Sensitivita is one of those films that is inherently intriguing on account of the likelihood of a clash between the director and his material, namely Enzo G Castellari approachinging horror-thriller material with a female protagonist and considerable sexual elements.
For Castellari is an undisputed master of no-nonsense action cinema, with his westerns, like Keoma, and crime and war films, such as The Grand Racket and The Inglorious Bastards, ranking amongst the best in their respective filone.
But he's also someone who was quick to dismiss his giallo entry Cold Eyes of Fear as an awkward piece of post-Bird with the Crystal Plumage trend following - an evaluation that perhaps sells the idiosyncratic film short - and who subsequently declined the offer of directing Zombie on the grounds that he didn't feel horror to be his forte.
Beyond this, there's the fact that even within Castellari's preferred genres his previous work had been marked by something of an awkwardness - admittedly one common to many action filmmakers - in handling more intimate material, especially in relation to male-female relationships and the sexually explicit.
The main thing to emerge from Sensitivita is that Castellari could direct a surrealistic cum absurdist nightmare to rival Argento's Inferno and Fulci's The Beyond, but with one very important caveat: It's not clear how far he had any intention to do so, nor of the extent to which there is an underlying poetic logic or symbolism to the images and events depicted.
Let's try to summarise:
As a young girl Lilian watches her mother be pulled into the lake by a hand. As a young woman she returns, on motorcycle, to the area. Riding to the lake, Lilian almost runs over a a blind girl who assembles dolls from mismatched parts. The girl gives Lilian a doll without a head - its head, rolling out onto the road, nearly precipitated their collision. At the abandoned house by the lake, Lilian is pursued by a axe-wielding figure, but escapes. She has a series of encounters, both discursive and sexual, with some of the locals, usually apparently being observed by a mysterious young woman, Lilith. After one sexual encounter - these often being accompanied by Lilith's masturbating - Lilian goes into a death-like state, whilst after another her partner dies in an accident, leading to a police investigation that goes nowhere. Everywhere the same symbol, )o(, keeps cropping up...
If it's probably the case that I missed something through watching the film in Italian I don't think English subtitling or dubbing would make things terribly much clearer. Rather, it's a film where things just happen, without definite rhyme nor reason.
But if we cannot make definite conclusions, we can begin to make interconnections, noting the way the film's images have their antecedents and descendants, that "generator" function identified by Tohill and Tombs in Immoral Tales as a key component of the European fantastique cinema of the period.
Thus, for example, Lilian and Lilith are clearly connected in both name and function, being figures of feminine power and monstrosity of the the type connoted by the monster of Jewish myth to whom the latter's name first applied.
From then we can emphasise dualistic and doppelganger ideas, that the two figures and the forces of light and dark they represent, must either combine or destroy one another, and note the particular affinities with the likes of Franco's Doriana Gray / Die Marquise von Sade, via the psychic link between the two women, there more obviously halves of the same whole as twin sisters played by the inevitable, inimitable Lina Romay; Bazzoni's The Lady in the Lake, via Sensitivita's alternate Italian title and their shared gloomy, old, small town settings; and Pensione Paura, via the shared presence of the beautiful, talented and risk-taking Leonora Fani in the lead role.
Castellari, who amusingly and tellingly cameos as the detective leading the investigation nowhere, uses about every technique in the book at some point, be it slow-motion, split-screen, shock zooms, colour filters, rapid shock edits and montages - the latter particularly to convey the significance of the )o( symbol in case we miss it - and dramatic compositions.
If the filters suggest a certain sub-Suspiria derivativeness, the use of three way split screen to showcase an exploding car is pure Castellari.
In the end, what you think of Sensitivita perhaps depends on what you think of its incoherence and the effortless way in which Castellari achieves that Euro-fantastique / Eurotrash sensibility.
I couldn't say for sure what I felt afterwards, other that that it was definitely an experience.
Showing posts with label fantastique. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fantastique. Show all posts
Friday, 22 May 2009
Thursday, 4 September 2008
Judex
Given that his widowed daughter Jacqueline Aubry is about to be engaged to remarry and obtain the family a noble title in the process, banker Favraux should be happy. All his schemes, 20 years in the making, seem about to finally come to fruition. Unfortunately for him there are two flies in the ointment.
The first, whom he initially dismisses, is Judex, the self-appointed scourge of the underworld – his name, as Favraux's assistant Valliers explains, means 'judge' or 'upholder of he law' – who knows his wealth and power is built on blackmail and treachery and has sent a letter telling the banker to own up to his crimes and give up his half his ill-gotten gains, or else.
The second is Pierre Kerjean, an old co-conspirator who went to prison for Favraux on the promise that his family would be supported, duly had his naïve trust betrayed, and has now showed up seeking help in finding his long-lost son.
The old man is easy enough to deal with, being taken care of in a hit and run 'accident' but Judex proves another matter entirely.
Making his first appearance at Jacqueline's engagement party disguised as a bird-masked conjurer, he spikes Verneau's drink, causing the banker to drop down dead at the very moment indicated in his letter of the previous day.
Judex's formal introduction, as classic surrealist shock moment
The masked ball
Following Favraux's burial, Judex and his men dig up the banker's coffin and take it to their secret hideout in a windmill. Favraux, who was not dead but merely in a catatonic state comes to in a cell for the continuation of Judex's punishment.
Marie listens in
And Diana, the huntress, makes her move
Meanwhile the governess, Marie Verdier, whom Favraux had been planning to marry and is secretly the head of a criminal gang of her own under her real name Diana Monti, stakes her claim to his ill-gotten gains and thus sets herself on a collision course with Judex...
Another quasi-surreal moment
Charming and entertaining as it is, Judex is never quite as good a film as it could have been for one very simple reason: the subject was not director Georges Franju's first choice. Knowing that a femme fatale and a diabolical master of disguise provided rather more interesting anti-heroic possibilities in tune with his own sensibilities, his preference was for two of silent serial director Louis Feuillade's other characters, Irma Vep of The Vampires – work out the anagram of her name, as a predecessor of “Johnny Alucard” – and the eponymous Fantômas. (Bringing it back for today's audiences we might consider here why the Joker gets the best lines and notices in the Batman films; if this seems arbitrary consider that both films feature caped crusaders and that the look of Batman's nemesis can be traced to another half-forgotten tale of crime and punishment, The Man Who Laughs.)
While Franju does make Diana / Marie into something of an Irma Vep character as she slinks around with feline grace in a black body stocking before disguising herself as a deliciously devilish nun, this serves to also emphasise the comparative blandness of Judex himself, with only his initial appearance in the bird mask really having the same imagistic power.
Suor omicidi; note also the reversal of the usual black and white symbolism in the first image
Indeed Feuillade, a conservative rather than an instinctual anarchist like Franju, had actually created Judex as something of a watered down version of his earlier more anarchistic villains-as-heroes that he hoped would quell the establishment criticism they had provoked.
Light and dark – Diana shows her true colours
The most telling scene with regard to the difference between the two men's sensibilities is one late here that sees Judex encounter Favraux after the banker has been rescued by Diana. As Judex lurks outside Favraux expresses contrition for his old actions and indicates that he is does not want his old life back any longer. In part this is because he knows it suits several influential people for him to be dead to the world, with the implication that if he did dramatically reappear – a reappearance not outwith the realms of probability in the universe of these films – he would then soon wind up dead for real. Judex then bursts in regardless, still determined to act as judge, jury and executioner without evident regard for the clear selectiveness of his approach – a selectivity which becomes still more evident and compromised by the end of the film – but also his impotence in the face of what is clearly an endemic criminality amongst the respectable classes. As such, if Feuillade's Judex was a figure and a film acceptable to the establishment, here Franju pushes both that little bit further to bring the inherent contradictions of his prececessor's work to the forefront.
Franju further makes the film distinctively his own through a number of intertextual references to his previous films, with the doves that Judex produces and the guard dogs that protect Jacqueline and her daughter both referencing Eyes Without A Face. Certain of his composer of choice Maurice Jarre's musical motifs also sound very similar to those in the earlier film.
Balanced against this, however, Franju also beautifully captures the style of his silent serial models with intertitles, irising and other archaic effects like keyhole shaped masks, while also using his camera in a thoroughly modern and personal manner that recalls the contemporaneous nouvelle vague and Alexandre Astruc's theoretical notion of the “camera pen” with which the auteur director inscribed their signature onto their work.
Indeed, if anything, I would actually say that Franju's combination of new and old works better than that of Truffaut in Shoot the Pianist, as a film set in the present but making use of anachronistic techniques, and perhaps even Jules et Jim, as a film set partly in the same period.
Whereas to me Truffaut's use of irising and suchlike can come across as somewhat mannered, Franju's assemblages always have that sense of authenticity. There's the sense that unlike his younger counterpart he was never trying to impress anybody with his knowledge of cinema history and technique but was simply expressing himself and the delight he found in the early cinema. (Whereas Truffaut 'studied' at the Paris Cinematheque, Franju, along with Henri Langlois, founded it.)
Though not an actor, American magician Channing Pollock has a 'fit' with the Judex character and the film's universe, in that you believe he could pull of these tricks and invent this technology after seeing his bird-masked conjuring routine – which must have challenged his ability to misdirect somewhat, one supposes – and thereby makes the role his own.
Edith Scob brings that distinctive combination of fragile beauty and steely resolve to Jacqueline Favraux as she had earlier exhibited in the role of the titular Eyes without a Face, making it clear why Franju was drawn to work with her time and again.
The real star of the show as far as I was concerned, however, is Francine Bergé who, as Franju's Musidora / muse, has a much more active, challenging and trangressive role – see here Vicki Callahan's Zones of Anxiety: Movement, Musidora, and the Crime Serials of Louis Feuillade for an extensive analysis of the actress and her characters and what they meant to 1910s audiences, particularly in relation to gender norms – as Diana / Marie.
Eurobabe fans will want to note that Sylva Koscina has a smaller, but nevertheless pivotal role, as a passing circus acrobat, while Eurotrash fans may be intrigued to know that the film was produced by Robert De Nesle, later known for his work with Spanish maverick Jesus Franco.
The first, whom he initially dismisses, is Judex, the self-appointed scourge of the underworld – his name, as Favraux's assistant Valliers explains, means 'judge' or 'upholder of he law' – who knows his wealth and power is built on blackmail and treachery and has sent a letter telling the banker to own up to his crimes and give up his half his ill-gotten gains, or else.
The second is Pierre Kerjean, an old co-conspirator who went to prison for Favraux on the promise that his family would be supported, duly had his naïve trust betrayed, and has now showed up seeking help in finding his long-lost son.
The old man is easy enough to deal with, being taken care of in a hit and run 'accident' but Judex proves another matter entirely.
Making his first appearance at Jacqueline's engagement party disguised as a bird-masked conjurer, he spikes Verneau's drink, causing the banker to drop down dead at the very moment indicated in his letter of the previous day.
Judex's formal introduction, as classic surrealist shock moment
The masked ball
Following Favraux's burial, Judex and his men dig up the banker's coffin and take it to their secret hideout in a windmill. Favraux, who was not dead but merely in a catatonic state comes to in a cell for the continuation of Judex's punishment.
Marie listens in
And Diana, the huntress, makes her move
Meanwhile the governess, Marie Verdier, whom Favraux had been planning to marry and is secretly the head of a criminal gang of her own under her real name Diana Monti, stakes her claim to his ill-gotten gains and thus sets herself on a collision course with Judex...
Another quasi-surreal moment
Charming and entertaining as it is, Judex is never quite as good a film as it could have been for one very simple reason: the subject was not director Georges Franju's first choice. Knowing that a femme fatale and a diabolical master of disguise provided rather more interesting anti-heroic possibilities in tune with his own sensibilities, his preference was for two of silent serial director Louis Feuillade's other characters, Irma Vep of The Vampires – work out the anagram of her name, as a predecessor of “Johnny Alucard” – and the eponymous Fantômas. (Bringing it back for today's audiences we might consider here why the Joker gets the best lines and notices in the Batman films; if this seems arbitrary consider that both films feature caped crusaders and that the look of Batman's nemesis can be traced to another half-forgotten tale of crime and punishment, The Man Who Laughs.)
While Franju does make Diana / Marie into something of an Irma Vep character as she slinks around with feline grace in a black body stocking before disguising herself as a deliciously devilish nun, this serves to also emphasise the comparative blandness of Judex himself, with only his initial appearance in the bird mask really having the same imagistic power.
Suor omicidi; note also the reversal of the usual black and white symbolism in the first image
Indeed Feuillade, a conservative rather than an instinctual anarchist like Franju, had actually created Judex as something of a watered down version of his earlier more anarchistic villains-as-heroes that he hoped would quell the establishment criticism they had provoked.
Light and dark – Diana shows her true colours
The most telling scene with regard to the difference between the two men's sensibilities is one late here that sees Judex encounter Favraux after the banker has been rescued by Diana. As Judex lurks outside Favraux expresses contrition for his old actions and indicates that he is does not want his old life back any longer. In part this is because he knows it suits several influential people for him to be dead to the world, with the implication that if he did dramatically reappear – a reappearance not outwith the realms of probability in the universe of these films – he would then soon wind up dead for real. Judex then bursts in regardless, still determined to act as judge, jury and executioner without evident regard for the clear selectiveness of his approach – a selectivity which becomes still more evident and compromised by the end of the film – but also his impotence in the face of what is clearly an endemic criminality amongst the respectable classes. As such, if Feuillade's Judex was a figure and a film acceptable to the establishment, here Franju pushes both that little bit further to bring the inherent contradictions of his prececessor's work to the forefront.
Franju further makes the film distinctively his own through a number of intertextual references to his previous films, with the doves that Judex produces and the guard dogs that protect Jacqueline and her daughter both referencing Eyes Without A Face. Certain of his composer of choice Maurice Jarre's musical motifs also sound very similar to those in the earlier film.
Balanced against this, however, Franju also beautifully captures the style of his silent serial models with intertitles, irising and other archaic effects like keyhole shaped masks, while also using his camera in a thoroughly modern and personal manner that recalls the contemporaneous nouvelle vague and Alexandre Astruc's theoretical notion of the “camera pen” with which the auteur director inscribed their signature onto their work.
Indeed, if anything, I would actually say that Franju's combination of new and old works better than that of Truffaut in Shoot the Pianist, as a film set in the present but making use of anachronistic techniques, and perhaps even Jules et Jim, as a film set partly in the same period.
Whereas to me Truffaut's use of irising and suchlike can come across as somewhat mannered, Franju's assemblages always have that sense of authenticity. There's the sense that unlike his younger counterpart he was never trying to impress anybody with his knowledge of cinema history and technique but was simply expressing himself and the delight he found in the early cinema. (Whereas Truffaut 'studied' at the Paris Cinematheque, Franju, along with Henri Langlois, founded it.)
Though not an actor, American magician Channing Pollock has a 'fit' with the Judex character and the film's universe, in that you believe he could pull of these tricks and invent this technology after seeing his bird-masked conjuring routine – which must have challenged his ability to misdirect somewhat, one supposes – and thereby makes the role his own.
Edith Scob brings that distinctive combination of fragile beauty and steely resolve to Jacqueline Favraux as she had earlier exhibited in the role of the titular Eyes without a Face, making it clear why Franju was drawn to work with her time and again.
The real star of the show as far as I was concerned, however, is Francine Bergé who, as Franju's Musidora / muse, has a much more active, challenging and trangressive role – see here Vicki Callahan's Zones of Anxiety: Movement, Musidora, and the Crime Serials of Louis Feuillade for an extensive analysis of the actress and her characters and what they meant to 1910s audiences, particularly in relation to gender norms – as Diana / Marie.
Eurobabe fans will want to note that Sylva Koscina has a smaller, but nevertheless pivotal role, as a passing circus acrobat, while Eurotrash fans may be intrigued to know that the film was produced by Robert De Nesle, later known for his work with Spanish maverick Jesus Franco.
Sunday, 31 August 2008
Qualcosa striscia nel buio / Something is Creeping in the Dark / Something is Crawling in the Dark
We open on a dark, stormy night on an isolated road that is seeing an unusually high amount of traffic.
Feuding couple Sylvia and Donald Forrest (Lucia Bose and Giacomo Rossi-Stuart) are en route to a party at her friend Helen's, prompting Donald to naturally assume that the two cars which race past them must be other guests.
Director Colucci constantly reverses the angles here, framing Sylvia and Donald in the eerie blue light that dominates much of the film
In fact they are occupied by Inspector Wright (Dino Fazio) and Detective Sam and their quarry, the psychopathic Spike (Farley Granger).
Farley Granger as a rather old juvenile delinquent
Spike reaches the bridge and discovers it has been washed away in the storm and is thus apprehended by Wright. He then starts to turn back towards town with his quarry, advising Sylvia and Donald to do likewise.
They encountering another car heading in the opposite direction, occupied by Dr Williams and his assistant Susan who, despite being on the way to perform a vital operation, nevertheless had time to stop and pick up Professor Lawrence after his car broke down.
With the road back flooded and the water level rising all around, attention turns to a mansion house on the hill nearby.
The old dark house, plus ca change
Once inside, Wright and Williams go to make their urgent telephone calls, only to discover that lines are also down.
Sylvia and Donald continue to argue, with Sylvia also proposing that the group all make the most of the night via an anonymous orgy.
Spike then proves himself to be more than your average psychopapthic killer by improvising an etude on the piano. This has a powerful effect on Sylvia as we segue into a slow-motion fantasy sequence situated in an as yet unidentified room; later on it will prove to be the guest bedroom Sylvia and Donald are allocated.
In the fantasy Spike strikes Sylvia, who then stabs him repeatedly as he grins, undoubtedly plenty of material for anyone wanting to interpret the characters' repressed desires through the lenses of psychoanalytic and / or feminist theories: is this what men are really like? what women are really like? what men really think about women? what women really think about men? what men think women are like?
Intriguingly, however, the ensuing exchange of dialogue again hints at something beyond all this, insofar as both Spike and Sylvia seem to have somehow shared this fantasy and, through it, something of their respective inner secrets and desires:
Sylvia: “Tell me, how does it feel to kill?”
Spike: “Do you think you could really understand? Tied to a thousand fears, a thousand prejudices, a thousand superstitions? No, you live a life full of vanity and compromise. You could be able to understand what it really means to free yourself from all the hypocrisy and stupidity of this decadent world. You couldn't understand that.”
“And why not?”
“Because you're swimming in it.”
As the night continues the irrational and magical side is further foregrounded as discussion next turns to the house's former owner, whose initially covered portrait dominates the room. Apparently Lady Sheila Marlowe died in mysterious circumstances a year ago, not long after being acquitted for the murder of her husband. The information that she was also an occultist and held regular séances prompts Sylvia to suggest trying to contact Lady Marlowe.
The only true mystery is that our lives are governed by dead people?
Needless to say this soon proves to have been a less than good idea given the circumstances...
This 1971 supernatural horror / thriller was one of only two films directed by Mario Colucci and the only one which he both wrote and directed; his other directorial credit is on the 1968 spaghetti western Vendetta per Vendetta, while his list of writing credits is surprisingly, encompassing a total of seven films in nine years.
With Something is Creeping in the Dark also being Colucci's final film credit, one wonders whether he died shortly afterwards; had invested most of his own money in the film in the hope of launching his career, or simply responded to the indifference that met its release by turning his attentions elsewhere.
Yet while the film may not be particularly outstanding or memorable is it not the exactly the worst example of its kind on any count.
Colucci uses all manner of techniques – including slow motion, freeze-frame, superimpositions, rapid-fire edits and subjective camera alongside the more usual zooms and extreme close-ups – and demonstrates a firm grasp of how to generate atmosphere and effect and of ways in which to tell a story visually.
At one point Colucci even turns the camera upside down
Technically the film is likewise accomplished, with production design and lighting dominated by cool blues and brilliant reds, while the presence of Lucia Bose, Giacomo Rossi-Stuart and Farley Granger in the cast imparts a degree of quality and name recognition there as well.
Angelo Francesco Lavagnino – who also makes his only on-screen appearance in the film, minus the Angelo, as the Professor – contributes a simple but effective series of cues, ranging from the percussive polyrhythmic mix of bongos and hi-hat overlaid by shock stabs that heighten the excitement of the opening car chase; through Spike's suitably lush and swooning piano piece, to the piano chords that accompany the séance and sound like they could well be emanating from the pits of hell itself.
The satisfactoriness of the script is more dependent on how generous one is willing to be. For example, we're told that Professor Lawrence was picked up by Dr Williams after his car broke down. Given that Williams were supposed to be racing to an emergency it seems unlikely that he should have stopped – unless this selfsame contrivance is read as another indicator that no-one present here as quite the control over their actions they think, albeit in terms of the supernatural rather than the unconscious.
What this in turn clues us into is that, to the extent it is an example of the European fantastique, the film should theoretically be working via a cinematic rather than a narrative logic. The question here is whether this is successfully and consistently conveyed. While the aforementioned dream sequence certainly works in fantastique / cinematic terms, the mundane nature of the conflict between the police and Spike doesn't, with the filmmakers also failing to make the most of the rational detective type figures encountering a supernatural mystery angle or the Terror Express / Assault on Precinct 13 one of the two coming together against a mutual foe.
Beyond this, it's perhaps also that, for all the technique, the film also feels curiously old fashioned compared to Bava's Five Dolls for an August Moon, as another group of unpleasant characters stranded in an isolated location thriller, and Freda's Tragic Ceremony, as another occult themed horror-thriller. Colucci's direction lacks the sense of irony and self-parody we get in Bava's film, while his set of characters and séance are that bit less hip and happening than their counterparts in Freda's.
The one other area where the film is modern, namely its avoidance of an obvious protagonist with whom we can identify – Sylvia or Donald?, Spike or Inspector Wright? – also hurts it, because we're not given sufficient information to approach them the other way, that they aren't supposed to be rounded flesh and blood characters with whom we might identify as much as the pieces in some cosmic game.
One final point of note is that Something is Creeping in the Dark contains one of the more memorable credits within the Italian horror and thriller cinema, that of Lorenda Nusciak. Appearing as Lady Sheila Marlowe, the actress has a role recalling Gene Tierney's debut in Laura, in that she too only appears on screen in a still photograph. Nice work if you can get it?
Feuding couple Sylvia and Donald Forrest (Lucia Bose and Giacomo Rossi-Stuart) are en route to a party at her friend Helen's, prompting Donald to naturally assume that the two cars which race past them must be other guests.
Director Colucci constantly reverses the angles here, framing Sylvia and Donald in the eerie blue light that dominates much of the film
In fact they are occupied by Inspector Wright (Dino Fazio) and Detective Sam and their quarry, the psychopathic Spike (Farley Granger).
Farley Granger as a rather old juvenile delinquent
Spike reaches the bridge and discovers it has been washed away in the storm and is thus apprehended by Wright. He then starts to turn back towards town with his quarry, advising Sylvia and Donald to do likewise.
They encountering another car heading in the opposite direction, occupied by Dr Williams and his assistant Susan who, despite being on the way to perform a vital operation, nevertheless had time to stop and pick up Professor Lawrence after his car broke down.
With the road back flooded and the water level rising all around, attention turns to a mansion house on the hill nearby.
The old dark house, plus ca change
Once inside, Wright and Williams go to make their urgent telephone calls, only to discover that lines are also down.
Sylvia and Donald continue to argue, with Sylvia also proposing that the group all make the most of the night via an anonymous orgy.
Spike then proves himself to be more than your average psychopapthic killer by improvising an etude on the piano. This has a powerful effect on Sylvia as we segue into a slow-motion fantasy sequence situated in an as yet unidentified room; later on it will prove to be the guest bedroom Sylvia and Donald are allocated.
In the fantasy Spike strikes Sylvia, who then stabs him repeatedly as he grins, undoubtedly plenty of material for anyone wanting to interpret the characters' repressed desires through the lenses of psychoanalytic and / or feminist theories: is this what men are really like? what women are really like? what men really think about women? what women really think about men? what men think women are like?
Intriguingly, however, the ensuing exchange of dialogue again hints at something beyond all this, insofar as both Spike and Sylvia seem to have somehow shared this fantasy and, through it, something of their respective inner secrets and desires:
Sylvia: “Tell me, how does it feel to kill?”
Spike: “Do you think you could really understand? Tied to a thousand fears, a thousand prejudices, a thousand superstitions? No, you live a life full of vanity and compromise. You could be able to understand what it really means to free yourself from all the hypocrisy and stupidity of this decadent world. You couldn't understand that.”
“And why not?”
“Because you're swimming in it.”
As the night continues the irrational and magical side is further foregrounded as discussion next turns to the house's former owner, whose initially covered portrait dominates the room. Apparently Lady Sheila Marlowe died in mysterious circumstances a year ago, not long after being acquitted for the murder of her husband. The information that she was also an occultist and held regular séances prompts Sylvia to suggest trying to contact Lady Marlowe.
The only true mystery is that our lives are governed by dead people?
Needless to say this soon proves to have been a less than good idea given the circumstances...
This 1971 supernatural horror / thriller was one of only two films directed by Mario Colucci and the only one which he both wrote and directed; his other directorial credit is on the 1968 spaghetti western Vendetta per Vendetta, while his list of writing credits is surprisingly, encompassing a total of seven films in nine years.
With Something is Creeping in the Dark also being Colucci's final film credit, one wonders whether he died shortly afterwards; had invested most of his own money in the film in the hope of launching his career, or simply responded to the indifference that met its release by turning his attentions elsewhere.
Yet while the film may not be particularly outstanding or memorable is it not the exactly the worst example of its kind on any count.
Colucci uses all manner of techniques – including slow motion, freeze-frame, superimpositions, rapid-fire edits and subjective camera alongside the more usual zooms and extreme close-ups – and demonstrates a firm grasp of how to generate atmosphere and effect and of ways in which to tell a story visually.
At one point Colucci even turns the camera upside down
Technically the film is likewise accomplished, with production design and lighting dominated by cool blues and brilliant reds, while the presence of Lucia Bose, Giacomo Rossi-Stuart and Farley Granger in the cast imparts a degree of quality and name recognition there as well.
Angelo Francesco Lavagnino – who also makes his only on-screen appearance in the film, minus the Angelo, as the Professor – contributes a simple but effective series of cues, ranging from the percussive polyrhythmic mix of bongos and hi-hat overlaid by shock stabs that heighten the excitement of the opening car chase; through Spike's suitably lush and swooning piano piece, to the piano chords that accompany the séance and sound like they could well be emanating from the pits of hell itself.
The satisfactoriness of the script is more dependent on how generous one is willing to be. For example, we're told that Professor Lawrence was picked up by Dr Williams after his car broke down. Given that Williams were supposed to be racing to an emergency it seems unlikely that he should have stopped – unless this selfsame contrivance is read as another indicator that no-one present here as quite the control over their actions they think, albeit in terms of the supernatural rather than the unconscious.
What this in turn clues us into is that, to the extent it is an example of the European fantastique, the film should theoretically be working via a cinematic rather than a narrative logic. The question here is whether this is successfully and consistently conveyed. While the aforementioned dream sequence certainly works in fantastique / cinematic terms, the mundane nature of the conflict between the police and Spike doesn't, with the filmmakers also failing to make the most of the rational detective type figures encountering a supernatural mystery angle or the Terror Express / Assault on Precinct 13 one of the two coming together against a mutual foe.
Beyond this, it's perhaps also that, for all the technique, the film also feels curiously old fashioned compared to Bava's Five Dolls for an August Moon, as another group of unpleasant characters stranded in an isolated location thriller, and Freda's Tragic Ceremony, as another occult themed horror-thriller. Colucci's direction lacks the sense of irony and self-parody we get in Bava's film, while his set of characters and séance are that bit less hip and happening than their counterparts in Freda's.
The one other area where the film is modern, namely its avoidance of an obvious protagonist with whom we can identify – Sylvia or Donald?, Spike or Inspector Wright? – also hurts it, because we're not given sufficient information to approach them the other way, that they aren't supposed to be rounded flesh and blood characters with whom we might identify as much as the pieces in some cosmic game.
One final point of note is that Something is Creeping in the Dark contains one of the more memorable credits within the Italian horror and thriller cinema, that of Lorenda Nusciak. Appearing as Lady Sheila Marlowe, the actress has a role recalling Gene Tierney's debut in Laura, in that she too only appears on screen in a still photograph. Nice work if you can get it?
Sunday, 3 August 2008
Estratto dagli archivi segreti della polizia di una capitale europea / Tragic Ceremony
Estratto dagli archivi segreti della polizia di una capitale europea is a strange title for a strange film.
A subtitler's nightmare
It translates as Extracted from the Secret Archives of the Police of a European Capital, suggesting a early 70s poliziotti along the lines of the previous year's Confessione di un commissario di polizia al procuratore della repubblica / Confessions of a Police Captain, whose vagueness in identifying a state compared to this apparent predecessor might be attributed to the combination of Italian and Spanish production money, with many Spanish genre films of the period using foreign settings as a means of getting around the censors by presenting their contents as offering a critique that was not directed at their conservative Francoist regime.
What we actually get, however, is a supernatural / fantastical horror that references in the dialogue to Scotland Yard, Chelsea and “Church Street” indicate to be around London, even as the sun-drenched sea and rural mediterranean locales and distinctly Italian cast to the architecture and fauna indicate very much otherwise.
Simultaneously, however, this also affords a degree of contuinity with director Riccardo Freda's previous British-Isles set, Italian-made gothics The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock and The Ghost and the giallo Double Face, on each of which he also used his Robert Hampton pseudonym, even if the motivation underlying this name and perhaps the choice of settings could be understood as more commercial than artistic:
“I was in Sanremo, and I happened to be in front of the cinema where I Vampiri was on. At that time, I would sometimes go into the hall to study the audience's reactions. I don't know why, but the theatre was almost empty. Anyway, many people were attracted by the posters, which were very beautiful. The people would read I Vampiri, I Vampiri and that seemed to tempt them. Then, at the very last moment, they would notice the name: Freda. The reaction was sort of automatic: Freda? It's Italian, it must be horrible, the Italians can't make this kind of movie.”
Yet Tragic Ceremony – as I will from hereon refer to the film, both for brevity and as better suited to its actual content – also evinces elements of continuity even with I Vampiri, through its present-day setting, mixture of aristocratic and commoner characters and theme of the old and powerful feeding upon the young and powerless.
The film opens on a sailing yacht as we are introduced to our four hippie-ish protagonists. Bill (Tony Isbert) is the son of an industrialist, Jane (Camille Keaton) the girl he covets. Joe and Fred (Maximo Valverde and Giovanni Petrucci) are friends, of less privileged backgrounds and happy to take advantage of Bill's seeming gullibility.
The game the three men play here is interesting in the light of Freda's cynical world view and interests in fine art and games of skill and chance, including horseracing and the wager-based origins of some of his films.
Fortune and misfortune as the dune buggy attack batallion meets the mysterious Lord Alexander
Within the context of the film meanwhile it also serves to introduce a pervasive theme, that of the clash of cultures and values between generations and classes, as Joe remarks: “You might be the son of a great industrialist, but as far as boats go you know nothing. You're only good at spending money. It almost seems like you prefer it that way.”
Given Joe's own modest origins and coming from an interior part of Andalucia if an indicental line of dialogue can be accorded any weight, it is less clear where he picked up his specialised knowledge of nautical terminology.
Later, as the group go ashore and make camp for the night, Joe confesses to Fred that he read up on the subject beforehand because it seemed likely to prove useful, highlighting the idea of the working-class student who consciously studies bourgeois tastes and practices to move outwith the world of his own class.
Bill then follows after Jane to give her a gift of a pearl necklace. (Cue ZZ Top lyrics, although in this case it is jewellery we are talking about.) A match cuts as he places it round her neck sees him placing the item around his mother’s instead, following which he tells her – and thus the audience looking in – its curious history.
The necklace is said to contain an evil spirit, which took over the woman who once owned it. A psychic and medium then performed an exorcism, and was given the necklace in gratitude by its previous owner, but then herself died in doubtful circumstances shortly thereafter.
Good bad taste and bad bad taste, to invoke John Waters's distinction
Bill’s mother hesitated to wear his gift, not out of fear of its provenance – or so she claims at least – but rather because she finds this history to be “in bad taste,” to again highlight the film’s distinctive tendency to intertwine aesthetic and moral judgements. Given the relative prevalence of bello and brutto rather than buono and male in Italian compared to their English language counterparts of beautiful and ugly and good and evil, this might also be a wider aspect of Italian culture – note here also the notion of Fascism as the aestheticisation of politics – that Freda and his collaborators are making particularly obvious here.
Whatever the case, Tragic Ceremony is clearly one of that subset of Eurocult films – Bava's Five Dolls for an August Moon would be another obvious example, along with much of Jess Franco's oeuvre – whose own discourses might profitable be analysed using Pierre Bourdieu's ideas around the social judgement of taste, as an ironic point of “distinction” from other examples of the form insofar as they tend to approached and interpreted more externally as cult film objects.
As Jane moves to kiss Bill, a dramatic image from her point of view shows his face all blue, as if he were dead – an image all the more shocking inasmuch as there is no indication that Bill has told her the item’s history and, as such, one which also suggests its curse may not yet have been lifted.
Having rested for a while, the group decides to return home. A few miles along the road their beach buggy runs out of petrol – this despite Bill having checked and being certain the tank should be half-full. Worse, the assistant at the petrol station (Jose Calvo), who seems to appear out of nowhere, is highly distrustful of Bill’s travellers cheques and reluctant gives them a little petrol, albeit for free.
A bit further along, the buggy breaks down again anyway, with the weather also having worsened considerably. Fortuitously there is a large house opposite. Even more fortuitously there are several cars in its driveway, indicating that someone must be at home. Joe rings the doorbell, which is answered by Count Alexander (Luigi Pistilli). He and his wife (Luciana Paluzzi) purport to be firm believers in noble traditions of hospitality and invite the group to stay overnight.
Jane and the Countess
While the three men are assigned the kitchens, the countess takes Jane up to a room of her own, next to the countess, who takes an interest in her the necklace. Elsewhere in the building, preparations are being made for a black magic ceremony – a ceremony in which Jane has been assigned the role of sacrificial victim.
Fortunately Bill, Fred and Joe realise something is up just in time, leading to a shocking orgy of violence and a deliberately confusing extended denouement, the events described thus far barely taking us to the midway point of the film.
The satanic ritual is one of the film's visual highlights, with effective use of black void space and distorting lenses and angles
If Freda's approach to exploitative material in Tragic Ceremony is reminiscent of its immediate predecessor The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire in its general crudity, its distinctive approach towards aesthetics-as-ethics means this also comes across as a more deliberate decision, that Freda was self-consciously indulging in bad taste and deploying techniques like the shock zoom because they were justified by the material.
In other places the film recalls its gothic predecessors more with the emphasis being squarely on atmosphere. The lighting and lightning effects are convincing and many of the individual compositions arresting.
Though the camerawork is mobile, it is not particularly fluid, sometimes having something of a stop-start quality, while the hand-held shots are often a bit on the wobbly side. While we might take these as further expressions of the film's themes, I think this would be going too far and that Freda really needed a better camera operator.
Some of the film's more striking images
Though on paper the film has quite a good cast it should be noted that Pistilli and Paluzzi aren't really in it for very long, with the youthful protagonists on screen for most of the time. Their performances are adequate rather than inspired, although Keaton displays an effective blank / traumatised expression that also served her in good stead as the titular victim in What Have you Done to Solange?
Stelvio Cipriani provides the music, with Freda also contributing lyrics to the opening and closing credit theme. The score is a strange and at times inconsistent seeming mixture of styles, though this could also again be taken as a reflection of the film itself, with the individual cues generally being effective excepting some overly dramatic shock horror pieces.
A subtitler's nightmare
It translates as Extracted from the Secret Archives of the Police of a European Capital, suggesting a early 70s poliziotti along the lines of the previous year's Confessione di un commissario di polizia al procuratore della repubblica / Confessions of a Police Captain, whose vagueness in identifying a state compared to this apparent predecessor might be attributed to the combination of Italian and Spanish production money, with many Spanish genre films of the period using foreign settings as a means of getting around the censors by presenting their contents as offering a critique that was not directed at their conservative Francoist regime.
What we actually get, however, is a supernatural / fantastical horror that references in the dialogue to Scotland Yard, Chelsea and “Church Street” indicate to be around London, even as the sun-drenched sea and rural mediterranean locales and distinctly Italian cast to the architecture and fauna indicate very much otherwise.
Simultaneously, however, this also affords a degree of contuinity with director Riccardo Freda's previous British-Isles set, Italian-made gothics The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock and The Ghost and the giallo Double Face, on each of which he also used his Robert Hampton pseudonym, even if the motivation underlying this name and perhaps the choice of settings could be understood as more commercial than artistic:
“I was in Sanremo, and I happened to be in front of the cinema where I Vampiri was on. At that time, I would sometimes go into the hall to study the audience's reactions. I don't know why, but the theatre was almost empty. Anyway, many people were attracted by the posters, which were very beautiful. The people would read I Vampiri, I Vampiri and that seemed to tempt them. Then, at the very last moment, they would notice the name: Freda. The reaction was sort of automatic: Freda? It's Italian, it must be horrible, the Italians can't make this kind of movie.”
Yet Tragic Ceremony – as I will from hereon refer to the film, both for brevity and as better suited to its actual content – also evinces elements of continuity even with I Vampiri, through its present-day setting, mixture of aristocratic and commoner characters and theme of the old and powerful feeding upon the young and powerless.
The film opens on a sailing yacht as we are introduced to our four hippie-ish protagonists. Bill (Tony Isbert) is the son of an industrialist, Jane (Camille Keaton) the girl he covets. Joe and Fred (Maximo Valverde and Giovanni Petrucci) are friends, of less privileged backgrounds and happy to take advantage of Bill's seeming gullibility.
The game the three men play here is interesting in the light of Freda's cynical world view and interests in fine art and games of skill and chance, including horseracing and the wager-based origins of some of his films.
Fortune and misfortune as the dune buggy attack batallion meets the mysterious Lord Alexander
Within the context of the film meanwhile it also serves to introduce a pervasive theme, that of the clash of cultures and values between generations and classes, as Joe remarks: “You might be the son of a great industrialist, but as far as boats go you know nothing. You're only good at spending money. It almost seems like you prefer it that way.”
Given Joe's own modest origins and coming from an interior part of Andalucia if an indicental line of dialogue can be accorded any weight, it is less clear where he picked up his specialised knowledge of nautical terminology.
Later, as the group go ashore and make camp for the night, Joe confesses to Fred that he read up on the subject beforehand because it seemed likely to prove useful, highlighting the idea of the working-class student who consciously studies bourgeois tastes and practices to move outwith the world of his own class.
Bill then follows after Jane to give her a gift of a pearl necklace. (Cue ZZ Top lyrics, although in this case it is jewellery we are talking about.) A match cuts as he places it round her neck sees him placing the item around his mother’s instead, following which he tells her – and thus the audience looking in – its curious history.
The necklace is said to contain an evil spirit, which took over the woman who once owned it. A psychic and medium then performed an exorcism, and was given the necklace in gratitude by its previous owner, but then herself died in doubtful circumstances shortly thereafter.
Good bad taste and bad bad taste, to invoke John Waters's distinction
Bill’s mother hesitated to wear his gift, not out of fear of its provenance – or so she claims at least – but rather because she finds this history to be “in bad taste,” to again highlight the film’s distinctive tendency to intertwine aesthetic and moral judgements. Given the relative prevalence of bello and brutto rather than buono and male in Italian compared to their English language counterparts of beautiful and ugly and good and evil, this might also be a wider aspect of Italian culture – note here also the notion of Fascism as the aestheticisation of politics – that Freda and his collaborators are making particularly obvious here.
Whatever the case, Tragic Ceremony is clearly one of that subset of Eurocult films – Bava's Five Dolls for an August Moon would be another obvious example, along with much of Jess Franco's oeuvre – whose own discourses might profitable be analysed using Pierre Bourdieu's ideas around the social judgement of taste, as an ironic point of “distinction” from other examples of the form insofar as they tend to approached and interpreted more externally as cult film objects.
As Jane moves to kiss Bill, a dramatic image from her point of view shows his face all blue, as if he were dead – an image all the more shocking inasmuch as there is no indication that Bill has told her the item’s history and, as such, one which also suggests its curse may not yet have been lifted.
Having rested for a while, the group decides to return home. A few miles along the road their beach buggy runs out of petrol – this despite Bill having checked and being certain the tank should be half-full. Worse, the assistant at the petrol station (Jose Calvo), who seems to appear out of nowhere, is highly distrustful of Bill’s travellers cheques and reluctant gives them a little petrol, albeit for free.
A bit further along, the buggy breaks down again anyway, with the weather also having worsened considerably. Fortuitously there is a large house opposite. Even more fortuitously there are several cars in its driveway, indicating that someone must be at home. Joe rings the doorbell, which is answered by Count Alexander (Luigi Pistilli). He and his wife (Luciana Paluzzi) purport to be firm believers in noble traditions of hospitality and invite the group to stay overnight.
Jane and the Countess
While the three men are assigned the kitchens, the countess takes Jane up to a room of her own, next to the countess, who takes an interest in her the necklace. Elsewhere in the building, preparations are being made for a black magic ceremony – a ceremony in which Jane has been assigned the role of sacrificial victim.
Fortunately Bill, Fred and Joe realise something is up just in time, leading to a shocking orgy of violence and a deliberately confusing extended denouement, the events described thus far barely taking us to the midway point of the film.
The satanic ritual is one of the film's visual highlights, with effective use of black void space and distorting lenses and angles
If Freda's approach to exploitative material in Tragic Ceremony is reminiscent of its immediate predecessor The Iguana with the Tongue of Fire in its general crudity, its distinctive approach towards aesthetics-as-ethics means this also comes across as a more deliberate decision, that Freda was self-consciously indulging in bad taste and deploying techniques like the shock zoom because they were justified by the material.
In other places the film recalls its gothic predecessors more with the emphasis being squarely on atmosphere. The lighting and lightning effects are convincing and many of the individual compositions arresting.
Though the camerawork is mobile, it is not particularly fluid, sometimes having something of a stop-start quality, while the hand-held shots are often a bit on the wobbly side. While we might take these as further expressions of the film's themes, I think this would be going too far and that Freda really needed a better camera operator.
Some of the film's more striking images
Though on paper the film has quite a good cast it should be noted that Pistilli and Paluzzi aren't really in it for very long, with the youthful protagonists on screen for most of the time. Their performances are adequate rather than inspired, although Keaton displays an effective blank / traumatised expression that also served her in good stead as the titular victim in What Have you Done to Solange?
Stelvio Cipriani provides the music, with Freda also contributing lyrics to the opening and closing credit theme. The score is a strange and at times inconsistent seeming mixture of styles, though this could also again be taken as a reflection of the film itself, with the individual cues generally being effective excepting some overly dramatic shock horror pieces.
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