Deleuzean Hybridity in the Films of Leone and Argento

As the corrections to my PhD thesis, on Deleuzean Hybridity in the Films of Leone and Argento, have now been approved, here it is for those who wish to read it.

Basically what I say is that Deleuze formulates his concepts of the movement-image and the time-image primarily in relation to classical Hollywood genre cinema and modern European art cinema respectively. As such, the films of Leone and Argento raise questions regarding this framework, in being post-WWII European films, but also being genre films (westerns, thrillers, fantasy-horror, and a gangster film). I then try to bring out how these films have hybrid characteristics, and relate this to certain earlier and later films to place the two directors within a broader tradition.

Help on sourcing a couple of remarks

There are a couple of remarks by Luigi Cozzi (I think) that I mention in my thesis, which I could remember well enough to paraphrase, but cannot remember their sources.

First, Cozzi remarking that a difference between Bava and Argento's films was that Bava's tended not to play in the first-run circuit (except maybe very briefly) whereas Argento's did.


Second, Cozzi remarking that in Italy producers did not want to know what a film was about, but what films it was like.

Thanks in advance

Framing in Argento -- fragment of a Deleuzean reading

Like Leone, Argento used 2.35:1 widescreen Techniscope until commercial considerations of television and video sales encouraged use of the 1.85 ratio on Inferno and Tenebre. While Argento's compositions perhaps do not draw attention to the shape of the 2.35:1 frame as often as Leone does, the effect on those occasions where he does so is thereby arguably heightened. In Leone's films the use of the all areas of the frame, the out of field/frame and quasi-split screen effects generally does not serve any obvious purpose beyond making the conventions of classical cinema evident. In contrast the likes of the widescreen composition in Deep Red when Marc, on the far left, and Carlo, on the far right, shout to one another across a space dominated by the central statuary, also have a pedagogical role. For in conjunction with Carlo's remarks on the distinction between what Marc thought he saw and what he actually saw this image draws attention to Marc's reading of the image of Carlo's mother in the bottom left of the frame as a face in the painting she was reflected into. This image also establishes a crystal-image circuit between the actual - Carlo's mother - and the virtual - Carlo's mother as mirrored into the painting that confuses Marc.

Some thesis stuff

Introduction: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
A recurring theme in Sergio Leone's 1966 film The Good, The Bad and the Ugly/Il buono, il brutto e il cattivo is that there are two kinds of people in the world: There are those whose neck is at the end of a hangman's noose and those who do the cutting of the rope. There are those who enter through the door and those who enter through the window. There are those who, faced with poverty, become priests and those who become bandits. There are those with loaded guns and those who dig. Though such pairings might suggest the applicability of structuralist binaries or tables of oppositions to The Good, The Bad and the Ugly the film clearly resists and problematises these in other ways. This begins with its title and the fact that it introduces three rather than two terms. Inasmuch as the traditional Hollywood western features good guys and bad guys, often codified by such markers as wearing white hats and black hats or being clean shaven and unshaven, the good/bad pairing can be read as a relatively familiar and conventional one.

Even here, however, Leone's characters do not abide by these dress codes, with each of the three men's costumes and supposed allegiances changing through the course of the narrative: The Good (Clint Eastwood) and the Ugly (Eli Wallach) strategically don Confederate uniforms and the Bad (Lee van Cleef) that of the Union. The Good also later acquires a serape similar to those worn by Eastwood in his two previous collaborations with director Leone, A Fistful of Dollars/Per un pugno di dollari (1964) and For a Few Dollars More/Per qualche dollaro in più (1965), an item of dress that confuses Anglo and Mexican identities.

The good and ugly pairing might meanwhile be understood as one of the film's more distinctively Italian touches, one that refers more to their relative stylishness and lack of style. The Good, described at one point as “a golden-haired angel”, is the one who makes a favourable impression, displaying la bella figura, or a beautiful figure. The Ugly, also known by the nickname “the rat” and described as “a sawn-off runt”, is the one who does not; significantly the Italian equivalent of the English bad joke is un brutto scherzo, or an ugly joke.

Beyond this there are the inter-relationships between the three characters and the shifting positions that they occupy, both to one another and to the wider context of their treasure hunt, the American Civil War. Leone has identifies one of his intentions within the film as putting the terms good, bad and ugly into play with one another:

It was while I was reflecting on the story of For a Few Dollars More and what made it work, on the different motives of Van Cleef and Eastwood, that I found the centre of the third film … I had always thought that the “good”, the “bad” and the “violent” did not exist in any absolute, essential sense. It seemed to me interesting to demystify these adjectives in the setting of a Western. An assassin can display a sublime altruism while a good man can kill with total indifference. A person who appears to be ugly may, when we get to know him better, be more worthy than he seems – and capable of tenderness … I had an old Roman song engraved in my memory, a song which seemed to me full of common sense:

A Cardinal is dead
Who did good and bad things
The bad, he did well
And the good, he did badly

This was, basically, the moral I was interested in putting over in the film.
(Leone, quoted in Frayling, 2000: 203)

Interpreting Leone's remarks semiotically we can thus see how he is identifying the three terms as mutually interdependent and negatively defined. No one term occupies a privileged, central, anchoring position. The Good, for example, is not good in some absolute sense. Rather he is only good in relation to the Bad and to the Ugly as less or non-good.

Against the ever-more intrusive backdrop of the war the three men's activities seem almost harmless: “I've never seen so many men wasted so badly” remarks the Good after he and the Ugly have just witnessed another futile frontal assault by Union troops on their Confederate counterparts for a bridge of doubtful strategic importance, described by the Union commander as a mere “fly-speck on the map”. Indeed, Leone's treatment of the Union and the Confederacy is equally unconventional, as he emphasises the good, the bad and the ugly on both sides and, at one point, their seeming interchangeability: Wearing Confederate uniforms, the Good and the Ugly see a patrol of what appear to be Confederate soldiers approaching. It is only as the riders get nearer that they and the audience realises the soldiers are in fact Union cavalry, their blue uniforms caked with grey dust.

In sum, The Good, The Bad and the Ugly is a film which challenges identities in various ways. While I will return to this theme in relation to its form and content in greater detail later, the point I wish to emphasise here is the challenge the very existence of the film and others like it pose to many of the established structures of film studies. The most basic challenge The Good, The Bad and the Ugly poses is that it is an Italian western, a film with an obvious hybrid identity.

The issue here is that the US and European cinemas have traditionally been positioned largely in opposition to one another. But while each gains something of its meaning from what it is not in relation to the other, the hegemony of Hollywood has always meant that it is more of a centring, defining term or assumed norm against which European cinema – or, crucially, a particular understanding of European cinema – is placed in opposition. We might summarise some of the main distinctions as follows:

USA / Europe
Hollywood cinema / Art, auteur and avant-garde cinemas
Industrial mode of production / Artisanal mode of production
Popular / Elite
Commercial / Less or non commercial
Impersonal / Personal
Generic / Less or non generic
Uncritical / Critical
Illusionist / Anti-illusionist
Classical / Modern or neo-modern
Movement-image / Time-image

Within these distinctions it was difficult to accommodate a US director who made 'European' style films, such as John Cassavetes. More important for my purposes, however, is that the work of European directors making popular, genre cinema, such as Leone with his westerns, was liable to be ignored or treated as inherently inferior and inauthentic in comparison with an assumed Hollywood original. Such films were simply not supposed to exist, at least according to the canonical understandings of cinema. Something of this can be seen, for example, from a consideration of the British Monthly Film Bulletin's reviews of A Fistful of Dollars and For a Few Dollars More at the time of their original UK releases in 1967:

[A Fistful of Dollars] was the film which […] made a lot of money in Italy and sparked off the craze for a few dollars, more dollars, silver dollars for Ringo, Django and the rest. It turns, predictably perhaps, to be extremely efficient, fashionably immoral, and rather lacklustre except for a fine opening sequence in which the stranger rides into the sinister town past a dead man riding in the opposite direction with a placard reading “Adios Amigo” on his back. Thereafter it is the prolific action which keeps it going, rather than any particular distinction in the direction – or for that matter the acting, though Clint Eastwood is competent as the dead-pan hero who sports a stylish poncho [sic] and chews an eternally half-smoked cheroot.
(Monthly Film Bulletin, no 401. Vol 34, June 1967. p. 96.)

In the old days badmen died decently. But in Sergio Leone's derivative imitation of the American Western the badmen are tortured beforehand and death comes in leering close-up of a red hole in the head. This is the second in this particular series, and it is possibly even more ostentatiously sadistic than its predecessor, A Fistful of Dollars. Clint Eastwood, as the laconic stranger, he of the chewed cheroot, well-worn poncho and growth of beard, is here joined by Lee Van Cleef, whose distinguishing characteristics are his ironic smile and his pipe. This, though, is just about the only innovation. As killers, these two are almost supercilious in their professionalism, summed up in the final shot of a wagon-load of victims (who include, incidentally, a pathological murderer and a hunchback). There is no denying that the whole thing is efficiently done; an occasional scene (like the one in which the two bounty hunters shoot up each other's hats) reveals a grain of originality; and Lee Van Cleef's intelligent performance provides some antidote to the poisonous effect of the blood-letting. The ear-splitting soundtrack seems, in the context, quite appropriate; but the film's total effect is to leave a sour taste in the mouth.
(Monthly Film Bulletin, no 406. Vol 34, November 1967. p. 176.)

In both cases the reviewer is here responding negatively to Leone's distinctive approach to the western. On the one hand he is seen as being too close to the Hollywood western, making films that are “derivative” and “unoriginal”. On the other hand the things which distinguish the films – immorality, sadism, violence and excess – are viewed as unwelcome departures from the Hollywood formula. The negative responses to Leone's specifically Italian westerns can be contrasted with the positive response to Duccio Tessari's more Hollywood-styled A Pistol for Ringo. Crucially it was made after A Fistful of Dollars, but released, like a number of other Italian westerns, that perhaps made Leone's film seem less original, in the UK beforehand:

Lovingly culled from a variety of sources ranging from Ford and Hawks to Raoul Walsh, this amalgam of well-tried Western situations is put together with real flair and sophistication. The action never lets up for a minute, the characters are vividly drawn, and the general tone reminds one, oddly enough, of minor league Bunuel.
(Monthly Film Bulletin, no 394. Vol 33, November 1966. p. 176.)

Today critics recognise that Leone's films drew equally on Ford, Hawks, Walsh and other Hollywood western directors, and also had a somewhat Bunuelian cruelty and grotesquerie to them. I would argue, however, that these aspects were not always recognised by 1960s reviewers precisely because Leone adopted a more critical stance towards the Hollywood model than did a director like Tessari: Whereas Tessari was making westerns in Italy that celebrated pre-existing generic traditions, Leone was making specifically Italian westerns that deconstructed and demythologised these selfsame traditions in favour of a new and different approach, one that he would later theorise as “cinema-cinema”. This, in summary, was a pure cinema, a cinema in and for itself.

Much the same can be said of the two other Italian filmmakers who form the basis of this thesis, Dario Argento and Giulio Questi. Argento is often described as doing for the Italian thriller what Leone did for the Italian western, beginning with his 1970 debut The Bird with the Crystal Plumage/L'Uccello dalle piume di cristallo (1970). Indeed, just as Leone became recognised as the leading “spaghetti western” filmmaker, Argento receiving comparable epithets like “the garlic-flavoured Hitchcock”. Significantly Argento has also been profoundly influenced by Pier-Paolo Pasolini's notion of a cinema of poetry, which we might here summarise as a cinema in which the presence of the camera is self-consciously and intersubjectively felt; again I will return to this concept in greater detail later. Questi, who made both the thriller Death Laid an Egg/La morte ha fatto un uovo and the western Django Kill/Se sei vivo, spara (both 1967) was, if anything, even more radical in the kind of hybrid filmmaking he pursued. His eclectic mixture of influences and juxtapositions of high/European and low/Hollywood cultures tended to confound reviewers:

Though the familiar presence of torture and sadism might seem to cast [Django Kill] in the routine mould, its first twenty-five minutes or so have an extra-ordinary, dour atmosphere which suggests that Giulio Questi (who was last seen fashioning the curious erotica of A Curious Way to Love) is at least attempting something different. […] A pity that the story is overpopulated and the action sequences overwrought; but there's no denying that Questi, with better material, could make something really interesting.”
(Monthly Film Bulletin. Vol 37, No 433. February 1970, p. 35)

The implication, of course, is that “better material” would mean a move away from genre towards art cinema. Ironically this was what Questi and his co-writer and editor Franco 'Kim' Arcalli had in fact done. Death Laid an Egg/A Curious Way to Love was actually made after Django Kill as a more personal project, at a time before Argento popularised the Italian thriller in the early 1970s; Questi and Arcalli had been unable to convince backers of Death Laid and Egg's value without first agreeing to make a more commercial western.

In all of this the key point, of course, is that there are not just two cinemas, the good and the bad, or Hollywood and Europe, or Europe and Hollywood. Rather there is a third, 'ugly', almost 'abject', cinema, namely the European popular cinema, which does not fit into such a neat framework. Instead, it is a hybrid cinema, now drawing from hegemonic European traditions and now from Hollywood ones.

A thesis on Brutality in Filone cinema

Abstract and download link here: http://theses.gla.ac.uk/608/

A Fistful of Dollars

I know this is an apprentice work, which sees Leone trying out things without necessarily integrating them into a coherent whole.

But

God damn

He still framed like no-one else had done.

Similarly, I now wonder about the bad day for night shooting in the cemetery scene, and the apparent inability of the (dead) soldiers to hear what is going on around them: Does this signify that they are "playing at cowboys and indians," in a cinema-cinema way?

Power in Four Flies on Grey Velvet and Once Upon a Time in the West

Nina's conception of power can be understood can be understood, in Deleuze and Guattari's terms as a negative one. This concept of power is inspired by Spinoza and Nietzsche (Colebook in Parr, 2005: 215-217). From Spinoza they take the idea of power as potential and of joy the result of fulfilling this potential: “Joy, as the realisation of power, is therefore different from the moral opposition of good and evil, an opposition that impedes power by constraining it within some already given norm.” (215). In itself, this formulation might imply that Nina's murderous activities and desire for revenge are themselves neither good nor evil. Such a reading could accord with a more relativist reading of Nietzsche, insofar as the Christian virtue of forgiveness is read as a slave morality inversion of the preceding master morality of vengeance. This would also accord with the ethics of the Italian western and the vendetta, which Argento has spoken of favourably on occasion [quote from John Martin]. However, Deleuze here emphasises an equally Nietzschean distinction between active and reactive powers: “An active power maximises its potential, pushes itself to its limit and reaffirms the life of which it is but one expression. A reactive power, by contrast, turns back on itself.” (216) Cast in these terms, we may thus distinguish between the positive power of Leone, Bertolucci and Argento's avenger, Harmonica, and the one seeks vengeance upon, Frank, in Once Upon a Time in the West, and Nina and Roberto here.

Harmonica accepts that he is merely one expression of the old west, part of “an ancient race” whose role is now to helps bring into existence a new, feminine, west in which he knows and fully accepts that he has no place. Although Frank initially attempts to use his powers negatively to establish a place for himself in this coming world as a businessman like Morton, this reactive power turns back upon itself. For eventually he positively accepts of his equal obsolescence as one of the ancient race as he and Harmonica finally face off: “The future don't matter to us. Nothing matters now – not the land, not the money, not the woman. I came here to see you. 'Cause I know that now, you'll tell me what you're after.” Regardless of the which man wins this duel, the wider outcome, the birth of the new west, is assured. Their “large form” binominal leads to a new situation. The elegiac qualities of the film depend upon its ambiguity here, as to what this new situation represents: improvement, degeneration or an admixture of both. Cast in these terms, Harmonica and to a lesser extent Frank's becomings, like that of the west itself, are of a deterritorialising, becoming-woman type.

Nina's desire for vengeance upon her father is, by contrast, entirely reactive and negative. As we have seen, she is never positioned as looking towards the future, only the past, through the circling camera work. We get no sense of what her plans for life without her father and/or Roberto are, if any. As such, it makes sense that Nina should die rather than escape when her plans fail. Nina's becoming is of a territorialising, masculine, reactive type, one that can only turns back on itself in a destructive manner.

Today's Deep Red Notes #2

The interrelated themes of doubling and foreshadowing in the film have been independently identified and discussed by Tim Lucas (200?) and Aaron Smuts (2002). Insofar as Smuts's is the more extended and academic commentary it is the one I will focus upon here. To Smuts, Deep Red employs what he terms “principles of association” and “association provocation” between images, with these being concepts he draws from David Hume. There are two main ways in which Deep Red does this: By “encouraging viewers to pair disparate elements” and by “using pairings established within the film and in normal everyday experience to provoke and heighten the viewers' response.”.

These associations begin with the enigmatic vignette which interrupts the credits. In this one shadowy figure stabs another, then a knife is dropped at the feet of a child. This image, which has no direct bearing upon Marcus's investigation, exists solely in the past and minds of Carlo – the child – and his mother. However, the nursery rhyme which plays over is reprised prior to Helga's murder and elsewhere, establishes associations for the viewer, as does the image of the scene drawn by Carlo as a child when Marcus finds it on the wall of the House of the Screaming Child. (After the house burns down Marcus discovers that Olga has copied this image – or, rather, the other original that is in the Leonardo Da Vinci School archives. (Again, issues around the original and the copy are not significant in meaning or auratic effect here, to once more suggest Argento's postmodernism.)

Other associations are more subtle. For instance, the close-up of water spilling from Helga's mouth as she senses a malevolent presence in the theatre is reprised in the spittle and foam coming from Carlo's mother's mouth as she is decapitated in the climax. Likewise, the attention paid to the image of a road maintenance truck makes no obvious sense until we can relate it to the similar truck which accidentally catches Carlo and drags him to his death. As viewers we might also notice the discrepancy between the image of the House of the Screaming Child Marcus takes from Amanda's book and the House, that there is a bricked up window, before Marcus does. If so, then we might also retrospective realise an association with the image of Carlo's mother in the hallway of Helga's apartment.

Elsewhere it is the dialogue that creates associations. For example, Marcus tells Gianna that his analyst might suggest his choice of occupation is psychoanalytically (over-)determined: When playing the piano he is “really bashing [his] father's teeth in”. Later, Giordani has his teeth bashed in.

In each of these cases, it might be argued that we have the completion of a circuit between two images. The difference from Deleuze would perhaps be that both images are actual, rather than one initially appearing as virtual and the other actual, before they then become indiscernible.

Giordani's fate exemplified the other aspect of Deep Red's associational strategies, that of basing the most of the violence inflicted upon its characters on the intensification of routine rather than exceptional experiences. As Argento notes in an interview featured on the Anchor Bay DVD of the film, few of us know what it feels like to be shot. However, we all know what it is like to be cut with a piece of broken glass, be scalded by too hot water or bump our teeth on a glass. When we see Helga's throat sliced to ribbons by the plate glass window; Amanda Righetti having her head forced into a bath full of boiling water, or Giordani's teeth being bashed in, we thus have a more visceral response. Rather than being just a conceptual shock, that it cannot feel good to be shot, it is an experiential grounded one as well, something that is felt in our bodies. The “cinema of the mind” and the “cinema of the body” are brought closer together, their differences downplayed by situations that are a combination of “everyday banality” (a little cut, a too hot bath) and “extremes” (crashing through a window, being immersed in boiling water).

Another way in which Deep Red is a more complex film than its predecessors is in its narrative structure. As McDonagh (1992) has noted, the film's opening scenes present us with a disorienting series of disconnected fragments: the vignette that interrupts the credits, jazz musicians at a conservatory and a parapsychology conference. What is lacking is the clear introduction of protagonist and narrative, with these only emerging once Helga has been murdered and Marcus has been identified as the eye-witness to the crime. Such an approach was likely to frustrate the terza visione viewer, especially as he might well still be settling into his seat or not even in the auditorium for the vignette and thus be miss out on it.

If this fragmentation is more indicative of the international art cinema, or the modernist time-image, this is again countered by more popular, vernacular or movement-image elements elsewhere. One of the most notable of these, in its excesses, is the screwball comedy and commedia dell'arte styled exchanges between Marcus and Gianna. Equally, however, the more substantive content of these scenes, with their positive commentary on the emergence of Italian feminism in the late 1960s and early 1970s, was probably somewhat alien to the typically traditionally-minded terza visione male.

Comparisons with other filmmakers gialli and the Decamerotic filone are useful here. Marcus and Gianna's relationship lacks any displays of physical intimacy or nudity from Nicolodi. As Nicolodi had been naked through much of Carmelo Bene's experimental adaptation of Salome (1972) and in some of her stage roles, it seems safe to say that this was not down to prudishness on her part. Rather, in combination with the sex scene in The Cat o' Nine Tails between Giordani and Anna Terzi, and the bath scene in Four Flies on Grey Velvet between Roberto and Daria, it appears that Argento was basically uncomfortable with displays of nudity and intimacy and sublimated them, with conscious awkwardness, into violent set pieces: The only bare breasts we see in Deep Red are those of Helga, after her clothes have been ripped falling through the window.

Though this approach, Argento was refusing to give terza visione viewers what they would have found in many of his imitators' gialli. The obvious examples here would be just about any film starring either Edwige Fenech, such as Andrea Bianchi's self-explanatory Strip Nude for Your Killer (1975). If the giallo is essentially a kind of exploitation cinema, as Koven contends, not all gialli are equally exploitative, or exploitative in the same ways. (Some gialli, like Massimo Dallamano's What Have You Done to Solange (1972), present a curious combination of female nudity for the male gaze but incorporate this same gaze into their diegesis in a somewhat self-critical manner.)

The Decamerotic, meanwhile, often presented women getting the better of men in the battle of the sexes, but rarely before they had shed their clothes for the delectation of the male viewer. Moreover their medieval settings meant that were engaged with gender politics at a historical remove, while their straightforwardly comedic nature made them inherently less challenging. The Fenech vehicle Ubalda, All Naked and Warm (Dir: Mariano Laurenti, 1972) is an obvious case in point.

Smuts, Aaron. 'The principles of association' http://www.kinoeye.org/02/11/smuts11.php vol2 no. 11. 2002.

Today's Deep Red notes #1

These images also suggest transference from Helga to Marcus: She has seen the face of the killer, just as he will do. In typical Argento fashion, however, Marcus does not realise what he has seen, though he is immediately aware that there is something missing or different about Helga’s apartment as he revisits it with the police.

Another element which adds credence to this interpretation is the introduction of reporter Gianna Brezzi (Dario Nicolodi) as the scene progresses. Identifying Marcus as the eye-witness, the one who saw everything, she photographs him. This image, besides showing a reversal of the gaze, is also the thing which, when reproduced in the newspaper, allows Carlo’s mother to know who now threatens her secrets, that Marcus is now confirmed as Helga’s double. (Given the film’s excesses, however, it is also possible that she may know via her son, especially if he was indeed a lookout.)

Deep Red can also be considered a poetic film in the manner proposed by Edgar Allan Poe, a strong influence upon Argento and his co-screenwriter Bernardino Zapponi, who had earlier worked with Fellini on his free adapation of Poe in Spirits of the Dead (196?). The key text here is Poe’s essay The Philosophy of Composition (1846), in which he analyses his earlier poem The Raven (1845). In this essay Poe argues that texts should have what he terms “unity of effect”. The emotional response or affect that the author desires to produce in his reader ought to dictate his aesthetic decisions. In Deep Red, as we have seen, everything is orchestrated to produce feelings of unease and dread in characters and audience alike.

The theme of doubling is most obviously seen in the characters of Marcus and Carlo. When we first see them together, they are dressed in similar but contrasting outfits: Carlo wears a dark suit and a light shirt, Marcus a light suit and a dark shirt. As Carlo and Marcus discuss Helga’s murder, they are then positioned identically to the extreme right and left of the frame, which is dominated by the statue in its centre, as if mirror images. Another image sees Marcus holding up his hand, while Carlo has his back to the camera, with the composition such that they again look like near reflections of one another. Later, the two men perform a duet on the piano. Yet there are also crucial differences between the two men: Marcus may have a sensitive, “artistic temperament” and suffer from claustrophobia, but he is not the drunken, self-destructive mess that Carlo is. Marcus is straight, Carlo gay. And, in relation to the film’s politics, Marcus is pointedly described by his friend as “the bourgeois of the piano” who plays for art, whereas he self-identifies as the “proletarian,” playing for survival. The extent to which this is true is questionable, with Carlo’s mother seemingly wealthy and respectable enough, but it again contributes to the fact that the film is more than a regular giallo.

Another important other aspect of Deep Red’s doubling relates to this. This is its double or hybrid nature as a giallo and as a fantasy-horror film. As we saw, the Animal Trilogy basically presented a rational, non-supernatural worldview. Though the films were critical of the way science was used, none really presented any radically different alternatives. In Deep Red, by contrast, certain images hint at the co-existence of natural and supernatural worlds. This is seen at the parapsychology conference, where a number of images suggest something beyond Helga’s assertion her powers have nothing to do with the occult or magic. There are the false point-of-view shots from high up in the auditorium, which are never resolved to be incorporated into the set, by showing someone there. Then there is the shot from behind Helga, Bardi and Giordani, which cannot be from any human character’s position, as they would be obvious from the reverse angle. Then we have the assaultive camera movement which sweeps over Helga as she senses a murderous presence amongst her audience, who will kill again. Finally, as they leave the theatre and Helga announces that she knows the killer’s identity and senses something, the point-of-view camera is positioned where Carlo’s mother would be visible to the others.
Another of Deep Red’s major differences from its predecessors is the way Argento uses music. Goblin’s progressive rock styled score is considerably more intense than those provided by Morricone. As it plays in murders of Helga, Giordani and Amanda Righetti, it is also decidedly anamepathetic towards them. Indeed, if this cue empathises with anyone it seems more Carlo’s mother than her victims, with percussive stabs corresponding to some of the blows she inflicts upon them in manner perhaps derived ultimately from the stabbing strings of Psycho’s shower scene cue. Tellingly the cue usually preceding these murder set pieces is the children’s song first heard in the fragment that interrupts the credits and Goblin’s theme music, which has become part of the scene that Carlo’s mother must replicate to perform the murders. As such, it seems that one diegetic cue is replaced by another, non-diegetic one. There is not one “leitmotif of the crime,” as Bardi remarks, but two.

Given the complexity of its central images, Deep Red presents a different kind of situation to the Bird with the Crystal Plumage: There the triggering image, of the struggle in the gallery, was sufficiently clear for Sam Dalmas to make an immediate sensory-motor response. It was only when he became trapped that we began to become aware of the action-image breaking down into component opsigns and sonsigns. While the initial image of Helga crashing through the window performs a similar triggering function for Marcus, nothing stops him from reaching Helga, even although he is unable to prevent her death. But in blindly passing by the composite image of the framed and mirrored Carlo’s mother, he is confronted with something that he cannot respond to. There is too much to this image in its formalist, realist and psychoanalytic facets, each in turn contained in the Deleuzean frame as opsigns. Here it is important to also remember that Marcus has not yet seen the full extent of the damage inflicted upon Helga. As such, it seems that he is shocked by an image that is excessive, but not simply in conventionally violent erms:

“A purely optical and sound situation does not extend into action, any more than it is induced by an action. It makes us grasp, it is supposed to make us grasp, something untolerable and unbearable. Not a brutality as nervous aggression, an exaggerated violence that can always be extracted from the sensory-motor relations of the action-image. Nor is it a matter of scenes of terror, although there are sometimes corpses and blood. It is a matter of something too powerful, or too unjust, but sometimes also too beautiful.” (2005b: 17)

http://www.eapoe.org/works/essays/philcomp.htm

Some notes on Deep Red

Koven argues that the typical giallo set piece, with its self-conscious use of techniques, can be seen as a poetic interlude within an otherwise prosaic film. One issue with his use of Pasolini's concept is the different subjectivities that are implicated through visible and subjective camera. For Pasolini the camera consciousness of The Red Desert functioned as a reflection of Giulia's neurosis, which he felt was shared by director Antonioni himself and by the modern bourgeois audience. In the typical giallo set piece, however, Koven identifies the camera as expressing a psychotic rather than neurotic state. As such, it is less easy to see the camera as also articulating a wider shared consciousness, whether that of the director or of his audience.

While the Animal Trilogy certainly contains it share of “violence numbers” Cat o' Nine Tails and Four Flies on Grey Velvet also have poetic moments and representations apart from the obvious set pieces: In both cases these are connected with characters: In Cat o' Nine Tails key images are associated with Arno, reflecting his insight, and Casoni, reflecting his desire to be invisible or disembodied. In Four Flies on Grey Velvet circular camera movements are associated with Nina, reflecting her inability to escape from her traumatic past, while many of the scenes centring around Roberto have a distinct edginess to them, as a reflection of his mounting paranoia.

Where Deep Red represents an advance on its predecessors is in its still more pervasive poetic quality. Besides the general mise en scene and use of sound, this is related to doubling, foreshadowing and images of seemingly random violence and cruelty, like those of two dogs fighting or of the little girl, Olga (Nicoletta Elmi), torturing a lizard: These images are excessive, in the sense of having no obvious narrative purpose. But are not excessive in that they contribute to the film's overall tense and fearful atmosphere. This atmosphere is one that Argento has identified as a reflection of the situation in Italy at the time, with terrorist activity from left and right alike and a rise in crime and unrest. The difference between Argento and other filone directors such as Sergio Martino and Umberto Lenzi is again a poetic one: Argento chose to comment on this wider situation indirectly via a giallo-horror hybrid, whereas they preferred to make actual crime films, known generically as polizioteschi or poliziotti, or turned towards giallo-poliziotto hybrids which were more direct. Another difference, as far as Lenzi is concerned, is political. While the politics of Martino's Suspicious Death of a Minor and Secret Action / The Police Accuse, The Secret Service Kills (both 1975) are more complex, Lenzi's films tend to endorse a relatively straightforward right-wing position with policemen acting as Dirty Harry style vigilantes when they feel it necessary. The politics of Deep Red are, by contrast, more to the left.

The key aspect here is Helga Ulmann's Jewishness. In itself this is another seemingly excessive element. Unlike Antonio Bido's Deep Red and Suspiria inspired The Cat with the Eyes of Jade (1977), in which a Jewish killer seeks revenge upon those who were responsible for betraying his mother and sister to the Nazis, nothing within the narrative relies upon Helga being Jewish. But this fact allows for the inclusion of a clear subtexts about the Holocaust and Fascism, both of which would be further explored in Suspiria. Helga is, after all, murdered by Carlo's mother (Clara Calamai) because she threatens to reveal her crime, hitherto thought safely in the past, just as her husband's body is bricked up behind a wall. Or, we might venture to say, hidden in a “secret annexe” in reference to Anne Frank. There is also an intertextual connection here, in that Calamai's most famous role, at least outside Italy, is probably as Giovanna in Ossessione – a film made, of course, during the Fascist regime; when her character speaks of once being an actress and shows Marcus the pictures of her in various films, these are taken from films Calamai appeared in in the 1930s and 1940s. As such, Argento seems to be warning his Italian audience in particular that if they were not careful Fascism could, like any other repressed element, still return. If someone like Lenzi was not actually pro-Fascist, Argento thus nevertheless seems to be implicitly arguing that there was a danger the position taken by his films could help Fascism re-emerge. This is also reflected in the unimportance of the police within Deep Red. In films like Free Hand for a Tough Cop (1977) Lenzi emphasises the restrictions placed upon the police by corrupt and self-serving politicians and endorses the strong lawman who is willing to take a stand and do what needs to be done. In Deep Red, by contrast, the police are incapable of solving the crime even without having to deal with any obstacles in their way.

Argento's interest in Judaism around this time can be related to the influence of two collaborators. Production designer Guiseppe Bassan, who had first worked with Argento on Five Days of Milan and would also work on Suspiria (in which Hewbrew is among the various scripts seen on the walls of the witches' lair) and Tenebre was Jewish. Perhaps more importantly actress, muse and partner Daria Nicolodi has identified herself as being brought up in both Roman Catholic and Jewish faiths and as being especially close to her Jewish grandmother, whose experiences Nicolodi has said part-inspired Suspiria.

Another difference between Argento's gialli and those of most of his imitators is that they hold up better to repeat viewings. As Koven says, the majority of gialli have little to offer once we know whodunit. In contrast, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage can be watched again to see how Argento misdirects us at the crucial moment in the gallery scene. Deep Red is similar, but a richer and more confident text. In the first 'proper' scene, of Marcus at work with his students at the conservatory we are told, in overt reference to their jazz playing but also doubling as a remark on the film's own mise-en-scene, that it is “too formal, too precise” and needs to be “more trashy”. Immediately, that is, we are being told to question what we see and hear, along with the usual hierarchy by which the formal, precise work is valued over the trashy one. These are, of course, postmodern traits: Words are used “under erasure,” with the awareness that our writing and speech cannot communicate only what we want them to, while the art/trash binary opposition is decentred.

The single image which Argento's auto-critique most clearly alludes to is the film's central one, that of Carlo's mother's face amongst the faces in a painting, caught in the mirror opposite. But if this composite image is a central one in narrative terms it occupies a marginal position within the frame(s) in which it appears. It is positioned in the bottom-left hand corner, where the first-time viewer is unlikely to notice it. Yet the fact that it is there, to be noticed upon a repeat viewing, is crucial in relation to its Bird with the Crystal Plumage counterpart. There the misdirection prevents us from seeing what Sam Dalmas does, such that we have no way of solving the mystery for ourselves. Here the misdirection lets us recognise what Marcus does not at this point, but with Argento relying upon the position and brevity of this image, along with its complexity, to prevent us from so doing. The complexity of this image stems from what it depicts: Carlo's mother's face is the realistic component, something that is presented to us 'as is' without human intervention or intentionality coming into play. The painting in which she is framed is, however, Expressionistic in style, with the other faces resembling Munch's The Scream. As such, it is a formalist component, something in which human subjectivity and expressivity are paramount. This gestalt image is then seen via a mirror, as something which both doubles or copies the original image, but which also distorts it by reversing left and right. As such, it is a psychoanalytic component, something in which we misrecognise ourselves and which can be put to ideological ends. Finally, the value of Deleuze's notion of the frame as the boundary of an information system comes into play in relation to the “pedagogy” of this image. It is simply too complex a set of data to take in at once, especially when combined with everything else in the frame at the same time, or the other images. Like Marcus, we are thus presented with a Hitchcockian “demark”, something which is out of place in the image but which we are unlikely to ourselves be able to place.

In this regard, the preceding scenes, in which Helga is attacked and in which Marcus responds are also significant. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, Argento disrupts the otherwise linear chronology of the film with a moment of simultaneity in which time is made visible: Rather than joining Marcus at the moment when he becomes aware of the attack on Helga, the action within the plaza outside takes place at the same time. We jump back in time a few minutes, even though we may not notice this until Helga crashes through the window. It is possible that Carlo is present as a lookout for his mother – albeit one compromised by his drunkenness – and that she actually passes by her son and Marcus when they talking, out of frame. However, as Deleuze emphasises, out of frame does not mean out of mind: The images within the frame connect with the larger circuit, the infinite set of images from which they are drawn. The second reason is the way in which Helga and Marcus are connected together. Argento uses a sudden and extreme zoom out from the window of Helga's apartment to Marcus and Carlo in the square, soon followed by a cut to a close-up of Helga from Marcus's implied point of view. The zoom is not a device which Argento particularly uses, especially when compared to other filone directors including Mario Bava and Lucio Fulci. Both these directors would often use the zoom as alternative to conventional cutting or decoupage, zooming in or out on a character or detail within the scene. As such, whenever Argento uses the zoom, we may assume there is a specific reasoning behind it. The close-up of Helga, meanwhile, is too close to be an actual reflection of what Marcus sees, and thereby further reminds us of the distinctive abilities of the camera compared to the human eye as it also establishes a connection between the two characters.

More on another image from Deep Red

Doubling is also an aspect of Deep Red’s soundtrack. Argento originally commissioned jazz composer Giorgio Gaslini, who had done the scores for Five Days of Milan (including a Kubrick/Carlos styled rendition of The Thieving Magpie on synthesiser) and Door into Darkness. In the event, however, Argento encouraged Goblin to reinterpret Gaslini’s work, with the result being a soundtrack which was more Goblin/Argento than Gaslini.

The dominant features of the soundtrack are its intensity and its indifference, or its anempathetic quality, particularly when compared to Morricone’s soundtracks for the Animal trilogy: The musical cues, whether the one which plays over the credits, or over Helga’s murder, or to Marc’s visits to the haunted house, do not reflect these characters’ consciousness, nor any consciousness we are invited to share. Rather, they are intense and exciting, in a distanced way: Aesthetised murder, be it of a man or a woman – gender is irrelevant in pure figural terms – is exciting, even if we may feel revulsion towards its real world, unaestheticised, counterpart. Murder as one of the fine arts is one thing, banal unartistic, real murder another.

[As I paste this, there is the image of Marc and Carlo doing a piano duet, sometimes doubling one another, sometimes departing;..]

Some thoughts on two or three images from Deep Red

As Marcus’s gaze meets Helga, Argento does something unusual within his work: He uses the zoom lens, rather than the sequence of two or three jump cuts. Through this he draws us from Marcus to Helga in an instant, without any interruption.

Argento’s general avoidance of the zoom lens is something which distinguishes him from Bava, Fulci and many other Italian directors working within the giallo and horror filone. For them the zoom was a staple part of their repertoire: It was a device which still had meaning, beyond signifying the laziness and ineptitude assumed by more traditionally inclined critics, but one which was nevertheless equally predictable: It was an impulse image, a shock.

For Argento it is also a shock, but through its rarity or singularity a shock to thought: What does this image, from this filmmaker, mean in this context? The answer, I would argue is that it makes a connection, and a transference, from Helga to Marcus. Helga had earlier indicated at the parapsychology conference that she could only see things at the instance they happened, but not what was to happen. As such, she could not predict her murder. But what she may have done here, at the moment of death, was project the killer’s identity to Marcus via her gaze. Marcus, however, is likewise thereby unable to see things until the moment they have happened: As he races into Helga’s apartment, he cannot recognise what he sees as a movement-image, a sensory-motor schema that provides a guide to action, as it is before him (or to his side).

This is also perhaps due to the sheer complexity of this image. Besides its marginalisation with the frame, that it is a central piece of data in a peripheral position, it neatly combines the three pre-Deleuzean conceptions of the frame. As a realist image it is a window on the world: Here is Martha’s face. As a formalist image it is a frame on the world: Here is Martha, seemingly as part of a painting. As a psychoanalytic image it presents a distorting mirror: Martha, reflected in the mirror, appears as part of the painting.

But, as we saw earlier, Deleuze’s notion of the frame (or the frame within the frame?) as encompassing a set of data potentially incorporates and thus supercedes each of these previous images. It presents the frame, or the frame within the frame, as containing a data set to be read.

Yet, this notion also indicates one of the problems here: an information system, of a computer type, and human perception do not accord. This is at least implicit in Deleuze’s discussions of conventional organic human or animal perception, as attending to those things which are habitually of the most important, and of those things through habitual patterns. But it is questionable if machine perception works in the same way. Rather than arriving in a massively parallel fashion, computer data arrives in series. An image is not perceived all at once, with the point(s) of interest then being focused upon. For humans, however, visual images are still processed in a linear fashion, starting at the top left and continuing along and down to the bottom right. (While there are bidirectional code libraries for text display, to reflect the habituated reading patterns of Hebrew, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and other written languages, these are not yet reflected in conventional image processing libraries. In addition computer display co-ordinates are not Cartesian: an X, Y graph of pixel coordinates is different from an X,Y graph of Cartesian coordinates.)

As such, whereas we might happen – especially on a repeat viewing – to acknowledge the figure or information in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen, a Deleuzean, more linear reading of this data, line by line, would perhaps fall short.

Alternatively, this again points to the difference between using these ideas metaphorically, as philosophical concepts, and literally, as scientific functions...

Yet more notes to self

There are a multitude of ways in which we can study film: Aesthetically, technologically, culturally, economically and so forth. The value of any given film for the discipline of film studies could be seen as lying in the extent to which it will support different interpretive perspectives. A film which can be looked at both for its aesthetics and for its wider significance is arguably thereby more valuable, than one which offers little or nothing in aesthetic or formal terms. On this basis, Italian neo-realist and modernist films are undoubtedly more important than most other films released in Italy from the mid 1940s through to early 1980s. However, there were also aesthetics other than neo-realism and modernism, such as the post-modernist aesthetic I will argue was explored by my three figures, Sergio Leone, Dario Argento and Giulio Questi. Similarly not everything made by the neo-realist and modernist auteurs made was of equal significance, other than from an auteurist perspective. Vittorio de Sica's late films, such as Sunflowers and The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, are a case in point. While conventional, well-made films, they have little to offer aesthetically for this selfsame reason. Indeed, the most interesting other aspect of Sunflowers is an awkward one: The fundamental unreality of its treatment of Italan prisoners in the USSR and general portrait of the Soviet regime in the Stalinist and immediate post-Stalinist period, such that it might be read as an ageing humanist filmmaker's being taken advantage of by the then-regime in the USSR.

Also of issue here is the quality-quantity relationship. Is it better to have a film that is 'correct' in both its form and content, as famously espoused by the Cahiers du cinema editorial collective in the heavily politicised post-1968 context – one in which both Leone and Argento operated, albeit in its Italian rather than French form? Is it better to make compromises on one of these axes in order to be more accessible? Or is it better to be excessive, in the manner of the collective's Category E. By this the works of favoured auteurs were often rescued through recourse to (these) readers interpretations, in the manner of Barthes' notion of the Death of the Author. What was perhaps lacking, however, was the absolute freedom of those readers whose interpretation differed from that of the Cahiers theorist, that freedom of thinking differently, of seeking other (no less readerly) “Pleasures of the text”. From a postmodern perspective a right-wing reading of Ford's Young Mr Lincoln (1940) is not necessarily more or less valid than a left-wing one, nominally against the grain. Or, we may be able to deconstruct the deconstructive text that wrongly attempts to exempt itself from deconstruction, or the text that goes with the grain of the against the grain text. Put another way, we should consign ourselves to permanent opposition, of always refusing the doxa, perhaps more particularly when the former paradoxa has become the doxa.

All this is compounded by the national-international aspect: The more an Italian, French or German film talks to its specific national audience, arguably the less it says to a wider international one. Or, by addressing itself to a particular international audience, particularly that of an intellectual revolutionary elite arguably with a tendency towards abstract theory over specific contextual details, it has less to say to a broader national audience more characterised by the opposite tendencies.

In all this I am challenging modernist positions in favour of postmodernist ones: Form should not necessarily be privileged above content; quality over quantity; the elite over the mass, the general (international) over the specific (Italian). Rather each term needs to be put into “free play” or association with the others, the relative gains and losses recognised. For instance, if the Leone film was not as pure as the Antonioni, it reached many more people; as I write this with my word processor, Leone is recognised as a word, like Hitchcock, whereas Antonioni is not. I would, however, argue that in productive terms, in encouraging us to think about phenomena in a fresh way the popular-postmodernist text has now more to offer than the elite-modernist one.

Some notes on box-office

Neo-realist films had mixed fortunes at the Italian box-office. Rome Open City was the most successful film of 1945, with takings of 25,476,250,000 lire in 1998 terms. However its uncompromising follow-up, Paisan ranked only seventh in 1946. This was behind Alberto Lattauda's more populist Il Bandito, in third place with takings of 37,501,040,000 lire, but ahead of Scuiscia in 22nd place. The most successful film of 1947 was Riccardo Freda's adaptation of Les Miserables; Freda had also directed the second most popular film of 1946, The Black Eagle. 1948 presents a similarly mixed picture: If Bicycle Thieves was 5th most successful, with takings of 32,160,240,00, Germany Year Zero and La terra trema were only 34th and 38th respectively. No significant neo-realist films were released in 1949, although Pietro Germi's In the Name of the Law and Giuseppe De Santis's Bitter Rice, both featuring neo-realist elements alongside more conventional genre aspects, ranked 6th and 7th respectively. Tellingly, however, both were behind the Toto vehicle Toto cerca casa, in 3rd.;; the previous year the comedian's Toto al giro d'italia was in fourth place at the box-office. Even at the height of neo-realism, Italian audiences were clearly selective in the neo-realist films they saw and frequently preferred more traditional fare. This was again evident in 1950, where Marcel L'Herbier and Paola Moffa's version of the oft-filmed Last Days of Pompeii was the highest grossing film of the year, with receipts of 89,082,084,000, whereas Rossellini's Stromboli ranked only 17th; Antonioni's debut feature, Story of a Love Affair, ranked 46th. In 1952, meanwhile, Europa '51 ranked 55th, Umberto D 98th. Finally, in 1957, by which time neo-realism was over, the relative success of Nights of Cabiria, in 12th place, must be considered alongside the 46th and 72nd places achieved by White Nights and Il grido respectively.

Relating figures like these back to most studies of Italian cinema a discrepancy is evident. A minority of neo-realist and modernist films have received a disproportionate amount of critical attention compared to their actual success with Italian audiences. Although many films that were more commercially successful may be dismissed as aesthetically uninteresting, it seems wrong to reject them in toto. It is true that neo-realist and modernist films were more likely to be amongst the ten to fifteen percent of Italian productions that received international distribution. However, so were many filone films.

[All figures come from Maurizio Baroni's Platea in piedi, 1945-58]

More notes to self

Deep Red/Profondo Rosso

Argento's first three films were distributed internationally in versions identical to the Italian one but for the dubbing track, with only a short period between the domestic and foreign releases. In contrast Profondo Rosso was not distributed internationally at the time of its Italian release and was eventually issued in a shorter version. This international edit, as Deep Red, was approximately 30 minutes shorter than the Italian version, which ran just over two hours, omitting some scenes (mostly those dealing with the relationship between the male and female investigators) and rearranging others. The original version, which I will here identify as Profondo rosso, has since been released. As it is more representative of Argento's vision, making clearer his excessive, poetic and crossover popular/vernacular and arthouse apects, or the prima visone as well as the terza visione aspects, is the one I will address here.

I have addressed a number of other commentators on Argento's cinema in relation to the Animal Trilogy, including Gary Needham, Mikel Koven and Maitland McDonagh. Until now, however, I have not mentioned the work of Colette Balmain, who is perhaps the most important figure for my purposes. This is because, unlike Needham and McDonagh, who emphasise psychoanalytic approaches, Balmain takes a Deleuzean approach. As such, it is obviously necessary to distinguish my Deleuzean reading of Argento from hers. The first difference is without our respective bodies of Argento texts. Whereas Balmain takes a filone based approach, by focusing on Argento's gialli over the quarter century or so from 1970's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage through to 1996's The Stendhal Syndrome. In contrast, I examine a shorter time period and look at Argento's gialli and fantasy-horror films. I would argue that this shift is justified on two grounds. First, because the period from 1970 to 1982 is widely accepted to be Argento's most productive and original one. Second, because I feel it is impossible to really distinguish between his gialli and his fantasy horror films in the way Balmain does. Balmain distinguishes between Argento's gialli through to Tenebre and from Phenomena onwards. While Phenomena contains supernatural aspects that she arguably does not fully address, this general division is one I would agree with. I would also agree with her as to the substance of this division. The films through to Tenebre are more concerned with making a critique of masculine ways of being, while those from Phenomena on explore alternative feminine becomings. What Balmain fails to really look at, however, is the way in which Suspiria and Inferno were vital to this shift in perspective through their emphasis upon young adult protagonists reduced to desexualised, child-like positions. The second difference is in our use of Deleuzean concepts. For Balmain Argento's films are examples of a time-image cinema, as is the giallo as a whole. I consider this to be both too easy an approach to take and inherently contradictory. It is too easy in that it basically entails following Deleuze but not challenging him: It is one thing to make the case for a post-war filmmaker's greatness as a time-image figure, using the concepts that Deleuze provides, another to argue for them as a movement-image figure or something else. Deleuze certainly tells us that he is addressing “masterpieces” of the movement-image and of the time-image, such that no hierarchy can apply. But he also identifies Bergson's discovery of the time-image as “more profound” than that of the movement-image, suggesting a hierarchy. Within Cinema 2 he is also notably reticent about the achievements of Scorsese, Altman, Coppola and other figure of the American cinema of the 1970s, the implication apparently being that they are not time-image or modernist enough. It is contradictory in that by reading the giallo as a time-image cinema in general Balmain denies the specificity of Argento's films and his qualities as an auteur. Being time-image becomes a condition of the genre or the filone rather than of the director. This said, Balmain's sample of non-Argento gialli is extremely limited, comprising three titles: Visconti's Ossessione and Bava's The Girl Who Saw Too Much and Blood and Black Lace. It is questionable if Visconti's film can really be read as a giallo. Most commentators would probably regard it as prototypical neo-realist work in the first instance, whilst it also lacks the whodunit element found in Bava's films and those of Argento. The whodunit form raises another contradiction. While concentrating upon Argento's thrillers Balmain actually views them largely in relation to the horror film, even as she downplays those texts which are more obviously of this type, Suspiria and Inferno.

Note to self

Fascist aesthetics emphasised spectacle. As such, neo-realism can be understood as inherently anti-fascist. This however, posed a problem for those filmmakers who were not interested in following neo-realism: By pursuing an alternative aesthetics, one potentially involving spectacle , how could they avoid being labelled as Fascists, especially within the politicised Italian cultural climate of the 1960s and 1970s? One answer was that Marxism, at least in its Soviet form, was not exactly aesthetically ‘correct’ either: Besides the spectacular parades and architecture, we may here consider socialist realist art, as something which was neither particularly socialist nor realist by emphasising the (future) ideal over the (present) reality. Another, that pursued by my (no less anti-fascist) filmmakers was to recognise that the spectacle/fascist, realist/anti-fascist division was an the product of particular circumstances rather than something inherent, and that placing the latter terms above the former was itself a hierarchical, totalising (or totalitarian) move.

This week's work in progress

Introduction
In this section I discuss a number of the major contextual features of the Italian cinema in the post-war period, including the importance of post-synchronised or dubbed sound; the structures of production, distribution and audiences, and the importance of filone as an alternative and supplement to the more familiar Hollywood notion of genre.

There are four main points I wish to make through this. First, that some of these features are common to both the art and popular cinemas, although their consequences for each may also sometimes be rather different. Second, that those features important to the popular cinema had the consequence of encouraging some film-makers, most notably Leone, Argento and Questi, to develop what can in retrospect be identified as a postmodern cinema avant la lettre. Third, that parallels may be drawn between the importance of contextual factors in assisting the emergence of this postmodernist cinema and the modernist Italian cinema as discussed by Deleuze. Finally, that the significance of contextual factors here again the usefulness of taking a wider, or more “schizoanalytic” approach, one than goes beyond the film texts themselves.

Dubbing and sound
With the coming of sound, filmmakers across the globe were confronted with the issue of what to do to make their product accessible to those who did not speak their native language. The two main solutions that emerged were subtitling and dubbing. With subtitling a film is kept in its original language and written titles are added above the image in another language. With dubbing the audio track in the original language is replaced with a new audio track in another language. All this is, of course, straightforward. So too are the broad distinctions that can be drawn between different countries’ approaches: Since dubbing is more expensive than subtitling, countries with smaller populations and thus markets have tended to subtitle whereas their larger counterparts have favoured dubbing. Whereas France and Germany will dub usually US films, the Scandinavian countries are more likely to subtitle them. Inevitably, however, there are exceptions.

One obvious exception is the English-speaking territories of the USA and UK. Despite their respectively populations, which would indicate the use of dubbing rather than subtitling, historically a disproportionate number of foreign-language films have circulated in their original language with English subtitles. This split is one which has largely been in terms of likely audience. This is a vital point whose implications I will return to.

Another exception, more specific to this study, is the Italian cinema. From the outset, almost all Italian films used post-synchronised rather than direct sound. Whereas on the typical Hollywood film the sound would be recorded along with images, Italian films would either be shot without sound entirely or with only a rough guide track for the subsequent dubbing. In addition, all foreign films imported into Italy during the Fascist period were also required to be dubbed. A key reason for dubbing was political: By dubbing imported films into Italian, the Fascist censors ensured relatively strict control over their messages. Dialogue could be altered to convey a different meaning without the Italian audience being aware of this fact (with the possible exception of the odd intellectual who had seen the film in its original language whilst abroad). By dubbing domestic products, meanwhile, the use of standard Italian, as distinct from regional languages and dialects, could be encouraged.

One of the things which distinguished many neo-realist films from their Fascist-era counterparts was the use of non-standard Italian. Perhaps the most famous example of this is the use of Sicilian by the fishermen in Visconti’s La terra trema (1948), which necessitated the film’s being subtitled into standard Italian in order to be intelligible to mainland audiences. The point that needs to be made here, however, is that certain Fascist-era films had used dialects for sake of historical authenticity. One famous example is Alessandro Blasetti’s 1860 (193?), about the reunification of Italy and, more problematically, the drawing of parallels between Garibaldi and Mussolini.

Another thing which distinguishes many neo-realist films from their Fascist-era counterparts is the use of location shooting. Ironically, however, the ability to do so depended in large part upon the dubbing tradition that had developed during the Fascist period. At this time recording equipment was still rather bulky compared to the likes of the Nagra tape recorders associated with the later nouvelle vague, making it difficult to capture sound and image simultaneously whilst on location. Recording both whilst on a boat, as in the scenes within Blasetti’s film which portray the patriots’ journey from the Italian mainland to Sicily, would have impractical: Direct sound would have here necessitated using a water tank in the studio, as with Hitchcock’s Lifeboat (1944) or similar.

A further point of reference and comparison here is one of Rossellini’s war-era propaganda productions The White Ship (1942), which was shot on an actual hospital ship.Intriguingly Mario Bava, who served as a camera operator on the film, has referred to its writer and supervising director Francesco De Robertiis as the father of neo-realism. If this is perhaps not a truth that is easily dealt with in conventional terms, it might be acknowledged within a more Deleuzean framework, as making us think about neo-realism afresh: Rather than being an absolute break with Fascist-era cinema, as traditionally emphasised within film histories, there are also points of continuity which have been marginalised.

Indeed, location shooting, usually combined with studio interiors, was also an important feature of the Italian popular cinema from the mid-1950s to the early 1980s: Leone’s westerns, for instance, were mostly shot in the south-eastern Spainish region of Almeria, doubling as the American south-west. Argento’s gialli characteristically defamiliarise their urban settings, as with his use of the distinctive modernist architecture of the EUR region of Rome, as also seen in Antonioni’s L’Eclisse and La notte, within Four Flies on Grey Velvet and Tenebre.
A distinction can nevertheless be made between the neo-realists’ use of dubbing and that of my directors and others working within the Italian popular cinema: For Bazin, the neo-realists’ combination of location shooting with dubbed sound could be justified in terms of leading to an overall increase in the amount of reality captured. On balance the gains made in the visuals outweighed the losses in the audio. For my filmmakers, however, dubbing is more likely to be justified in terms of leading to an overall increase in expressiveness, that when operating independently of the microphone the camera can be made to move in more complex and dramatic ways. The issue here, in terms of Bazin’s analysis, is that the neo-realists approach, by being based upon “faith in reality”, is positioned as superior to that of Leone, Argento and Questi, which is implicitly based upon “faith in the image”. Realism, that is, trumps formalism.

Bazin’s analysis can, however, be challenged. He himself acknowledged that the neo-realist combination of location shooting and dubbed sound was not the culmination of cinema itself, but only the next stage in its mimetic trajectory. Sound technologies would also inevitably develop to a point when they too could be taken on location and used to capture reality. But with the neo-realists this did not happen: Rossellini, De Sica and Visconti continued to use post-sychronised sound, even as new technologies allowed the French nouvelle vague to record sound and visuals alike whilst on location, and as Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet experimented with more complex live sound recording techniques. The same was true of the Italians’ own modernist successors, with Fellini’s films, for instance, being especially notable for the conscious unreality of their dubbing. Nor did the neo-realists and their modernist successors ever eschew using non-diegetic music, which is inherently unrealistic. Indeed, if anything, dubbing and non-diegetic music would seem to have become increasingly important to these Italian filmmakers into the 1950s and beyond.

A major reason for dubbing’s continuing importance was the increasing propensity of Italian directors to work with international stars who did not always speak Italian with the level of proficiency required to convincingly deliver dialogue in it. Here we may cite the likes of Broderick Crawford and Anthony Quinn in Fellini’s I Bidone and La Strada respectively; Farley Granger and Burt Lancaster in Visconti’s Senso and The Leopard; Ingrid Bergman in her films with paramour Rossellini, and Richard Burton in Antonioni’s The Red Desert.

Non-diegetic music, meanwhile, remained significant insofar as these filmmakers continued to develop their aesthetics. For example, while opera had always been part of Visconti’s filmmaking, as evinced by Ossessione, its importance within the likes of Senso and Rocco and his Brothers was such that they might well be described as presenting a (seemingly somewhat oxymoronic) combination of the operatic, the melodramatic and the realistic. Crucially this development was something Bazin himself acknowledged in his discussion of Senso, that it did not merely represent the end of ‘traditional’ neo-realism but also its potential renaissance.
The vital point is that these neo-realist and modernist filmmakers’ practices were echoed by their more popular counterparts. Leone’s films, for instance, also featured international casts who lacked a common language. They also feature a highly expressive use of non-diegetic music, such that they have often been described as closer to actual “horse operas” than their Hollywood counterparts, with “arias that are stared rather than sung”.

Though I will later demonstrate that “a certain realism,” to use Pasolini’s phrase, can be discerned within my filmmakers’ work, this does not make them realists in Bazin’s more traditional terms. Rather, Leone, Argento and Questi would seem to place excess faith in the image at the expense of reality. Moreover, if we accept Bazin’s critique of self-conscious 1950s “superwesterns” like George Stevens’ Shane (1952) as no longer having the confidence to be ‘merely’ westerns, then it would presumably follow that Leone’s “cinema cinema” approach would have been similarly unsatisfactory to him.

An answer to this, both post-structuralist and post-modernist, is to reject the kind of binaries and hierarchies that underpin Bazin’s positions, whilst also foregrounding the complexities and nuances of his arguments. In addition to his defence of Senso we may here note, for instance, his recognition that realism, as he understood it, could sometimes only be achieved through artifice.
A similar approach may be taken towards the issue of dubbing or subtitling for Italian films when they are distributed in the US and the UK. The arthouse preference for subtitling over dubbing and prejudice against dubbing can be challenged on various grounds. First, the notion that subtitling, with its preservation of the Italian language track, is somehow more authentic is itself flawed: The Italian dubbing track was arguably as inauthentic – or authentic, depending on perspective – as an English track, with both being prepared in the studio and usually involving input from voice artists. Italian audiences never heard Clint Eastwood’s actual voice in the Dollars films, just as US or UK audiences never heard that of Gian-Maria Volonte. Second, subtitling entails translation not only between languages but also between spoken and written forms, with the latter needing greater concision of expression, means subtitling entails just as much, if not more, modification of the original message as dubbing. Third, in paying greater attention to the written word, the viewer of the subtitled version is, all other things being equal, paying less attention to the original visual text. Fourth, notions of authentic and inauthentic, original and derivative, and so forth, along with the implied hierarchies between each pair, are again modernist and structuralist positions that postmodernism and post-structuralism would reject. Finally, arthouse criticism of dubbing is itself an elitist position that might well be construed as little more than an attempt to retain a cultural distinction (Bordieu, 1984) over the popular audience.

Filone
Although the Cinecitta studios in Rome, developed under the auspices of the Fascist regime, offered facilities comparable to Hollywood, it is crucial to realise that the Italian film industry itself lacked a studio system comparable to that of Hollywood in the 1920s, 30s and 40s, of the majors and the mini-majors: The Italian film industry was never vertically integrated, with the same companies being responsible for film production, distribution and exhibition. Nor could they be compared to the Hollywood studios of the 1950s. Having been forced to divest themselves of their theatres, they still controlled production and/or distribution. Instead, in Italy different companies were responsible for producing, distributing and exhibiting films. Rather than film production being dominated by a small number of studios, each producing a relatively high level of output, Italian cinema was dominated by a large number of small producers, often existing on a more ad-hoc film-to-film basis.

A consequence of this was that the Italian film industry lacked stability comparable to that of Hollywood. The Hollywood studios of the 1950s and 1960s still made enough different films that the profits from some could generally be relied upon to offset the losses from others. In contrast, Italian producers needed one film to return a profit to be able to produce the next, or at best relied upon one film to help amortize another; we have already seen this practice in operation with Jolly Films’ Pistols Don’t Argue and A Fistful of Dollars.

While this instability sometimes helped filmmakers get backing for relatively risky projects, in general it encouraged a more conservative approach. We saw this earlier with Death Laid and Egg: In 1966 the giallo was an untested genre, hence the insistence of Questi and Arcalli’s backers that they first prove themselves with a more marketable spaghetti western. The irony is that after the breakthrough achieved by The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, “everybody started making gialli,” as Argento put it, precisely because they were now in at the box-office.

This tendency to seek to hop onto the bandwagon of a box-office success may be described as the filone principle. As discussed by Koven (2006: ??), summarising a number of other commentators, filone has a variety of meanings. The most important, I would argue, is that of a stream or a (river) tributary. In film terms this translates in broad terms to the way a successful film swiftly gives rise to various imitators-cum-tributes (tributaries), which may then join up with other filone further 'downstream'.

Amongst relatively pure filone A Fistful of Dollars led to such sullo stesso filone (“in the style of”) westerns as Sergio Corbucci’s Django, with its similar stranger protagonist and town under the control of rival factions, who are then played against one another by the mysterious stranger. Likewise, Argento’s Animal Trilogy spawned numerous sound-alike gialli imitations such as Lucio Fulci’s A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin and Riccardo Freda’s The Iguana with a Tongue of Fire (both 1971). Amongst less pure filone, the gothic horror and peplum filone of the late 1950s and early 1960s merged in the likes of Bava’s Hercules in the Haunted World (1961) and Freda’s The Witch’s Curse (1964). Likewise the cannibal and zombie filone of mid and late 1970s combined in Marino Girolami’s Zombie Holocaust (1980), in which both monsters were present.

Taken as a whole filone cinema offers two challenges to the more familiar Hollywood notion of genre. First, it foregrounds the kind of impurity that is generally argued to have only become evident in Hollywood genres since the 1970s. Second, the short life span of the typical filone means that notions of generic evolution, from the classical to the parodic, tend to be manifest only in attenuated or accelerated ways. Films starring Franco Franchi and Ciccio Ingrassia present a useful gauge here: Between the early 1960s and the early 1970s, the two comedians appeared in dozens of low-budget, low-brow filone films inspired by whatever was sufficiently successful at the box-office: For example, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly led to The Good, the Bad and the Stupid (Dir: ??, ??), The Cat o’ Nine Tails to Two Cats of Eight and a Half Tails in the Middle of Amsterdam (Dir: Osvaldo Civriani, 1972). Put another way, a filone cycles in general often shifted from relatively straight texts to overt pastiches or parodies within the space of a year or so.

The filone principle was not, however, confined solely to popular forms, instead applying whenever a film was successful at the box office: Last Tango in Paris inspired the Franchi-starring Ultimo tango a Zagarol (Dir: Nano Cicero, 1973) while Pasolini's Canterbury Tales inspired the likes of The Other Canterbury Tales (Dir: ??, ??) and The Sexbury Tales (Dir: ??, ??). Indeed, the “Trilogy of Life” as a whole formed the basis for the entire 'Decamerotic' filone and likely played a large part in Pasolini's subsequent “repudiation” of The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales and The Arabian Nights via his essay of the same title (1974) and Salo (1975).

Filone cycles can be thus seen as exhibiting a distinction between the original film which innovates and the followers which imitate, or the film which presents us with productive, thought-provoking images and truths and the film which does not. This is the case whether we are talking about a filone which develops out of a more popular success (A Fistful of Dollars) or a more arthouse one (The Decameron). Due of a critical tendency to view filone outwith its context and through the perspective of genre this has rarely been recognised. Rather, filone films as a whole are also seen as lacking in tradition and as being entirely derivative.

A number of points may be made in defence of the filone system. First, like genre, it was a rational response to particular industrial conditions, something which functioned 'scientifically' to lessen chance and encourage predictability. Second, it is questionable whether Hollywood genres have ever been pure themselves. Third, the notion of a developmental trajectory to genre, with one phase inevitably being succeeded by another, according to an arborescent logic, is questioned by Deleuze:

“It would be dangerous to reserve an epic genius for Ince and Ford, attributing to other more recent directors the invention of a tragic or even a romantic Western. The application of Hegel's and Lukacs' formula of the succession of these genres [i.e. the tragic and the romantic] works badly for the Western: as Mitry has shown, from the outset the Western explores all the directions – epic, tragic, romantic – with cowboys who are already nostalgic, solitary, ageing, or even born losers, or rehabilitated Indians.” (2005a: 151)

A good example here which demonstrates both generic impurity and an unusually early decadence is George Marshall's spoof western Destry Rides Again, tellingly released in the same year as the aforementioned Stagecoach, 1939. Deleuze's statement is also highly significant for my purposes more generally: It implies a rejection of Bazin's more teleological aspects, while also suggesting that Italian westerns, thrillers, horror and gangster films should not merely be dismissed out of hand as 'degenerate' forms. Even if Deleuze himself was a modernist in his film tastes, there is no reason we cannot put his concepts to more postmodernist ends. Fourth, Hollywood has itself experienced filone-like cycles of production alongside or as part of more enduring genres: Part of the history of the thriller genre, for instance, might be written in relation to the gangster cycle of the 1930-32, the G-man cycle of the mid-1930s and the (retrospectively identified) film noir cycle of the 1940s and 1950s. In turn, certain filone, most notably the giallo, have become relative staples of Italian film production, with histories that now stretch back more than 40 years. Finally, taking 'genre' as a positive term against which 'filone' is viewed negatively is an implicitly modernist, structuralist, hierarchical position that must today be rejected.

Returning to Delueze's analysis of the western as an inherently rhizomatic form, the sceptic may be tempted to ask what is then different about Italian westerns, thrillers and so on, other than their being of Italian origin. I would argue that this is precisely the point: Besides anything else, the films of Leone, Argento and Questi represent a filone “deterritorialisation” of Hollywood genre, or a distinctive “line of flight”. To give but one example, whereas Hollywood gangster films conventionally emphasised Italian-American mobsters, Leone instead foregrounded their Jewish-American counterparts in Once Upon a Time in America. While such figures had been present in some US gangster films, such as Nails Nathan in The Public Enemy (Dir: William Wellman, 1931) or Hyman Roth in The Godfaher Part II (Dir: Francis Ford Coppola, 1974) they were generally marginal figures.

Visione
In itself, the filone system was only one side of the production-distribution/exhibition-audience triangle. We must also consider the visione, the cinemas in which films played to Italian audiences, and their interactions.

The key commentator here is Christopher Wagstaff (1992), particularly since he addresses the subject of the visione, or the cinema circuits, in relation to the spaghetti western. Historically the growth of cinema in Italy followed much the same pattern as in other western countries: Initially films were screened in existing venues that catered to existing cultural forms. This was followed by the building of purpose-built movie theatres, a development which helping to legitimise cinema with the vital middle class audience. Particularly in the south, however, film screenings were never confined solely to cinemas, with town halls and other venues also being important. By the 1960s, however, it was nevertheless possible to speak of three distinct cinema circuits. These were the prima, seconda and terza visione, or the first, second and third run circuits. Wagstaff concentrates upon the prima and terza visione and says less about the seconda visione, which occupies an in-between position in most if not all respects. The prima visione, first-run, cinemas were concentrated in the big cities, disproportionately in the north of Italy. They had relatively high ticket prices and catered to an audience which was generally wealthier, better-educated and more likely to be middle class and young. This was an audience which would go to the cinema to see a particular film, which they would typically engage with in the attentive manner presumed by film studies. On each point, the prima visione can be contrasted with the terza visione, third run, cinemas. They were more likely to found in rural areas and small towns, disproportionately in the south of Italy. They had relatively low ticket prices and catered to an audience which was generally poorer, worse-educated, more likely to be working class or peasant, and older. This was an audience which would go to the cinema in general, caring less about the particular film that was playing than the opportunity to see friends and socialise. As such, they typically viewed the film in a relatively inattentive manner, more like the casual television “glance” than the intense cinematic “gaze” (Ellis, 1982).

Relating the visione to his chosen filone, Wagstaff points out that although more than 400 spaghetti westerns were released between the early 1960s and the mid-1970s, only a handful of these were released internationally. In itself this is nothing unusual: As noted earlier, only around ten to fifteen percent of Italian productions and co-productions made it to the US and/or the UK. The issue was that the 50 or so spaghetti westerns released internationally, and which were drawn upon in most studies, were not a representative sample. They were disproportionately drawn from the more respectable end of production, the films which played the prima visione as well as the terza. As such, they were often hybrid or crossover films, in which the more spectacular and affective elements aimed at the terza visione were combined with others aimed at their prima visione counterparts. Leone's Dollars films, for instance, could be enjoyed at a purely visceral level and/or intellectually for the way in which they engaged with the myths of the west.

The terza visione filone film is primarily of sociological interest: It is unlikely that anyone will ever look at the westerns of “The Italian Ed Wood” Demofilo Fidani (variously credited as Miles Deem, Dick Spitfire, Lucky Dickinson, Slim Alone and Sean O'Neal) aesthetically, other than in relation to paracinema (Sconce, 1995). In contrast, by moving between the visione, the westerns of Leone and Questi offer aesthetic and other interests; the same can be said of Argento’s gialli.
This also distinguishes these films from the likes of Last Tango in Paris, which enjoyed a degree of popular success within Italy as the most commercially successful film of 1972: The simple fact is that a film like Last Tango was made for the prima visione at home and the art cinema circuit internationally. What success it had with the terza visione audience can be attributed to a kind of “textual poaching,” (Jenkins, 1992) whereby viewers took what they wanted from the film, chiefly its sexual content.

Antonioni's films as a whole are also worth considering in this regard: Until Il grido (1957) they were not particularly successful at the Italian box-office. L'Avventura (1960) was a surprise hit in Italy and France (Nowell-Smith, ??). This might be attributed in part to the presence of the then-popular Lea Massari in what seemed to be a starring role. With L'Eclisse and La Notte, however, Antonioni seemed to turn away from the popular audience, with advertising campaigns that emphasised his auteur status and the sense that cinema was being taken to new levels as an art form (??, ??). Following The Red Desert, the third and last of Antonioni's films to feature Monica Vitti, the director then embarked upon a three-film deal with MGM, beginning with Blow-Up. Though the film was released in English, this departure from arthouse practice was justified by its London setting. Likewise, if it was an anti-giallo that eschewed conventional resolution, Blow-Up also offered moments of then-daring female nudity as incidental “attraction” for the terza visione “textual poacher”. The film undoubtedly made most of its money, however, with the prima visione in Italy and on the international arthouse circuit.

This points to the different distribution and exhibition patterns extant in the 1960s and 1970s by which film could make money: Within Italy, a film could sell a relatively small number of higher priced tickets on the prima visione over a shorter period of time, or a larger number of lower priced tickets on the terza visione over a longer period of time. For the small production company relying on one film to finance the next, appearing on the prima visione circuit as well as the terza visione was thus vital. This was all the more so since only films that played on the prima visione had the opportunity of international sales. However we can see a general division between auteur and crossover filone cinemas: When distributed internationally auteur films by Antonioni, Bertolucci, Pasolini and others typically played in art cinemas, or to the international equivalent of the prima visione audience. The films of Leone, Argento and Questi, by contrast, typically played in drive-ins, grindhouses and fleapits, or the international equivalents of the terza visione.

I would argue that by made for a wider range of audiences within Italy the crossover filone films of my filmmakers were encouraged to engage in a practice of Pasolinian “double articulation” far more than their prima visione focused counterparts. Leone, Argento and Questi, were concerned, that is, with making films featuring an excess of signs and meanings where one possible reading (e.g. the prima visione one) was not necessarily privileged over another (the terza visione one). This is, of course, something that again marks their work out as postmodern rather than modernist in orientation.

Having said this, account must also be taken of other changes in the Italian cinema over the course of the 1960s and 1970s. As noted previously, the terza visione audience often watched films in a relatively detached, TV-like manner. Taken in retrospect, this can be seen as being because they were a pre-television television audience: Whereas the peak year for cinema admissions in the US was 1946, it was 1956 in Italy, with television ownership likewise lagging ten or fifteen years behind. Until the mid-1970s there were only two state-controlled television channels in Italy, the more mainstream, Christian Democrat associated RAI 1, and the less mainstream, Socialist Party associated RAI 2. (RAI 3 was assigned to the Communist Party in 197?, although by this time Silvio Berlusconi’s illegal channels were also in operation.) The emergence of the Italian western, meanwhile, can in large part be attributed to the different circumstances pertaining in the US and in Italy in the late 1950s and early 1960s: During this period the western had moved from being a staple of Hollywood film production to becoming a major part of Hollywood television production. US audiences who wanted to see westerns could now watch them on television, through series like Rawhide, in which Dollars star Clint Eastwood first made his name. However, these same television series were either not exported to Italy or only have reached the minority who had televisions. The demand for westerns thus created a gap in the market which Italian filmmakers were happy to fill. As television ownership spread, however, the terza visione audience increasingly found their entertainment needs were being met in the home environment. Indeed, spaghetti westerns became a staple part of Italian television programming, as demonstrated by scenes in gialli like My Dear Killer and Don’t Torture a Duckling (both 1972) in which characters watch them on television; the films were directed by western veterans Duccio Tessari and Lucio Fulci respectively.

As such, the impact of television was felt disproportionately within the Italian film industry. It was the terza visione and the filone cinema which benefited most from television in the 1960s and then suffered most in the 1970s: While there was certainly an absolute decline in the size of the cinema audience and in the number of cinema screens over the course of the two decades, this decline was felt far more acutely in the terza visione than the prima. The prima visione, meanwhile, also benefited from general improvements in education and embourgeoisement, that there was a growing audience willing to take cinema as something other than mere entertainment.

Conclusions
Despite Deleuze’s initial claim that he will look at cinema in purely formal terms, the importance of background context is evident within Cinema 1 and Cinema 2 in places. In particular, neo-realism and the wider modernist movement-image cinema could not have emerged without the Second World War: The likes of the bombed out city were necessary for the breakdown of the sensory-motor schema of the action image and the concomitant emergence of the seer.
The situation is no less different with my postmodernist filmmakers and their combination of the movement-image and the time-image. Like their neo-realist and modernist counterparts, they too benefited from the increased camera mobility inherent in shooting without synchronized sound. But, unlike these filmmakers, their work was often ghettoized outwith Italy in the equivalent of terza visione cinemas, and not taken seriously on account of being released in an English dub rather than the ‘original’ Italian; I use quotes or brackets to again highlight the question of where the original actually is when we are dealing with co-productions intended for international release, featuring casts lacking a lingua franca. Like Rossellini’s taking to the streets of Rome in Open City because of the unavailability of studio facilities, the filone system can be seen as a rational, functional response to circumstances. In the absence of a strong studio system, Italian producers and filmmakers were largely risk-averse. They could not afford to take a chance on making innovative, original works that might not find favour with the audience. This is an area where Argento and Questi went against the grain, in different ways: In The Bird with the Crystal Plumage Argento made a new type of giallo. In Django Kill and Death Laid an Egg Questi pushed the western and the giallo (as it existed in the 1960s) to breaking point. At the same time, however, Leone, Argento and Questi’s films also have a crossover aspect that goes against the prima visione/terza visione binary. Each filmmaker sought to offer both these audiences something, whilst also presenting them with implicit challenges through this selfsame hybrid or crossover approach. For Leone and Argento taking a hybrid approach was to prove especially important over the course of the 1970s and into the 1980s, as the relative importance of the terza visione declined. This refusal of an either/or is, meanwhile, again something which marks these filmmakers out as early postmodernists.