If you are limited, X is limited?

“For every surreally beautiful set piece, Blood and Black Lace contains at least one equally dull and conventionally photographed sequence whose function is to advance the story – most scenes involving the police, who are ineffectually looking into the matter fall into this category”

“Like Blood and Black Lace [...] the visual style of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage is conspicuously inconsistent. Scenes involving the police are tolerable at best, tending towards wooden exposition”

While I agree with Maitland McDonagh that the police sequences in Bava and Argento's films are less visually interesting than the set-pieces, I don't know this necessarily makes them uninteresting.

Rather, I would ague that in sequences like these the conventional nature of the mise-en-scene might be considered as a more “poetic” way of intersubjectively externalising and expressing the mindset of the professional investigator as it is characteristically presented within gialli, that way in which, as the line in The New York Ripper puts it, he thinks “according to fixed patterns.”

It is, of course, these fixed patterns that the plots of both films, with their multiple maniacs and confusions of identities – perhaps particularly gender identities – confound; what both film-makers are telling us, perhaps, is that we need to perceive the world afresh.

They are also patterns which, we might argue, are paralleled in the way the work of these directors and the filone more generally tend to be approached with that familiar concentration upon spectacular visuals at the expense the rest – the swinging sign and telephone receiver that bookend Bava's film or the choreographed to-ings and fro-ings around the handbag containing the coveted diary seem perfect examples, along with the parallel investigation into enigmatic sound accompanying that into sight in Argento's – and of all-encompassing psychoanalytic interpretations as to what they are 'really' about.

A remark by Merleau-Ponty seems apposite here, getting to the heart of why I find a phenomenological approach to the giallo film truer to my experience:

“[T]he question is not so much whether human life does or does not rest on sexuality, as of knowing what is to be understood by sexuality. Psychoanalysis represents a double trend of thought: on the one hand it stresses the sexual substructure of life, on the other it 'expands' the notion of sexuality to the extent of absorbing into it the whole of existence. But precisely for that reason, its conclusions [...] remain ambiguous. When we generalize the notion of sexuality making it a manner of being in the physical and inter-human world, do we mean, in the last analysis, that all existence has a sexual significance or that every sexual phenomenon has an existential significance? In the first hypothesis, existence would be an abstraction, another name for the sexual life. But since sexual life can no longer be circumscribed, since it is no longer a separate function definable in terms of the causality proper to a set of organs, there is now no sense in saying that all existence is understood through the sexual life, or rather this statement becomes a tautology.”

Experimental cinema site

Not giallo, Argento or Italian cult cinema, but well worth a look:

http://merzboy-goes-conceptual.blogspot.com/

Points de capiton

Recognising the voice of a Carolyn De Fonseca or Frank von Kuegelgen on the English dub...

Linguistic oddities

How confusing would it have been to be on an Italian set with Senta (i.e. “Hey, listen”) Berger or Stanko (i.e “Tired”) Molnar?

7 Hyden Park: la casa malaedetta / Formula per un assassinio / Formula for a Murder

This US-set giallo opens with an attack by a priest – for added iconic value he offers his victim a doll beforehand, which then bounces down the steps with head and body separating before coming to rest – and an an attack on a priest.


Classic broken doll imagery


A nice juxtaposition of modern and traditional architectures and Vincenzo Tomassi hiding being an Anglo pseudonym

It's an attention grabbing, risk taking opening of the where-do-we-go-from-here variety. The answer is into more conventional Hitchcock / Clouzot thriller territory as the three principal characters and a wealth of backstory come thick and fast.

Joanna is a rich, wheelchair bound heiress who has found new purpose in life through the activity centre for the handicapped she has set up and her own training for a paralympics type event.

Craig is Joanna's physical therapist cum trainer, who professes to have fallen in love with her and is thus contemplating a proposal of marriage.

Ruth is Joanna's personal carer and assistant, who admits to regarding Craig as an rival for her affections in a could-this-be-a-sapphic-infatuation kind of a way.




The evils of panning and scanning

Joanna is about to give most of her fortune away to her local church – the same church as we saw the priest being killed in earlier – as was her father's wish.

Her paralysis is the result of having been violently attacked and raped by an insane priest-impersonating maniac – possibly the incident glimpsed in the pre-credits sequence. (Giallo aficionados will also recognise this stratagem from Seven Deaths in the Cat’s Eye and Who Saw Her Die: present a killer priest for anti-clerical shock value but then say the man is not really a priest in case of too great a controversy arising.)




Joanna is menaced by the killer priest / priest killer

Curiously, however, the next piece of exposition also throws the status of the pre-credits sequence as a straightforward flashback into doubt – perhaps significantly the sequence uses slow-motion, a technique unused elsewhere in the film – as we are then told that Joanna does not remember the traumatic incident. Indeed, attempts to make her remember were soon abandoned after it became clear that the shock of remembering could strain her weakened heart to breaking point.

Craig wonders whether making sex with Joanna might incur similar risks, but is reassured by Joanna's personal physician Dr Sernich that this would be safe by virtue of being an act done out of love – the little death of orgasm will not lead to death itself.

Accordingly he and Joanna marry, their nuptials being overheard with apparent disgust by the seemingly now out of the picture Ruth.

While all this has been going on the killer priest / priest killer has also struck again...

Given the predictability of the set-up thus far, along with the film-makers themselves now showing their hand – or at least revealing part of it by way of a possible bluff – it's not likely to spoil your enjoyment to reveal that Craig is indeed only in it for the money...

7 Hyden Park: la casa malaedetta / Formula per un assassinio / Formula for a Murder is the kind of old-fashioned giallo that one can imagine enjoying more had it been made roughly 15 years earlier, with reliable troupers like George Hilton, Carroll Baker and Anita Strindberg in place of David Warbeck – delivering a solid performance as per usual – and two-no name actresses, along with more 70s visuals, designs and scoring.

The last aspect does need some qualification, however. There are two sort of cue used, droning synthesizer pieces that sound like out-takes from The House by the Cemetery and funkier numbers that previously saw service in The New York Ripper. Though not a patch on the classic 70s giallo sound, these at least allow for some nice in-jokes when the newlyweds visit The Big Apple on their honeymoon and Craig decides upon the Staten Island ferry as an ideal place to kill.


All done with mirrors


Zombie, The New York Ripper and Formula for a Murder – The Staten Island Ferry makes another bid for its SAG status


A traumatised but unexpectedly resilient Joanna, wearing a yellow raincoat...


... the killer attired in the same...


... and the obligatory straight razor

While the plotting and dialogue leave much to be desired, throwing in more than the usual quota of credulity straining twists and turns, motivations and lines, the participants attack this material with the kind of enthusiasm that wins the viewer over with the courage of their convictions, as if we'd never seen a Les Dialoboliques or Taste of Fear.

At the helm Alberto De Martino likewise goes all out, handling the suspense and shock set-pieces with energy and endeavouring to impart a degree of visual style to the proceedings as a whole, with a particular penchant for mirrored shots.

If one is again reminded of earlier gialli to Formula for a Murder's detriment, inasmuch as there is rarely that sense of this particular angle, movement or cut having been carefully chosen for what it brings to the whole, the small number of characters and comparative lack of opportunities for enigma do somewhat lessen the director's options.

Likewise, it also has to be noted that characteristically insensitive panning and scanning make it harder to know for sure – a original aspect ratio release would be welcome.

The other side of disrespect is a two-way street

“If you're interested in the in's and out's of a “Cat o' Nine Tails” arse then this is the book for you! If you want to know what the story involves, how much of the red stuff is spilled, what the F.X. work is like and whether it's a good film or not then look else-where!

I really can't get interested in anything that takes everything apart studies it and then takes it apart some more, and more ... and I'm afraid that's what we've got a bad case of here, maybe it's your “cup of tea”? But it sure as hell ain't mine! I only find this kind of book of use when I'm suffering from insomnia, having said that the, the interview etc., is great and the stills are very nice.”

– from a 1991 In the Flesh review of Maitland McDonagh's Broken Mirrors Broken Minds.

100 European Horror Films

The first thing to say about 100 European Horror Films is that what it is really about is Eurohorror, defined by editor Steven Jay Schneider in his introduction as a post-1960 Continental European phenomenon in which generic boundaries were less important than greater explictness, in terms of sex and violence and transgression.

Its a definition that, not surprisingly, throws up questions as to the absence of the English Gothic and the inclusion of a small number of Central and Eastern European productions. For, as subsequent entries on the likes of Franco's Awful Dr Orlof and Ferroni's Mill of the Stone Women make clear, many Eurohorror films, particularly from Italy and Spain, need to be situated in relation to filmmakers like Fisher, while as Schneider himself notes this selfsame western Eurohorror context did not apply in the more (or differently?) censorious Soviet Bloc.

Insofar as the selection of 100 films is presented as an attempt at building a Eurohorror canon, there are likewise some awkward exclusions seemingly resulting from this policy. Polanski is represented by the The Tenant whereas its distaff counterpart Repulsion is absent, whilst Grau's Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue seems included and Larraz's Vampyres omitted for no obvious reason. Likewise, why (the Mexican) Del Toro's The Devils Backbone but not (the Spanish) Erice's Spirit of the Beehive?

In terms of the 100 films themselves and the approaches taken by the various contributors, the dominant impression one gets is of an updated version of the Aurum Film Encyclopedia approach, distinguished by the inclusion of a number of more recent films and the application of slightly more varied theoretical frameworks so that, whilst film psychoanalysis is still very much the dominant approach, it is not necessarily seen as the one true way to the same extent as 20 or so years ago.

The films are listed in A-Z order rather than chronologically or by country, with this proving a decision that makes it harder to see connections and contradictions when combined with the lack of an overall authorial voice.

The reader new to the form is left to note the line of necrophiliac descent from The Horrible Secret of Dr Hichcock to Buio Omega for themselves, whilst the likes of Rollin's visual quotation in The Grapes of Death of Katya's entrance in Bava's Black Sunday is left as an exercise for the viewer to discover – or not.

Fulci's Zombie is presented as his embrace of horror in the City of the Living Dead write up, whilst elsewhere the giallo – including Don't Torture a Duckling – is subsumed within the (Euro)horror framework. (His Beatrice Cenci is not mentioned at all, although I suspect it could likewise be read as a proto-horror predating the La Reine Margot approach by a good quarter century.)

These weakness is exacerbated by the absence of recommendations for further reading or viewing of the sort that one feels should be in an introductory volume of this sort, whether it be Immoral Tales, Alternative Europe or the longer Kinoeye and Senses of Cinema articles from which many of the authors pieces seem to have been derived.

Unsurprisingly the individual entries vary considerably in quality and insight. A good example of this are those on the krimi The Door with Seven Locks and the giallo / krimi crossover What Have You Done to Solange? Ken Hanke does an excellent job of outlining the krimi formula and what the filmmakers did with their Edgar Wallace source texts in updating them for contemporary German audiences. Neil Jackson seemingly attributes 1978's Rings of Fear to Solange director Massimo Dallamano, who had in fact died in 1976, and simply presents the film as “based on the Edgar Wallace story 'The Case of the New Pin'” without elaborating further. Whilst I cannot claim to have read the Wallace story myself, my gut feeling is that schoolgirls being killed by knives to the vagina; a schoolteacher carrying on an affair with one of his pupils and a back-story involving a backstreet abortion gone wrong are not things he would have considered suitable subject matter when writing in the 1920s.

Elsewhere one finds Suspiria being referred to as a film which meant “Argento's films have all been successfully distributed in the US” and thus ignores the very limited release given Inferno, the retitling and re-editing of Tenebrae and Phenomena or the straight-to-video fate of Trauma – if these are examples of successful distribution, what counts as failure? – while Tenebrae's score is attributed to Simonetti from Goblin, rather than three members of Goblin operating without the ability to use the name.

One of the most thought-provoking pieces is Mikel Koven's entry on Torso, where he situates the film, via its opening scenes, and the filone as a whole as existing between art and exploitation. Maybe this is in accord with his giallo as vernacular “cinema of poetry” thesis in La Dolce Morte, but I also wondered if the “literal” way in which the question is identified as being asked implied a degree of premeditation and self-consciousness that seems alien to the way it is presented as more unconscious art in that study.

Despite all I've said, I would heartily recommend this book to those wanting to know more about European horror cinema, precisely because the more interest there is in the subject the better. (And others like it for that matter – it would be a tragedy if the canonisation of a select body of Eurohorror texts means that other European and World genre cinemas are correspondingly marginalised.) Plus, as these brief notes hopefully indicate, there is a lot of material in the book sure to provoke reaction and debate...