Quotes

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.

Giallo is not gothic

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.

What is the police doing?

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.

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.

Expressionism

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.

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.

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.

Primal fear

My favourite scene in "La ragazza che sapeva troppo", that Mario Bava obviously named after Hitchcock's famous "Man who knew too much".
Nora Davis is alone in a Rome flat, close to the place where she thinks she saw a murder at the very beginning of the film.
It's dark, it's windy and the windows of the flat are turned into a scary Chinese shadows theatre.

Back to primal, childish fears, where it's your imagination which scares you.
Nothing's happening just now. But it's coming.


Know more about "The girl who knew too much" by reading Michael McKenzie's very interesting review here, and the article on "The Mario Bava web page".

It comes from the books (2)

The film which is unanimously considered as the first Giallo opens with a young American lady reading a giallo book on her plane to Rome.
It is Mario Bava's "La ragazza che sapeva troppo" (The girl who knew too much - 1963).

And that detail is so symbolic it can only be a statement : the giallo as a cinema genre was born.