L' Assassino è ancora tra noi / The Murderer is Still with Us

The opening images of L' Assassino è ancora tra noi / The Murderer Is Still with Us, trees silhouetted against a violet sky as darkness descends, recall Sergio Martino's occult-themed All the Colours of the Dark. The impression is enhanced when the writing credits indicate that scenarist Ernesto Gastaldi performed a similar role here, in conjunction with director Camillo Teti.




Darkness descends

Another Martino / Gastaldi giallo, Torso, is then brought to mind as a couple, parked in a lover's lane, fail to notice the stalker outside until it is too late. His modus operandi, however, throws us for a loop, as he unceremoniously guns them down in a manner more reminiscent of The Son of Sam than your typical giallo killer.

Artistry and perversity then combine as the figure drags the woman's body away, removes her remaining clothes, and indulges in some strange shadowplay as the silhouette of his hand caresses her corpse before, using a knife, he makes a few exploratory incisions, as if testing the tensile strength of her flesh, before apparently violates her with a tree branch.


The hand of doom, aesthetically interesting to look at but somewhat problematic from the perspective of a film based on a true case

A telephone rings and we segue from what could have been the feet of the female victim to those of our protagonist, criminology student Cristina Marelli, as she is informed that the killer has struck again.

Deciding to use the case for her thesis, Cristina begins her own investigation, and soon threatened herself. Worse, she comes to suspect that her pathologist boyfriend Alex may be the killer, through a combination of circumstantial evidence like bloody gloves and fetishistically wrapped scalpels and his conspicous absence whenever the killer strikes...


The assassin's tools, or just a coincidence; giallo film or real life fetishistic (re)presentation?

Featuring some truly nasty violence reminiscent of the likes Giallo a Venezia and The New York Ripper type, this 1986 giallo arguably even outdoes such models in sheer tastelessness by taking its inspiration from a still-unsolved real case, that of the so-called “Monster of Florence”. (Koven's argument that the idea of the serial killer is alien to Italian culture is supported by the numerous references to il mostro, the monster.)


Despite such reports, the idiot plot prevails as a succession of victims position themselves to be killed in a manner more akin to slasher film ciphers than convincingly drawn characters

The result is a highly curious blend of fact and fiction in which the foregrounding of the amateur-type investigator figure against a seeming backdrop of official and public concern – a succession of victims feeling the blade of the ripper, albeit posthumously – feels inappropriate. (It is worth noting here that both Giallo a Venezia and The New York Ripper emphasised the poliziotto professional instead.)

The style of The Murderer Is Still with Us also vacillates awkwardly between documentary and giallo conventions, as when the lights go out out in Cristina's apartment to allow for some highly stylised expressionistic lighting effects.






Neo-realism it ain't

In the end Cristina even attends a seance in the hope it might help illuminate the case, at which point the film-makers cut between the participants and the monster's latest atrocity, although his mutilations of a young woman's body is shown in unflinching, no cutaway close ups.

Such touches work in Deep Red and Opera which don't purport to be about the quotidian world – “it all depends on what you mean by reality,” of course - but again leaves a unpleasant after-taste here.


The nightmare becomes reality?

This itself isn't necessarily a problem – a film with this subject matter should position us outwith our comfort zone, I would argue – but we are not given further spur to thought except to question the motives of Teti and his collaborators, especially when an open ended (non-)resolution takes us into self-reflexive, mise-en-abyme territory as Cristina settles down with Alex to watch a giallo entitled L' Assassino è ancora tra noi...

Opera tattoo

From http://www.danhenk.com/

Mother of Tears pictures

Some Mother of Tears pictures:

http://www.dead-donkey.com/modules/news/index.php?id=230

Morirai a mezzanotte / The Midnight Killer

We open with a man stalking a woman, observing her as she enters a boutique – complete with surrealistic mannequins – picks out some lingerie and trysts with her lover in the fitting room.

There is an angry confrontation as we learn that the man, a policeman by the name of Nicola, and the woman, Sara Levi (the name suggestive of that giallo fascination with Jewish characters, though nothing is to made of it on this occasion) are in fact married.

He hits her. She retaliates by stabbing him with an handy ice-pick, although it seems more that it is his masculine pride that is damaged rather than anything else, inasmuch as he is still able to half-drown her in the sink, before recovering a measure of composure and walking out.




The obligatory but still effective mirror-based compositions; note also the yellow

As Sara takes a shower and contemplates revenge, a black-gloved killer stabs her repeatedly with the ice-pick, fatally.


Not a mirrored composition but rather one making good use of the distinctive architecture of Anna's split-level apartment with its interior window

Nicola arrives on the doorstep of criminal psychologist Anna Bernardi, whom he had bumped into earlier that morning, and confesses that he almost killed Sara in his rage.

Meanwhile, his colleague Paolo Terzi (Paolo Malco) has been called to the crime scene and calls Anna, the presence of their mutual acquaintance the judge further indicating that this is kind of place where everyone who matters knows everyone else to help overcome what could otherwise seem like one contrivance too many.

Believing that no-one will believe his innocence, Nicola goes on the run, only adding to the weight of circumstantial evidence against him. While Terzi has some doubts – “I'd like to find out why a good policeman could get mad and become a criminal,” as he explains to Anna in indicating why he has involved her in the case – he is unwilling to countenance her alternative hypothesis. Might the crime may mark the return of the maniac Franco Tribbo, presumed dead following a fire at the asylum where he was incarcerated? (A plot idea that prefigures Sleepless's dwarf killer returning from beyond?)


Effective use of 'natural' frames within the frame


The preservation of rare birds


Anna, Terzi and Carol discuss the case


A mannequin looks on at the action concealed by the yellow curtain

But as subsequent murders are committed and new evidence comes to light, Terzi is finally forced to reconsider – precisely at the moment when his daughter Carol (Lara Wendel) and two of her friends, Gioia and Monica, all of whom happen to be criminology students studying under Anna, have gone for a study weekend at an otherwise deserted, out of season hotel...

Like many gialli, 1986's Morirai a mezzanotte / The Midnight Killer / You'll Die at Midnight is the kind of film that works better in the set piece moments than as a convicing, sustained narrative. The issue, I would contend, is that in attempting to deal with the weight of history – a theme admittedly diegetically germane – by referencing a number of their genre predecessors, the film ends up feeling too much like a greatest hits compilation

Much the same thing could – and has – been said about Argento's near-contemporaneous Phenomena – itself one of these reference points, though the similarities between the traumatic incidents that emerge as root cause for their respective killers' psychoses – but there is a crucial difference. In Phenomena we have are given a consistent point of identification, that this is a story centred about Jennifer Corvino. Here, by contrast, our point of attention shifts too often – from Nicola to Anna and Terzi to Carol and her friends – which is perhaps beneficial by way of keeping us guessing as to the killer's identity as we sift through the suspects, but rather less satisfactory in that we end up caring less about the victims than we might.

Nor does it help that the Torso-style final act recalls Sergio Martino and Ernesto Gastaldi's success there in performing the Psycho trick in unexpectedly killing off Tina Aumont's character to position Suzy Kendall's as our point of identification against the clumsiness with Lamberto Bava and Dardano Sacchetti attempt comparable tricks here.

The same can be said for their borrowing from another major reference point, Argento's The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. The issue here is that, a well-mounted and suspenseful stalking sequence in a museum tellingly lined with cases full of stuffed birds aside, the reference does not actually become apparent until the moment at which, with the killer unmasked and brought to book, the facts of the case are usefully summed up. So, instead of joining a protagonist in their obsessive quest to uncover what precisely was “wrong with that scene” we are again distanced from the action and given a shock revelation when a suspenseful process of discovery would perhaps have been preferable.


Voyeurism...


Black Gloves...


Self-referentiality...




and the usual phallic cutlery...

Bava's nods to his father's work are more successful, perhaps because they are less to do with the structural aspects of the film, as with the vaguely Blood and Black Lace lichtspiel when the killer targets the boutique assistant, or a nod to The Girl Who Knew Too Much when one of Carol's classmates reads a giallo before going to sleep, has a nightmare and then awakens with a start only to find herself in a much worse situation.


La Maschera del demonio


Unfortunately for Monica, here seen attempting to fend off the killer with a whisk – a nod to Puzzle, perhaps? – she's not the marked out as the final girl

Elsewhere the director and his production designer, Guiseppe Bassan's son Davide, have fun with that 80s penchant for pastel shades by dotting lemon yellow curtains, shirts and sweaters around the place, while Claudio Simonetti delivers an effective synthesiser led score that ratchets up the tension as and when required.

Fans of Fulci's The Beyond and The House by the Cemetery will also enjoy seeing Gianpaolo Saccarolo in yet another sweaty, shifty cameo role as a caretaker who discovers a body but is quickly determined by Malco – inducing a sense of deja vu for those who've seen the latter Fulci – to be harmless rather than a possible suspect.

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...