Giallo!

Genre, Modernity, and Detection in Italian Horror Cinema

Alexia Kannas

• Publisher: SUNY Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781438480343
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

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.

1

The Problem of Genre

IN 1817, SCOTTISH PHYSICIST SIR David Brewster patented an instrument invented to help educate observers in the basics of optics; he called it the kaleidoscope. The word is derived from the Greek καλός (beautiful), είδος (form), and σκόπιο (to see; tool for examination), to denote something like “an observer of beautiful forms.” A handful of small transparent colored objects, such as glass beads, are transformed by light and the cylindrical toy’s internal arrangement of mirrors to produce what Tom Gunning has called “a nearly infinite array of shifting symmetrical visual patterns, quite unrelated to … any claim of typicality” (Gunning 32). The saturated jewel-tones of patterns typically produced by the kaleidoscope recall the transparent, luminous palette of the stained glass window—and, for me, the opening credits of Italian director Mario Bava’s 1964 film Blood and Black Lace.

This film’s opening encapsulates so much of Italian giallo cinema’s peculiar allure. The sequence’s color palette transports the viewer at once to the dark world of the stylized mise-en-scène typical of the giallo; there are beguiling compositions that bathe the character’s faces in eerie washes of deep rose or moss green as they pose, mannequin-like, with actual mannequins of deep red velvet who wear shiny black wigs. Bava uses the opening sequence vignette as a formal device to playfully introduce the forthcoming mystery’s characters, but also to foreground the film’s aggressive stylization from the moment it begins. Frozen in deliberate configurations of body and body-double, the characters and mannequins are arranged among the skeletal effigies of dressmaker’s models in green, red, and blue, or beneath the abstract glitter of an out-of-focus chandelier, lit in twinkling chartreuse.

Figure 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.

Confronted with the opening scene of this film that is regularly cited as one of the earliest examples of cinematic giallo, one begins collecting clues to arrange a system of expectation and hypothesis. Standing in the dark with their strangely lit faces expressing malice, naivety, or guilt, the characters appear to inhabit a baroquely ornamented rendering of the gothic horror film. But the vignette construction cuts through this moodiness; these characters tangled in what could be a murder-mystery have all the fullness of a playing card from the whodunit board game Cluedo, and the deliberate staging of their wooden poses create a distinct impression of self-consciousness. At the same time, there is something that very nearly overwhelms both these generic impressions; it is as if the film’s style is leaking out, staining the surface of the film, which is perpetually threatening to explode in jewel-toned patterns. Like the first time you peer through that little hole in the end of a kaleidoscope, experiencing the opening sequence of Blood and Black Lace is utterly intoxicating.

Although the viewer new to giallo films may not yet recognize it as such, the peculiar, intriguing tone of this opening sequence is the ambience of the giallo world beginning to materialize: a world of crime, mystery, detection—and of madness, paranoia, alienation, and operatic violence. And, in its opening sequence, Blood and Black Lace offers us a number of clues that lead to mysteries far greater than those that occupy this single film’s narrative. What is this strange, dark world that feels familiar yet antipodal all at once? How do we hold the ever-shifting image of it in our hands long enough to be able to trace its topography? If, as Rick Altman leads us to believe, “the entire history of genre theory has trained us to expect critics to start with a predefined genre and corpus” (Film/Genre 24), a consideration of the giallo as genre will require us to think through a group of films that have consistently eluded that very history. The questions raised by this complex problem are those that preoccupy this chapter. In what way do films called giallo belong to a distinct group that generates meaning through this membership? How do we begin to come to terms with the complexity of this set of films that seems to endlessly resist the manageable definitions that genre criticism has sought to achieve, time and time again? Taking such difficulties into account, is the giallo to be considered a genre at all?

The giallo makes a fascinating case study for genre theory for a number of reasons. Firstly, like most non-Hollywood genres, its existence has been almost entirely overlooked in the history of genre criticism. As a number of critics, including Dimitris Eleftheriotis and Alan Williams, have noted, genre theorists have historically turned, and returned, to the genre film output of Hollywood—and especially the western—in their attempts to decode the ways in which film genre operates. In fact, so great is the wealth of literature on the American genre film that one could be deceived into believing that the concept of film genre is entirely a Hollywood phenomenon. As Williams points out as early as 1984, however, to progress the work of genre criticism and to assert its validity in contemporary film studies, we need to begin to consider manifestations of film genre outside of Hollywood: “Crucially, we need to get out of the United States. Contrary to the impression given by books like [Thomas] Schatz’s, ‘genre’ is not exclusively or even primarily a Hollywood phenomenon” (124).

The surge of interest in the Italian giallo film over the past decade has helped to reconfigure its status not only as a genre but also in terms of its position within the broader area of scholarship in Italian cinema. The academy’s pervasive historical bias towards the European art film and its precursors has meant that the significance of the postwar period almost always pivots on the moment of neorealism and the canonized art cinema—of directors like Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, and Luchino Visconti—that followed it, despite the nation’s vast output of popular genre films during the same period. If the Italian giallo film has become more visible in the academy, it has been via its powerful association with the area of cult cinema rather than its absorption into the canon of Italian cinema. What is it about these (often) well-attended commercial releases that has precluded their significance to the construction of national identities? And what is happening, politically, when we disregard those popular cultural products consumed by a large percentage of the population?

Because the problem of giallo and Italian national cinema opens out onto these broader concerns, the genre is ideally positioned to help us push further into the terrain of genre theory. The task of arguing for the value of genre cinema—in discourses of national cinema or otherwise—necessitates an investigation into the mechanics of the system of genre itself. This means that our first concern is to come to terms with the system of “film genre”—as opposed to the “genre film.” This qualification, as Schatz states, is necessary because the terms refer to distinct, but interrelated, entities; he writes that,

whereas the genre exists as a sort of tacit “contract” between filmmakers and audience, the genre film is an actual event that honors such a contract. To discuss the western genre is to address neither a single western film nor even all westerns, but rather that system of conventions which identifies western films as such. (16)

Conceptualizing the giallo as such a system, we are able to think through its positioning in relation to a number of seemingly divergent discourses in order to show how these films harbor the power to pose fundamental questions about genre as a theoretical system, as well as to question the task of genre criticism as it has played out through history. As a case study of the ways in which genre behaves, the giallo shrugs off theories of generic evolution and nearly explodes the myth of hybridity; in fact, it asks for a conceptualization of genre that more readily accommodates the system’s propensity to shift and change through time as films interact with film genre to produce meaning and cultural value.

The giallo is used here as a case study to explore the difficulties genre theorists and critics have faced in their attempts to come to terms with the complex patterns that systems of film genre produce over time. As this group of films comes into contact with each model, what I hope will become clear is the validity of the call made by Williams for a “radical” genre criticism that takes into account the difficult, often unpredictable and perpetually shifting nature of film genre. Building on theoretical frameworks developed by writers like Altman and Steve Neale, this book argues for that radical model—one that, in a number of ways, behaves like the mechanics of the same philosophical toy that Bava’s opening credits recall: the kaleidoscope.

Writers have often returned to the idea of the kaleidoscope as a metaphor for the conditions of modern life; as Noel Gray points out, “The idea of bizarre images in jumbled disarray as a sign for the fragmentation of modern life and/or the loss of reality is a familiar metaphoric conception to us all” (11). Despite this, the kaleidoscope’s use as metaphor has rarely been investigated as one that may provide a deeper understanding of other cultural patterns. In the case of giallo, the kaleidoscope metaphor works on two levels: it gestures towards the destabilized and fragmentary conditions of modern life that preoccupy these films, while, simultaneously, it describes the perpetually shifting nature of film genres like the giallo. I focus here primarily on the latter level. The quintessential modern optical toy reflects the ways genres work, because, like genres, the patterns it produces are fluid and unpredictable, yet always related to one another. It is useful as a metaphor for genre precisely because we can think about both genre and the kaleidoscope as “problematic[s] … made possible because the production of meanings generated by an image will always exceed the tight restraint of the designer’s intentionality whilst appearing to remain forever tied to the graphic form of that intent” (Gray 96–97). What it offers for the study of film genre is not a new system for developing precise definitions, but a device that foregrounds genre’s instability and fluidity. This shift from a commitment to rigid classification of film genres to a fragmented yet inclusive approach is a response both to Hollywood’s hegemonic position in relation to the history of film genre studies, and to Williams’s call for a “more radical” genre criticism (124).

Giallo, National Cinema, and Questions of Genre

Those who inhabit nations with a strong sense of self-identity are encouraged to imagine themselves as members of a coherent, organic community, rooted in the geographical space, with well-established indigenous traditions.

—Higson, “Limiting Imagination”

At one point, critical work on the giallo lived almost solely in publications and institutions dedicated to the celebration of cult cinema, B movies, trash, exploitation film, and horror movies. These spaces have been instrumental to growing and maintaining the visibility of giallo films, but have been less concerned with the tangled issues of genre and nation that the giallo’s identity brings up. Determining the giallo’s degree of “Italianess” in the face of such complexity is not the aim of this study, but some discussion of these problems is necessary in order to be able to move on to open up the films to new possibilities of meaning. While the giallo has been both celebrated and preserved in the canons of cult cinema, as Susan Hayward warns, “one must be aware of invoking an ‘alternative’ form of essentialism as a solution since, in the final analysis, it merely mirrors the practice of dominant ideology” (95). In other words, to consider the giallo genre only in relation to its cultness limits its potential to generate meaning.

To begin to open up some of the complex problems the Italian giallo film presents us, we might start by investigating the genre’s characterization in scholarly maps of Italian national cinema. Peter Bondanella’s seminal English-language history of the field, Italian Cinema: From Neorealism to the Present, first released in 1983, makes note of the careers of Bava and Argento in relation to what he calls the “spaghetti nightmare” film, which is framed “as a minor but intriguing variant of the mainstream Hollywood [horror] genre” that foregrounds “gore at the expense of coherent plots, complex character development, or subtle themes” (Italian Cinema 424). In this context the films are characterized by a focus on “special effects rather than mood” and a tendency to favor “grizzly scenes staged upon beautifully constructed sets that are edited and shot in an aesthetically interesting manner” (424). While Bondanella notes the spaghetti nightmare’s formal experimentation and impressive stylization, the lack of attention paid to narrative is still framed as a deficiency, rather than a deliberate strategy. But where the incoherent plots of these films result in a lack of credibility, Antonioni’s “slim” plots are perfectly acceptable—even when they take “second place to technique” (214). In celebration of the ambiguity of Fellini’s oeuvre, Bondanella writes that “cinema entails expression, not the communication of information, and therefore its essence is imagery and light” (231), yet Bava and Argento’s radical experiments in light are linked to B movie production values (424). Such readings of the landscape of Italian cinema—structured by the implicit binary of high and low art—are less representative of Bondanella than of the giallo’s status and perceived cultural value at a particular point in time. As the key text for English-language study of Italian cinema around the globe, this book’s survey of the field—which distinctly privileges certain kinds of films for inclusion in the national canon—was particularly influential. Through the first decade of the twenty-first century, this began to change: in 2009 Bondanella produced a new edition of this seminal text with the title A History of the Italian Cinema, which includes a chapter devoted solely to the Italian giallo film, along with a chapter on the Italian police procedural, both in addition to the original spaghetti nightmare material.

As the only popular Italian film genre that received sustained attention in English-language scholarship from the early 1980s, the spaghetti western has held a unique position in relation to Italian national cinema. This genre’s inclusion in national cinema discourses relied on a major critical shift facilitated, to a great extent, by the pioneering work of British scholar Sir Christopher Frayling, who first wrote on Italian westerns and the genre’s most celebrated auteur, Sergio Leone, in the 1970s and in 1981 released his pioneering book Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone. Critical acceptance of these films as inherently Italian was also possible because films that traded under the Italian western genre label, especially those made by Sergio Leone, enjoyed both international popularity and favorable critical reviews in non-Italian publications. Being able to conceptualize the genre as a cycle in the historical trajectory of that most canonized Hollywood genre, the western, also rendered the films more easily digestible for non-Italian audiences who arrived at the cinema with a firm set of ideas about what a western might be. The ostensibly “pure” or classical form of the western developed in Hollywood made it easy to highlight the differences in the Italian western...