Into Fulci

"[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.

The sound of confusion

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.

Scars

"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

"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.

Titles 2 (The bestiary)

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.