From Starblack
Showing posts with label the mask. Show all posts
Showing posts with label the mask. Show all posts
Thursday, 18 February 2010
Monday, 18 December 2006
Nightmare Castle
I watched Mario Caiano's Nightmare Castle yesterday. I had seen it before, but found I got more out of it this time around, thanks to having become more aware of Italian Gothic in the interim.
The story itself is one of those standard combinations of the supernatural and quotidian, as Paul Muller's scientist murders his first wife Muriel and her lover, then marries Muriel's half sister Jenny - both being played by Barbara Steele - and conspires with his mistress to use Jenny for a vampire-style blood transfusion to save his mistress's life.
Thus Steele gets to do her usual good / bad, pain / pleasure, sadistic / masochistic dualisms, here further emphasised by having Jenny being blonde in contrast to the dark Muriel, who also returns from beyond with one side of her face horribly scarred.
This last aspect I found quite Satanik-like, though unlike Satanik's alter-ego, Marny Bannister, whose scraped-back hair makes her disfigurement obvious, here Steele's character hides her scars behind i lungi capelli della morte until the time is right for the shock revelation.
There's also a spot of mask action, as Muller attempts to drive Steele #2 mad by drugging her and setting up weird nightmares. Somewhat Opera:
Also of interest are the little intertextual nods. At one point early on Muller's character announces that he's going to a conference in Edinburgh, recalling the Scottish setting of Riccardo Freda's The Ghost. That film and the director's earlier Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock also seem to be referenced via the original surname of Muriel and Jenny, Hampton - just like Freda's pseudonym of choice.
The story itself is one of those standard combinations of the supernatural and quotidian, as Paul Muller's scientist murders his first wife Muriel and her lover, then marries Muriel's half sister Jenny - both being played by Barbara Steele - and conspires with his mistress to use Jenny for a vampire-style blood transfusion to save his mistress's life.
Thus Steele gets to do her usual good / bad, pain / pleasure, sadistic / masochistic dualisms, here further emphasised by having Jenny being blonde in contrast to the dark Muriel, who also returns from beyond with one side of her face horribly scarred.
This last aspect I found quite Satanik-like, though unlike Satanik's alter-ego, Marny Bannister, whose scraped-back hair makes her disfigurement obvious, here Steele's character hides her scars behind i lungi capelli della morte until the time is right for the shock revelation.
There's also a spot of mask action, as Muller attempts to drive Steele #2 mad by drugging her and setting up weird nightmares. Somewhat Opera:
Also of interest are the little intertextual nods. At one point early on Muller's character announces that he's going to a conference in Edinburgh, recalling the Scottish setting of Riccardo Freda's The Ghost. That film and the director's earlier Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock also seem to be referenced via the original surname of Muriel and Jenny, Hampton - just like Freda's pseudonym of choice.
Sunday, 17 December 2006
Superargo vs Diabolicus
Last night I got round to viewing Superargo vs Diabolicus, which my good friend Matt had copied for me a while back but which had long languished on my to watch pile. Being in a fumetti kind of mood of late, I decided to finally give it a spin.
While the best part of it was the pop-art / psychedelic title sequence, it was quite fun in a disposable way, coming across as a Italian-Spanish attempt to combine a lucha libre film with the post-Thunderball superspy action filone.
It starts off much like the former, as our masked hero, a champion wrestler, takes on his friend El Tigro for the right to be the undisputed champion. Superargo accidentally kills El Tigro, throwing him into depression and soul-searching.
Then Diabolicus and his goons steal some nuclear equipment. His diabolikal (groan) plan is to flood the world with gold, cause the economy to collapse and then present himself as saviour-dictator. So the head of the secret service calls for Superargo and sends him in.
Prior to this, however, we get some weird sado-masochistic subtext as Superargo gets the chance to prove how tough he is as he is stabbed to no effect and demonstrates his invulnerability to electricity – which nevertheless causes him pain – by holding on to a metal bar door as thousands of volts of current are passed through it.
He also gets kitted out with a new, bullet-proof version of his costume (Crimson Executioner hued, with black pants, belt, boots, gloves and masks for stylish contrast); some pills that will suspend his vital signs for a while, and a nifty cocktail olive containing a transmitter-cum-Geiger counter.
Informed of Superargo's mission by an informant within the secret service, some of Diabolicus's goons intercept Superargo and leave him for dead, not realising that he's secretly taken one of the aforementioned pills.
Thus, when he arrives on Diabolicus's island base - there is some nice budget-defying underwater cinematography here and some decent cave complex sets along the way - the evil genius does not believe he is Superargo and sets about alternately cooking and freezing our hero to test his mettle, before Superargo escapes to save the free world.... until next time...
While Superargo wears his costume all the time much like El Santo or Blue Demon, the wrestling sequence at the start proves to be the only one, perhaps suggesting it was included more as a way of conveniently marketing the film in Mexico than a more thoroughgoing crossover.
The wrestling mask is also worth commenting on in terms of its key differences from the giallo killer's stocking mask: whereas the wrestling mask generally gives / secures its wearer's identity – Diabolicus's doubts about whether this is the real Superargo notwithstanding – the featureless stocking mask obscures / erases / effaces the identity of its wearer; such that he / she could be anyone.
Another element connected with this is whether the speaking mouth is visible, this being one of the criteria Michel Chion uses to distinguish between the normal voice and the acousmetric one – i.e. the uncanny voice whose source cannot be definitively placed and fixed to a body. Which brings us back to Argento, Hitchcock and Lang, but that is a matter for prolonged discussion another time...
While the best part of it was the pop-art / psychedelic title sequence, it was quite fun in a disposable way, coming across as a Italian-Spanish attempt to combine a lucha libre film with the post-Thunderball superspy action filone.
It starts off much like the former, as our masked hero, a champion wrestler, takes on his friend El Tigro for the right to be the undisputed champion. Superargo accidentally kills El Tigro, throwing him into depression and soul-searching.
Then Diabolicus and his goons steal some nuclear equipment. His diabolikal (groan) plan is to flood the world with gold, cause the economy to collapse and then present himself as saviour-dictator. So the head of the secret service calls for Superargo and sends him in.
Prior to this, however, we get some weird sado-masochistic subtext as Superargo gets the chance to prove how tough he is as he is stabbed to no effect and demonstrates his invulnerability to electricity – which nevertheless causes him pain – by holding on to a metal bar door as thousands of volts of current are passed through it.
He also gets kitted out with a new, bullet-proof version of his costume (Crimson Executioner hued, with black pants, belt, boots, gloves and masks for stylish contrast); some pills that will suspend his vital signs for a while, and a nifty cocktail olive containing a transmitter-cum-Geiger counter.
Informed of Superargo's mission by an informant within the secret service, some of Diabolicus's goons intercept Superargo and leave him for dead, not realising that he's secretly taken one of the aforementioned pills.
Thus, when he arrives on Diabolicus's island base - there is some nice budget-defying underwater cinematography here and some decent cave complex sets along the way - the evil genius does not believe he is Superargo and sets about alternately cooking and freezing our hero to test his mettle, before Superargo escapes to save the free world.... until next time...
While Superargo wears his costume all the time much like El Santo or Blue Demon, the wrestling sequence at the start proves to be the only one, perhaps suggesting it was included more as a way of conveniently marketing the film in Mexico than a more thoroughgoing crossover.
The wrestling mask is also worth commenting on in terms of its key differences from the giallo killer's stocking mask: whereas the wrestling mask generally gives / secures its wearer's identity – Diabolicus's doubts about whether this is the real Superargo notwithstanding – the featureless stocking mask obscures / erases / effaces the identity of its wearer; such that he / she could be anyone.
Another element connected with this is whether the speaking mouth is visible, this being one of the criteria Michel Chion uses to distinguish between the normal voice and the acousmetric one – i.e. the uncanny voice whose source cannot be definitively placed and fixed to a body. Which brings us back to Argento, Hitchcock and Lang, but that is a matter for prolonged discussion another time...
Friday, 1 December 2006
The mask
Within The Body in the Mirror: Shapes of History in Italian Cinema (1992) Angela Dalle Vacche endeavours to illuminate the national-specific aspects of Italian cinema, relating them to the distinctive historicist orientation of the country's intellectual and cultural life over the course of the 20th century.
Her analysis begins further back in time, however, with Renaissance art, although unusually she does not focus on the discovery of perspective in apparatus theory terms (basically that by replicating quattrocento perspective, the film camera and cinema more generally cannot but also replicate the humanistic worldview embedded within it) but instead emphasises its legacy in other arts:
"From painting to the cinema, body, spectacle and allegory are the three parameters that control how Italian filmmakers depict the national identity and adjust their vision of contemporary life within the these parametric forms. Allegory, spectacle, and body not only characterize Italian Renaissance painting, but influence two art forms that in themselves are important to Italian cinema: opera and the commedia dell'arte.” (4)
Whereas opera focussed on the large scale / spectacular, the commedia dell'arte focussed on the small scale / intimate. Both, however, could still be contrasted with the literary in terms of their universal appeal within an Italy - not yet an Italy "in itself" let alone "for itself", if we can appropriate from Marx's class analysis to a nation based one - divided by region and language even beyond unification in the latter half of the 19th century and then increasingly by class over the course of the 20th.
While the nationalist and fascist projects over the years certainly constructed a more unitary Italian identity through the education system, military service and the mass media, the search for something with sufficiently broad appeal nevertheless remains a hallmark of the Italian cinema.
Consider - for instance - the divergent characteristics of the prima and terza visione circuits and audiences as discussed by Christopher Wagstaff. This, in turn, cannot but affect the type of cinema that is made, what it emphasises and downplays. In this regard Argento is fortunate: having begun his career as a writer and only turning his hand to direction out of fear of what another would do to his The Bird with the Crystal Plumage script, he turned out to have a visual flair. In a similar vein his oft-criticised writing could also be read as a symptom of his nationality and the enduring legacy of the questione della lingua. (Here it is perhaps also worth recalling the frequent failures of language in Argento's cinema, whether the problems the Roman Romolo and Milanese Cainazzo have communicating with one another in Le Cinque giornate in the absence of a completely common lingua, or musicology student Mark Elliot in Inferno being mistaken for a professor of toxicology - perhaps intentionally; the misreading is after all made by the incognito Mother of Darkness.)
Another aspect of Dalle Vacche's discussion here which is relevant is that of the maschere or mask, one of the three key elements of the aforementioned commedia dell'arte alongside pantomime and improvisation. Within the commedia, the role of the mask was to identify particular character types to the audience - i.e. while concealing the identity of the performer, the mask also made the nature of the role he was playing immediately recognisable. This, I think, is highly significant when we turn to the featureless stocking mask of the archetypal giallo killer, as epitomised by Bava's Blood and Black Lace and later codified in the plethora of imitations that followed in the wake of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage's phenomenal box-office success.
For while this mask may identify its wearer qua killer, at least diegetically, it also conceals his or her underlying identity. Anyone could turn out to be the killer when typification fails. Indeed, is is worth remembering how in Blood and Black Lace Max Morlachi has Countess Como don the mask and other accoutrements to commit a murder while he is in police custody in order to equip him with an ironclad alibi, or how in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage Alberto Ranieri does his best to throw the police off his murderous wife's trail by doubling for her and assuming her killer identity himself. In cases like these, then, the masked killer cannot even be pinned down to a single identity. If not quite legion, s/he (and here remembering that, via her misidentification with her attacker, Monica Ranieri could be argued, like many of Argento's characters, to be suffering from a degree of gender confusion) is at least doubled/multiple.
Another thing worth mentioning here is the more painterly heritage behind the giallo killer's mask. Though often most readily associated with the Belgian Surrealist Rene Magritte, in works such as The Lovers, a specifically Italian reference point can also be identified in Giorgio de Chirico's pittura metafisica / metaphysical painting, within which blank-faced mannequins are a recurrent feature. (We can also think here of the original credits sequence to Blood and Black Lace, where the characters, many of their number the sei donne per l'assassino, are introduced alongside mannequins.)
Magritte's The Lovers
De Chirico's The Two Sisters
While Dalle Vacche does not refer to Argento within either The Body in the Mirror or her later Cinema and Painting: How Art is Used in Film (1997) a line of influence can nevertheless be traced from De Chirico to Michelangelo Antonioni to Argento. Discussing Antononi's The Red Desert in the latter study, Dalle Vacche notes that "de Chirico's puppetlike intruders in his airless piazze are nothing but the other side of F T Marinetti's mechanical man, whose direct descendant we encounter in the toy robot moving up and down Valerio's room and interrupting Giulia's natural sleep," thereby reminding us - to give only the most obvious example - of the mechanical doll in Deep Red with which Martha terrorises Professor Giordani before murdering him.
Her analysis begins further back in time, however, with Renaissance art, although unusually she does not focus on the discovery of perspective in apparatus theory terms (basically that by replicating quattrocento perspective, the film camera and cinema more generally cannot but also replicate the humanistic worldview embedded within it) but instead emphasises its legacy in other arts:
"From painting to the cinema, body, spectacle and allegory are the three parameters that control how Italian filmmakers depict the national identity and adjust their vision of contemporary life within the these parametric forms. Allegory, spectacle, and body not only characterize Italian Renaissance painting, but influence two art forms that in themselves are important to Italian cinema: opera and the commedia dell'arte.” (4)
Whereas opera focussed on the large scale / spectacular, the commedia dell'arte focussed on the small scale / intimate. Both, however, could still be contrasted with the literary in terms of their universal appeal within an Italy - not yet an Italy "in itself" let alone "for itself", if we can appropriate from Marx's class analysis to a nation based one - divided by region and language even beyond unification in the latter half of the 19th century and then increasingly by class over the course of the 20th.
While the nationalist and fascist projects over the years certainly constructed a more unitary Italian identity through the education system, military service and the mass media, the search for something with sufficiently broad appeal nevertheless remains a hallmark of the Italian cinema.
Consider - for instance - the divergent characteristics of the prima and terza visione circuits and audiences as discussed by Christopher Wagstaff. This, in turn, cannot but affect the type of cinema that is made, what it emphasises and downplays. In this regard Argento is fortunate: having begun his career as a writer and only turning his hand to direction out of fear of what another would do to his The Bird with the Crystal Plumage script, he turned out to have a visual flair. In a similar vein his oft-criticised writing could also be read as a symptom of his nationality and the enduring legacy of the questione della lingua. (Here it is perhaps also worth recalling the frequent failures of language in Argento's cinema, whether the problems the Roman Romolo and Milanese Cainazzo have communicating with one another in Le Cinque giornate in the absence of a completely common lingua, or musicology student Mark Elliot in Inferno being mistaken for a professor of toxicology - perhaps intentionally; the misreading is after all made by the incognito Mother of Darkness.)
Another aspect of Dalle Vacche's discussion here which is relevant is that of the maschere or mask, one of the three key elements of the aforementioned commedia dell'arte alongside pantomime and improvisation. Within the commedia, the role of the mask was to identify particular character types to the audience - i.e. while concealing the identity of the performer, the mask also made the nature of the role he was playing immediately recognisable. This, I think, is highly significant when we turn to the featureless stocking mask of the archetypal giallo killer, as epitomised by Bava's Blood and Black Lace and later codified in the plethora of imitations that followed in the wake of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage's phenomenal box-office success.
For while this mask may identify its wearer qua killer, at least diegetically, it also conceals his or her underlying identity. Anyone could turn out to be the killer when typification fails. Indeed, is is worth remembering how in Blood and Black Lace Max Morlachi has Countess Como don the mask and other accoutrements to commit a murder while he is in police custody in order to equip him with an ironclad alibi, or how in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage Alberto Ranieri does his best to throw the police off his murderous wife's trail by doubling for her and assuming her killer identity himself. In cases like these, then, the masked killer cannot even be pinned down to a single identity. If not quite legion, s/he (and here remembering that, via her misidentification with her attacker, Monica Ranieri could be argued, like many of Argento's characters, to be suffering from a degree of gender confusion) is at least doubled/multiple.
Another thing worth mentioning here is the more painterly heritage behind the giallo killer's mask. Though often most readily associated with the Belgian Surrealist Rene Magritte, in works such as The Lovers, a specifically Italian reference point can also be identified in Giorgio de Chirico's pittura metafisica / metaphysical painting, within which blank-faced mannequins are a recurrent feature. (We can also think here of the original credits sequence to Blood and Black Lace, where the characters, many of their number the sei donne per l'assassino, are introduced alongside mannequins.)
Magritte's The Lovers
De Chirico's The Two Sisters
While Dalle Vacche does not refer to Argento within either The Body in the Mirror or her later Cinema and Painting: How Art is Used in Film (1997) a line of influence can nevertheless be traced from De Chirico to Michelangelo Antonioni to Argento. Discussing Antononi's The Red Desert in the latter study, Dalle Vacche notes that "de Chirico's puppetlike intruders in his airless piazze are nothing but the other side of F T Marinetti's mechanical man, whose direct descendant we encounter in the toy robot moving up and down Valerio's room and interrupting Giulia's natural sleep," thereby reminding us - to give only the most obvious example - of the mechanical doll in Deep Red with which Martha terrorises Professor Giordani before murdering him.
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