Giallo!

Alexia Kannas

Description

Italian giallo films have a peculiar allure. Taking their name from the Italian for "yellow"— reflecting the covers of pulp crime novels—these genre movies were principally produced between 1960 and the late 1970s. These cinematic hybrids of crime, horror, and detection are characterized by elaborate set-piece murders, lurid aesthetics, and experimental soundtracks. Using critical frameworks drawn from genre theory, reception studies, and cultural studies, Giallo! traces this historically marginalized genre's journey from Italian cinemas to the global cult-film canon. Through close textual analysis of films including The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963), Blood and Black Lace (1964), The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), The Black Belly of the Tarantula (1971), and The Case of the Bloody Iris (1972), Alexia Kannas considers the rendering of urban space in the giallo and how it expresses a complex and unsettling critique of late modernity.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. The Problem of Genre

2. The Cultification of the Italian Giallo

3. No Place like Home: The Late-Modern City

4. Those Who Wait: Tourists, Detectives, and Urban Experience in the Giallo City

5. The Most Unnatural Kind of Death

Conclusion

Works Cited
Filmography
Index

Sujets

• Film
• My Last Duchess
• Cinema
• History of film
• Italy
• Visual culture
• Película fotográfica

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 01 novembre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438480343
• Langue: English

Extrait

Giallo!

Giallo!
Genre, Modernity, and Detection in Italian Horror Cinemas

Alexia Kannas
Cover image courtesy of Photofest. Reprinted with permission.
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2020 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Name: Kannas, Alexia, author.
Title: Giallo! : genre, modernity, and detection in Italian horror cinema / Alexia Kannas.
Description: Albany : State University of New York Press, [2020] | Series: SUNY series, horizons of cinema | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020018284 | ISBN 9781438480336 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781438480343 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Detective and mystery films—Italy—History and criticism. | Horror films—Italy—History and criticism. | Motion pictures—Italy—History—20th century.
Classification: LCC PN1995.9.D4 K29 2020 | DDC 791.43/61640945—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020018284
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Christos, who gave me my first Italian horror film, and the wrinkle in my brow.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 The Problem of Genre
2 The Cultification of the Italian Giallo
3 No Place like Home: The Late-Modern City
4 Those Who Wait: Tourists, Detectives, and Urban Experience in the Giallo City
5 The Most Unnatural Kind of Death
Conclusion
Works Cited
Filmography
Index
List of Illustrations
1.1 Fashion-house model Nicole (Ariana Gorini) poses with velvet-bound mannequins in Mario Bava’s Blood and Black Lace (1964). Digital frame enlargement.
1.2 Industrial scientist Silvia Hacherman (Mimsy Farmer) attends a séance in Francesco Barilli’s The Perfume of the Lady in Black (1974). Digital frame enlargement.
2.1 VHS cover sleeve of Fletcher Video’s precertification release of Dario Argento’s Deep Red (1975), rated X. Digital scan.
2.2 Uncut sexploitation, Charles Manson figurines and Italian horror on video: mail order advertisements on page 75 of Psychotronic Video , number 18, in 1994. Digital scan.
2.3 Lost masterpiece recovered: cover art for a 2012 release of Dario Argento’s Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1971) from Shameless Screen Entertainment.
2.4 Death Waltz Recording Company’s 2017 vinyl release of composer Bruno Nicolai’s lush score for The Case of the Scorpion’s Tail (Sergio Martino, 1971). Digital scan.
3.1 Journalist Andrea (Franco Nero) descends one of many spiral staircases in Luigi Bazzoni’s The Fifth Cord (1971). Digital frame enlargement.
3.2 Tilde (Mirella D’Angelo) catches a glimpse of her murderer in Tenebrae (Dario Argento, 1982). Digital frame enlargement. 81
4.1 Roman local Marcello (John Saxon) shows American tourist Nora (Letícia Román) the beauty of the eternal city in Mario Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963). Digital frame enlargement.
4.2 Nora (Letícia Román) tries to reconcile Rome’s contradictory identities in The Girl Who Knew Too Much (Mario Bava, 1963). Digital frame enlargement.
4.3 Foreigner Sam Dalmas (Tony Musante) is caught off guard while strolling in Rome in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (Dario Argento, 1970). Digital frame enlargement.
4.4 The tourist becomes the eyewitness in The Girl Who Knew Too Much (Mario Bava, 1963). Digital frame enlargement.
5.1 Eyewitness by design: Opera singer Betty (Christina Marsillach) is bound, gagged, and forced to watch the brutal set-piece murders in Dario Argento’s Opera (1987). Digital frame enlargement.
5.2 Reporter Gregory Moore (Jean Sorel) plays detective in Aldo Lado’s Short Night of Glass Dolls (1971). Digital frame enlargement.
5.3 Who was where, when? Marie’s (Edwidge Fenech) friends discover her corpse in Mario Bava’s Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970). Digital frame enlargement.
Acknowledgments
For the encouragement, support, and the inspiration they have offered, I would like to thank Melody Ellis, Ramon Lopez Castallano, Amy Clarke, Martin Evans, Adele Daniele, Bruce Milne, Craig Frost, Meg Johnston, Alexandra Heller-Nicholas, Stuart Richards, and Donna McRae.
This book began life as a PhD research project undertaken at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, where I was fortunate to receive a teaching and research scholarship in the School of English, Communications, and Performance Studies. The project took longer than it should have, but it would never have been completed without the guidance of my supervisors Constantine Verevis, Adrian Martin, and Deane Williams; each made vital contributions to this work and I thank them for their ongoing support. Thanks also to Therese Davis, who provided invaluable advice during various stages of my candidature. To Susanna Scarparo and John Gregory: it was in your unit ‘Italy on Film’ that the seed for this project was sown—thank you.
During my candidature, I was fortunate to connect with a group of scholars on the other side of the world who I quickly recognized as “my people.” Cult film scholar-stars Ernest Mathijs, Russ Hunter, Kate Egan, Peter Hutchings, and Jamie Sexton enriched my thinking and approach to this material via their own excellent work, as well as the detailed, provocative, and encouraging feedback they provided. Thanks also to the ever-inspiring Maša Peče.
The project took its current shape while I taught courses in cinema studies and critical writing in the School of Media and Communications at RMIT University. My thanks go to Lisa French, Patrick Kelly, Stayci Taylor, Adrian Danks, Stephen Gaunson, Peter Kemp, Smiljana Glisovic, and Djoymi Baker for their support and their friendship. Thank you also to my wonderful students who continually remind me how important it is to watch, to listen, and to write. I also gratefully acknowledge the stellar work of the staff at the AFI Research Collection: Olympia Szilagyi, Alex Gionfreddo, and Cathie Gillam, thank you for your wonderful support and enthusiasm.
In producing this book, I have had the great privilege of working with a scholar whose writing has long been a source of inspiration: thanks to my brilliant editor Murray Pomerance, whose intellectual generosity and patience know no bounds. Thanks also to Rafael Chaiken, Eileen Nizer, Michael Campochiaro, Gordon Marce, and the rest of the team at State University of New York Press.
And to Loris, James, Madeleine, Quincy, and Ryan: thank you for all your patience and love.
An earlier version of chapter 1, “ The Problem of Genre ,” appeared in volume 5, number 2 of the Journal of Italian Cinema and Media Studies under the title “All the Colours of the Dark: Film Genre and the Italian Giallo .”
Introduction
F RENCH WRITER/DIRECTOR DUO Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani’s 2009 debut feature, Amer , imagines three key moments in its protagonist’s life. The first part of the film introduces us to a child named Ana (Cassandra Foret) as she wanders the dark halls of her family’s hilltop mansion on the Côte d’Azur. In one room, she encounters the corpse of an elderly man, from which she takes a gold pocket watch; afterwards, she imagines him awakening and regarding her with a horrific stare. Peering into another room further down the hall, she glimpses her parents having passionate sex. The film then leaps forward in time and we find that Ana (Charlotte Eugene-Guibbaud) is now a teenager, shopping with her mother in their village. The psychosexual tone established through Ana’s witnessing of the primal scene in the first section of the film takes on a heightened potency now; as she saunters through the streets, her dress moving in the breeze, her nubile sexuality is put on display for the men of the village and Ana plays with this new dynamic system of looks she finds herself at the center of. In the third section of the film, the threat of Amer ’s dark undercurrent materializes as a masked killer when Ana (Marie Bos) returns to her childhood home. The distinct three-part structure aside, Amer (which is French for “bitter”) plays like a voyeuristic fever-dream, with almost no dialogue, sweeping lapses in time and close-ups that fetishistically fragment space and the body.
Most English-language reviews of Amer mention that Cattet and Forzani envisioned their film as an homage to the Italian popular film genre known as giallo . Stephen Holden’s unfavorable review in the New York Times , for instance, calls the film “a surreal cinematic tone poem that pays slavering homage to Italian giallo horror films of the 1970s” (10). Nigel Andrews at the Financial Times elaborates on the giallo influence, writing that Amer “is intended as a homage to the Italian, mostly city-set giallo films of the 1960s and 1970s—tales of murder and detection influenced by opera and grand guignol” (11). Jamie Dunn at The Skinny also foregrounds the stylization of the film in his review, calling it “a banquet of baroque imagery and kaleidoscopic colour.” In his more nuanced reading of the film’s multivalent relationship to its Italian genre lineage, Anton Bitel, in Sight and Sound , explains that
Amer is a surrealist homage to the thematic preoccupations, vis