Or, look what arrived this morning: an original, unused, rather large poster for Bava's Schock.
Tuesday, 3 July 2007
Schock poster
Or, look what arrived this morning: an original, unused, rather large poster for Bava's Schock.
Disrespect is a two-way street
A perfect illustration of the inadequate way Italian popular cinema is characteristically treated by academic commentators is Peter Bondanella's chapter From Italian Neorealism to Cinecittà in European Cinema, edited by Elizabeth Ezra.
Bondanella at least shows a willingness to mention the peplum, western and horror genres – other popular forms such as comedy are absent – but given the errors in the three pages he devotes them one feels that he might has well have not bothered.
For instance, Sergio Leone's collaborators on Once Upon a Time in the West, Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento, are identified as “young aspiring film buffs soon to become directors themselves,” conveniently ignoring that Bertolucci had already directed the likes of La Commare secca and Before the Revolution well before this collaboration with Leone.
Discussing the “spaghetti nightmare” film, Bondanella identifies three pioneers: “Mario Bava [...] Lucio Fulci [...] and Riccardo Freda, whose directorial debut, La maschera del demonio (Black Sunday, 1960), made a cult figure out of British actress Barbara Steele.”
Right...
Does anyone actually bother checking the facts in cases like this? Do they simply not know enough about these films and filmmakers to be able to tell? Do they think that the cult film enthusiast reading will not notice? Or by complaining does one merely further marginalise oneself and this cinema, for failing to show a lack of 'proper perspective'?
Bondanella at least shows a willingness to mention the peplum, western and horror genres – other popular forms such as comedy are absent – but given the errors in the three pages he devotes them one feels that he might has well have not bothered.
For instance, Sergio Leone's collaborators on Once Upon a Time in the West, Bernardo Bertolucci and Dario Argento, are identified as “young aspiring film buffs soon to become directors themselves,” conveniently ignoring that Bertolucci had already directed the likes of La Commare secca and Before the Revolution well before this collaboration with Leone.
Discussing the “spaghetti nightmare” film, Bondanella identifies three pioneers: “Mario Bava [...] Lucio Fulci [...] and Riccardo Freda, whose directorial debut, La maschera del demonio (Black Sunday, 1960), made a cult figure out of British actress Barbara Steele.”
Right...
Does anyone actually bother checking the facts in cases like this? Do they simply not know enough about these films and filmmakers to be able to tell? Do they think that the cult film enthusiast reading will not notice? Or by complaining does one merely further marginalise oneself and this cinema, for failing to show a lack of 'proper perspective'?
Monday, 2 July 2007
Giallo month
It seems to be "giallo month" on the bittorrent tracker Zaerc
Hopefully we'll see some otherwise unavailable rarities appearing over the coming weeks.
Hopefully we'll see some otherwise unavailable rarities appearing over the coming weeks.
Saturday, 30 June 2007
The Spaghetti Western: A Thematic Analysis
As an academic study adapted from Bert Fridlund's doctoral thesis, this is not a book for those seeking a viewer-friendly introduction to the Italian western. Rather, it forms a very useful counterpart and corrective to what probably still remains the dominant study of the cycle in English, Christoper Frayling's Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone.
Whereas Frayling takes a more auteur focussed approach in concentrating upon a core selection of perhaps 50 spaghettis, Fridlund points to the frequent inconsistencies in such canon constructions - films like Django Kill and The Great Silence receive greater attention than box-office would warrant while the Trinity series are correspondingly downplayed as emblematic of little more than the descent into parody, for instance - and accordingly casts his net wider to discuss some 200 titles.
Fridlund's methodology likewise differs. Whereas Frayling emphasised the aesthetic dimensions of his films and was somewhat critical of Will Wright's structuralist analysis of the American western, albeit whilst offering his own alternative formulations of characteristic Italian western narratives, such as the "The Servant of Two Masters" plot he identified in A Fistful of Dollars and Django, Fridlund effectively reverses these terms, downplaying aesthetics in favour of thematics.
Indeed, in discussing Fistful of Dollars and A Pistol for Ringo, Fridlund is quick to offer an alternative formulation to Fraylings, that of "The Infiltrator," whilst subsequently identifying Django as an exemplar of another plot constellation, that of "the deprived hero".
Some of the strengths and weaknesses of these approaches are nicely summarised by the Fistful / Pistol pairing. Whilst I have not watched Ringo and his Golden Pistol for a while - and reading Fridlund makes me want to do so again, which always a good sign - from what I recall its aesthetics were far removed from those of Fistful, more neo-classical in seeking to directly emulate American models, less baroque, askew and 'Italian' - in other words, precisely the kind of thing that Frayling analyses excel at. But on account of this and the fact that aesthetics aren't Fridlund's topic, this is not a problem per se.
What some readers may find less convincing, however, is the way Fridlund's analyses develop over the course of the book as he explores other plot constellations, including "the unstable partnerships of bounty killers," as seen in For a Few Dollars More for example, and "the social bandit" of political or politicised spaghettis like A Professional Gun and Companeros. Or, more precisely the way in which they don't.
The key thing, after all, about Will Wright's Sixguns and Society is that second term in its title, the way in which he sought to bring Levi-Strauss and Propp inspired structuralism and formalism together with Marxism to show that the shifting configurations of the heroes, villains and their relationships with society in the American western over the decades, corresponded to social changes. Thus, for example, the emergence of the "professional" plot in the 1950s and 1960s, wherein the heroes remained outside of and separate from a weak society, corresponded with the emergence of technocratic elite rule.
Fridlund doesn't attempt anything comparable here. Whether this is down to too great a barrier of cultural difference - an American investigating his own country's myths obviously has it easier here than a Swede looking for the ways in which Italian film-makers used an imaginary America as a means of addressing specifically Italian concerns - that between an enduring American genre and a short-lived Italian filone cycle, a simple lack of enthusiasm - the success rate in bringing together the theoretical paradigms of Marxism and Structuralism has arguably been rather low despite the contributions of some of the best intellectual minds - or a combination of them, is open to debate.
On the plus side, however, the very fact that the emphasis is upon description also means that there is more here for the reader who is interested in the films in themselves, with less of those over-analytic, over-reaching and credibility-straining interpretations that often mar academic books as far as the fan reader is concerned.
For those with a more theoretical bent, meanwhile, it also opens up possibilities for further investigations, whether in filling in the gaps between theory and practice - a topic, often of great significance in the political spaghetti westerns to both characters and film-makers if not necessarily their viewing audience - or indeed in demonstrating their very irreconcilability as the reason for such a gap here.
Thursday, 28 June 2007
Defining remarks
I've just been re-reading a useful little introduction to the giallo by John Martin, one of my favourite writers on the subject and Italian exploitation cinemas in general.
While he goes on in the piece – published in The Dark Side, of all places – to suggest his own quasi-definition, that "The essence of the giallo resides in two factors: style and savagery,” it's the introductory remarks by a number of other luminaries that I find really thought-provoking.
“That's a tricky one. I guess the first thing that springs into my mind is people with big black gloves, with zippers up the sides, and big knives, to stick into people... but its more complex than that...”
– Richard Stanley, offering a definition based around visual iconography and immediately acknowledging its shortcomings.
“It defines a genre of mysteries in which the discovery of the criminal's identity is less important than discovering how the crime was done.”
– Maitland McDonagh, emphasising narrative and thematic elements but raising questions over whose discovery of how the crime was done that matters.
“You mean Argento? Bava? Those films are blood operas...”
– John McNaughton, picking out defining auteur figures and a national cultural tradition.
While he goes on in the piece – published in The Dark Side, of all places – to suggest his own quasi-definition, that "The essence of the giallo resides in two factors: style and savagery,” it's the introductory remarks by a number of other luminaries that I find really thought-provoking.
“That's a tricky one. I guess the first thing that springs into my mind is people with big black gloves, with zippers up the sides, and big knives, to stick into people... but its more complex than that...”
– Richard Stanley, offering a definition based around visual iconography and immediately acknowledging its shortcomings.
“It defines a genre of mysteries in which the discovery of the criminal's identity is less important than discovering how the crime was done.”
– Maitland McDonagh, emphasising narrative and thematic elements but raising questions over whose discovery of how the crime was done that matters.
“You mean Argento? Bava? Those films are blood operas...”
– John McNaughton, picking out defining auteur figures and a national cultural tradition.
Chi l'ha vista morire? / Who Saw Her Die?
1968, the French Pyrenees: A young red-haired girl, Nicole, is abducted and murdered, her body left buried in the snow. The case is never solved.
Four years later, Venice: Roberta (Nicoletta Elmi) arrives to visit her sculptor father Francesco (George Lazenby) from London where she and her mother, Francesco's estranged wife, Elizabeth (Anita Strindberg) live.
Atypical and typical ways to open a giallo: the snowy wilderness and the plane landing in the Italian city, in this case the oft-used Venice
Then Roberta disappears. Frantic with worry, Francesco searches everywhere he can think of. Her body turns up floating in one of the canals. Yet, strangely, she has not been molested…
Who could kill a child - Nicoletta Elmi in yet another giallo
Black gloves, but not as we are accustomed to seeing them
Frustrated by the failures of the police, realising that his daughter's murder was by no means the first perpetrated by the killer, whoever he or she may be, and haunted by his own feelings of guilt – at the exact moment Roberta was snatched, Francesco was making love with his girlfriend Gabriella (Rosemarie Lindt) – Francesco embarks on his own investigation, soon uncovering a web of corruption, blackmail and perversion amongst the city's elite, including a number of his own contacts and associates from the fine art world...
Aldo Lado's second giallo makes for a more conventional filone outing than its predecessor through its psychologically motivated black-gloved killer; considerable use of the subjective camera; comparatively explicit murder scenes – excepting, of course, the taboo subject of child murder, where the focus is necessarily on the aftermath rather than the act – though still characterised by a more restrained approach than seen in many contemporaries, and more mundane world devoid of occult references.
A wordless sequence that speaks volumes: Francesco and Elizabeth re-united in their shared grief
As with Short Night of Glass Dolls, however, Lado again demonstrates a level of artistry and intelligence not always seen in the filone, along with a consistent interest in playing with the then-emergent conventions.
Like most gialli the killer is represented metonymically by fragments that identify them qua killer, but not as a specific individual. Unusually, however, Lado presents them as wearing a veil rather than a mask and fedora, knitted rather than black leather gloves and old-style women's boots, painting the picture of a harmless nonna dressed against the winter cold instead of a stylish, dressed to kill mostro.
This said, viewers familiar with the filone are likely to have little difficulty in identifying the killer from the suspects presented and will also probably experience something of a sense of deja vu as to the manner of their demise; to say much more would run the risk of spoiling things.
What is worth noting, however, is that on the featurette included on Anchor Bay's DVD, Lado mentions providing a get out clause by which the killer is not what they seemed to be purely as a way of appeasing the authorities – as with Short Night, there is the sense of a filmmaker who is subversive in more than one sense.
Who Saw Her Die? also has a distinctive rhythm to it, and one which is again perhaps more reminscent of the art cinema than the popular / vernacular, as characterised by a distracted audience impatiently awaiting the next set-piece; tellingly from reading a number of comments on the IMDB and elsewhere a criticism often levelled against the film is that it lacks pace.
Rather than entering the scene at the dramatically significant moment and cutting from one shot to the next on the point of action, Lado instead often present a pre-existing world and holds a shot for an extra beat or two, giving the film a certain documentary quality, as when Roberta's body drifts silently and disruptively into the midst of a busy market or we observe the father of one of the killer's previous victims at work in a glass factory or are left in Franco's studio, empty but haunted by his dead daughter.
Francesco's studio; note the sign on the wall
Similar directorial attention to detail is apparent in Serpieri's first visit to a suspected paedophile lawyer in some way involved with the murders. As the lawyer fingers a pendant similar to one Roberta had been given shortly before her abduction and murder, Serpieri neither seems to notice nor Lado's direction to draw attention to the gesture as one with definite significance: rather than pointing it out with a close-up or zoom in in the manner of an “obvious cinema”, he leaves it up to the spectator to notice, or not, and make a connection, or not.
Images can be deceptive
Ennio Morricone's score ranks as one of the most haunting he composed for the genre. Whereas some of his gialli scores feature three types of cue – the character leitmotif; the improvised, aleatory or otherwise technically experimental suspense cue, and the easy listening party cue – and others the first two of these, here he strips things down by providing only the first, providing a number of subtle variations on the same theme dominated by a children's choir and invariably signalling the killer's presence within or – more usually – at the periphery of the scene.
Here we can note, for instance, how the black rubber glove wearing cleaner who runs the bath – a sequence which would be the prelude to a successful or attempted drowning in most other gialli – is clearly signalled as a Hitchcockian joke by departing from the killer's fetish attire of knitted gloves, as the otherwise eerie ambient soundscape of the running water becomes less eerie precisely because of the absence of the musical leitmotif.
Simultaneously the cross-cutting in of the cue as Serpieri stalks the lawyer through the streets as the camera cuts back and forth between Serpieri's point-of-view and that of an unidentified presence following him, indicates where the real killer is at that moment.
If the monothematic nature of the score perhaps makes it a touch repetitive – a criticism that, reading some other reviews, often seems to emerge – this same repetition can also perhaps be justified as an insight into the killer's monomaniacal personality, that he or she has to kill and Serpieri's subsequent obsession, even as the latter raises the idea of an alternate score featuring an obvious Serpieri leitmotif and a kind of musical duel. (The music that plays over the wrapping up scene at the end, the killer having been unmasked and brought to justice, actually lacks the children's choir, only for it to re-emerge as the end credits roll.)
Curiously off-centre framings suggest a world out of sorts
Another nice touch is the murder of another character in a cinema, recalling the krimi Curse of the Hidden but with the difference of having the killer use a silent method – strangulation – rather than a noisy one – shooting, relying on the noise issuing from the screen to mask the fatal shot – and the screening of a mondo sexy film rather than a thriller murder mystery, to nicely tap into the situation of the viewer themself, momentarily breaching the barrier between screen and spectator and likely giving an extra frisson to the theatrical experience of the film regrettably absent on home viewing.
Alone in the dark – the assassin strikes...
Francesco arrives and realises what has happened, just as the killer exits
Whilst we can safely “play at cops and robbers” – the remarks of the representative of official authority, whose characteristic lack of effectiveness and engagement ironically signals why the protagonist's amateur, private investigation is so necessary – in a way that Serpieri cannot, we are not equally safe from those others watching the film in the dark with us or awaiting on the way back home from the cinema; the double edge of the cover provided by darkness...
Four years later, Venice: Roberta (Nicoletta Elmi) arrives to visit her sculptor father Francesco (George Lazenby) from London where she and her mother, Francesco's estranged wife, Elizabeth (Anita Strindberg) live.
Atypical and typical ways to open a giallo: the snowy wilderness and the plane landing in the Italian city, in this case the oft-used Venice
Then Roberta disappears. Frantic with worry, Francesco searches everywhere he can think of. Her body turns up floating in one of the canals. Yet, strangely, she has not been molested…
Who could kill a child - Nicoletta Elmi in yet another giallo
Black gloves, but not as we are accustomed to seeing them
Frustrated by the failures of the police, realising that his daughter's murder was by no means the first perpetrated by the killer, whoever he or she may be, and haunted by his own feelings of guilt – at the exact moment Roberta was snatched, Francesco was making love with his girlfriend Gabriella (Rosemarie Lindt) – Francesco embarks on his own investigation, soon uncovering a web of corruption, blackmail and perversion amongst the city's elite, including a number of his own contacts and associates from the fine art world...
Aldo Lado's second giallo makes for a more conventional filone outing than its predecessor through its psychologically motivated black-gloved killer; considerable use of the subjective camera; comparatively explicit murder scenes – excepting, of course, the taboo subject of child murder, where the focus is necessarily on the aftermath rather than the act – though still characterised by a more restrained approach than seen in many contemporaries, and more mundane world devoid of occult references.
A wordless sequence that speaks volumes: Francesco and Elizabeth re-united in their shared grief
As with Short Night of Glass Dolls, however, Lado again demonstrates a level of artistry and intelligence not always seen in the filone, along with a consistent interest in playing with the then-emergent conventions.
Like most gialli the killer is represented metonymically by fragments that identify them qua killer, but not as a specific individual. Unusually, however, Lado presents them as wearing a veil rather than a mask and fedora, knitted rather than black leather gloves and old-style women's boots, painting the picture of a harmless nonna dressed against the winter cold instead of a stylish, dressed to kill mostro.
This said, viewers familiar with the filone are likely to have little difficulty in identifying the killer from the suspects presented and will also probably experience something of a sense of deja vu as to the manner of their demise; to say much more would run the risk of spoiling things.
What is worth noting, however, is that on the featurette included on Anchor Bay's DVD, Lado mentions providing a get out clause by which the killer is not what they seemed to be purely as a way of appeasing the authorities – as with Short Night, there is the sense of a filmmaker who is subversive in more than one sense.
Who Saw Her Die? also has a distinctive rhythm to it, and one which is again perhaps more reminscent of the art cinema than the popular / vernacular, as characterised by a distracted audience impatiently awaiting the next set-piece; tellingly from reading a number of comments on the IMDB and elsewhere a criticism often levelled against the film is that it lacks pace.
Rather than entering the scene at the dramatically significant moment and cutting from one shot to the next on the point of action, Lado instead often present a pre-existing world and holds a shot for an extra beat or two, giving the film a certain documentary quality, as when Roberta's body drifts silently and disruptively into the midst of a busy market or we observe the father of one of the killer's previous victims at work in a glass factory or are left in Franco's studio, empty but haunted by his dead daughter.
Francesco's studio; note the sign on the wall
Similar directorial attention to detail is apparent in Serpieri's first visit to a suspected paedophile lawyer in some way involved with the murders. As the lawyer fingers a pendant similar to one Roberta had been given shortly before her abduction and murder, Serpieri neither seems to notice nor Lado's direction to draw attention to the gesture as one with definite significance: rather than pointing it out with a close-up or zoom in in the manner of an “obvious cinema”, he leaves it up to the spectator to notice, or not, and make a connection, or not.
Images can be deceptive
Ennio Morricone's score ranks as one of the most haunting he composed for the genre. Whereas some of his gialli scores feature three types of cue – the character leitmotif; the improvised, aleatory or otherwise technically experimental suspense cue, and the easy listening party cue – and others the first two of these, here he strips things down by providing only the first, providing a number of subtle variations on the same theme dominated by a children's choir and invariably signalling the killer's presence within or – more usually – at the periphery of the scene.
Here we can note, for instance, how the black rubber glove wearing cleaner who runs the bath – a sequence which would be the prelude to a successful or attempted drowning in most other gialli – is clearly signalled as a Hitchcockian joke by departing from the killer's fetish attire of knitted gloves, as the otherwise eerie ambient soundscape of the running water becomes less eerie precisely because of the absence of the musical leitmotif.
Simultaneously the cross-cutting in of the cue as Serpieri stalks the lawyer through the streets as the camera cuts back and forth between Serpieri's point-of-view and that of an unidentified presence following him, indicates where the real killer is at that moment.
If the monothematic nature of the score perhaps makes it a touch repetitive – a criticism that, reading some other reviews, often seems to emerge – this same repetition can also perhaps be justified as an insight into the killer's monomaniacal personality, that he or she has to kill and Serpieri's subsequent obsession, even as the latter raises the idea of an alternate score featuring an obvious Serpieri leitmotif and a kind of musical duel. (The music that plays over the wrapping up scene at the end, the killer having been unmasked and brought to justice, actually lacks the children's choir, only for it to re-emerge as the end credits roll.)
Curiously off-centre framings suggest a world out of sorts
Another nice touch is the murder of another character in a cinema, recalling the krimi Curse of the Hidden but with the difference of having the killer use a silent method – strangulation – rather than a noisy one – shooting, relying on the noise issuing from the screen to mask the fatal shot – and the screening of a mondo sexy film rather than a thriller murder mystery, to nicely tap into the situation of the viewer themself, momentarily breaching the barrier between screen and spectator and likely giving an extra frisson to the theatrical experience of the film regrettably absent on home viewing.
Alone in the dark – the assassin strikes...
Francesco arrives and realises what has happened, just as the killer exits
Whilst we can safely “play at cops and robbers” – the remarks of the representative of official authority, whose characteristic lack of effectiveness and engagement ironically signals why the protagonist's amateur, private investigation is so necessary – in a way that Serpieri cannot, we are not equally safe from those others watching the film in the dark with us or awaiting on the way back home from the cinema; the double edge of the cover provided by darkness...
The post-industrial giallo
One locale that seems to crop up with a disproprtionate frequency in 1970s gialli is the abandoned factory or warehouse, replete with treacherous pitfalls. It appears in The Fifth Cord, Crimes of the Black Cat (which also features the model agency, for a double whammy) and Who Saw Her Die and others I can't recall offhand. Is the death factory just a cool location for a stalk and slash showdown, or is there some deeper significance that can be attached to it?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)