The digging machine

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).

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.

One image says it all

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.

The picture

"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.

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.

The camera is the weapon.

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.

Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi ochi

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.

What have you seen?

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")

Behind the mirror

Earlier on, I talked about how Mario Bava played with darkness and shadows to instill primal fear in "La ragazza que sapeva troppo".

This was an interesting way of building on the "classic" model of the crime scene : it always happens in the dark. Darkness means fear, danger, violence, crime. In the darkness reality is blurred and obscured, faces are out of sight, threat can come from anywhere. Darkness makes you feel insecure because you can't see and that makes everything possible, even the worst.
Safety is back only when the lights are turned on again, or when the day is back.

In a crucial scene from "The bird with the crystal plumage", Dario Argento turns this classic model upside down.

Look at this picture: this modern art gallery is the crime scene.
Yet there's a frame. There are large glass doors. The room is brightly lit. The dominant colour is white. Every single detail is clear and visible. It actually feels like the only safe place in an empty and dark street at night where Sam Dalmas, the main character, is walking to go home.

The moment after he will be the eye-witness of a brutal attack involving a mysterious man dressed up in black and a beautiful young woman in white in this very gallery.
He will be able to see, but unable to do anything as he's trapped between the two glass doors which have been locked.

This fascinating inversion is at the core of the movie, and will later be referred to in many occasions throughout the scenario, as Sam Dalmas keeps on thinking there was "something wrong about it". How could there be something wrong when everything was apparently so obvious and visible?

Probably because it happened behind the mirror.

You can watch a slideshow of this scene on the excellent darkdreams.org website, dedicated to Dario Argento (in the film reviews section).
More on this film from this blog there.

Alfred Argento / Dario Hitchcock

1958


1975


There are connections between Alfred Hitchcock and Dario Argento. These two posters speak for themselves (on top of that I think the Profondo Rosso artwork is simply stunning - even better than the one it was inspired by).

Another connection was the directors' shared taste for making appearances in their own films.
And of course an incredible talent for dramatising violence in a very graphic manner.

The fascinating aesthetics power of violence, again.

Imagination not reality

Many of the giallo posters were not made out of photographs, but of drawings.
Most of the time extremely graphic and imaginative layouts.

These posters were, along with the title, already conveying a story in themselves.

What killing in style is all about.

I got to discover the Giallo genre through music.

Before I even knew what this very unique Italian cinema genre existed, I was already listening to these amazing scores composed by Ennio Morricone & the likes, from the end of the 60's to the late 70's.



So I actually embraced the Giallo genre with my imagination, just listening to the music and letting the images come by themselves. And these images were all conveying an amazing feeling of ambiguous atmosphere and utterly sophisticated esthetics. Just like the music.

This is when I became curious about actually watching the images that the music I loved was supposed to accompany. But it took me a while to get to this stage. Probably more than 10 years. I imagined a lot of movies before I started confronting my vision to reality. With the fear that it could be disappointing somehow.

So I started only very recently digging into the genre, with the great help of a lot of DVD re-edition happening these days. And soon found out that yes, reality could be very disappointing when you look at the plethoric production of CineCitta during this 60-70s period. A lot of crap movies often with good scores (and bad as well).

However, a significant number of movies do encapsulate perfectly what I had imagined.
Some genuine gems within a chaotic and heterogeneous production.

These films and their music are what I'd like to have a chat with you about. This is the aim of the "Killing in Style" blog.

(I first started to look for a Giallo blog on the web, but most of them appear to be in Italian, which I'm not this familiar with...)