Killing in Style.

And cut.

2007-07-17T00:00:00.000+02:00

Dear readers,

When I started writing this blog, two years ago, I was far from thinking it would live so long.
I was far from imagining that 2,000 people across the globe would pop by every month to spend some time reading and commenting.
I was also underestimating how much I would learn from this experience.

Killing in Style was the first blog to talk about Giallo, and tried to do it by bringing new angles and perspectives on the genre, beyond a pure cinematographic point of view. I hope it lived up to this objective.

Two years have passed and I am amazed at how insightful this has been, and how encouraging your support has consistently been.
It started from the love of Italian soundtracks of the 70s, led to the exploration of a unique cinema genre and opened many new directions for future reflections.
All of which would not have happened without this blog.

Today, Killing in Style comes to an end.
Simply because I feel I have written all I could write about it. It's time to wrap up and watch a new generation of blogs bring fresh ideas about the genre.
Time to say thank you. Sincerely.
And time to say "Au revoir".

Sylvain

Killing in Style will stay online for a little longer.
Before it disappears, please click here to get to a summary of the films and topics I wrote about, or simply flick through the archives.

Update on July 17, 2007
I understand a lot of you would like to see the blog stay online. So I decided to finally leave it on. I would like to thank you all again for the many messages and comments I received.

Films I talked about in April & May

2007-05-31T23:45:00.000+02:00

Mio Caro Assassino (My Dear Killer) - Tonino Valerii, 1972

L'ultimo treno della notte (Night train murders) - Aldo Lado - 1975

Specific Topics
A short movie inspired by the Giallo

The digging machine

2007-05-08T23:11:00.000+02:00

A man is found dead, decapitated by a digging machine.
After such a start, Mio Caro Assassino (My Dear Killer - Tonino Valerii, 1972), had to maintain a certain standard to keep the memorable-images-seeker hooked until its final scene.

Well, what's genuinely striking about this film is not this strong opening scene, but more the typical novel-like structure the rest of the film is built on. Its resolution scene could have been taken out of an Agatha Christie book: inspector Luca Peretti gathers all the suspects in a room and unveils the mysteries of the plot in front of them, to finally reveal the identity of the killer, who is obviously one of them. Isn't this reminiscent of Hercule Poirot's adventures?

Fact is, this giallo has got method. Its opening scene with the digging machine is both misleading, as the rest of the film is not visually as striking (apart from the circular saw murder), and at the same time perfectly consistent with the story structure and the main character.
Because our hero, Peretti, is a digging machine. He will conscentiously and literally dig into the secrets of a bourgeois family where a little girl was killed, explore the dark aspects of a previously aborted investigation led by a private eye (who happens to be the victim of the real digging machine) and relentlessly overcome the obstacles and threats to reach for the truth.

He will do this with a method, which is very unusual in gialli, where most of the time heroes not only don't belong to the police, but also unveil the truth by chance or instinct more than logic.

But the key is: this method is fuelled by a genuine desire of doing good. As a matter of fact, Inspector Luca Peretti appears as one of the very rare truly moral characters of giallo.

A moral giallo? Sounds like an oxymoron.

Find Mio Caro Assassino here (French DVD by Neo Publishing) or there (US DVD by Shriek Show).

Quotes

2007-04-13T11:01:00.000+02:00

I received this morning an email from Semih Tareen, who directed last year a short film called "Yellow". As the name says it is a tribute to Giallo and Mario Bava in particular.

Breaking the editorial and layout rule of this blog (one picture, one point of view, one practical paragraph - never show films), I have decided to share it with you as it is not only very well made, but also a rather entertaining exercise spotting all the "quotes" Semih Tareen put in his film.

Here's what I noticed:
Lighting inspired from Bava's Blood and Black Lace and Argento's Suspiria,
Tree shadow behind windows from the appartment scene in Bava's Girl who knew too much,
Close ups on eyes a la Fulci,
Drawer with gloves and knife from Argento's Bird with the crystal plumage's introducing scene,
Scene with glove on girl's mouth from Bava's Girl who knew too much, Lenzi's Seven blood stained orchids and Argento's Bird with the crystal plumage,
Crime scene music in Goblin's style,
And more surprisingly, checkboard scene and music in typical Thomas Crown Affair's style, by Norman Jewison (soundtrack from Michel Legrand).

There must be some other references I may have missed on, so feel free to add them in the comments section.

Negative

2007-04-09T17:29:00.000+02:00

I recently re-watched L'Ultimo treno della notte (Night Train Murders, Aldo Lado - 1975), as it was recently reissued by Neo Publishing with a very interesting interview and audio commentary from Aldo Lado himself.

It is fairly obvious the film is structured in three parts:
Munich,
the train journey,
and Verona
(Munich and Verona being, interestingly enough, twin cities).

But the train journey itself is divided in two distinct sections: day (1st train) and night (2nd train). And the night part is built in almost perfect symmetry to the day part:

Aboard the first train, there's light and natural colors,
the two girls are travelling on the platform and free to move around,
they are surrounded by a lot of people as the train is pretty full,
the disturbation caused by the two thugs is perceived more as some fun than a real threat (the girls joke with the two guys, even though they're not always at ease),
the woman with the veil is led by the thugs (when she's 'raped' in the toilet and lets go).

Aboard the 2nd train, darkness and cold blue and red monochrome colors prevail,
the two girls are isolated in a compartment which turns out to become their jail,
there seems to be nobody else on the train but the two girls, the woman with the veil and the two thugs (apart from the peeping tom showing up later),
the two guys' behaviour is now a real threat to the girl's lives,
and they are led by the woman with the veil, who obviously controls the situation.

The latter part of the train journey is the exact negative of the former, as if Aldo Lado wanted to reinforce that impression the viewer gets of a parallel dimension, of a world behind the mirror where there is no limit to cruelty and violence.

Knowing Aldo Lado's tendency to use cinema as a way to express a political point of view on the social situation of Europe in the 70s, needless to say he was trying to tell us something here.

L'ultimo treno della notte is one of the most striking and interesting genre films of the 70s. Find it here (FR) or there (US).
Read more about it from this blog here.

Films I talked about in January, February and March

2007-03-31T17:37:00.000+02:00

Spasmo - Umberto Lenzi - 1974

The soundtrack of L'uomo senza memoria (Man without a memory AKA Puzzle) - Duccio Tessari - 1974

Beatrice Cenci - Lucio Fulci - 1969

About Gothic Giallo: Margheriti's "Seven deaths in the cat's eye", Miraglia's "The night Evelyn came out of the grave" and "The Red Queen kills seven times"

Specific topics
A few interesting articles about Fulci
"La Dolce Morte, Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo film", by Mikel J. Koven
The best gialli on rankopedia

Sunstroke

2007-03-25T22:58:00.001+02:00

A few days after watching it, Spasmo (Umberto Lenzi, 1974) leaves the viewer under the crude white light of a burning sun, which prevents you from articulating a rather confusing and somehow unconvincing story, yet triggers haunting images and impressions:
A giallo by the sea, hit by sunstroke, overexposed, at the opposite of the usual dark urban landscapes;
A mysterious killer who oddly looks like Dario Argento - could Lenzi do this unintentionally?
Human size dolls hanging from trees, lying on beaches, hidden in the bushes, scattered across the movie like all-too-obvious symbols of death;
Birdcages in a house by the sea;
And red roses portrayed on an ocean background, that someone suddenly cuts off;
Finally, sweet sounds and distorded melodies by Ennio Morricone.

This is all I can remember from this film, strange feelings and visual impressions from a summer dream that would have turned seriously wrong.

Spasmo, a giallo by Umberto Lenzi which is proof that the director has his own visual style, but is not really at ease with making plots credible. Read on Giallo Fever an interesting article about this movie.
Find the French DVD here and the US release there.
Morricone's haunting score is here.
And read more about Lenzi from this blog here.

Bringing something subtle to the table

2007-03-13T16:55:00.000+01:00

How can you get away with using a chainsaw in a Giallo so it does not feel gross?
First, if you are Duccio Tessari, who knows how to make beautiful images, it helps. Then, you can set your film in Portofino, a rather eye-pleasing scenery.
This is the case for "L'uomo senza memoria" (Puzzle, 1974), which I previously talked about.

But the secret weapon is having your score composed by Gianni Ferrio, one of the most elegant film music composers of the golden years of Italian genre cinema.

From the very first seconds of the film, you cannot help being transported by the opening piece, "Labyrinthus", sung by Rosella. Ferrio's trademark, exquisite and crafted melodies, is once again performing magic to get you in the movie as we see shots of London streets, where the story starts.

Let me insist on this: in this film, it is the music which leads the film and sets the theme and the mood. "Labyrinthus" could have been the movie title, as it perfectly encapsulates what this giallo is about. The intricacies of memory and how a man struck with amnesia is faced with snapshots of his dark past life.
How this past is actually reconstructed step by step through both the reactions of people around him and the images and feelings these reactions trigger in his failing memory.

A man lost in the labyrinth of his mind, hesitating, in doubt, anxious, and one guide only throughout the film: the music, which literally works as the backbone of the story and holds the pieces of the puzzle together.

Until the end where, all of a sudden, we are ourselves in doubt: is that man without a memory a victim, or could he be a great manipulator?
Just the shadow of a doubt.

Not only is "L'uomo senza memoria" a very good giallo, but its score by Gianni Ferrio is one of the best in class and Digitmovies have just released it. Listen to it and buy it here.
More on the film from this blog there.

Into Fulci

2007-03-01T15:08:00.000+01:00

"[Fulci] uses the position of the camera to define the moral and emotional weight of his scenes; each shot is a judgement, an act of involvement. [...] Fulci either keeps his distance, shooting from a height, or zooms in as if to point his finger".

I recently came across three articles about Lucio Fulci on the Bad Zero blog, which lay out some highly insightful thoughts on the director's unique style and approach to filming.

Check these two general articles here and here (the latter notably covers "A lizard in a woman's skin") and another one there, which gives an excellent point of view on "Don't torture a duckling" while drawing an interesting comparison with Almodovar's cinema.

Images for the masses

2007-02-28T17:03:00.000+01:00

A few months ago was published La Dolce Morte, an interesting study of Giallo by Mikel J. Koven. All the more interesting as there's hardly anything serious which was ever published on the genre - long considered a mediocre body of work not deserving of any in-depth analysis by cinema critics.

Which is the angle Koven chose for his book: Giallo was ignored or despised by critics because they were using the same filter to look at these films as for the 'officially artistic' cinema production. This, reckons Koven, was a complete misunderstanding of the initial intentions of this particular cinema, crafted for 'Terza visione' audiences: popular, working-class spectators going to the movies for pure entertainment purposes, very much so like they would consume TV now.

Having set his point of view as Giallo being 'vernacular cinema' that has nothing to do with the art house, Koven then gets into a very detailed analysis of the main themes of the genre, which makes the reader think that paradoxically, he would love Giallo to be recognised as artistic cinema.
Even though Koven's point of view is very relevant and casts a new light on the genre, he can be caught in many occasions using himself a similar method as the one used by traditional cinema critics: analysing the storytelling and the key elements which build gialli's screenplays to serve his main purpose: demonstrate that the genre was not as basic as it could look in the first place. To the point of sometimes over-intellectualising it.

But Giallo is not a cinema of storytelling.
It is a cinema of "memorable images", in the tradition of expressionism, and as such it is closer to painting than litterature. Like these images that struck the killer's disturbed brain in many gialli and triggered their appetite for murder.
The best examples of the superior importance of memorable images over storytelling are "Blood and Black Lace" and "The New York Ripper" which almost reach abstraction in their gratuitous, extremely graphic violence, and where scenario is secondary to the visual effect they're trying to produce.

So we need more books on Giallo.
Books which use semiology as a tool to make these images speak, beyond the scenario.
Books talking about the memorable images. Books made of these memorable images.

Because it's the images that best tell the story of Giallo.

"La Dolce Morte, Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo film", despite showing no image, remains a very interesting first attempt at analysing the genre, that the true Giallo amateur will find here.

Lists

2007-02-15T18:57:00.000+01:00

We all love lists. Especially when it comes to ranking our favourite music, places, films, you name it.
So I decided to create a ranking of the best Gialli.

This evening, sit down, get a glass of J&B, re-watch all your favourite gialli and go rank them here on rankopedia.com.

The ogre's daughter

2007-02-06T16:23:00.000+01:00

An antique theatre drama with a modern structure, that is Lucio Fulci's grand oeuvre: 'Beatrice Cenci', released in 1969.
The film opens on the end of the story, as Beatrice Cenci and her family are about to be executed, after having been sentenced to death by the Pope for the murder of their father, Francesco Cenci. This opening scene introduces a structure made of flashbacks, an unusual construct for a film aiming at recreating a classic tragedy from the Italian Renaissance.

Apart from this innovative structure, it looks like Lucio Fulci wanted to come up with a typical historical movie: sophisticated costumes, impressive locations, hundreds of extras, the whole thing feels like a big production with unusually high budgets, aiming at bringing XVIth century Rome back to life.
Fulci probably thought this film should have elevated him to the auteur status. But it did not. Maybe because he was trying a little too hard. Maybe because he thought the Cenci tragedy would allow him to prove he was good at directing actors.
Directing actors is obviously not Fulci's main skill. Thus, the acting comes across as if it was classic theatre, where comedians play in a Shakespearian manner - a little overacted.

Partly because of its flaws, Beatrice Cenci is a very interesting film: it is a twisted historical movie. Behind Fulci's apparent willingness to stay true to the codes of the genre, his obsessions arise, and soon neither the dialogues nor the acting really matter anymore: it's the bodies, again and again. Insisting close-ups on flesh and bodies in pain come back, in typical Fulci's style.
The whole film is a long and painful torture, which pace is set by the construction in flashbacks: it is about a man torturing his family, both psychologically and physically, and then about the Church torturing the same family to make them admit they killed this man (again, Fulci's extremely critical point of view on Religion, as in "Don't torture a duckling"). Inevitably, this leads to a fatal ending - we know it from the very first scene.

Finally, it's a film built on the opposition of two characters: the ogre, Francesco Cenci. Inhuman, corrupted, shameless, cruel, sweating. And his daughter, Beatrice Cenci. Pure, idealistic, faithful, strong, beautiful. She will be the one deciding to kill her father, with the help of her lover.
This is when we will realise that the ogre and her daughter, while seemingly opposite, are in fact very close to each other. Like him, she is merciless.

Beatrice Cenci is Fulci's long-forgotten gem, laying out in 1969 the director's favourite themes of the following decade. Neo Publishing has just released it in DVD.
More on Fulci from this blog here.

Giallo is not gothic

2007-01-13T00:44:00.000+01:00

Nothing thrills like a good old story of mysterious castles, baroque decorum, ambiguous ancestors, ghostly silhouettes and centuries-old curses on noble families. So much so that worldwide litterature as well as cinema have seen a proliferation of these stories. That we could categorize, even if it is a little of a shortcut, as embodying the Gothic genre.

In Italian genre cinema, if gothic all'italiana had its highlights - La Maschera del Demonio (Black Sunday), shot by Mario Bava in 1960 is definitely one of them -, there are also a number of counter-examples. Actually, the same Bava would return years later, in 1972, with a much less impressive take on gothic with a contemporary flavour: Gli orrori del castello di Norimberga (Baron Blood).

Because Italian genres, or should we say filone, tend to feed one another, most of the time in extremely interesting ways, it could only happen that Giallo would be at some point mixed with Gothic.
Antonio Margheriti's La Morte Negli Occhi del Gatto (Seven deaths in the cat's eye, 1973) and Emilio Miraglia's two gothic gialli La Notte Che Evelyn Uscì Dalla Tomba (The Night Evelyne Came Out of the Grave, 1971) and La Dama Rossa Uccide Sette Volte (The Red Queen Kills Seven Times, 1972) are just a few examples of this attempt at mixing two lucrative filone.
And probably amongst the less interesting gialli ever made.

Like oil and water, gothic and giallo seem to be utterly unable to mix.
Of course these three films can be noticeable by their photography (but in this particular cinema where aesthetics was more important than anything else, great photography was a given). Yet they consistently fail in maintaining any integrity throughout the storytelling. Even visually, they struggle to reconcile two opposites: the contemporary style of giallo and the baroque of gothic.
As a result, they are unconvincing and quite boring to watch.

Unlike other filone, there seems to be a fundamental contradiction between both genres. Whereas Gothic appeals to centuries-old tales and supernatural to trigger fear, Giallo is extremely contemporary by essence. It is born out of vast concrete cities, of their anonymity, of psychologic disorders, of human perversions. Giallo is all but supernatural. At the contrary, it is rooted in real, daily life.

Giallo is Evil next door. Please get rid of the castle.

If you're still curious to watch them, these films can be found at Blue Underground and NoShame films. Also read Michael Mackenzie's reviews here and there.

Renaissance

2007-01-09T10:53:00.000+01:00

Portrait of Beatrice Cenci,
by Italian painter Guido Reni (XVIIth century)

Coming soon, Lucio Fulci's "Beatrice Cenci", from 1969. Referred to in Stephen Thrower's "Beyond Terror : Films of Lucio Fulci", as one the director's masterpieces.
Stay tuned.

Films I talked about in October, November and December

2006-12-31T14:56:00.000+01:00

Il Trucido e lo sbirro (Tough cops) - Umberto Lenzi - 1976

La banda del Trucido (Destruction Force) - Stelvio Massi - 1977

Luca il contrabbandiere (Contraband) - Lucio Fulci - 1980

Giornata nera per l'Ariete (The Fifth Cord) - Luigi Bazzoni - 1971

Specific topics
A new blog on Giallo
J&B, the official whisky of Giallo

See also the films I previously talked about.

The Milian Show

2006-12-15T14:14:00.000+01:00

In the second half of the 1970s, Poliziesco had taken over Giallo in Italian popular cinema. Amongst the abundant production, two films are worth noticing as a somewhat unsuccessful attempt to mix the poliziesco filone with 'la comedia all'italiana'.

Definitely off-track, Il Trucido e lo Sbirro (aka Tough cops, Umberto Lenzi - 1976) and La banda del Trucido (aka Destruction force, Stelvio Massi - 1977) are in fact more innovative than one could think in the first place: whereas, in Italian genre cinema, characters are most of the time secondary to the intrigue or the set-up, scenarist Dardano Sacchetti tried in these movies to give depth and personality to a central character, shaped up by the writer's knowledge of Rome's working class culture: Monnezza - litterally "garbage" in Roman slang -, a bigger than life thug from Rome, played by the incredible Tomas Milian.

Wouldn't it be for Milian's pretty hilarious and spectacular incarnation of Monnezza, it has to be said that these two films are far from being unforgettable. Yet this misunderstood attempt at hijacking poliziesco to turn it into some sort of violent comedy stuffed with Roman popular humour remains noticeable: in La banda del Trucido for example, Monnezza owns a trattoria called "Alla Pernacchia" (try this on google to understand what it means) and welcomes his clients by insulting them and cracking jokes of utter vulgarity.

Cynicism and bad taste here are sometimes reminiscent of the Italian tragicomedies à la Scola (Brutti, Sporchi e Cattivi, aka Ugly, Dirty and Bad), even if it never reaches the same level because of inconsistencies in the structure of the films, which never really manage to succeed in merging two genres. As a result, the overall impression is that you watch rather mediocre polizieschi interrupted with regular bursts of outrageous comedy, overacted by a decidedly weird Tomas Milian.

This could have been really great, but as Dardano Sacchetti explains in an interview, it seems nobody shared the same vision of the films when they were produced.

The French production company Neo Publishing recently released the rare Il Trucido and its sequel in DVD, in their "Italia a mano armata" collection. Sadly, no English subtitles.
More on filone from this blog here.

Blog and black lace

2006-12-05T22:10:00.000+01:00

Keith Brown has recently started what probably is the only other blog dedicated to Giallo.
Informed by his obvioulsy extensive knowledge of cinema history, "Giallo Fever" offers fresh perspectives into the genre.

Welcome Keith, I am already one of your regular readers.

Listening and reading

2006-11-26T15:05:00.000+01:00

This is what I am doing these days. Listening to a lot of jazz and reading books.
So this place might be a little quiet for some time.

It's always nice visiting a place when it's not too busy though. You always end up noticing things you hadn't paid attention to the first time around.
So if you have a bit of time, make your own way through the archives or simply click here to display the list of all the films and topics I've written about since this blog started, a year and a half ago.

See you soon.

Napoli Vice

2006-11-05T22:19:00.000+01:00

Fulci again. Luca il contrabbandiere (Contraband), a smugglers' story taking place in Naples, and released in 1980.
Often underrated, this movie is nonetheless a testimony of its time: a time of change. For Italian genre cinema - the beginning of its decline, for Lucio Fulci - from gialli to zombies , and for Italian crime - from cigarettes smuggling to drug traffic. The end of an era, the end of a troubled decade for the country.

Beyond the director's trademark (gore effects, the obsession for body mutilation), there's often a social subtext in Fulci's cinema, as previously demonstrated in "A lizard in a woman's skin" with a point of view on psychedelic culture and drugs in the Swingin' London, and even more brilliantly exposed in "Don't torture a duckling", an impressive allegory on rural Italy's conservatism.

In "Contraband", change is stylistically visible. Photography, just like clothes, have an early 80s touch, disco has definitely invaded the glossy night-clubs' dancefloors, gangsters don't drive Alfa Romeos anymore, but impressive Mercedes, and powerful speedboats allow them to escape coastguards.
We're in Naples, but somehow the whole aesthetics of the film - even though less sophisticated - feels quite close to Michael Mann's TV show "Miami Vice", that would start only four years later.

In "Contraband", ageing gangsters are still watching vintage spaghetti westerns on TV.
Berlusconi's shows will soon take over.

The spiral

2006-10-24T23:06:00.000+02:00

A film can have a geometry: lines, curves, circles, squares, angles, spirals.
It can also have an architecture: volumes, lights, shadows, contrasts, space, narrow corridors, spiral staircases.
Giornata nera per l'ariete (The Fifth Cord, AKA Black Day for Aries - Luigi Bazzoni, 1971) has spiral staircases everywhere. It's a movie made out of spiral staircases. If it did not strike you in the first place, take a second look at it. Almost every other scene has a spiral staircase in it.
In the background, in the foreground, in the frame of a window...
The spiral as the graphic backbone of the movie.

"The Fifth Cord" is also about astrology. Symbolism, zodiacal signs, fate, symmetry, the predictability of things. A kind of esoteric geometry, where the sign of Aries plays the core role:
take the horns of an aries - in their simplest shape, they are in fact spirals.
And if you look at a spiral staircase from above, it definitely looks like aries' horns.

It is always interesting, this obsession of a director for symbolism.

"Giornata nera per l'ariete" is an incredibly stylish film. Amateurs of design and architecture will definitely love it. Not to mention the great photography. Definitely a giallo bringing something to Giallo, by radicalising its aesthetics in every single detail - and with another of these amazing Morricone's scores.

Early Marketing Trick

2006-10-12T15:59:00.000+02:00

When they have a serious explanation, Edwige Fenech & George Hilton pour themselves a glass of it.
Susan Scott enjoys it with a cigarette, in her cosy boudoir.
From time to time, Luc Merenda gets some.
Franco Nero likes it so much he drinks it while driving.
Anita Strindberg indulges on it with Florinda Bolkan, during a wild party.
Not to mention Jean Sorel, who was spotted with a bottle in his flat.

Yes, J&B is the official Giallo drink.
Which shows that product placement in movies is not a recent idea.

J&B's Italian marketing director was certainly a man of taste, yet image cannot change reality: even with the glamour of Italian genre cinema, it remains a terrible whisky.

Films I talked about in June, July, August & September

2006-09-30T18:47:00.000+02:00

L'uomo senza memoria (Man without a memory AKA Puzzle) - Duccio Tessari - 1974

Milano trema: la polizia vuole giustizia (Violent Professionals) - Sergio Martino - 1973

Romanzo Criminale - Michele Placido - 2006

Il Caimano - Nanni Moretti - 2006

Arrivederci mi amore, ciao - Michele Soavi - 2006

Il cittadino si rebella (Street Law) - Enzo G. Castellari - 1974

Non si sevizia un Paperino (Don't torture a Duckling) - Lucio Fulci - 1972 - 1 /2 / 3

Specific topics
The films of Luciano Ercoli
Great soundtrack places on the web

See also the films I previously talked about.

The odd detail

2006-09-26T18:09:00.000+02:00

Not that far from the urban landscapes of Northern Italy, lies a lovely city by the seaside.
Portofino. Its harbour, its small colourful houses, its relaxed atmosphere. Strange place for a giallo.

Is L'uomo senza memoria (Man without a memory aka Puzzle, Duccio Tessari - 1974) really a giallo? Not sure, but it's probably Tessari's trademark: his other contribution to the genre, Una farfalla con le ali insanguinate (The bloodstained butterfly, 1971) wasn't exactly a typical giallo either. There is something that cannot be denied: both films have their own particular style, and a remarkable elegance - something "precious" which makes them stand out of the crowd.

So, here we are in London with the story of a man who has lost his memory, and is attracted to Portofino by a letter supposedly written by his wife, whom he doesn't remember.
And the location is so beautiful, with the boats and the twisted paved streets,
and the characters all dress up in fashionable clothes, and there are nice cars too,
there's a witty kid, who helps solving the mystery,
there is also Anita Strindberg, and a bad guy who blows his nose all the time,
there's even a subtle tribute to Mario Bava's "La ragazza che sapeva troppo" when Sara (Senta Berger) is alone in the shadows of her house at night, as she's heard a strange noise...
Not to forget the soundtrack which is so classy, as ever with the great Gianni Ferrio.

All these elements contribute to make this film a definitely pleasant experience, something classy not quite fitting in the giallo frame, still very close to it.
Like an elegant painting made of a number of carefully selected details perfectly matching together, except for one. One detail which presence in the painting would seem very odd. Not something big, but sufficiently disturbing to make you rethink of the whole picture with a different look.
In L'uomo senza memoria, this odd detail appears shortly at the very beginning of the film only to find its utility at the very end of it: it is a chainsaw. Yes, a chainsaw which turns the final scene into a bloodbath, after 90 almost violence-free minutes.

Such an odd detail, which is typically constitutive of Puzzle's strange charm.

The film was recently released by two production companies: the French Neo Publishing and the Danish Another World Entertainment. The soundtrack, unfortunately, seems nowhere to be found, which is a shame considering Gianni Ferrio's consistently excellent scores.
More from this blog on Duccio Tessari's other giallo here and there.

Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental

2006-09-06T16:29:00.000+02:00

Does the name Susy Lion ring a bell? Probably not.
In 1973, Susy was part of an obscure band called "Susi and Guy", picked up by Guido & Maurizio de Angelis for a couple of songs included in their soundtrack for Milano Trema: la polizia vuole giustizia (Violent Professionals - Sergio Martino).
On the B-side of their 45 rpm, Susy sings in Italian a nice, lighthearted yet melancholic song called "And life goes on".

A memorable scene from the film opens on a lovely sunny morning, with Susy singing about her lover who has gone. The camera embraces a vast place in the center of Milan. Traffic is fluid and nice colourful cars zoom through the frame.
A taxi stops. An elegant middle-aged man gets off.
A few yards away, a woman walks up the stairs out of the tube station. She's carrying a shopping bag with fruits and vegetables. Before crossing the street, she puts her hair back in place.
Opposite the street, another woman is looking at a bakery's window while eating an ice cream.
Further down the street, a guy is sitting on a bench, reading the newspaper.

The guy who had got off the taxi now crosses the street. He knows where he's going. He is il comissario Del Buono. We know this from a previous scene in the film. And this police inspector is on a serious case, close to solve a big investigation.

As the love song goes on, we see a few kids cycling amongst the shadows of a building's pillars, in the background.
The man with the newspaper has left the bench. We follow him walking swiftly through the street.
Cut to inspector Del Buono, walking in the opposite direction. They're going to cross each other.
Kids in the background, woman with her shopping bag, the inspector's face, close up on the guy with the newspaper, close up on the newspaper hiding a gun, Del Buono's face, the guy with the paper shoots the gun as Del Buono walks to him, bang bang, woman screams and drops her shopping bag, Del Buono falls down on the pavement, a guy is running to help him, the newspaper man jumps into a car and in a second, he's gone.
Woman screaming. Guy bending over the body of inspector Del Buono. A few fruits roll out of the shopping bag before slowly coming to a stop.
Del Buono is lying on the ground. Dead.

Susy goes on singing about her lover who has gone.

This was Sergio Martino's personal take on the real murder of Inspector Luigi Calabresi in 1972, in the aftermath of the 1969 Piazza Fontana bombing in Milan.
Of course it's not meant to be historically exact, but it is an obvious example of the fact that "Violent Professionals", like most polizieschi, was built on the particular context of the Italian "anni di piombo" ("years of lead"). Another example is the key role of a publisher (played by Richard Conte) in subversive activities in the film: a striking connection with the real publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli who participated in radical left-wing activism in those days.
Although often simplistic, Poliziesco was definitely a political cinema genre.

Anni di piombo

2006-08-24T14:04:00.000+02:00

"Romanzo Criminale" - 2005

"Le anni di piombo" ("the years of lead").
This decade during which, between december 12, 1969 and August the 2nd, 1980, Italy saw its foundations crumble under left and right-wing terrorism in what is referred to by historians as "a low intensity civil war".

Strange coincidence, 30 years after, three Italian films released this year are looking back at this troubled period of their country: Michele Placido's 'Romanzo Criminale' (based on judge Giancarlo de Cataldo's eponymous novel), Nanni Moretti's 'Il Caimano' and Michele Soavi's 'Arrivederci amore, ciao' - the latter being well know from giallo fans for his 'Dellamorte dellamore' (1994).

Romanzo Criminale is probably the most spot on as it directly addresses the political events of the 1970s, building on the true story of a Rome gang which took advantage of the political mess to rise and conquer the city. Their path often crosses history, highlighting the ambiguous relationship between criminality, politics and terrorism during these years, until the Bologna railway station massacre in 1980.
Historically accurate, with a good cast and an efficient soundtrack, Romanzo Criminale is a must-see for anyone interested in understanding better what Italy was like in those days (not to mention the "poliziesco" style of the film).

As if it was a follow up to this first film, Arrivederci mi amore, ciao is the tale of a former political activist coming back to Italy nowadays, after years spent hiding in Latin America. Also adapted from a book by Massimo Carlotto, it depicts a pretty dark reality, showing how a man initially in search of starting a normal life is finally falling back into the dark side.

Finally, Il Caimano. Beyond the political statement about Berlusconi, this is a beautiful film about Italian genre cinema and its decline (when private TV rose in Italy, during the 80s).
It's also an emotional story of a family broken up by a divorce, as the main character, a has-been film director who used to be successful with B-movies during the 70s, progressively realises that his wife is walking away from him and his fantasies.
In order not to sink, he throws himself into a seemingly impossible project: making a movie denunciating the unclear origins of Berlusconi's overwhelming political and economical power. Somehow, an allegory about how cinema can still be a subversive power, and how genre cinema used to fulfill this role thirty years ago.

Overall, Moretti doesn't sign a movie directly about the anni di piombo, but certainly raises questions about the new powers which rose after the 70s and their consequences on the current Italian political structure - On a lighter note, but not to be missed, is the hilarious tribute to genre cinema in a memorable scene where an evil food critic is being murdered in a restaurant he had criticised.

Three films, three angles to reach a similar conclusion: not only have the mysteries of 1970s Italy not been completely elucidated, but they still have a strong influence on today's Italian society.

It seems that these films are not that easy to get to watch beyond Italy and France - apart from "Il Caimano", which was presented in Cannes this year. A shame as they're very insightful for anyone interested in the strong connections between Italian genre cinema and the history of the country in the 1970s.

The connoisseur and his lady

2006-08-13T14:09:00.000+02:00

In three years and three films, the Luciano Ercoli-Susan Scott duo left a touch of their own to Giallo, before disappearing with a large sum of money Ercoli had suddenly inherited from a relative.

Lots have been said about Ercoli/Scott's films bringing a feminist point of view to the genre, and there is no question about it: for the first time in this otherwise rather machist production, women were empowered and key to the plots (on this topic, read this interesting review of "Forbidden photos" and a previous article from this blog).

Despite this undeniable emphasis put on women, almost as a political statement, it is also interesting to see "Le foto proibite di una signora per bene" (1970), "La morte camina con i tacchi alti" (1971) and "La morte accarezza a mezzanotte" (1972) as visual testimonies of what state-of-the-art fashion and design meant in early 70s' Europe.
Building on glamourous lifestyles (Susan Scott is either a model or a dancer or even a lady with no other known activity than just taking pleasure out of life), these three movies are definitely landmarks of the genre: skirts, dresses, sunglasses, handbags, make-up and wigs - just remember Dagmar Lassander in "Photos..." - are displayed in an endless ballet, turning the movies into 90 minutes-catwalks in which the star of the show would be Susan Scott.

And indeed Susan Scott - aka Nieves Navarro - shines like a star in her boyfriend's movies. Everytime she's on screen she becomes the main focus and grabs attention like no other. So much so that when she disappears half-way through in "La morte camina con i tacchi alti", the film is somehow loosing its substance.
Evidence that in the end, all three movies would certainly not have been the same if Luciano Ercoli, decidedly a connoisseur, hadn't been in love with Susan Scott, decidedly a lady with an attitude.

"Le foto proibite di una signora per bene" (Forbidden photos of a lady above suspicion - 1970), "La morte camina con i tacchi alti" (Death walks on high heels - 1971) and "La morte accarezza a mezzanotte" (Death walks at midnight - 1972) are three highly enjoyable gialli, with an outstanding collection of soundtracks composed respectively by Morricone, Stelvio Cipriani and the great Gianni Ferrio. Don't miss them.

Dance

2006-07-14T00:01:00.000+02:00

If Giallo is an allegoric illustration of Italy's dark years, then Poliziesco, this other typical 1970s Italian genre cinema, is their very realistic, day-to-day report.

In Giallo, violence has no face as it can take anybody's identity.
In Poliziesco, criminals are all clearly identified: street punks, small-time thieves, dangerous gangsters, corrupted policemen or cynical politicians, all of them drawing the scary portrait of a seriously ill Italian society. Sometimes a simplistic portrait, yet sketched up in an ever efficient and graphic manner.

Like in "Il Cittadino si Rebella" (Street Law - Enzo G. Castellari, 1974), one of the highlights of the genre. From the first to the last second, this movie, based on the revenge of a banal citizen against the gangsters who brutally kidnapped him during a bank hold-up, is a breathless sequence of action scenes which have clearly been used as Tarantino or John Woo's back catalogue for their own films.

One amazing scene. Carlo Antonelli (Franco Nero) is running for his life, chased by a gangster's Ford Mustang. This scene is under influence: it's a western scene, with the Mustang moving like an infuriated horse. It's also a tribute to Hitchcock's "North by Northwest", with its strange similarity between Franco Nero and Cary Grant's run to escape a machine.

Above all, this scene is a ballet, a deadly choregraphy between a man and a machine, shot like contemporary dance, from sophisticated angles, with the camera accompanying the agressive and desperate movements of the car and its prey, in slow motion to stress their beauty, in close-ups to enhance the brutal feeling of fear.

The uglier the reality, the more beautiful its representation.

"Il Cittadino si Rebella" is a very good introduction to Poliziesco. Its score, by Guido & Maurizio de Angelis, is inspired by early 70s American cop movies and has some definitive Blaxploitation influences.
More about this cinema genre on this great site: Pollanet Squad (in Italian).

Witch hunt

2006-06-23T15:47:00.000+02:00

Marciara (Florinda Bolkan) leaves the village's police station in the early morning. She walks through the empty square, amongst the little white houses. She's free.
She had been arrested the day before, suspected of being the killer of three young boys. In fact she did not deny. She told the police she was guilty. She hysterically explained why she wanted to punish them and proudly described how she did black magic to do make the young boys die.
Yes she's the killer, and she's a witch!

Only trouble is the boys were strangled, a more down-to-earth way to die. Therefore Marciara the Witch can only be innocent. The rational thinking of the police sets her free, but also leaves her completely empty: if she has no magic power, then who is she but just a poor mad woman?

Now her mad eyes have turned to a sad and resignated expression, while she walks through the small streets of the village. She is harmless, she won't scare anybody anymore.
Yet the village inhabitants look at her suspiciously - after all, there's always been something wrong with that woman. She is the witch, so it's likely she killed their children.
They look at her as she walks past them. A look that sentences her to death.

On the way to her hideaway in the mountains, out of the village, she suddenly hears a noise. She knows exactly what is happening, and tries to run to hide in the graveyard nearby.
Too late. The villagers immediately catch her. Three of them, armed with wooden sticks and iron chains. They've turned on their car stereo loud, so nobody can hear the witch screaming.

The radio plays "Quei Giorni Insieme a Te", by Ornella Vanoni, a beautiful song which becomes the soundtrack of her agony.

Bleeding and almost unconscious, she crawls in the dust to reach for the highway, where happy families pass by in their cars, not even seeing her.
There, a few meters from the asphalt, Marciara will die.
The modern world is oblivious to the death of a poor mad woman.

This extremely violent beating scene from Lucio Fulci's "Don't torture a duckling" is one of this masterpiece's highlights, thanks to Florinda Bolkan's stunning talent and Riz Ortoloni's evocative music which both give this moment an incredibly powerful emotional dimension. Get the score here and read more about this film here and there.

Kids

2006-06-13T23:38:00.000+02:00

Gialli often reflect a point of view on Italy's moral and political crisis of the 70s (Short night of the glass dolls, The bloodstained butterfly...). But it was nearly always made through a very sophisticated vision of the world, the aesthetical treatment moving away from an objective depiction of reality. Giallo is an allegoric cinema genre.

Except for Lucio Fulci's Don't torture a duckling, which could be considered a giallo born out of Neo-Realism.

Beyond the plot, this film has a documentary feel, turning the viewer into a witness of the accelerated modernisation of Italy in the 60s & 70s, depicting the country's evolution through the very ones remaining untouched by change: poor and rural people.
A testimony on a schizophrenic country, stretched out between the extremes of tradition and modernity.
Neo-realist films were clearly about this particular topic after the desolation of WWII: witnesses of the Italian reconstruction, often symbolised by kids (Vittorio de Sica's "Bicycle Thief", Roberto Rossellini's "Open City", amongst many others).

Kids.
In Fulci's film, they clearly embody the link between the old and new Italy.
They are the perpetuation of traditions, under the strict rules of Religion that will ensure this little village living at the foot of a brand new highway will remain untouched.
Yet the kids are irremediably attracted by the promises of the modern world coming from the highway. They are the living connection with this new world, letting temptations and alien cultures in. So much so that they end up becoming a threat to the village community, bringing change and disorder.
In a terrifying reflex of self-preservation, the community chooses to cut this dangerous link out to maintain its integrity.

The community chooses to kill the kids. It's the end of hope.
We are, indeed, in a giallo.

More on Neo-Realism here. And on "Don't Torture a Duckling" from this blog there.

Soundtrack extravaganza

2006-06-03T14:12:00.000+02:00

Killing in Style has just turned a year. Let's have a party. Not forgetting I came to 60s & 70s films through their music, here are a few great places to visit for your ears' delight:

First of all, "Nova fait son cinéma" by Nicolas Saada, the best French radio broadcast dedicated to soundtracks. Every sunday at 8pm Paris time, you can listen to it live here (no podcast). And there is its blog, keeping a record of all the playlists.

Then, Radio Aperitivo, a cool pop music radio broadcast from Lyon, which has especially made two great downloadable programmes on 60s & 70s soundtracks here and there.

ScoreBlog is an audioblog only dedicated to film music, whatever their styles.

ScoreBaby's Annex is a recent audio blog created by "Score, Baby!", where you can find rare and out-of-print soundtracks to listen to.

Pretty new and groovy is the Winged Avenger, also with extracts from cool 60s/70s pop & film music.

Quite Quite Fantastic, the name says it all, with its unique compilations.

And finally, to buy the music (because you must support those small exciting labels), check out Movie Grooves, probably the most extensive soundtrack resource on the web.

This is it for the moment, but I'm sure there must be plenty of other cool places to discover (don't hesitate to post your own bookmarks in the comments section).

The transplant

2006-06-01T10:59:00.000+02:00

It is a long concrete snake which crawls through a green southern Italian valley, rising above with majesty. A gigantic highway bridge which fluidly carries cars coming from and going to places we will never know of. It is modernity in motion, arrogantly cutting through the past, ignoring those who can't follow its pace.
Down in its shadow, at the foot of the piles, lies a village, stuck in a timewarp. Remote from the movement above.

Two different worlds, living next to each other but completely separated. Yet interactions do occur, and this is the idea Non si sevizia un Paperino (Don't torture a Duckling - Lucio Fulci, 1972) is built on: describing and analysing the violent effects of the intrusion of urbanisation and modernisation in a conservative community.
This is why, contrary to what's being often said, this film is not a rural giallo. Giallo is a quintessentially contemporary and urban genre, and this one is no exception.

In fact, "Non sevizia..." can be considered a detailed report of the reactions of a body rejecting a transplant.

An emblematic symptom of the rejection: Patrizia (Barbara Bouchet). She is the girl who came from the city through the highway, driving a powerful Iso Lele. She lives in a house at the entrance of the village. Her home remains outside of the community though, both geographically and architecturally (a futuristic building in complete contrast with the traditional little white houses). To escape from the suffocating atmosphere of the village which ostracises her, she sometimes goes back to her natural element, the highway, and drives for hours for the sake of driving. Movement against immobility.
She also actively tries to convert the most permeable elements of the community to her libertarian lifestyle, by sexually teasing the young boys of the village.

Temptation is coming from outside. The same teenage boys can't help being intrigued by the regular visit of other outsiders : prostitutes coming from the city to give some nice time to a few workmen.
Temptation is a threat to the community; it jeopardises its future by corrupting youth and detracting them from traditions. It detracts them from the most important: religion.
Temptation implies change, when the main aspiration of this traditional land is to maintain a status quo.

So when the young boys start being murdered one after the other, the whole community stands as one, pointing at those who are considered outsiders: the village idiot, the sleazy city girl Patrizia and a poor mad woman considered a witch, Martiara (Florinda Bolkan).

But the death of the young boys is the brutal and obvious symptom of the village's rejection of the modern world: it's in fact from the deep heart of the community that the sacrifice of "corrupt sprouts" was perpetrated.

Don't Torture a Duckling is probably one of the best gialli ever made, and certainly a demonstration of Lucio Fulci's underestimated talent. It also ties back to the director's obsessions about the body, which he explored in most of his films. More on this theme from this blog here.

Films I talked about in March, April & May

2006-05-31T17:21:00.000+02:00

Django - Sergio Corbucci - 1966

Tutti i colori del buio (All the Colors of the Dark) - Sergio Martino - 1972

Lo Squartatore di New York (The New York Ripper) - Lucio Fulci - 1982

Quattro mosche di velluto grigio (Four Flies on Grey Velvet) - Dario Argento - 1971

Specific topics
The incompetence of the police in giallo
Futurism and the Italian avant-garde in the early XXth century
The soundtracks of Gianni Ferrio

See also "Films I talked about in February"

What is the police doing?

2006-05-20T23:37:00.000+02:00

Police inspectors at work in Strip Nude for Your Killer.

Institutions falling apart - an underlying topic of Italian genre cinema, especially in Giallo and Poliziesco.

In Giallo, the police is either non-existent, like in Martino/Gastaldi's movies (The Strange Vice of Mrs Wardh, Case of the Scorpion Tail, Your vice is a locked room...), or ridiculously incompetent, like in the caricatural Strip Nude for Your Killer (A. Bianchi - 1975), or even evil and corrupted, like in Aldo Lado's Short Night of the Glass Dolls (1971).
In the best case scenario, it is so inefficient that it needs an outsider's help to do most of the job (like in Dario Argento's animal trilogy).

The figure of the stranger who happens to take the biggest part in the plot's resolution - the "hero by accident", which is already present in the very first giallo La Ragazza che sapeva troppo by Mario Bava - is so recurring that it's like an acknowledgement of a society which has completely lost faith in itself:
Good things can only come from outside of a deeply corrupted community.

More from this blog on Giallo's questioning of Italian institutions here.

Unlighthearted

2006-05-05T10:52:00.000+02:00

Usually a cowboy doesn't come without his horse.
Django (Franco Nero in Sergio Corbucci's eponymous film, 1966) doesn't come without his coffin.

Initially, I had decided to watch a spaghetti western as a recreation from Giallo. How naive of me: it's hard to think of a more gothic western than this very dark, very violent, very nihilistic film which epitomises the opposition between the American and Italian Western genres.

Django seems to have been built on a systematic inversion of the classic western codes:
the classic cowboy rides an energetic horse, Django carries a dirty coffin;
the classic landscape is wide open, full of promises, here the decaying city is slowly sinking into the mud (where a bunch of prostitutes are wrestling at some point, offering a typical Meyer-ish scene...);
classic gunfights are based on honour and all opponents are equitably armed, when Django's coffin hides the most deadly machine gun which leaves no chance to his enemies and results in massive killings...
The list of examples could go on forever.

When classic western was an epic representation of the American pionneering spirit, overcoming obstacles to get a better life, Django, as one of the funding movies of the Italian western, is its perfect symmetrical embodiement:
a devastated land where Death has blue eyes and carries a coffin.

Django, a strange crossover of a gothic movie, a western and a shoot-them up video game. Available here.

Femme fatale

2006-05-01T23:44:00.000+02:00

Among the many actresses who were trying to build their fame in genre cinema, one was sadly under-employed and did not appear in the best productions: Marina Malfatti.
With her beautiful yet strange looks, she's a typical European "femme fatale" of the 70's. Severe but charming, Italian with a hint of German style, mysterious and vulnerable, she probably epitomises ambiguity better than any other.

Her magnetic presence in the role of Mary, Jane's (Edwige Fenech) mysterious neighbour in "All the colors of the dark" (Sergio Martino - 1972), by far makes her the most interesting character in this otherwise particularly disappointing giallo. She manages to exhude a poisonous beauty which perfectly suits her character and makes her very attractive yet scary at the same time. Probably the modern idea of a witch.

In the film, she is the one who leads Jane to a satanic sect, then vanishes. She is Mary, not that immaculate.

If "Tutti i colori del buio" is a giallo you can easily live without, its score by Bruno Nicolai is a great one you can find here.
Marina Malfatti was also quickly appearing in Umberto Lenzi's "Seven Bloodstained Orchids", on which I wrote a few words there.

Like porn

2006-04-17T22:22:00.000+02:00

1982. New York has one of the highest criminality rates of the cities of the world. It epitomises more than any other place the modern Babylon.

1982. Giallo's golden years are far behind. In fact the genre has slowly died in the second half of the 70's, clearing the ground for new 'filones' going even further in the visual representation of violence: the most well-known being the zombies and cannibal genres.
The 'after-giallo' Italian cinema is somewhat a desperate and vain race to reach new heights in shocking audiences, against the ineluctable rise of television.

1982. Lucio Fulci's "New York Ripper" is released and soon becomes famous because of the multiple problems the film encounters with censorship boards in most countries.
Nearly 25 years after, this infamous shocker is still widely debated: a masterpiece or a rip-off? a giallo or a slasher? Should the killer have a Donald Duck voice or shouldn't he?

The anti-aesthetical core principle of "The New York Ripper" - the raw photography, the run-down locations, the miserable characters... - makes this film philosophically incompatible with Giallo.
At the same time, the complete absence of any puritanistic or moral subtext which is slasher's trademark doesn't allow to affiliate the film to this typically American genre.

It's hard to classify "the Ripper". It is so cynical and nihilistic it is almost an experimental object.

In fact, it could be compared with porn as it uses a similar parasitic approach: diverting a rather classic and well-coded cinema style to use it to its own advantage. When porn leverages any stereotypical scenaristic frame as a pretext to fit in as many porn scenes as possible, Fulci hijacks the early 80s American cop film codes and structure to stuff it with ultra-violent (and sometimes almost pornographic) sequences.

This method makes the film both very flat and very paroxystic at the same time. Flat because the scenario is incredibly predictable, linear and, at the end of the day, banal as it is a stereotypical American cop movie, of which Fulci has respected all the codes, including the cheesy score. Paroxystic because this banality is meticulously dynamited from the inside by the regular occurence of voyeuristic and disturbing peaks of violence. Hence an overall feeling of heterogeneity.

In its Italian DVD edition, "The Ripper's" bonuses consist in all the murder scenes in their uncut versions. After watching everything, you get this odd feeling that these bonuses, the murder scenes seen in isolation, embody in fact the purest version of the film. They don't need any scenaristic frame around them to work efficiently. They are its 'raison d'être'. As if Fulci, in an afterthought, had been forced to find a scenario to wrap these scenes in order to be able to produce the movie.
Again, just like porn.

That does not solve the question of the killer talking with a Donald Duck voice, a detail considered original by some, grotesque by others. What's for sure is that it is on behalf of Fulci an intentional disrespect for the rules of the American cop movie: killers don't have a ridiculous voice like Donald Duck's. But what if it was an ironic statement on US subculture?

Yes the world can also be terrorised by Disney's creatures.

"Lo squartatore di New York" is widely available in dvd (US/IT/FR) and its 80s funk influenced score can be found here.

Avanti!

2006-04-07T22:30:00.000+02:00

Dinamismo di un automobile - Luigi Russolo, 1911

"We affirm that the world’s magnificence has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing car whose hood is adorned with great pipes, like serpents of explosive breath—a roaring car that seems to ride on grapeshot is more beautiful than the 'Victory of Samothrace'."

Extract from the "Manifesto of Futurism", Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.
Published in Le Figaro, Paris, 20th of February, 1909.

A few years before the First World War bursted, a group of Italian artists, led by writer Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, founded one of the most important artistic movements of Europe's early XXth century avant-gardes: Futurism.

Celebrating speed and violence, throwing away the past in a strong rupture with Italy's conservatisms, Futurism had the ambition of spreading across all disciplines: writing, painting, sculpture, architecture, music, fashion and obviously embracing recently born cinema as a key art form.

Again the typically Italian dialectic between conservatism and modernity, pushed to violent extremes.
Again the aesthetisation of violence, elevated to an art form.
Of course no obvious links with Giallo, but a similar 'engine' born out of Italian society's tensions and contradictions, which produced many great artistic movements across the last century in this country.

Futurism and other Italian avant-gardes between 1900 and 1950 are explored in the "Italia Nova" exhibition held at Le Grand Palais in Paris, starting April the 5th.
A great web resource on Futurism: futurism.org.uk.
The Estorick Collection, in London, is also a small yet great museum dedicated to Italian modern art, which has very interesting exhibitions (read a previous post from this blog here).

Take a walk with Gianni

2006-03-21T15:24:00.000+01:00

Take a walk with Gianni Ferrio.
Or rather, let him take you for a walk throughout the refined paths of his elegant melodies.

Gianni Ferrio is a much less well-known composer than Morricone, especially in Giallo. Yet his music stands for me as the most delightful surprise of the genre's soundtracks.

It's particularly interesting noticing the differences between both musicians in the composition structure.
Morricone builds his scores on a simple and recurring theme, which somehow works like stones thrown on the water's surface: bouncing and developing circles in waves which grow and vanish, always moving back and forth. An almost fractal musical structure, both very tight and loose at the same time, which made his signature and probably produced the most beautiful themes ever written for films.

If Gianni Ferrio does not have this incredible consistency and strength within his own themes, he is definitely immensely talented for something different, very much ahead of its time: coming up with deliciously crafted pop melodies encapsulated in a mix of jazz and classical structure. This cross-over of musical genres is so natural in his compositions that it comes across effortlessly.

La Morte Accarezza a Mezzanotte is a great example: its theme was built on the main character, Valentina, like a pop-sounding starting point of both the film and the score, which later takes us through more jazzy sounds, nice acid jazz party snapshots and eventually easy listening flavours. It really feels like visiting a house: the general atmosphere remains consistent but depending on the moment and the room you're in, the atmosphere changes and you experience a variety of tunes few composers can compete with.

Another fantastic score is Una Farfalla con le Ali Insanguinate, which manages to mix Tchaikovsky's Concerto no.1 with a jazz tune and makes it sound perfectly elegant and balanced. Again this soundtrack feels like taking a nice walk through the park of an old house which classy owners all have something to hide. Not to forget this very melancholic core theme, reflecting the bitter reality behind a glossy surface depicted by the film. One of these scores which is completely tailor-made for the film yet has a life of its own.

Thanks for the nice walks, dear Signore Ferrio.

Gianni Ferrio's giallo soundtracks and more are available at Movie Grooves.

A tragic clown

2006-03-13T22:23:00.000+01:00

Humour comes in short supply in Giallo.
Four flies on grey velvet (Dario Argento, 1971) is a notable exception. If the main character, Michael Brandon, is quite a bland figure, secondary casts are an interesting gallery of tragi-comic characters, sad and grotesque in a unique Italian way.
Take Gianni Arrosio, for example.

Played by Jean-Pierre Marielle, one of the finest French actors, Gianni Arrosio is introduced to us as a homosexual private eye who never solved a case in his life.
Even though Argento's vision of homosexuality is highly stereotypical and sometimes falls into a caricature, Marielle manages to turn it into some kind of weirdness which gives Arrosio an amusing bizarreness.

When Tobias, the rock drummer who's blackmailed for a murder he committed by accident, comes to meet him, Arrosio is busy re-painting his office, wearing a ridiculous blouse. Taken in this embarrassing situation clearly showing he's got nothing much to do, he doesn't seem surprised and very naturally puts down his brush to sit back at his desk, ready to listen to his new client.

"After so many failures, the probability of me solving this case has never been so high", he says as an encouraging start for his investigation, leaving Tobias puzzled. From the very start, Marielle makes his character a tragic clown, both funny and desperate at the same time.

Later in the film, Gianni Arrosio will be the first to identify who's behind the plot. When the blackmailer leads him into a trap in Milan subway's public toilets, and eventually kills him by injecting air through a hypodermic needle in the heart, his last words will be: "I knew I was right". As if he could not believe himself that a success would be possible.

Such an achievement could only condemn him to death.

Jean-Pierre Marielle is an actor whose talent is unique. More about him on Wikipedia in English or in French.

Films I talked about in February

2006-02-28T14:47:00.000+01:00

Quattro mosche di velluto grigio (Four flies on grey velvet) - 1971 - Dario Argento

Una farfalla con le ali insanguinate (The bloodstained butterfly) - 1971 - Duccio Tessari

L'ultimo treno della notte (Night train murders) - 1975 - Aldo Lado

See also "Films I talked about in January"

The staging of the crime

2006-02-26T15:52:00.000+01:00

Argento's "animal trilogy", beyond the fact that titles all bear a reference to an animal (bird, cat, flies), has an essential common point: a founding scene which is the pivotal element of the film, giving birth to a twisted mystery, and which is in one way or the other staged. Literally in isolation from the rest of the film.

In "The Bird with the crystal plumage", this scene is obviously the art gallery crime sequence, which is precisely defined and isolated by the frame of the massive glass window from the street and the city life.

A different illustration of the same principle is found in "The cat o'nine tails", where the founding scene is not visual, but audio. There, it is a conversation in a car (again a precise location) which is overheard by a blind man and a little girl as they're passing by.
It is this conversation which holds the key elements of the plot, but of course at the beginning of the film, it is encrypted for us. Just like the art gallery scene in "The bird", which only unfolds its secret at the very end of the movie.

There comes the founding scene of "4 flies on grey velvet" (1971), baroque, picturesque and surreal: One evening, a young rock musician, Tobias, follows into an opera house a man he suspects has been spying him for days.
What better place than an opera house could Argento choose to stage a tragedy?
The moment Tobias enters the building, he symbolically switches to a different world, which boundaries are physically marked by several red velvet curtains he passes through.

Outside is the real world. Inside is a parallel dimension, a vast and empty music hall in which light projectors focus the attention on the stage, where a fight between both men start: the prey becomes the predator as the musician accidentally stabs the mysterious man to death in a reflex of self-defence.
Sole audience of this scene, a third person takes pictures of the crime from the mezzanine. A person wearing a scary smiling mask.

This is the incredible talent of Dario Argento: in an almost exaggerated, maybe typically Italian way, he underlines a scene by making it stand out of the rest of the film, creating what could appear as a completely artificial rupture, yet totally convincing. Like if he was telling us: "Now look very carefully".

Paradoxically, it is when all the details are offered and pointed out that the mystery springs: by indicating where to look, Argento blinds us.

"4 flies on grey velvet" is a much more interesting film than what is usually said about it. Correspondences with David Lynch's work are quite intriguing and visual ideas are really ahead of their time. Check darkdreams.org for a detailed review.
It is however difficult to find a copy of it, as no DVD was released yet. You can still try your luck with second-hand VHS on eBay.

In the public eye

2006-02-19T23:46:00.000+01:00

It's autumn in Italy, a blanket of fallen leaves has started covering the park. Two kids are playing hide-and-seek as it starts to rain. Their nurse tries to get them to stop to go home, but they won't listen to her.

"Uno, due, tre...", counts one of them.

By the time he reaches 10, we suddenly hear a girl screaming from behind the trees, then the sound of a body rolling down a small hill in the wet leaves.
We now see someone, a man, running away from the park, under the eyes of various witnesses. He's wearing a raincoat and a hat, so we can hardly see his face as he's rushing out. There, he climbs a wall to get away from the park. He's gone.
People are pointing at where they saw the murderer escape, but the police arrives just a few seconds too late to catch him.

They've just found the body of the girl. She's lying down amongst the leaves, beautiful and young. And dead.
The night has come.
The scientific police is investigating, taking samples of everything to gather evidence. These guys are professionals, they have an eye for hidden details. A TV crew is here also. They're not missing a single bit of the investigation, with their reporter commenting live in the middle of the police cars, a few meters away from the body.

Meanwhile, a teenage girl is watching the scene as broadcasted on TV and, in shock, recognises the girl who was killed: she was her best friend. She doesn't know yet that after a few days of the investigation, based on scientific proofs and the testimony of eye witnesses, her own father, a very famous TV sports presenter, will be arrested and convicted for the murder. Ruining both his life and reputation.

A crime scene scrutinized by police's scientists, an investigation extensively led in laboratories, TV cameras transmitting live the affair to the public, the trial of a media icon which we follow step by step.
Oh, the modernity of Una farfalla con le ali insanguinate (The bloodstained butterfly - Duccio Tessari, 1971)!
These particularities make this film stand out of the classic giallo definition, but are incredibly predictive of the typical scenaristic approach of the 90's and 2000s' thrillers.

And so predictive of the media society that we know now, where everything, litterally everything ends up in the public eye.

More on "The bloodstained butterfly" from this blog here.

On a train

2006-02-11T23:45:00.000+01:00

There are different points of view about L'ultimo treno della notte (Night train murders, Aldo Lado - 1975). Some see it as just another "rape-and-revenge" flick, others say it's a copycat of Wes Craven's "Last house on the left" (1972).
In fact, it's a film which leverages a well-known scenaristic frame to convey a political statement about 1970s' Europe.

30 years after, and seen from other cultures, this political dimension could well be not so obvious. However it is this particular element which makes it such a unique film - and the terrible translation of the title into 'Night train murders' totally undermines the initial symbolical meaning of 'The last train of the night'.

It is a social journey between Germany and Italy, surrounded by the shadows of fascism - the German war veterans singing 3rd Reich songs in their cabin -, terrorism of the Red Brigades - the first train stops because of a bomb alert -, cynically questioning the dark side of the Church - the senile bishop glancing at a young priest, and later this obvious physical connexion made by Lado between the bishop seen in the first train and a very unappealing prostitute in the second one -, and above all denouncing the overwhelming power of the upper class, the "Bourgeoisie".

A metaphor where the woman with no name (Macha Méril) epitomises Bourgeoisie, with her veil as a sign of respectability as much as duplicity - and somehow of death.
She is the puppetmaster, cynically manipulating two hooligans - the embodiement of the lower class - to achieve her selfish and vicious goals (raping two young girls on the train). She will later get rid of the two guys by abandoning them to the revenge of the desperate father.
They will end up crawling on the ground like agonising animals.

A fatalistic tale about the ineluctable loss of innocence and its irreversibility.
Once the damage is done, there is no escape: one of the girls dies, the other one has no other choice but to commit suicide.
The implacable build up to a fatal end is very cleverly encapsulated in the idea of the train: a journey you can't deviate from, in a claustrophobic environment.
This is why the real score of this film is the noise of the train, which becomes overwhelming throughout the movie, and sometimes even covers scenes disconnected from the train itself.

In this context, it is interesting to point out that Morricone's score is very minimalist, yet very powerful. A few harmonica notes, highly reminiscent of "Once upon a time in the West", which reinforce the anguish, especially since they're played by one of the two villains.
Strangely enough, music from Morricone scores made for other films can also be heard, as if he was quoting himself: the opening pop track of "Four flies on grey velvet" when the two thugs reach the train station at the beginning of the film, and a reinterpretation of "L'Assoluto Naturale" theme at the end, heard through a radio in the parents' house.

At the end of this trip, there's no justice to be found, no hope to take away ; just the bitter taste of a crude representation of society's cruel games, somehow still relevant today.

L'Ultimo Treno della Notte was one of the two films shown at La Cinémathèque in Paris, during an evening dedicated to Aldo Lado on February the 3rd.

An evening with Aldo Lado

2006-02-04T23:39:00.000+01:00

A short man with a grey beard smoking a cigarette, out in the cold at the bottom of Frank Gehry's beautiful architecture for the former American Center turned La Cinémathèque Française : that was Aldo Lado last night in Paris, just before the special evening he was the guest of started.

After an introduction which sounded like a warning about what was about to be shown, the evening started with "L'ultimo treno della notte" (Night trains murders - 1975), a film which remains, 30 years after it was shot, still relevant in many aspects and certainly a distressing experience.

The lights came back on a deep silence of the audience, under the disturbing feeling left by this excellent film I'll come back to very soon.
Before the evening closed with the very original giallo "La corta notte delle bambole di vetro" (Short night of the glass dolls - 1971), a discussion was held with Aldo Lado and a surprise guest : Macha Méril, a French actress who is one of the key characters of "L'ultimo treno" and also played in Argento's "Profondo Rosso".

Aldo Lado talked (in excellent French) about his memories of making popular cinema in the Italian 70s. Back then, Italy was producing nearly three hundred films a year; it was the peak of exploitation cinema, or "cinema B" as it was referred to. Producers were so busy chasing money to pay the crew at the end of the week, they left directors with great freedom.

Undoubedtly, Aldo Lado's talent was to take advantage of genre cinema to make a political point in his films. If "L'ultimo treno della notte" was building on the "violence against violence" filone, it is also a very impactful critic of the European society in the 70s. This is also true for "La corta notte", which original idea was to demonstrate how "Power" crushes contestation. Indeed, both films are very consistent in denonciating the overwhelming power of the establishment.

This freedom of speech was daringly supported by unmatched violence and shocking scenes at the time, and many films had lots of trouble with Censorship, which was very strong in Italy.
"We can't release the film, they said we have to burn it", cried "L'Ultimo treno's" producer to Aldo Lado when the film was brutally rejected by the Italian board of Censorship.
But that wouldn't stop Lado: he went to the board and proposed to cut a few scenes which he had selected himself, and which absence in the final edit would not undermine the film. But they were strong enough to let censors think the worst had been avoided.
And obviously, when asked to cut a scene, Lado was saying yes and then only cut half of it...

Amongst the many obstacles, critics in Italy were also very powerful, if not always very honest: basically, there were the "Maestros" (Bellochio, Fellini, Antonioni...) and the others. When a director had reached this "Maestro" status, critics would never question his films, even if they were bad.
Genre cinema was highly disregarded, even if sometimes foreign critics managed to get their Italian counterparts to change their mind: Lado and Méril were mentioning the amusing example of a film which had been completely despised by critics in Italy, but when reading very positive French and American reviews the next day, the same Italian critics changed their points of view, all of a sudden considering the film a masterpiece...

Snapshots and memories from the weird years of Italian genre cinema, that was a very nice evening with Aldo Lado and his films, and a rare occasion to see them on a big cinema screen - definitely worth the experience.

Films I talked about in January

2006-01-31T21:26:00.000+01:00

Una farfalla con le ali insanguinate (The bloodstained butterfly) - 1971 - Duccio Tessari

Nude per l'assessino (Strip nude for your killer) - 1975 - Andrea Bianchi

Il tuo vizio e una stanza chiusa e solo io ne ho la chiave (Your vice is a locked room and only I have the key) - 1972 - Sergio Martino - 1 / 2 / 3

Les Diaboliques - 1954 - Henri-Georges Clouzot (compartive analysis with "Your vice...")

See also "Films I talked about in December"

The first impression matters

2006-01-26T18:41:00.000+01:00

On the music of Gianni Ferrio's extremely elegant soundtrack,
framed by the silhouette of a butterfly,
a blue Fiat 124 Spider zooms on a small Italian country road.
It's driven by a very stylish brunette who eventually stops the car in front of her house.

Then the camera smoothly pans to introduce the other characters of the drama, caught in various places at the same moment. They are identified by carefully designed supers indicating their names and their respective links - exactly like a filmed version of a character list in a play.

This is the very sophisticated opening sequence of Una farfalla con le ali insanguinate (The bloodstained butterfly - Duccio Tessari, 1971), a giallo which could well be of a different flavour.

More about this film soon. In the meantime, find the movie here and do not miss Ferrio's great blend of classic and jazz melodies there.

Thank you

2006-01-20T11:46:00.000+01:00

Thank you Mario Bava for the murders taking place in a model agency (Blood & Black Lace),
Thank you Massimo Dallamano for the revenge linked to an abortion (What have you done to Solange?),
And for the killer dressed up in a motorcycle gear (What have they done to your daughters?),
Thank you Sergio Martino for the ear rings seen on a newspaper picture (like the scorpion cufflinks appearing in a newspaper in The Case of the Scorpion Tail),
Thank you Giuliano Carnimeo for the tacky photoshoots (Case of the Bloody Iris),
Thank you Ernesto Gastaldi for the lesbianism to spice up the plot (Your vice is a locked room and only I have the key),
Thank you Lucio Fulci for the body mutilations,
And of course thank you Edwige Fenech for on demand undressing.

Steal as much as you can from other gialli, and make it even hotter by mixing it with the sexy comedy "filone": you'll get Strip Nude for your Killer (Andrea Bianchi - 1975), which title is as subtle as the film itself.

3+1=5

2006-01-15T14:15:00.000+01:00

At first, it seems obvious a trio is the core cast of Your vice is a locked room and only I have the key (Sergio Martino, 1972): The writer (L. Pistilli), his wife (A. Strindberg) and their young cousin (E. Fenech).

But it's wrong. In fact there are four key characters, if you include the cat. Because the black cat, called "Satan" - that says it all -, is everywhere in the film.
Regular close-ups on his eyes (and later on his unique eye left) are somehow giving a rhythm to the film, almost like an editing device. These sinister snapshots of feline yellow eyes staring in a flash at the viewer efficiently convey a feeling of anxiety and give the strange impression that indeed, the one character which is the puppet master is nobody else but the cat himself -
it must be stressed this is an interesting cinematographic transposition of the black cat's role in Edgar Allan Poe's short novel the film was inspired by.

Now, what if there were five key characters?
What if the cat was double?
Indeed there is one last character we never talked about: the Mother. The mother whose face is the first we see when the film opens on her painting, the mother whose incestuous love for her son stands between him and his wife, the mother whom the cat belongs to...
The mother, absent yet omnipresent, dead yet incredibly alive throughout the film. The mother, watching through the cat's eyes, like spying through a keyhole. The mother, symbolically blinded by his son's wife when she stabs the cat in the eye. And ultimately taking her revenge on her daughter-in-law, at the very last second through Satan's mewing.

Isn't it enough to consider "Your vice" a highly oedipian giallo?

There's definitely more to "Your vice is a locked room..." than meets the eye. Read from this blog here and there. A short article about Giallo & animals can also be found here.

Decadence

2006-01-08T14:34:00.000+01:00

There's a fragrance of the XIXth century decadent literature floating in the atmosphere of ll tuo vizio e una stanza chiusa e solo io ne ho la chiave (Your vice is a locked room and only I have the key, 1972 - Sergio Martino/Ernesto Gastaldi).

First this title, outrageously long, twisted and complex, which was actually taken from a dialogue between Rassimov & Fenech in Martino's first Giallo: The strange vice of Mrs. Wardh. A reflections of the twisted mind games at work in the film.

Then, the figure of the decadent writer, uninspired and bitter, who despises the others as well as himself, living in the memory of the past, in adoration with the incestuous souvenir of his mother - who from the start is described both as a Lady and a whore -, driving a somptuous 1930s black and deep blue BMW 327 and dedicated to making his wife miserable.

Also, the decaying manor, which precious furniture the writer is forced to sell as he's progressively running out of money, his mother's ancient dress secretly worn by a young black beauty tragically murdered a moment after, the masochistic wife whose life seems to be an endless tunnel of pain, and the beautiful cousin Floriana whose bisexual tendencies serve her materialistic purposes.

Not to forget Bruno Nicolai's great score, chamber music with a typical 70s erotic flavour, which distills a distinguished yet sleazy feeling to it all.

The inner violence and ambiguity of the character's relationships, and the colours, the style, the costumes, the sounds it's wrapped in make the atmosphere of this huis-clos completely suffocating.
Like a world about to collapse.

Despite being underrated, "Your vice is a locked room and only I have the key" is an original take on Giallo by Sergio Martino & Ernesto Gastaldi. Find it here.
And for the soundtrack, it's there.

A women's affair

2006-01-02T16:47:00.000+01:00

It is acknowledged that Edgar Poe's short novel "The black cat" was a source of inspiration for Martino/Gastaldi's Your vice is a locked room and only I have the key (1972).
However it must be said that the film was also strongly influenced by Henri-Georges Clouzot's chef-d'oeuvre Les Diaboliques (1955).

Both movies involve a twisted trio: a domestic tyran (Delassalle/Ruvigny), his wife with a weak condition (Christina/Irina) and a cold-blooded lover (Nicole/Floriana).
Both take place in a run-down school/manor which reinforces the feeling of a decadent atmosphere.
Both also build on a similar plot, where the two women team up to get rid of the evil man. But things are not what they seem, and the frontiers between good and evil are ever changing in the tension of a cynical role play.

Sergio Martino & Ernesto Gastaldi even 'cited' Clouzot directly in a few different scenes : the wife humiliated and forced to eat/drink something disgusting in public, a dead person's clothes delivered back by the dry-cleaner.
And above all the famous scene where the terrified wife hears Delassalle/Ruvigny's typewriter working when the man is supposed to be dead.
In the night, as the door frighteningly opens in a creepy sound on an empty room with the typewriter on the desk, the camera slowly enters and reveals what was written on the white pages which cover up the table. Somebody typed the same thing over and over: the name "Michel Delassalle" in 'les Diaboliques', and, as a if Gastaldi & Martino had wanted to pay a witty tribute to Clouzot, the word "Vendetta" (Revenge) in 'Your Vice'.

When you finally get to discover both films' twist endings, this idea of "vendetta" makes complete sense: indeed, in Your vice, one of the characters takes a revenge on what happened in Les Diaboliques.

Read more about Clouzot's "Les Diaboliques" here, and have a look at a few screenshots there. Henri-Georges Clouzot (1907-1977) is a great French director who deserves a closer look: read this article from "Senses of Cinema".

Films I talked about in December

2005-12-31T11:53:00.000+01:00

Solamente Nero (The Bloodstained Shadow) - 1978 - Antonio Bido

La Morte Accarezza a Mezzanotte (Death Walks at Midnight) - 1973 - Luciano Ercoli

Una Lucertola con la Pelle di Donna (A Lizard in a Woman's Skin) - 1971 - Lucio Fulci

See also "Films I talked about in November".

One image says it all

2005-12-28T12:29:00.000+01:00

Gialli's plots explanation or resolution often hides within one key image.

In "The bird with the crystal plumage", it's a painting - bought in an antique shop - which reflects the initial trauma experienced by the murderer.
"The bloodstained shadow" also revolves around a painting which depicts the terrible truth behind a scene the main character was a witness of when he was a child, and that he could not remember in details.

It's a photograph that reveals, when blown up several times, a murder was committed in Antonioni's "Blow-up". A similar treatment applied to a newspaper photograph (by the way, how unrealistic given the usual quality of pictures in papers!) unveils the secret behind the scorpion cuff links in "The case of the scorpion's tail".
We could also mention it's the re-cropping of a photograph which shows that what initially looked like an accident - a man falling under a train in a railway station - was indeed a murder in Argento's "The cat o'nine tails"...

Paintings or photographs, Giallo marks the victory of the visual and symbolic approach over the narrative, litterary explanations which used to prevail in "classic" thrillers up until the late 60s.
In this instance, it illustrates this genre's modernity, reflecting the movement towards the image-based society we all know now.

Doll rage

2005-12-21T18:43:00.000+01:00

It's fairly anecdotical. But ever since I saw The Bloodstained Shadow (Antonio Bido, 1978), the doll scene has stayed in a corner of my memory, as a sick visual idea to express blind and gratuitous violence.

We have here an apparently very "bourgeois" woman, who's hiding her monstruously difformed son at home, as we later find out. Their relationship is obviously perverse: under the pretext of maternal love he is her prisoner and stays locked in the house all day. Despite he's already an adult, she takes care of him as if he was a baby. He's even got a doll.

A lovely baby doll.
Which is tortured and dismembered before our very eyes when the woman, for obscure reasons, decides to punish her for having been naughty to her son, her 'baby'...
After this visually striking burst of rage, the doll is left mutilated on the floor. And we're left with that very uncomfortable feeling a child has just been tortured to death in front of us.

Like the rest of the film though, this scene is somewhat formulaic. As if it was trying to be a recipe for a giallo: dismembering a doll, that is gross.
Yet so efficient.

More from this blog on "The Bloodstained Shadow" here.

Edwige's rival

2005-12-15T14:50:00.000+01:00

Milan, 1973. To the melody of a sophisticated easy-listening tune, a beautiful young woman decidedly walks into the hall of a modern building and starts joking with the portier.
From the first second, we know that she will not be the usual Giallo heroine - fragile, scared and vulnerable.

As Gianni Ferrio's beautiful music theme goes on, a choir of singers reveals her name: Valentina.
Valentina is Susan Scott, aka Nieves Navarro. In "Death walks at midnight" (Luciano Ercoli, 1973), she introduces a new feminine figure in the genre: empowered, hot tempered and all but shy; she's the screaming queen with an attitude.
A very interesting feminist take on the Giallo heroine, perfectly symmetric to the usual Edwige Fenech part.

Valentina/Susan Scott is very much at the core of the film and definitely drives it from the start.
Not fully though: the first sequence shows her, a fashion model, being set up by her boyfriend in an experimental photoshoot on drugs - where she becomes the witness of a murder. While she thought the experiment would remain anonymous, the next day she finds herself on the cover of a tabloïd which headline reads: "Valentina under the effect of HDS".

Then she starts being very angry.

If "La Morte accarezza a Mezzanotte" is not a great giallo, it is certainly very sophisticated from a cinematographic point of view, and its score is one of the most interesting I've come accross, clearly contributing to the great aesthetics of the film.

1978

2005-12-13T12:13:00.000+01:00

A poster from the PCI (Italian Communist Party)
about Aldo Moro's kidnapping - Rome, 1978

A red Renault 4 parked via Caetani, Roma. 9th of May, 1978.
Inside the car's trunk, the lifeless body of Aldo Moro, President of Democrazia Cristiana (DC, the biggest Italian political party at the time).
Moro, kidnapped and murdered by the "Brigate Rosse" (The Red Brigades), a left-wing terrorist group which was very active in Italy's 1970s.

During the three months of his detention (from March the 16th to his death on May the 9th), Aldo Moro wrote dozens of letters, to fellow politicians or adversaries, to his friends and family, even the Pope. Writing to keep hope, writing to maintain the dialogue, writing to remain alive. Writing to open doors and break walls, he who was locked in a Roman flat's small room for weeks.

Writing to keep on doing politics in a paralyzed political sphere.

Through his letters, it's an amazing personality which shapes up before our very eyes: as death is getting closer everyday, he never surrenders, trying all possible means to stop the irreversible, demonstrating immense humanity, empathetic for the ones he loves, convincing with the politicians, confident yet scared; all his energy is focussed on getting the different parties involved to start a dialogue, to get to a compromise that would both save his life and demonstrate what the word "politics" really means.

In vain. The Red Brigades' blind ideology and the inflexible position adopted by the democratic parties, refusing to negotiate whatsoever, had already sentenced him to death from the start.
As much as the Red Brigades, it's Italy's complete political and social sclerosis which killed Aldo Moro in 1978.

Learn more about Aldo Moro here. His correspondence while in detention was recently published in France in an excellent book, that you can find there.

Aldo Moro's tragic fate gives even more strength to Aldo Lado's political allegory in his great giallo "Short Night of the Glass Dolls", where a man locked in a lifeless body ends up being buried alive. Read more from this blog here.

The sound of confusion

2005-12-04T17:44:00.000+01:00

Staging the soundtrack’s main theme within the film scenario itself was one of Lucio Fulci’s very interesting ideas in “A lizard in a woman’s skin”.

The theme, which is once again a wonderful one from Ennio Morricone, perfectly reflects the abyss of confusion in which Carol (Florinda Bolkan) is slowly sinking across the film.
As usual, the music is used as a recurring pattern. However, with one character it becomes a key element of the scenario: Inspector Corvin (Stanley Baker). Each time he appears in the screenplay, he is shown whistling the theme, in a fashion very reminiscent of Sergio Leone's western (where the characters are strongly identified by their musical theme).

This use of a musical pattern within the scenario is quite unusual in a Giallo. It is very interesting because it builds a link between the two characters on which the film will eventually close: Carol, who can't cope with her inner dilemma, as reflected in the main theme, and the inspector, who from the start, by whistling the very same melody, shows her he has already understood what's happening in her mind.

By this clever use of a simple musical device, Fulci makes it clear that the inspector's deduction technique is a more efficient tool than the psychoanalyst's skills to find the truth and read Carol's twisted mind.
Which means, in this otherwise irrational movie, it surprisingly sounds like the final say is left to rational thinking.

Una lucertola con la pelle di donna's soundtrack can be found here.
More from this blog about this film here and there.

Films I talked about in November

2005-11-30T14:46:00.000+01:00

La Lucertola con la Pelle di Donna (A Lizard in a Woman's skin) - 1971 - Lucio Fulci - 1 / 2

La Coda dello Scorpione (Case of the Scorpion's Tail) - 1972 - Sergio Martino

Rosemary's Baby - 1968 - Roman Polanski

See also "Films I talked about in October".

Scars

2005-11-29T00:13:00.000+01:00

"What are you doing?

- Painting."

When Fulci decides, in "A lizard in a woman's skin", to express his own vision of what painting is, unsurprisingly it ties back to his peculiar obsessions.

The brush becomes a knife.
The knife is plunged into red paint.
It is then thrown onto a white canvas.
When it hits the surface it looks like the canvas is wounded: it's bleeding.

What could look like action-painting is in fact the oldest form of body art: scarification.

Fulci's inner geography

2005-11-25T11:25:00.000+01:00

"La lucertola con la pelle di donna" (A lizard in a woman's skin - Lucio Fulci, 1971) is not a giallo.
It's a documentary on Fulci's twisted mind. Actually, a dive into both his mind and his body.

The early years spent by the director as a medical student left strong marks. The fascination for the body as an experimental object went to define Fulci's whole work.
And there's here more than a fair share of this obsession. From close ups on the knife striking the chest during the initial murder scene to the infamous eviscerated dogs sequence, of course Fulci's trademark is here. Physically. Viscerally.

But the body's inside is also very present on a symbolic level: tunnels, corridors, doors opening on dark rooms, spiral staircases draw the complex map of a threatening and surreal labyrinth Carol (Florinda Bolkan) gets trapped in across the film, where imagination and reality end up melting together.
The church scene for example, where Carol is chased by the hippy: the underground hide-and-seek game, where they're running across dark tunnels and overlapping arches, as if they were in a parallel dimension. And the massive church organ where Carol hides next, only to be discovered when the giant pipes start playing by accident, creating a scary symphony as she tries to escape the machinery.

Organs, pipes, underground tunnels and arches, the inner geography of a twisted body. And soul.

Lucio Fulci is a genre of its own. Read more here.

Milano's ambiguity

2005-11-17T13:09:00.000+01:00

I was in Milan this week.
Walking through the city's streets, around la piazza del Duomo, taking the so vintage underground... Because of all these 1970s Italian movies I'm watching, I guess my eyes are probably seeing a distorded reality and I was feeling like taking a walk through a movie set, more than visiting a 2005 city.

Milan lends itself to this cinematographic impression: the spectacular vertical and greyish architecture, the vast places, the yellow tram and its suspended wires above long and straight avenues, and also the little dark streets, the vintage pavement, the small shops still decorated with wooden walls and their crude neon lights. It all looks like time is only slowly making its way in, even though the city is agitated by its people's liveliness, this Italian talking which is like a song to foreign ears. There is an odd modernity to this atypical Italian city.

Indeed, in terms of urbanism and architecture, it feels more north-eastern european than anything else: dark and austere, yet very charming.
There's a peculiar vibe here, and I haven't decided yet whether it's a threatening or exciting one. Probably both. I love Milano's ambiguity.

Milan was extensively used in the "Poliziesco", this other genre which started just after Giallo. Less imaginative but even more strongly linked to the political and social context of the Italian 1970s.
A great site to learn more: Pollanet Squad.

La musica dello scorpione

2005-11-13T10:11:00.000+01:00

In the shadow of Morricone, Bruno Nicolai.
A discreet person, Nicolai (1926 - 1991) is essentially known for being Ennio Morricone's conductor, even though he was also a talented composer who demonstrated his skills throughout a number of film scores, among which quite a few gialli.

"La Coda dello Scorpione" (the case of the scorpion's tail - Sergio Martino - 1971) is one of Bruno Nicolai's very interesting soundtracks, as it's a musical journey into a very diversified mix of styles, from typical italian easy listening to more experimental and intricate tunes.

The main theme in particular is a fantastic musical support for the film's opening scene, where we follow a woman wearing a large red hat in the streets of London, as if we were litterally about to knock on her shoulder. The tune, which I feel was very much ahead of its time, sounds like a crossover between Morricone, Goblin and John Carpenter.
Morricone for the use of what sounds like a harpsichord as the main instrument, the backbone of the music.
Goblin for the scary synthetic sound which blossoms in a sinister way across the score.
And Carpenter for the simplicity, the economy of superfluous effects which gives the melody incredible power and sets up the strong tension within seconds.

Rarely has a soundtrack managed to convey such a strong threatening feeling in such a classy style. Well before Goblin or Carpenter themselves.

To hear more and buy this great soundtrack, just click here.

Young blood

2005-11-08T16:03:00.000+01:00

Terrifying film, Rosemary's baby (Roman Polanski - 1968).

Watching it a few days ago, I was stunned by its strength and its amazing capacity to drag you into the plot in an irresisitible manner. And there's this scene of Rosemary's dream, when she is raped by the Devil during an orgy of old satanic worshippers...

I could not help thinking Aldo Lado found here some inspiration for his own orgy scene with old people in his great giallo Short Night of the Glass Dolls (1971).
Both films seem to be carrying a similar message: old people need young blood to maintain or increase their power.

My God! That's almost a vampiric theme.

Read here an interesting analysis of Polanski's film.
And just for the anecdote, it's interesting noticing "Roman Castevet", the name of the sorcerer's son in the film, bears strange similitudes with "Roman" (Polanski) and "Cassavetes" (John).

Time-travelling on a jet

2005-11-06T00:36:00.000+01:00

Part of the charm of Giallo is that it is dated. Clearly attached to a specific time: the 1970s.

Even though its themes are quintessentially Italian (references to religion, family, the place of women...), Giallo's imagery highly draws on the 1970s' international style: fashion, design, music, everything is an almost perfect encapsulation of this period, which could explain its worldwide appeal and why it's so easy to relate to it more than 30 years down the line.

This is to me the "materialistic" dimension of Giallo: it puts at the forefront of its cinematography all the concrete signs of international modern living of the times.
This typical 1970s contemporaneity is best illustrated by the recurring presence of international travels in the scenarios, through an a posteriori naive fascination for planes and airports. For an obvious reason: international travelling was becoming more accessible and one of the most high-profile symbols of the modern western society: just remember the Boeing 747 mythology.

Countless gialli start or end or are structured by travels on glamorous planes, giving birth to a new figure: the stranger caught abroad in a twisted plot, allowing for multiple points of view on cultural interactions. This is best shown in films like "The girl who knew too much", "The bird with the crystal plumage", "The case of the scorpion tale" or "Short night of the glass dolls", just to name a few.

Perfectly embracing the 1970s' modernity and spreading violence into it like a virus, no surprise Giallo could only then disappear with this decade.

Read Gary Needham's interesting article about the figure of the stranger & post-colonialism here.

Films I talked about in October

2005-10-31T12:02:00.000+01:00

Sette orchidee macchiate di rosso (Seven blood stained orchids) - 1972 - Umberto Lenzi

Cosa avete fatto a Solange? (What have you done to Solange?) - 1972 - Massimo Dallamano - 1 / 2 / 3

Blow-Up - 1966 - Michelangelo Antonioni - 1 / 2

See also "Films I talked about in August & September"

Milk

2005-10-26T12:55:00.000+02:00

When Kathy Adams (Marina Malfati) heard her three cats crying in the kitchen just after she had given them some milk, she realised something wrong was going on.
Indeed, they sounded like desperate baby cries.
She was to find all three of them agonising on the kitchen floor a second later, poisoned by their own milk.

That disturbing scene which makes you feel uncomfortable, because of its clever ambiguous use of the cat's crying sound, is the only one worth noticing from Umberto Lenzi's "Seven Blood Stained Orchids" (1972). It is by the way reminiscent of the "milk glass" scene from Argento's "Cat o'nine tails" released the year before.

Apart from this, a very bland giallo to which Riz Ortolani manages to give some kind of pace, thanks to a nice jazz-soul score with hints of Morriconesque tonalities.

Back in utero

2005-10-24T12:31:00.000+02:00

For those who have seen the movie "What have you done to Solange?", you know how twisted and perverse the killer's method is.
And you probably also noticed that only one girl escapes this treatment: Elizabeth.
Elizabeth is killed as well. But she's the only girl to be drowned in her bath.

Even though the bathtub sequence is a classic in Giallo, this particular one carries in my opinion an interesting sense, considering the topics the film is dealing with:
Elizabeth, much like Solange, is a woman-child. But contrary to the latter and the other girls, she was a virgin, as we later find out. Because of this, she could not die the same way as the other victims - she was still "innocent".

And her death is visually very symbolic: seeing her in the bathtub water, it almost looks like she's floating into amniotic liquid.
Forever a child.

"Cosa avete fatto a Solange?" (Massimo Dallamano - 1972) can be found here.

Solange's silence

2005-10-18T11:47:00.000+02:00

Solange's secret is one she shared with thousands of women in Europe until the 1970s. These women were strangled by shame. They could not talk about their secret. Society would not let them anyway, as they were considered outlaws. These women had aborted.
This is the very serious issue "What have you done to Solange?" was built on back in 1972.

Living in Italy or in France, you only had two options: either leave the country to have a legal abortion in a hospital in the UK or the Netherlands. Or abort in clandestinity - which usually meant dreadful conditions, leaving women wounded forever or even killing them (on this particular point it is noticeable that Solange Beauregard is probably French and that the film takes place in England, shot by an Italian director).

Contrary to a lot of gialli, here the women are somehow empowered: only them have the answer to the question raised in the title. Men don't know or don't understand. It's a women's secret.
But they are the victims as well. They form a shadow society which members are tied together by a common psychological and physical suffering. Solange's pain left her muted for ever. Wounded in such a way that she will never become a real woman. And neither revolve to be a child again.

Worse, the film demontrates she suffers in vain: by taking a revenge on the women Solange was the victim of, the killer spreads the barbary even further. Dallamano even manages to underline the ambiguous position of the Church, questioning its role as in other gialli, by showing the murderer dressing up as a priest to gain his preys' trust and have them revealing their terrible secrets.

Silence, secrets, taboo are the true killers of this desperate movie.
In this instance, "Solange" is a highly political giallo: it was urging everybody to bring the abortion issue to light and debate it publicly.

In France, abortion was legalized in 1974. In Italy, in 1978.

More on "What have you done to Solange?" here.

Arms without a face

2005-10-17T12:08:00.000+02:00

Interestingly enough, the simple mention of black leather gloves and blades immediatly identifies the stereotypical Giallo killer.
Of course, there's nearly always a 'whodunnit' component to gialli. But when you think about it, knowing who the killer is never is the most interesting part.

How the killer will strike. With what perversity. In what fashion.
How stylishly he will strike. That is the interesting part.

Giallo killers have no face. They don't even wear a mask, or exhibit monstruous faces or use any specific device which would identify them as individuals. What we focus on is their hands, these black leather gloves holding sharp and shiny blades.
These arms are not a man's. They are the arms of Evil. And Evil has no face for it can strike from anywhere, using anybody's arms.

The Giallo killer figure, much more than a character, is actually very conceptual: a symbolic face of Evil.

Hamilton meets Lynch

2005-10-11T23:52:00.000+02:00

Part of the mysterious charm of "What have you done to Solange?" (Massimo Dallamano - 1972) is probably that it is a very elegant voyeur movie.

From the first seconds of the opening credits, where teenage girls are cycling through the countryside in an orange monochrome tone, we understand there is more to these images of innocence than meets the eye. And we want to know and see what it is.

Something terribly wrong floats in a gently erotic atmosphere, as if David Hamilton's and David Lynch's worlds had perfectly merged together to give birth to an evil kind of beauty. This is reinforced by Ennio Morricone's poisonous soundtrack, as sophisticated and aerial as ever.
It is a beauty which is irresistible, so innocent and perverse at the same time, so inaccessible... so close to its own tragic end.

This highly ambiguous shower scene perfectly encapsulates what this great giallo is: a twisted beauty you secretly watch through a keyhole.

More on "Solange" from this blog here.

The picture

2005-10-07T10:38:00.000+02:00

"The photographer in Blow Up, who is not a philosopher, wants to see things closer up. But it so happens that, by enlarging too far, the object itself decomposes and disappears. Hence there's a moment in which we grasp reality, but then the moment passes. This was in part of the meaning of Blow Up." - Michelangelo Antonioni.

At the core of Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni - 1966), there is this picture of a couple taken by a fashion photographer in a park.

Successively blowing it up, we find out that there's something going on which was invisible at first sight: a crime was perpetrated before our very eyes. Evidence is the shape of a body lying behind a tree, which we can see with the photographer when blowing up the picture even more...
Well at least it looks like the shape of a body. Because we zoomed in the picture so much it now looks like a collection of dots, blurring our vision.

In fact it's not a photograph any more, it's become an abstract painting and, as such, subject to multiple interpretations.
The same question over and over again: can you trust your eyes?

More on Blow-Up here. And an interesting in-depth analysis there.
Plus some more reflections from this blog about the eye-witness subject here.

The prey

2005-10-04T23:00:00.000+02:00

That scene.
That famous scene from Antonioni's "Blow-Up". Even if you haven't seen the film, you know about it: Thomas (David Hemmings), a fashion photographer, has a shooting session with Verushka, one of the 60's most famous models.

Watch it again. Listen to Herbie Hancock's laidback jazz. It sounds really cool. It looks very glamourous. Yes it almost feels like Thomas is making love to Verushka as they dance a sensual ballet together while he's taking pictures of her.

But look closer: isn't Verushka surrendering? Isn't Thomas taking over her in a very eager way? Hasn't she become his prey?
In this scene, Thomas shows his true colors. He is a predator. He is annihilating Verushka as he's forcing her onto the floor and stealing her very image.

It is not a love scene, it is a highly aesthetical crime scene.

More on Blow-Up, one of Giallo's greatest sources of influence, here.
If you have not seen this chef-d'oeuvre, then rush there. And find the soundtrack here.

Films I talked about in August & September

2005-09-30T20:19:00.000+02:00

Sei donne per l'assassino (Blood and Black Lace) - 1964 - Mario Bava - 1 / 2 / 3

Chi l'ha vista morire? (Who saw her die?) - 1972 - Aldo Lado

Solamente nero (The bloodstained shadow) - 1978 - Antonio Bido - 1 / 2

Lo strano vizio della Signora Wardh (The strange vice of Mrs. Wardh) - 1970 - Sergio Martino - 1 / 2

Blow-Up - 1966 - Michelangelo Antonioni

Perché quelle strane gocce di sangue sul corpo di Jennifer? (The Case of the Bloody Iris) - 1972 - Anthony Ascott (AKA Giuliano Carnimeo)

La ragazza che sapeva troppo (The girl who knew too much) - 1963 - Mario Bava

See also "Films I talked about in July".

Pandora's box (the handbag)

2005-09-29T00:29:00.000+02:00

Blood and Black Lace's cornerstone scene.
A young model was murdered near a fashion house she was working for.
Just before a fashion show, her diary is accidentally found by another model. She puts it into her handbag. Leaves the handbag on a table while she's on the catwalk.

From this instant, the handbag becomes everybody's main focus. And Bava starts an amazing sequence of eyesights: from a model to the bag, from another model to the bag, from the fashion house director to the bag, etc. The handbag is shot from every possible angle in a stunning and fast-paced camera dance.
By this very clever device, Mario Bava makes us understand the diary in the handbag contains the key to the whole story. Opening the bag and reading the diary would unveil the awful truth.

Of course the bag will disappear from our sight in a minute, stolen in the hubbub of the fashion show. And this theft will start the killing.

But just before it vanishes, Bava will beautifully focus on one of the models called Tao-Li, framed by both the camera and the handbag's handle.
Tao-Li will be the last to die.

Interlude

2005-09-21T00:21:00.000+02:00

While I'm away for a few days, enjoy the French poster of Bava's masterpiece. And take that opportunity to read the full blog if you haven't done so yet! See you soon.

The matrix

2005-09-15T00:30:00.000+02:00

Blood and Black Lace (Sei donne per l'assassino - Mario Bava, 1964) is not a movie.
It's an aesthetical performance.

No need for a scenario. Bava seems to obsessively focus on achieving one goal: shooting the most visually striking murder scenes ever. And this is what this film is all about: a collection of hyper-designed crimes. Within this context, the storyline becomes completely anecdotical and secondary.

In fact, the aesthetics of the crimes is the story. This, in my opinion, makes the movie totally experimental.

If The girl who knew too much, one year earlier, was laying out Giallo's fundamental themes - but still in a very Hitchcok-ian visual style -, Blood and Black Lace is probably the strongest statement of Giallo's visual codes ever made. The blades and black gloves. The use of lightning and colours. The amazing camera angles. The act of killing turned into a pictural work of art.
Closer to painting than cinema.

Every scene seems to be the mother of dozens of others that would later be shot by younger directors during Giallo's golden age - starting by the famous "bathtub scene" which would soon become one of the most classic exercises of the genre.

Aesthetically, Blood and Black Lace can be considered the Giallo matrix.

A lot of web resources on Bava and "Blood & Black Lace", most notably Kinoeye's article here, The Mario Bava Web page here and Images Journal's review there.

A serious problem of faith

2005-09-10T16:28:00.000+02:00

The 1970s will remain a dark decade for Italy. Shaken by scandals, corruption and terrorism, the country went through a deep and long-lasting crisis. The Italian society's fundamental pillars themselves were questioned and sometimes rejected.

Beyond the aesthetisation, beyond the twisted plots and the originality of the genre, the major earthquake of the Italian society's crisis is clearly showing through in Giallo.
On this particular subject, again there are strong links between two gialli I talked about previously: Who saw her die? (Aldo Lado - 1972) and The Bloodstained Shadow (Antonio Bido - 1978).

The first one was opening the decade by casting a dark light on Religion - an essential and untouchable element of Italian society -, through the terrifying example of a schizophrenic queer priest.
The second one was closing the 70s going even further in skepticism and nihilism, by frontally attacking both Religion and the ultimate Italian institution: La Famiglia (Family).
Both films share a similar disturbing ending symbolically picturing the inevitable fall of these institutions to their death.

By the time it reached the 80s, it looks like Italy had completely lost faith in itself.

More from this blog on these two films here, here and there, and a reflection about Italy's fall at the end of the 60s through the analysis of "Il Sorpasso" (The Easy Life, 1962 - Dino Risi).

Born too late

2005-09-05T18:41:00.000+02:00

In giallo, there seems to be a pre- and post-Deep Red era. As if after Argento's masterpiece, any other giallo would be made in vain.

Solamente Nero (The Bloodstained Shadow - Antonio Bido, 1978) clearly belongs to the post-Deep Red period.

Not that it's a bad giallo. Actually its opening scene is visually striking and catches you within seconds. The plot as well is rather good, as twisted and dark as it can get (and the doll dismembering scene alone is sick enough to make this film worth seeing).

Music is also a highlight, building angst in a very modern way. Composed by Stelvio Cipriani, it was nevertheless performed by Goblin for obscure money questions with their label, Cinevox.
And even this simple fact that the score comes from Goblin immediately puts this film in a "post-giallo golden age" period.

Bido's mise-en-scène is quite daring and imaginative, yet the overall feeling is that even he does not completely believe in what he's doing. All the right ingredients are here, but the plate does not taste as good as it should. Maybe it was served too late.

And this might well be the key: Antonio Bido made this film too late. As if he wanted to move back in time, to compensate for missed opportunities. As if it was a "remake".
The director knows this: in the DVD's extras, he first stresses the fact that he had some influence on Dario Argento's work... and finally regrets he did not shoot more giallos.

"Solamente Nero", the nostalgic giallo.

As an illustration, the location of this film strongly contributes to this strange feeling: read more here from this blog.
And get the film there, from Anchor Bay.

Duel of genres

2005-09-01T19:29:00.000+02:00

"The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh", a giallo which finds its resolution in a western.

This is another example of the great ideas Sergio Martino came up with for his very first giallo. As we're about to unveil the key to the story, the film brutally switches from typical giallo codes (black gloves, blades, darkness, mystery, light eroticism) to overt western elements (desert, guns, bright daylight, dust, close-ups on the eyes and... a duel).
Daring is the least I can say.

And we buy into it, as the photography remains consistent.
Martino has a fashion designer's eye. Every little detail or accessory seems to be thought of as if it was crucial to the beauty of the overall picture, just like in a fashion shoot. "Killing in style" has never been more appropriate: the flat's interior design, Julie and Carol's clothes and shopping session, Jean's threatening beauty, George's playboy apparel....

Even Nora Orlandi's great music never forgets to be elegant, whatever happens in the film. The score works like the final touch in many scenes - and capriciously disappears when you expect it to come back: like in this final western-like duel scene, for example.

Aesthetically mixing different styles together is the specificity of what the Italians call "filone": contrary to the genres - a very anglo-saxon concept which requires a clear and definitive definition of its components -, filone ignore boundaries, evolve over time and can borrow from each other without losing any of their strength. Just like rivers.

Read the very insightful analysis about genre vs filone by Gary Needham here.
More about this great giallo from this blog there.

The camera is the weapon.

2005-08-30T12:51:00.000+02:00

Forget one minute about the classic Giallo formula: black gloves, shining blades and blood-dripping.
Keep in mind the giallo's underlying themes: the eye-witness, violent seduction relationships between men and women, the pre-eminence of an aesthetical point of view...

When you look at it through this angle, then Blow-Up (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966) can be considered a giallo masterpiece. One which would have been completely re-shaped by Antonioni's minimalist eye, but featuring the very same ingredients.

Not to mention Herbie Hancock's score, which is an American musical view on Swingin' London, filmed by an Italian - Distanciation also is part of the Giallo.

In 1966, Antonioni probably laid out in Blow Up the key ideas that would become the genetic code of Giallo in the late 60s and early 70s.

Open space claustrophobia

2005-08-26T10:30:00.000+02:00

This is Carol (Cristina Airoldi).
She decided to go to a mysterious rendez-vous given by a threatening blackmailer to her best friend, Julie (Edwige Fenech).

It's sunset in a big Vienna park, near closing time. Carol has been waiting in the alleys and nobody came. She is alone. She, who is usually so lively and lighthearted, looks more and more un-at-ease. The large and empty alleys of the park she's walking through paradoxically give an oppressive and claustrophobic feeling to this moment.

She's on a vast lawn now. And suddenly she hears a noise, so she turns around to see where it came from. Nothing. All this empty space around - about to swallow her.

She's beautifully scared.
In a moment she'll be savagely assaulted.

This is a great crime scene from "Lo strano vizio della Signora Wardh" (The strange vice of Mrs. Wardh), by Sergio Martino (1970).
A very stylish film, both in terms of plot and image design.

Italian holidays

2005-08-07T13:15:00.000+02:00

Killing in Style will be back in September. See you then.

Playing "Clue" on ecstasy

2005-08-05T13:22:00.000+02:00

Listen to this.
It is the very morriconesque theme composed by Bruno Nicolai for Perché quelle strane gocce di sangue sul corpo di Jennifer? (Such a great title, AKA The Case of the Bloody Iris).
This picturesque soundtrack is one of the good aspects of this giallo I did not like that much.

But above all, what I found interesting about this movie is its construction around the same unique place, a modern and luxury condominium which happens to be hosting a gallery of freaks: the predatory lesbian neighbour and her strange violin-teacher father, the austere old lady hiding her hideous son in her flat, Jennifer's maniac sect-guru ex-husband, Jennifer's hysterical blonde flatmate and the typical ambiguous 911-Porsche-driver-playboy architect.

The unity in location (everything in the scenario always leads back to the building), the "overstylish" photography and these baroque characters turn this film into a rather amusing, high-on-drugs game of "Clue", where everybody can be successively suspected of being the murderer.

So watch this film as if you were playing the game and use your talents of deduction: this is a psychedelic whodunnit more than a giallo.

Some reviews acknowledge the good and bad aspects of this movie: DVD Maniacs' and Monsters at Play's, which stresses the pictural dimension of the film through its 70's imagery.
Bruno Nicolai's soundtrack is obviously worth a check.

Expressionism

2005-08-03T13:11:00.000+02:00

If gialli are a technicolor crime fresco, the first giallo, La ragazza che sapeva troppo, is definitely a late expressionist masterpiece. Clair obscur, intimidating shadows and meticulous plays with lights build a unique architecture of fear.

Mario Bava, as his black and white works testify, was a natural son of the 1920's Expressionism.

Mario Bava's Web Page has got an image gallery which shows good examples of the expressionist influences, visible even in later colour movies such as Blood & Black Lace.
More on La ragazza che sapeva troppo here and there.

Films I talked about in July

2005-07-31T23:49:00.000+02:00

Solamente nero (The Bloodstained Shadow) - 1978 - Antonio Bido

Il Sorpasso (The Easy Life / le Fanfaron) - 1962 - Dino Risi

Perché quelle strane gocce di sangue sul corpo di Jennifer (The Case of the Bloody Iris) - 1972 - Anthony Ascott (AKA Giuliano Carnimeo)

Chi l'ha vista morire? (Who saw her die?) - 1972 - Aldo Lado - 1 / 2

Cosa avete fatto a Solange? (What have you done to Solange?) - 1972 - Massimo Dallamano

La corta notte delle bambole di vetro (Short Night of the Glass Dolls) - 1971 - Aldo Lado

Il gatto a nove code (The Cat o'nine tails) - 1971 - Dario Argento

See also "Films I talked about in June".

Venice before and after the fall

2005-07-27T12:26:00.000+02:00

Despite having been shot by different directors and at a different period of time, both "Who Saw Her Die?" (1972) and "The Bloodstained Shadow" (1978), from the excellent Giallo Collection DVD set, show interesting symmetric links.

Example: Venice as a crucial element of the scenario.

In "Who saw her die?", Venice is like a stylish maze where the killer, the children and Franco play hide-and-seek. The settings are beautiful and neat, but the feeling is that it's a dangerous place where you can get lost. This is especially true when Franco's desperately looking for his daughter throughout the labyrinthic city. The architecture and topography are building mystery, tension, but somehow leaving some space for hope.

At the contrary, in "The Bloodstained Shadow", Venice looks like a ghost town: run-down, dirty, isolated and unappealing. A sad Venice. The opposite of anyone's dream picture of the city. Here the overall impression is a city which is lifeless and hopeless (in fact, Antonio Bido did not shoot his film in Venice, but in a nearby island called Murano, which is like a suburb of Venice). There's no doubt to have about the possibility of evil striking: it is already too late.

In one case Venice is a beautiful trap, in the other it is an abandoned cimetary.

This is just one example of the numerous connections between both films, on which we'll get back to in future posts.

Get the Giallo Collection DVD set here, and check out this picture of Murano's church - doesn't it ring a bell?
More on "Who saw her die?" in this blog here.

The end of la dolce vita

2005-07-26T15:21:00.000+02:00

In 1962, a Dino Risi film was released which is in my eyes an allegory on how Italy's golden years would end: tragically.
This film is Il Sorpasso, with Vittorio Gassman, Jean-Louis Trintignant and Catherine Spaak.

It can be considered as the first road-movie. Hopper himself admitted he got the inspiration for 1969's Easy Rider from Il Sorpasso.
Bruno (Gassman), an outspoken and lively dillettante, meets Roberto (Trintignant), a shy student, and they start a trip through Italy in a Lancia Aurelia B24 Spider.
The film is a point of view on the contradictions of post-war Italy. A fast and happy Italy: flashy sports cars overtaking antique bicycles on brand new roads, young people living a frenetic life on an upbeat jazz score (by Riz Ortolani), leaving the elder and their traditions behind.

Nothing seems to be able to calm this energy down.
Half way through the film though, our two travellers stop to look at a crash that has just happened between a car and a truck carrying fridges. At first it looks funny, with all the mess caused by the fridges which have fallen all over the road. But having a look around, they see a corpse on the macadam. The fun is over for an instant.
And then they take off again.
But at this moment we know the end will not be a happy one.

Il Sorpasso is an early glimpse at the end of "la dolce vita", on the ruins of which I believe the Giallo was born.

Il Sorpasso (AKA The easy life) is a great film you should not miss. It's difficult to find it but you can get it here (only available in France, unfortunately), and read French writer Marc-Edouard Nabe's article on Dino Risi there (in French).

Poor Edwige

2005-07-22T18:07:00.000+02:00

Edwige Fenech in "The Case of the Bloody Iris": the epitomy of the blonde girl concept as we know it today.

I apologise to the fans, but the certainly beautiful brunette offers quite an appalling spectacle in this rather mediocre giallo.
The Giallo genre is often criticised for showing women as objects, which is a comment I usually strongly disagree with. But in this particular case, I would be proven wrong.

Jennifer (Edwige Fenech) is all but a woman in control in this film. In fact she really goes through the story completely clueless, confused, sexy, screaming and driven by her emotions all the time. A caricature.

The film itself is alike: gross and formulaic. Highly predictable.
An embarrassing proof that sadly, sometimes, the Giallo genre was able to make a fool of itself.

Who directed it? Anthony Ascott. A fake name.

Having said that, there are good things about this film too, but I wanted to start by expressing my disappointment. Read also Michael Mackenzie's point of view in his "Giallo Collection" review.

Titles 2 (The bestiary)

2005-07-19T14:55:00.000+02:00

Italian giallo titles really sound nice to my ears:
L’uccello dalle piume di cristallo, Una lucertola con la pelle di Donna, Il gatto a nove code, Non si sevizia un paperino, Quattro mosche di velluto grigio, Il gatto dagli occhi di giada, La coda dello Scorpione, Sette scialli di seta gialla.

(The bird with the crystal plumage, A lizard in a woman’s skin, The cat o’nine tails, Don’t torture a duckling, Four flies on grey velvet, The Cat with the Jade Eyes, The case of the scorpion tail, Crimes of the black cat).

Cats, birds, scorpions, lizards, ducks, flies...

In the Middle-Age in Europe, the fear of the Devil being able to sneak into people's bodies led to the idea of the "beast within".

Being possessed, people would lose their judgement and spirituality and would act like animals - led by hunger, envy and rage.
Hence the Devil was often represented as an animal (cat, snake, goat...) or as a hybrid of human and animal.

This shades a new light on the highly symbolic and recurrent presence of animals within the vocabulary of giallo titles, which is a bestiary in itself.

Two interesting books study the relationship between the Devil and animals: "Une histoire du diable", by R. Muchembled (in French) and "The beast within: Animals in the Middle Ages", by J.E. Salisbury.
Read also a previous post about giallo titles.

Ripped-off innocence

2005-07-16T15:11:00.000+02:00

Despite "Who saw her die?" (Aldo Lado, 1972) not being its director's best movie, it is encapsulating in a sharp and strong manner what seems to me the quintessential idea of the giallo genre: the rip-off of innocence.
Lado builds on this idea on the razor's edge - in a very interesting because very ambiguous manner.

Three scenes illustrate this in a striking way.

First. A clear allusion to pedophilia when a friend of the family, left alone with the young Roberta, caresses her on the cheek. Nothing more happens. But the way Lado films it turn this moment into an uncomfortable episode for us, making us feel as if we were voyeurs more than viewers.

The second is when we see Roberta alive for the last time, through the eyes of her killer. She's facing us, with her childish, intimated look. A terribly innocent prey. The second after we brutally cut from the sight of her face to an unbearable close-up of a piece of meat hanging in a cold room. This visually striking short-cut better expresses the violence of what's going to happen than any detailed crime-scene.

The last one, and maybe the most significant, is a seemingly light-hearted scene where we see children playing basket-ball in what looks like an old Venice church. In a moment Franco (George Lazenby, who's playing Roberta's father) will rush in this safe place, looking desperately for his daughter who's just disappeared, hoping for relief: maybe she's just here, playing basket ball with the others? No, she's not.

How could we think a second that this scene - children at play under the protection of God - could be such a strong symbol of a terrible and pervert rape of innocence?

"Monsters At Play" features an interesting review of this movie.

Music as a film's DNA

2005-07-11T12:24:00.000+02:00

In jazz, all great musicians have a unique style that one can recognise just by listening to a few notes of a tune: Miles Davis, Stan Getz, Bill Evans, Wayne Shorter or Herbie Hancock... They've got a signature.

It's the same for Ennio Morricone. His style is absolutely unique and immediately recognisable in a million. Despite him responsible for more than 400 scores in the 60s - 70s, each of them is very faithful to the very idea of the film it was composed for, reflecting it in an effortless manner.

Listen to a score from Morricone: it first sounds very orchestral, very rich and complex. Now listen to it more carefully, you'll soon discover that its backbone is in fact extremely simple: usually 3 or 4 core chromatic notes on which Ennio Morricone builds endless variations, which unveil their amazingly evocative power.
These 3 or 4 key notes manage, as if by magic, to unlock the film's core idea and its singular atmosphere. Images immediately spring to mind. Whether you've seen the movie or not, they open the theatre for you.

Morricone's unique combinations of notes are like the DNA of the films they were composed for.

A concrete example is the role of the music in "Short night of the glass dolls", which I talked about here.
More from this blog about Morricone here and about his favourite female singer Edda dell'Orso there.

For the giallo amateur, the "Mondo Morricone" compilations are an absolute must-have: Mondo Morricone, More Mondo Morricone and Molto Mondo Morricone.

An odd coincidence

2005-07-08T18:06:00.000+02:00

I already talked about kinoeye.com, which is a very knowledgeable website when it comes to in-depth analysis of giallo films.
Steven Jay Schneider is a guest-editor for this site and has contributed to insightful articles about Dario Argento.

Donald Cammell - Self Portrait

But, as google made me find out, Steven also wrote in 2001 an article on Donald Cammell, a British director of aesthetical thrillers, which happens to be called: "Killing in Style: The Aestheticization of Violence in Donald Cammell's White of the Eye"

Well that's an odd coincidence of titles.
Having read it, I can tell there's a reason for this: Steven seems to be interested in how Cammell was trying to elevate violence to an art form in his films, which is very close to what I am trying to comment on in gialli. Read on, Steven's point of view is obviously very interesting for the giallo amateur.

What have you thought of Solange?

2005-07-07T20:26:00.000+02:00

Liam, who is a professor at the University of New Mexico, contacted me yesterday. He is teaching a course in Giallo cinema (indeed this sounds interesting), and would like to gather information about Massimo Dallamano's "What have you done to Solange?" for a lecture next week.

If some of you have already investigated this giallo, or if you have seen a good analysis of it on the web, please post a comment on this article or contact me by email, I will be happy passing your precious point of view to him.

Many thanks in advance.

Buried alive

2005-07-06T11:45:00.000+02:00

"La corta notte delle bambole di vetro" can be considered as the first political giallo.

Most reviews stress the fact that it's a vibrant allegory about repression in communist dictatorships. It is probably true considering the very obvious (almost "in-your-face") symbols Aldo Lado is using:
it is set in Prague (just after the "Prague Spring" in 1968) and tells the story of how Gregory Moore, an American journalist, and his girlfriend called Mira Svoboda - which means "freedom" in Russian -, are becoming preys of a secret society.

But in the Anchor Bay DVD, there's an interview of Lado where he says the idea actually came out of the Italian news: a judge who was getting close to unveil political scandals was suddenly transferred to some remote town in the south of Italy in order not to cause any trouble.

When you become a threat to the power in place, you are literally buried alive.
This idea just reveals the extreme tensions existing in Italian society and politics in the early 70s.

More about "Short night of the glass dolls" from this blog here, and a good article about it from braineater.com there.

Ears can see what eyes don't

2005-07-04T00:03:00.000+02:00

Dario Argento often says that "The cat o' nine tails" is one of his least favourite movies.
Well I like it.
One reason for this is that again it is playing with the conventions of the genre:
the eye-witness is a key element of a number of giallos.

And here, the plot starts when blind crosswords-inventor Franco Arno (Karl Malden) overhears a conversation between two people one night. It happens that his "eyes" are those of a little girl who lives with him and describes him the scene he's listening to.

Later on, in a crucial and breathtaking scene, Argento ironically puts Carlo Giordano, a journalist who's partnering with our blind hero in his investigations, in a situation where he's litterally blinded as he's locked inside a tomb and all the action is happening outside, between blind Karl Malden and the murderer. Giordano - and we - can only hear this scene, which makes the suspense reach a peak.

This clever twist on giallo's rules was also present in "The bird with the crystal plumage": what does lead the hero to the murderer? Certainly not what he's seen at the beginning of the film, but a very peculiar noise recorded on a tape...

Two insighful links to check out about "Il gatto a nove code" : kinoeye's article and the images website's.

Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi ochi

2005-07-03T19:37:00.000+02:00

Mario Giacomelli 1966-68

"Death will come and it will have your eyes –
this death that is always with us
from morning till night, awake,
dull, like an old remorse,
or an absurd vice. Your eyes
will be a vain word
an unuttered scream, a silence.
So you see them each morning
when you lean to look at yourself
in the mirror. O dear hope,
that day we, too, will know
that you are life and nothingness.

For everyone death has a look.
Death will come and it will have your eyes.
It will be like giving up a vice,
like seeing in the mirror
a dead face re-emerge,
like listening to a closed lip.
We shall descend into the whirlpool dumb."

Cesare Pavese - 22 March 1950

This week I visited the Estorick Collection's current exhibition in London: "Viewpoints - Italy in black and white". It notably shows work from Italian photographer Mario Giacomelli, and there's his serie called "Death will come and it will have your eyes", which title intrigued me (don't you think it is reminiscent of giallo titles?).
The pictures were taken in an old people hospital and are particularly poignant and disturbing. The title itself actually comes from Cesare Pavese's poem that you can read above, which is specially moving too.

"Death will come and it will have our eyes", what a thought-provoking idea.

An interesting article about Mario Giacomelli's work. And more pictures from him.

Films I talked about in June

2005-06-30T23:19:00.000+02:00

L'Assoluto Naturale (She and He) - 1969 - Mauro Bolignini

Rear Window - 1954 - Alfred Hitchcock

La Corta Notte delle Bambole di Vetro (Short Night of the Glass Dolls) - 1971 - Aldo Lado

L'Uccello dalle piume di cristallo (The Bird with the Crystal Plumage) - 1970 - Dario Argento - 1 / 2

Profondo Rosso (Deep Red) - 1975 - Dario Argento

La Ragazza che sapeva Troppo (The Evil Eye) - 1963 - Mario Bava - 1 / 2 / 3

Le Casse (The Burglars) - 1971 - Henri Verneuil

The Giallo amateur's tool

2005-06-30T15:29:00.000+02:00

If you're interested in giallo, then you can't miss this book, written by Adrian Luther Smith and published in 1999. Gary Needham, who wrote the very good "An introduction to the Italian giallo", participated in its conception.

It's comprehensively reviewing the films that can be related to the genre, and even more (as I could find quite a few which have more than a distant link with giallo).
It's very resourceful, of course, as it provides you with the right shopping-list of films you must see.

But there are two things which I don't agree with:

One is its subtitle "the definitive guide to Italian sex and horror movies".
Giallo is not a sex or a horror cinema genre. Yes it's talking about fears, yes it's talking about perversion. But it is so restrictive to put it into these two very limited categories. The very reason it's called Giallo is because it is a genre in itself: this is the whole challenge of its definition, which can't be this basic. And this is one of the key purposes of this blog.
In my opinion, Michelangelo Antonioni's "Blow up" is more of a quintessential giallo than Lucio Fulci's "The New York Ripper".

And the second thing is that despite giallo being a highly aesthetic genre, the whole graphic design of this book is very poor, using a lot of cheap & tacky VHS covers from the 80s, when the initial artworks of the posters were so often graphically very rich and elegant, great examples of 60s and 70s design. Even the inside template is very mediocre, cluttered and uninviting to the eye.

All in all, great wine, ugly bottle. Giallo deserves to stand out of the z-movie imagery.

Find the book here at amazon.co.uk.

The best score ever.

2005-06-27T01:01:00.000+02:00

There's a film which I've never seen, which I'm not sure is really good, which is not a giallo but that I could not help talking about.
It's called "L'Assoluto Naturale" (1969) and features a famous actress of this time : Sylva Koscina. Apparently she spends most of the film not wearing too much clothing - there's an obscure japanese site which shows a vintage fotonovela.

But here are the two great things about it:

There's an Iso Griffo (see picture above), which is one of the most intriguing and rare Italian cars produced - designed by Bertone and engineered by Chevrolet.

And most of all, the score from Ennio Morricone is probably my all time favourite: a simple melody of three notes which epitomises the feeling of nostalgia. It is so evocative I ended up imagining my own personal version of "L'Assoluto Naturale" and turned it into a beautiful film. You can find this chef-d'oeuvre here.

If you've seen this movie or if you have a copy of it, please contact me.

What have you seen?

2005-06-27T00:27:00.000+02:00

Last week on French TV, Hitchcock's "Rear window" (1954) was broadcasted. I've seen it a few times now, as they broadcast it every now and then: it's a classic, isn't it?

Yet it's the first time I realise it's building on a theme familiar to the giallo amateur : the idea of the eye-witness' credibility.

One of giallo's central questions : can you believe what you've seen? Can you trust your eyes?
A question we'll get back to more often than we think.

(Remember, it's already there in "The bird with the crystal plumage")

Somewhere between life and death

2005-06-22T19:22:00.000+02:00

"La corta notte delle bambole di vetro" (Short night of the glass dolls) is a unique giallo. In fact it's nearly not a giallo, according to the definition most people agree on when it comes to talking about this genre : no black-gloves-stabber is to be found here.

It opens on the apparently lifeless body of Gregory Moore, an American journalist, found in a Prague's park. He is actually in catalepsy, but no one seems to notice. As he's transferred to a morgue, he recalls the chain of events which led to his unfortunate situation.

Aldo Lado's great idea is that he applied Moore's condition to every element of the film. It is the whole film which is located somewhere between life and death. And this is what gives it its unique melancholic atmosphere.

One scene that struck me.
In one of the numerous flashbacks, Moore recalls the moments he spent with the beautiful Mira in Prague. They look madly in love with each other, and as they're taking a walk through the city, we follow them into a cimetery where they're playing between the graves, apparently not paying much attention to this sinister place.
Morricone's superb and haunting score, which sounds like being suspended between two worlds, is reinforcing the feeling of despair conveyed by this scene : we know that those two have already stepped on the land of the dead, and that their lives will be sucked away soon.

The score can be found at Movie Grooves, and the film is available from Anchor Bay entertainment.
Also read "Buried alive" on this blog.