Images for the masses

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.

Pandora's box (the handbag)

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

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

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.