera frame, freeze-frames and snapshots of the victim in black-and-white certainly serve to alert audiences to the fact that they are watching an explicit re-presentation of the world; to Argento's strategies; and the idea(l) of becoming alert, active participants, their diegetic meaning remains unclear. Why should the killer chose these particular victims and be compelled to document things in this manner, even going to the lengths of typing away whilst wearing the gloves.
While we could invoke a psychoanalytical rationale, such as the killer's attempting to master their original traumatic event through ritual and repetition, the remainder of the film does not really seem to support this. Though the killer's fourth victim / the film's second is photographed before her murder, the fifth / third is not. One possibility here is that the last victim is murdered by the killer's protector-accomplice, but this is not made explicit. Likewise, no reference is made to the killer's documenting their crimes in the analysts summing up of the case at the end of the film.
Photography or cinematography?
The shine of the photograph and the gloves; the killer touching the surface of the image
The fetishisation of the murder weapon
The obvious questions that then emerge is why they are there and why the sequence does not just show the killer's preparations, then the murder. (Indeed, the minimal representation of the murder here, the screen momentarily going black whilst a single scream rings out, also testifies that Argento's rarely recognised facility for restraint, most evident in his more recent films, was present from the outset.) One answer is that by foregrounding the constructedness of the image in this way Argento was better able to allude to one of his key influences, Antonioni, and specifically Blow-Up.
As such, these images seem to open themselves up to analysis in terms of the Barthesian framework of excess meaning proposed by McDonagh. They are excessive signifiers, or signifiers of excess, that only really make sense in relation to their own systems of meaning. Crucially in this case, this sense is also fundamentally external to the film itself, intertextual rather than intratextual.
This, in turn, is something that distinguishes the intermittent and less controlled excesses of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, which McDonagh downplays, from the more consistent and disciplined excesses of Deep Red, as Argento's most thorough-going working through of the problematic established by Blow-Up, which she emphasises.
In Deep Red the excesses are more multi-layered and thereby better able to meet the requirements of both “readerly” / popular cinema and “writerly” / art cinema approaches, providing a combination of textual, subtextual and intertextual meanings and reference points. Thus, to give one example, the bizarre puppet with which the killer torments and distracts one of her victims functions at the readerly or more surface level to amplify the shock moment and at the writerly or deeper as something associated with – for instance – a characteristic Surrealist motif and, by extension, notions of “convulsive beauty”.
Here, however, what we seem to have is a would-be “writerly” fragment that likely comes across as too self-conscious and mannered to really work in art cinema terms and as too confusing and nonsensical in those of popular cinema. (Though, as Sobchack's deconstruction of the term confusion to emphasise the co-mingling and co-presence of the senses shows, sometimes it is not necessarily a bad thing; the point here is that we seem to have a confusion that hinders rather than helps our understanding and appreciation of the film.)
What has rarely been recognised, however, is thus the importance of certain key sequences in The Bird's much-maligned follow-up, The Cat o' Nine Tails in offering a more successful initial interrogation of Blow-Up's (rhetoric of the) image. Part of the reason for this, one suspects, is that this is also achieved at the cost of being integrated more into film itself, with a concomitant diminution of the apparent scope for the critic to interpret. Put another way, Cat o' Nine Tails is a more classical and readerly film than The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (or, for that matter, the little-seen Four Flies on Grey Velvet).
In Cat o' Nine Tails it is actually a Blow-Up style professional photographer who captures the vital detail that reveals an apparent accident to be a deliberate act of murder. Waiting at the train station to record the arrival of a starlet – a sequence that itself perhaps allowing for a reference to Antonioni's L'Avventura and La Notte alongside the paparazzi of Fellini's La Dolce vita – the photographer happens to catch the hand of the assassin pushing the would-be blackmailer in front of the oncoming train.
The moment of death is captured by the photographer
But after a brief look at the body he remembers why they are there: “Hey, we've forgotten about the starlet – come on.”
Though the death continues to affect him: “That's right – smile, smile. A man is dead!”
Reflecting his inability to truly see – i.e. to see within the framework of the filmmakers' emerging sense logic – he does not, however, notice this until prompted to interrogate the photograph more closely by one of the film's protagonists. It is Arno, the blind ex-newspaperman, the one who sees, who is a seer, that asks the pertinent question of whether the reproduction of the blackmailer's fall (itself another recurring theme in Argento's cinema, as Thoret emphasises) reproduced in the newspaper was perhaps “cropped,” emphasising / framing it at the expense of excluding / deframing the remainder.
The photograph as it appears in the newspaper
And the detail that, working within the framework of an unfortunate accident, no-one sees
The second sequence in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is less excessive – though not totally lacking in this regard – but also more successful. Following the cut to a black screen and scream, the first thing we see is an announcement of the mysterious murder of a young woman, the third in a month. As the camera moves out, we then get more of the detail, that this is an advertising hoarding for Paesa Sera (the newspaper on which Argento himself worked) and that the other headline is a train crash in England, with many dead. Neither event, however, particularly concerns Professor Carlo Dover as he buys a newspaper from the kiosk and scans though its pages – “ah, the same old rubbish” – nor his friend Sam Dalmas – “come on Carlo, or we'll be late.” This indifference will of course prove deeply ironic in the light of the events about to unfold.
From the specific to the general; note the gialli paperbacks on the edicola
The way the scene is constructed, opening on a detail and then moving out to give the wider context, rather than using the more classical approach of providing an establishing shot, then breaking the scene up into smaller details once spatial relationships have been identified, soon emerges as one of the characteristic features of the film. This also, of course, gives it a distinctly modernist edge that distinguishes it from the likes of Bava's The Girl Who Knew Too Much and Blood and Black Lace, if not Questi's lesser-known, more experimental Death Laid an Egg.
As the two men walk along, we learn that Sam is an American ex-patriot writer, who came to Italy in search of inspiration. It has not emerged, however, and he has instead found himself writing a manual on the preservation of rare birds for as a work for hire. Besides introducing the common giallo theme of the foreigner or outsider and representing the first in a long line of Argento's creative figures, Sam's existential situation, his desire to be doing something authentic and meaningful, seems to parallel that of Argento himself at this point in his career. While quickly establishing himself as an in-demand screenwriter and script doctor after Once Upon a Time in the West, Argento had also rapidly become frustrated at the way his work was often treated by directors, his ideas failing to emerge onto the screen in the manner as he had hoped. Indeed, in large part it was his sense that the directors proposed to helm The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, such as Terence Young and Duccio Tessari, would be unable to appreciate its novelties – more, to repeat, in form than content – that led to his decision to direct the film himself. Perhaps surprisingly, however, he has indicated that he did so without any real thoughts of pursuing a career as a director rather than writer.
Portrait of the artist as a young man
Carlo: “Don't you want a copy?” (of the book)
Sam: “Who needs it – I have this!” (the cheque)
What also seems curious here is co-producer Goffredo Lombardo's sense that he had made a mistake in agreeing to part-finance the film with Salvatore and Dario Argento's own company, SeDA Spettacoli. For while one could understand the film's rushes not “making sense” in classical cinema terms by virtue of the more modernist approach Argento was taking, the extensive storyboarding he has indicated he undertook in developing the film might suggest that Lombardo ought to have known what the new director was aiming for.
In the first sequence, which plays over the film's credits, the killer prepares for the murder of 'his' next victim, who is also seen being stalked and photographed, neatly signifying the camera as assaultive weapon. The sequence introduces Argento's characteristic emphasis on textures through the shine of the black gloves and raincoat, photographs and knives; a shine that also, by happy coincidence, further foregrounds the director's introduction of a heightened fetish element to the giallo film killer's accoutrements in relation to Freud's famous formulation of fetishism in relation to the “Glanz auf der Nase” or “shine on the nose”. Nevertheless, although agreeing with Needham's assertion that the film sees what was primarily a fashionable disguise in Blood and Black Lace transform into something more replete with fetishistic meanings here, one also feels that his analysis perhaps neglects to consider the longer history of black gloves and raincoats in films such as M, where they are not particularly fetishised, and Death Laid an Egg, where they are.
Le mani sulla citta - the black gloves as normal attire in Fritz Lang's M and within the krimi tradition
The black glove and blade fetish combination in Death Laid an Egg (1967) prefiguring The Bird with the Crystal Plumage by three years.
In other regards, however, this sequence is less successful. Whilst the unclear chronology, superimposition of the camera frame, freeze-frames and snapshots of the victim in black-and-white certainly serve to alert audiences to the fact that they are watching an explicit re-presentation of the world; to Argento's strategies; and the idea(l) of becoming alert, active participants, their diegetic meaning remains unclear. Why should the killer chose these particular victims and be compelled to document things in this manner, even going to the lengths of typing away whilst wearing the gloves.
While we could invoke a psychoanalytical rationale, such as the killer's attempting to master their original traumatic event through ritual and repetition, the remainder of the film does not really seem to support this. Though the killer's fourth victim / the film's second is photographed before her murder, the fifth / third is not. One possibility here is that the last victim is murdered by the killer's protector-accomplice, but this is not made explicit. Likewise, no reference is made to the killer's documenting their crimes in the analysts summing up of the case at the end of the film.
Photography or cinematography?
The shine of the photograph and the gloves; the killer touching the surface of the image
The fetishisation of the murder weapon
The obvious questions that then emerge is why they are there and why the sequence does not just show the killer's preparations, then the murder. (Indeed, the minimal representation of the murder here, the screen momentarily going black whilst a single scream rings out, also testifies that Argento's rarely recognised facility for restraint, most evident in his more recent films, was present from the outset.) One answer is that by foregrounding the constructedness of the image in this way Argento was better able to allude to one of his key influences, Antonioni, and specifically Blow-Up.
As such, these images seem to open themselves up to analysis in terms of the Barthesian framework of excess meaning proposed by McDonagh. They are excessive signifiers, or signifiers of excess, that only really make sense in relation to their own systems of meaning. Crucially in this case, this sense is also fundamentally external to the film itself, intertextual rather than intratextual.
This, in turn, is something that distinguishes the intermittent and less controlled excesses of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, which McDonagh downplays, from the more consistent and disciplined excesses of Deep Red, as Argento's most thorough-going working through of the problematic established by Blow-Up, which she emphasises.
In Deep Red the excesses are more multi-layered and thereby better able to meet the requirements of both “readerly” / popular cinema and “writerly” / art cinema approaches, providing a combination of textual, subtextual and intertextual meanings and reference points. Thus, to give one example, the bizarre puppet with which the killer torments and distracts one of her victims functions at the readerly or more surface level to amplify the shock moment and at the writerly or deeper as something associated with – for instance – a characteristic Surrealist motif and, by extension, notions of “convulsive beauty”.
Here, however, what we seem to have is a would-be “writerly” fragment that likely comes across as too self-conscious and mannered to really work in art cinema terms and as too confusing and nonsensical in those of popular cinema. (Though, as Sobchack's deconstruction of the term confusion to emphasise the co-mingling and co-presence of the senses shows, sometimes it is not necessarily a bad thing; the point here is that we seem to have a confusion that hinders rather than helps our understanding and appreciation of the film.)
What has rarely been recognised, however, is thus the importance of certain key sequences in The Bird's much-maligned follow-up, The Cat o' Nine Tails in offering a more successful initial interrogation of Blow-Up's (rhetoric of the) image. Part of the reason for this, one suspects, is that this is also achieved at the cost of being integrated more into film itself, with a concomitant diminution of the apparent scope for the critic to interpret. Put another way, Cat o' Nine Tails is a more classical and readerly film than The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (or, for that matter, the little-seen Four Flies on Grey Velvet).
In Cat o' Nine Tails it is actually a Blow-Up style professional photographer who captures the vital detail that reveals an apparent accident to be a deliberate act of murder. Waiting at the train station to record the arrival of a starlet – a sequence that itself perhaps allowing for a reference to Antonioni's L'Avventura and La Notte alongside the paparazzi of Fellini's La Dolce vita – the photographer happens to catch the hand of the assassin pushing the would-be blackmailer in front of the oncoming train.
The moment of death is captured by the photographer
But after a brief look at the body he remembers why they are there: “Hey, we've forgotten about the starlet – come on.”
Though the death continues to affect him: “That's right – smile, smile. A man is dead!”
Reflecting his inability to truly see – i.e. to see within the framework of the filmmakers' emerging sense logic – he does not, however, notice this until prompted to interrogate the photograph more closely by one of the film's protagonists. It is Arno, the blind ex-newspaperman, the one who sees, who is a seer, that asks the pertinent question of whether the reproduction of the blackmailer's fall (itself another recurring theme in Argento's cinema, as Thoret emphasises) reproduced in the newspaper was perhaps “cropped,” emphasising / framing it at the expense of excluding / deframing the remainder.
The photograph as it appears in the newspaper
And the detail that, working within the framework of an unfortunate accident, no-one sees
The second sequence in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is less excessive – though not totally lacking in this regard – but also more successful. Following the cut to a black screen and scream, the first thing we see is an announcement of the mysterious murder of a young woman, the third in a month. As the camera moves out, we then get more of the detail, that this is an advertising hoarding for Paesa Sera (the newspaper on which Argento himself worked) and that the other headline is a train crash in England, with many dead. Neither event, however, particularly concerns Professor Carlo Dover as he buys a newspaper from the kiosk and scans though its pages – “ah, the same old rubbish” – nor his friend Sam Dalmas – “come on Carlo, or we'll be late.” This indifference will of course prove deeply ironic in the light of the events about to unfold.
From the specific to the general; note the gialli paperbacks on the edicola
The way the scene is constructed, opening on a detail and then moving out to give the wider context, rather than using the more classical approach of providing an establishing shot, then breaking the scene up into smaller details once spatial relationships have been identified, soon emerges as one of the characteristic features of the film. This also, of course, gives it a distinctly modernist edge that distinguishes it from the likes of Bava's The Girl Who Knew Too Much and Blood and Black Lace, if not Questi's lesser-known, more experimental Death Laid an Egg.
As the two men walk along, we learn that Sam is an American ex-patriot writer, who came to Italy in search of inspiration. It has not emerged, however, and he has instead found himself writing a manual on the preservation of rare birds for as a work for hire. Besides introducing the common giallo theme of the foreigner or outsider and representing the first in a long line of Argento's creative figures, Sam's existential situation, his desire to be doing something authentic and meaningful, seems to parallel that of Argento himself at this point in his career. While quickly establishing himself as an in-demand screenwriter and script doctor after Once Upon a Time in the West, Argento had also rapidly become frustrated at the way his work was often treated by directors, his ideas failing to emerge onto the screen in the manner as he had hoped. Indeed, in large part it was his sense that the directors proposed to helm The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, such as Terence Young and Duccio Tessari, would be unable to appreciate its novelties – more, to repeat, in form than content – that led to his decision to direct the film himself. Perhaps surprisingly, however, he has indicated that he did so without any real thoughts of pursuing a career as a director rather than writer.
Portrait of the artist as a young man
Carlo: “Don't you want a copy?” (of the book)
Sam: “Who needs it – I have this!” (the cheque)
What also seems curious here is co-producer Goffredo Lombardo's sense that he had made a mistake in agreeing to part-finance the film with Salvatore and Dario Argento's own company, SeDA Spettacoli. For while one could understand the film's rushes not “making sense” in classical cinema terms by virtue of the more modernist approach Argento was taking, the extensive storyboarding he has indicated he undertook in developing the film might suggest that Lombardo ought to have known what the new director was aiming for.
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