THE IMPRESSION OF NORMALCY

A review requested by Marc Lummis, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

There are many indisputably great films that it's clearly impossible for any normal audience member to complete unpack in all their nuances without the aid of some highly specialised arcane knowledge, but even then, writer-director Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist is a special case. It's the one and only quintessential all-time masterpiece I can name that trades, extensively, on its ideal viewer's knowledge of the history of 20th Century interior design. Cinematographer Vittorio Storaro invariably gets all of the credit, as well he might, given the relatively easy argument that The Conformist is the most impeccably-shot color film yet made. But as gorgeously lit as the film is - and that is much too weak a claim for the stunning compositions of light, shadow, and diagonal lines that dominate the film's cinematography - the engine driving the film's visuals is far less often the film's camerawork and lighting than production designer Ferdinando Scarfiotti and his team's recreation of the Modernist-derived architecture and furniture design of Fascist Italy. There is no film I know that so compellingly describes a link between the design of its world, the mentality that produced that design, and the mentality that is in turn encouraged by that design; that is to say, it is a film about the mindset of a man who wanted very badly to be a totally anonymous, perfect Fascist, and the most important way that it evokes that mindset is by containing it in distinctively Fascist spaces, distinctively Fascist compositions. And this is where I bring us back to arcane knowledge, because the simple fact of the matter is that I don't know a damn thing more about fine art under Fascism than I suppose you do (if you are some kind of design historian, I know infinitely less than you), and while the film allows us to intuit the nature of Fascist design theory, there's an enormous gap between being able to extrapolate a film's intentions versus understanding at a deep level the film's frame of reference.

So now that I've made this sound like the most absolutely staid piece of entertainment you could ever hope to stumble across, let me promise that The Conformist is, in fact, a gripping piece of cinema, far more watchable than any description of its content could suggest. It's kind of a gangster thriller, if you allow that the Fascist party in Italy was kind of a gang, structured around the fluttery thoughts of Marcello Clerici (Jean-Louis Trintignant, who is in this film one of the greatest empty vessels ever performed onscreen) as he rides in the back seat of a fine car one wintry day, being driven by fellow party member Manganiello (Gastone Moschin) on a mission whose exact details only reveal themselves slowly, but which plainly cause Marcello no end of unhappiness to ponder. Over the course of the next hour and a half, this car serves as the movie's home base, while we follow along with Marcello's stream-of-consciousness recollection of his life, which largely centers on his emotionally flat marriage to Giulia (Stefania Sandrelli), a smart choice of spouse rather than a passionate one, as well as his relationship with anti-Facist mentor Professor Quadri (Enzo Tarascio) and his obsession with Quadri's wife Anna (Dominique Sanda).

Viewed strictly as a psychological portrait, The Conformist is fairly blunt, overly Freudian, and not tremendously imaginative. As we see over the course of those chronologically erratic flashbacks, Marcello became aware as a preteen of his homosexual urges, and in particular had a rather ugly run-in with his family's pederastic chauffeur Lino (Pierre Clémenti) that ended with the older man dead by Marcello's hand. Absorbed by guilt and repulsed by his desires, Marcello has since spent his entire life attempting to disappear his own identity into the blank facade of a perfect conformist, behaving in the least aberrant way he possibly can, based on whatever is valued by the social order of the day. And that is, let us be honest, a bit overly schematic and just-so. Films about the sexual hypocrisy of the totalitarian parties in World War II were their own subgenre around this time, and there are those which have distinctly more sophisticated and less hoary ways of approaching that topic than The Conformist's frankly hoary appropriation of homosexuality as a metaphor (for the record, Luchino Visconti's The Damned from 1969 is my personal favorite example of the form).

But who needs crafty, unexpected screenwriting, when you have this kind of extraordinary psychoanalysis through style? This is, in places, massively obvious: the film's opening scene, as Marcello prepares to commit the worst sin he can imagine, finds the lighting from a neon sign outside his room gently washing him with red at intervals. A sequence synopsising the Allegory of the Cave, punctuated with the statement that those in the cave mistake a shadow of a thing for the thing itself, ends with Marcello's shadow against a wall being blotted out by another light source, the most straightforward "his self is dissolving" image that I could imagine. Frequently, the movie is craftier than that: an early scene where Marcello spills his guts and talks about how badly he wants to be normal and nondescript takes place in a dark room, with a window to a bright white radio studio casting into stark relief just how gloomy the world that Marcello wants to disappear into is. Naked, sexualised women are shown twice in the film, both times drenched in garish, colored lighting that renders them as something almost literally inhuman and unapproachable, the feverish dream version of normalised heterosexuality that Marcello reaches for and cannot attain. And the whole movie is dominated to the point of distraction with diagonal lines in the mise en scène and the lighting, imprisoning Marcello, slashing across his world and breaking it into fragments. It is among the most Expressionist films ever made in color, both in the descriptive sense (Expressionism, as a movement, was dedicated to expressing interior emotions through exterior form - hence the name), and in the more nitpicky sense that it uses the actual graphic techniques of German Expressionism: there's a shot of Sandrelli in a striped dress under striped lighting that is the most literally Expressionist shot that I have seen in any film made after the mid-'30s.

One could go through every single frame of the film and analyse how the composition, color, and lighting all reflect Marcello's mind, the dominance of the individuality-crushing cult of Fascism, or very often both. Certainly, it would go for tens of thousands of words beyond the meaningful scope of a "review" for me to fully work through every single image that I'd like to talk about - the one with the Eiffel Tower a hazy shape in the backdrop against a featureless grey sky, that's a profound emblem of isolation! The violet-selling woman singing "L'Internationale" is purposefully murky and blue to contrast against the ungainly brightness of he and his blonde mistress! Holy balls, the pullback to reveal Giulia patiently waiting as he fumbles his way through his first-ever confession to a priest, that's why they invented camera movement in the first place! - so I won't bother trying. There isn't, however, a single frame that feels accidental, anywhere in the movie: The Conformist is a dream movie for anyone who wants to play around with image analysis, just clicking around to random frames and unpack everything communicated by that shot, that pan, that marriage of visual desolation with the exquisite pain of Georges Delerue's great score, one of the best of the 1970s.

It is a greatly, audaciously cinematic movie, The Conformist is, imposingly precise in its arrangement of individual elements, and their collective shaping by Bertolucci into one grand statement about the the way that Fascism preyed upon humans and was created and bolstered by the same humans. Praising it feels a little obvious, like bothering to point out that there's some good stuff on the White Album; The Conformist is so direct and straightforward in so much of its symbolism that watching them feels like the movie has already done your work for you. But there are many layers to it, and they are not all so straightforward; I'll admit that I don't revisit this film as often as other of the great European art house classics of that generation, but every time I do, the film seems fresh and totally new, and that's the best thumbnail description of a masterpiece that I've got.

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THE MAN WITHOUT A PAST

A review requested by Julian D, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

The career of director Michelangelo Antonioni is not the kind that can be neatly summed up in blunt descriptions like "culmination", so I can't use that word to describe his 1975 triumph The Passenger. It does, however, clearly punctuate the director's career: the seventh feature in a chain of hyper-modern masterpieces stretching back to 1960, and his last film before an unintended six-year break that left him an old master whose new films we should dutifully consider even though we probably don't like them very much. A far cry from being one of world cinema's handful of true visionaries, using his movies to anatomise the character of modern society in the same breath and in fact by the same means that he pushed the boundaries of representational, narrative cinema.

In fairness, The Passenger doesn't push boundaries as hard as some of the director's other films. But I think it might very well be his best social document: it dissects and lays bare the paranoias and neuroses of the 1970s even more strikingly than Blowup does the same for the 1960s, and without feeling nearly as dated. The subject is Western Europe and the United States in the aftermath of Vietnam and the social revolutions of the 1960s, blindly hunting for a sense of purpose in a world where Western dominance has been dealt its most serious setbacks of the 20th Century. In the screenplay by the director with Mark Peploe and Peter Wollen), the embodiment of this collapse of identity and purpose is David Locke (Jack Nicholson), a presumably American-born BBC journalist making a documentary on the civil war in Chad. After failing to scrounge up any war or warriors, he loses himself in the Sahara Desert, and walks back to his hotel, where he finds that David Robertson (Charles Mulvehill), the only other white person around, whom Locke has befriended in a vague and noncommittal way, has died. On the spot, Lock decides to swap identities with the dead man, following Robertson's date book to complete whatever task the other man was in the middle of. This turns out to be gun-running. In the meantime, Locke's wife Rachel (Jenny Runacre), has asked her husband's colleague Martin Knight (Ian Hendry) to look for "Robertson", to learn what he knows about "Locke's" death, meaning that Locke finds himself dodging his friend in addition to faking his way around a group of impressively dangerous men who think he has a cache of weapons for him, aided only by an architecture student (Maria Schneider) he meets in Barcelona.

Purely at the level of narrative, there's a lot to unpack, from Locke's indeterminate Anglo/American status, to the complexity and slitheriness of gender roles in the movie (Schneider's character is literally only ever identified as "The Girl", but Locke is in some ways "The Not Even a Man"), to the relationship between Europe and its former colonial holdings bubbling in the background. All of that's not even mentioning the film's most prominent characteristic as a story, which is its merciless portrayal of Locke as a hollow thing, worn down by the speed with which the world is changing and by all available evidence for the worse, to the point that he's a human-shaped signifier of an identity without actually possessing a concrete self. The one word that describes Antonioni's filmmaking is "ennui", and The Passenger is his ennui-est movie; L'avventura and La notte might showcase characters with a complete detachment from the shallow culture containing them, but The Passenger goes one step further, taking away the culture itself.

It's not merely psychological and social vagueness that the film depicts; its indefinite sensibility goes clear to the structure. Antonioni's own stated interpretation of the movie is that it took place over the course of one day, and he and cinematographer Luciano Tovoli filmed it to match (the lighting, mostly natural, grows more and more afternoon-like as it goes along, and it's only in the very last shot that dusk arrives), even if at a practical level it's hard to see how a narrative that moves from Africa to Germany to Barcelona to rural Spain can possibly all take place in ten or twelve hours. Literalism or plausibility aren't the point, though: what is clearly the case, both in the writing and in the visuals, is that The Passenger doesn't seem to have chronology: time moves wrong in the film, in those moments that it moves at all. It is immodestly slow-moving, which has been used a criticism as far back as 1975 (Roger Ebert was an earlier detractor, though he later changed his mind), but of course the fact that the movie is stretched out and not apparently going anywhere in a hurry, or at all, is hardly incidental. Life itself, in The Passenger, isn't really going anywhere; anyplace you go is equally likely to be dead zone of anomie.

The visual scheme Antonioni and Tovoli use to explore this sensibility is broadly familiar from the director's earlier movies: there's a great deal of empty space, whether it's the open sky or featureless walls, against which the characters are set from a far enough distance and low enough in the frame to feel crushed by the size of the composition. The film uses a fairly straightforward and simple color scheme, influenced by the natural earthtones of its locations, the lend a feeling of blanched-out energy, with everything stronger tending to feel oppressive, such as the blue skies or, in the film's most visually and narratively aberrant scene, the toxic-looking neon lights in a metal and concrete hell of an airport. What primarily marks the film as its own thing is the magnificent use of location photography: The Passenger is set mostly in corners of the world and Europe that have a heavy sense of history on them, finally ending in a Spanish town that has tacked elements of modern technology onto streets and buildings that look ancient, hewn from the ground itself in some ways. These are locations bigger than human stories, and Locke seems small and forgotten by the end, finally getting his wish to lose his self figuratively.

Also literally, in the film's incredibly famous penultimate shot, one of the two big showy long takes Antonioni uses (the first is a shocking attempt to bring us into a flashback without cutting, and it's beautifully organic, suggesting the displacement of Locke's thoughts even before the plot starts to make the scope of that displacement clear). It's a long slow track past Locke and through the narrow window of his hotel room, focusing our attention on the geography of the town and the architecture of buildings while its characters die and come to other crises points largely offscreen, the perfect summary of the film's exhausted humanity. Ultimately, it's not even worth showing what happens to the character we've spent two hours getting to not know. Stuff just happens. This is all deeply pessimistic and inhumane, but The Passenger so persuasively argues that pessimism and inhumanity are two of the key traits of Western culture in the 1970s that it doesn't even feel depressing: just "yeah, I guess that's about it". Not a film for a happy, transporting mood, then, but as a diagnosis of purposelessness the film is the most intelligent, engaging kind of misery.

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AMONG THIEVES

A review requested by Josep, with thanks for contributing to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

There are plenty of things that could be one's immediate response to Big Deal on Madonna Street, a 1958 Italian caper movie that is one of the small handful of films directed by Mario Monicelli to have any meaningful presence on the radar of English-speaking cinephiles, despite his (and the film's) key role in developing an explosion of enormously popular sardonic social comedies in the ensuing decade. Mine was that it's nice to be reminded every now and then that there can be such a thing as comedy that boasts a deft screenplay, performed with brightness by a talented cast, and which is also good as a movie. It being the case that comedy, more than any other genre, has an annoying tendency (and has had it basically since the beginning of sound cinema) to coast on dialogue writing and staging physical gags, and to treat such niceties as well-constructed images and tight dramatic plotting as largely disposable.

Big Deal on Madonna Street - the infinitely less-evocative title of a film whose original Italian name, I soliti ignoti, means something akin to "the usual suspects" - is absolutely not that kind of comedy. As shot by Gianni Di Venanzo and designed by the great Piero Gherardi, it's a rich film of thick, moody atmosphere, low-rent and dangerous, perfectly etching out the grimy urban world its characters operate in and framing it as the site of constant hunted-animal tension. Take out every last joke but leave the rest alone, and you're still left with a crackerjack movie about a gang of frayed, mutually distrustful characters, operating in a mode that takes the spatial texture and busy, deep compositions of neorealism and genrefies them with the visual murkiness of film noir.

It's a splendid peek into a particular corner of the Roman underworld by any means, and that's a huge part of what makes it so much more interesting than a comedy content to keep the actors in frame, in focus, and clearly lit. But it's not only that. In fact, and this seems to have been Monicelli's great genius revelation, it's the very same aesthetic seriousness that makes Big Deal on Madonna Street such a great comedy - which it is to a degree that shocked me, given the difficulties of translating humor across language and culture, and the less than amazing state of film comedy generally around that period. The jokes present in the script written by Monicelli alongside Agenore Incrocci & Furio Scarpelli & Suso Cecchi D'Amico, as well as those inherent to the visualisation of that screenplay, come in a lot of different flavors, but if I had to pick the one thing the film tends to do over and over again, I'd go with its habit of allowing its characters to take themselves very, very seriously, despite their unfailing tendency towards incompetency. It's borderline parody how much the film mocks the figures at its center and the trappings of crime thrillers, and none of that humor would play if it didn't look so very much like an actual caper with its own internal reality. So the film gets it both ways: its style makes it thematically deeper and more sociologically alert than just any old dippy comedy about hapless idiots, and it's also a much funnier dippy comedy for the same reason.

The plot quickly becomes too sprawling to do much with a synopsis, but the basic outline is that minor criminal, Cosimo (Memmo Carotenuto) is in jail for a crime he did commit, but he wants somebody else to take his place regardless. After a great deal of finagling and hunting, his accomplices scrounge up Peppe (Vittorio Gassman), whose spotless record means he'll receive a much shorter sentence, to take the fall, but the unimpressed judge sees through the ruse and sends both men to prison. An irritated Peppe forces Cosimo to share the plans for a perfect heist, and is then immediately released on probation. This leaves him free to take over the heist himself, recruiting several of his and Cosimo's acquaintences for the job: the romantic Mario (Renato Salvatori); the tyrannical Michele (Tiberio Murgia), who keeps his sister (Claudia Cardinale) under lock and key; old Capannelle (Carlo Pisacane), who's munching on something almost every time we see him; and most delightfully of all, sweet Tiberio (an absurdly beguiling, fresh-faced Marcello Mastroianni), whose wife is in prison, leaving him to hall around a baby through all of the gang's planning. After receiving advice from a very dubious career criminal, safecracker Dante (Totò, an icon of Italian screen comedy), the gang is... not so ready to take the job on. They spend at least as much time bumbling around, living their messy lives, as readying to carry off the great heist, and it's not the remotest surprise that the heist itself is one fuck-up after another.

There are subtleties that are invisible to anyone who isn't a fluent speaker of Italian - my understanding is that the characters are all regional caricatures and the dialogue a smorgasbord of slang and casual expression - but even in the form that the rest of us can appreciate it, Big Deal on Madonna Street is delightful, a perfectly-timed comedy that turns the fizzy pleasures of a Rififi (its primary stated influence) into something even more lighthearted, with the moody lighting always making even the most inconsequential gags seem sharper and more unexpected and thus funnier. It helps that, for something that basically pivots on "stupid criminals sure are stupid", Big Deal on Madonna Street is extraordinarily intelligent, both in pacing out its jokes and in the implications of those jokes; it's an overreach and a half to call this a "satire", but like the visually similar, vastly more serious dramas that were still the main force in Italian filmmaking, it's attentive to how people live in the everyday modern world, and its observations about machismo and culture are pointedly mocking, however gently, and however full of love for the characters.

There's a baseline of social realism that the film shares with tonier, graver films of the same period, it's just filtered through good-natured ribbing instead of shell-shocked melodrama. The actors are all having an obvious good time, goofing around, and yet there's enough meat to their performances that it never feels like they're just fooling around - Gassman, in particular, was no kind of comic performer prior to this movie, and while its success altered the face of his career, he didn't at all abandon the basic sincerity of his dramatic work. Peppe, and all the rest, are still recognisable, grounded human beings, even if they're flopping around like clowns and being subjected to the silliest, lightest-touch humiliations available. This essential grounding in real-life, with a sharp eye towards using ridiculous comic excess as a way of calling attention to real-life behavior rather than distracting from it, is one of the cornerstones of the commedia all'italiana movement that largely began here, and while I greatly admire some of its followers - Divorce Italian Style is particularly close to my heart - it's pretty clear that this was one of the cases where the first of its kind got everything just about perfect, right out of the gate.

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ABUSES OF POWER

A second review requested by David Greenwood, with thanks for contributing twice to the Second Quinquennial Antagony & Ecstasy ACS Fundraiser.

Knowing, as one can't help but know, that Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom is the most god-damned notorious art film of them all for its grotesque displays of violence, warped sexuality, and bottomless imagination for depicting human cruelty, the film's opening is even more disorienting than it should be. And it's nothing but black titles on a white background! But underneath plays a jaunty, jazzy tune, Franco Ansaldo and Alfredo Bracchi's "Son tanto triste", promising a breezy tossed-off insincere experience to follow. In its own tiny way, it's as perverse and excruciating as anything that follows.

Truth be told, Salò's reputation for toxic, vile unwatchability is a bit overblown. It is, beyond question, a harrowing experience, and one that is very difficult to recommend - having at last seen it, I'm comfortable calling it an absolutely vital work of cinema that I'll never recommend to anybody for any reason - but it's nothing like a non-stop chamber of horrors that, once it stops, never lets up in punishing the audience. It's extremely formalised, in fact, and takes repeated stops to shift away from its depictions or even descriptions of depravity to indulge in circular conversation amongst its villains about European philosophy. True, these narrative pauses have a tendency to feel like the film is mustering its strength and drawing its breath for the next onslaught, so it's not like we're given a chance to relax in front of it. No, it keeps us pretty tense and wired throughout. Really, the parts of it that are most explicit are in some way the easiest to take, since at least in those cases we get to have a reaction and thus catharsis.

The film was the last to be directed by Pier Paolo Pasolini, whose horrible murder came earlier in the same month as the film's November, 1975 premiere in France, giving its depiction of sexualised violence an extra charge of sickening potency - moreso when it was new than now, I am sure, and the papers aren't busily running photos of Pasolini's bloody corpse. He and Sergio Citti adapted it from the novel by the Marquis de Sade, added some of Dante's Inferno for the framework - though Salò describes only a one-way descent into Hell - and transposed the action to the Mussolini government during its final days as a puppet for the waning Nazi regime. How closely it hews to de Sade, I cannot begin to say, but taken on its own terms, the story adopts an almost poetic structure, built around four "stanzas", each moving through roughly the same sequence of events, while escalating the specific cruelty and intensity of those events. Simply put, the plot centers on a Duke (Paolo Bonacelli), a Bishop (Giorgio Cataldi), a Magistrate (Umberto P. Quintavalle), and the President (Aldo Valletti), who assemble a host of gorgeous young men and women, some kidnapped and some hired, to populate their castle on the outskirts of Salò, the capitol of the short-lived Italian Social Republic. There, they conduct an endless (or 120 days, anyway) experiment in causing humiliation and torture to their victims as a way of indulging their own pleasure. And that's basically it.

Pasolini's essays and interviews conducted in the last few years of his life leave virtually no ambiguity as to what he wanted to accomplish with this film, particularly in relationship to the three immediately preceding it in his career, the "Trilogy of Life" - The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, and Arabian Nights. Those films, the sunniest of his career, cumulatively present an idealised vision of pre-capitalist society, using primitive film technique and ancient storytelling style to depict sexual and social freedom, something not entirely unlike Rousseau's swoony Enlightenment-era adoration of noble savagery. In that way, it makes perfect sense that Pasolini would turn to de Sade, whose work was an explicit and purposeful contrast to Rousseau's optimism, showcasing the darker side of human possibility. For Pasolini, who had abandoned Marxism but not anti-capitalism at this point, the kind of joyful sexuality he had explored in the trilogy was fundamentally implausible in the corrupt capitalist world around him, based on relationship of power and the exploitation and ownership of the lower classes by the upper classes. It's not unusual to see Salò described as an anti-Fascist parable, using humiliation, torture, and rape as metaphors for the exploitation of a whole country by right-wing authoritarians during the war, but it's more the case that Fascism itself is also a metaphor, and the whole thing is a more general parable about the inherent abuses meted out by the self-indulgent leadership classes against the rest of society, baked into The System The Way It Is Now. This approach itself led to the film being attacked by the Italian intelligentsia, notably Italo Calvino, who viewed Pasolini's appropriation of Mussolini's real-life abuses to serve as an extreme parody in a provocative movie to be dangerously amoral.

That might very well be the case - the last thing I'm qualified to do is tell the intellectuals who lived through Fascism that they don't understand Fascism. Morally, I am genuinely uncertain what we should do with Salò, other than to firmly declare that it's grotesque excesses have very little in common with the like of torture porn or the Nazi sexploitation films of the same era. As cinema, though, the film is ingenious - one can debate the merits of Pasolini's intentions, but not the skill with which he carried them off, and even if we allow for Death of the Author and Intentional Fallacy and the like (and we should), there's no denying that the movie and themes the director described in the last year of his life is precisely the movie that we can watch today, those of us who don't live in countries where it's still illegal.

It's a marvelously crafty picture, Salò is, an enormous shift away from the artful crudeness of the Trilogy of Life and mostly unlike anything Pasolini ever did. It's a mercilessly aesthetic piece: the all-star team of production designer Dante Ferretti, set decorator Osvaldo Desideri, and costume designer Danilo Donati, in concert with Pasolini and cinematographer Tonino Delli Colli's proscenium-like framing along strict gridlines, gives Salò the polish, richness, and geometric precision of classical art; for a film so jam-packed with ugliness, it's gorgeous, like, constantly. But also chilly and mechanical: what none of the visuals do is give any life to the movie, and the customary hollowed-out sound design of Italian film production does nothing to combat that, nor do the dispassionate performances which (much like the sound), only really have much vibrancy to speak of during the cruelest acts depicted. The film is so sharp and precise that it feels totally artificial, and the whole time one watches it, one is first and always aware of the artifice on display: the fussy staging, the inorganic cutting, the way that depravity turns on and off like a light switch.

It becomes uncomfortably clear, in other words, that the film anticipates an audience - ourselves, and probably Pasolini too, whose sexual proclivities weren't entirely unlike some of the ones being depicted in the film as so ugly. Particularly viewed in the context of Tree of Life, Salò is obviously a scream of primal rage, directed at a world where everything is cruel and even something as beautiful as sex has been curdled and turned into a device for the powerful to assert their control over the powerless (I'm not sure that I've ever seen a movie that so bluntly insists on rape as a totally de-eroticised act). But it is not righteous. It indicts itself, its maker, and its viewers for existing in the same system of abuse and exploitation as its subjects; even as the victimised characters start to become increasingly complicit in sustaining the sordid world they're suffering through, it grows harder to deny that Salò isn't letting us off the hook. Isn't it a beautiful movie to just look at? Aren't the many young men and women seen naked throughout the film attractive? Yes and yes - that's the movie's trap for us, for even though it's as thoroughly unpleasant as any film that does not depict actual dead humans or animals could possibly be, Salò anticipates its status as an unspeakable provocation, one of those movies that we all go see precisely because they're so shocking and upsetting and horrible. The film tricks us, though: first by including so much material that's upsetting without being shocking, its long passage of depressingly violent stories and shitty jokes and its slow-paced development of the visual and narrative rules, and sitting listening to its characters talk about how utterly vile they are without punishing them for it. And then when the shocks start to come, they're staged in a way that makes us feel like voyeurs - explicitly so, in one of the final moments. It's a film that indicts everything, up to and including itself for existing in the world it depicts.

It's a one-of-a-kind mixture of rarefied intellectualism and disgusting visceral spectacle, and its themes are so severe as to feel like a howl of despair more than an articulate statement of radical politics. But it is pure cinema. I was not glad to see it while I was watching it, but I'm glad to have seen it; it is quite a thing to grapple with. Movies like this simply don't exist: that's arguably a good thing, but it certainly makes Salò stand out as a singular artistic accomplishment.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: ITALIAN SLASHERS

1982's The New York Ripper is a very, very, very special motion picture: it represents the exact moment at which the great Italian horror master Lucio Fulci transformed into the hacky Italian schlockmeister Lucio Fulci. The transition was achieved very cleanly: outside of two scenes which could stand along any giallo of the '70s for visual flair and psychologically bent terror, the film bears not a trace of the poetically gory hands of the man who just one year before had wrapped up his celebrated Gates of Hell trilogy with The Beyond and The House by the Cemetery.

We'll get back to that; in the meantime, let's ease into the thing. The New York Ripper opens with an elderly man (Sal Carollo) and his dog, the man shot in such disorientingly tight, pinched close-ups that I thought for certain that he was being set up as some demented figure who'd play a considerable role in the sick drama to follow, and not just a dude who would literally never appear again after the opening credits. All he's there for is to be part of a game of fetch gone wrong, when his dog brings back a rotting hand. This hand becomes the problem of NYPD officer Lt. Fred Williams (Jack Hedley), who you can tell just from looking at him is one of those world-weary sorts who has seen it all, and found all of it depraved and wanting. The kind who can reel off the statistic that eleven people are murdered in his jurisdiction every day, half of them women, and do so with the sort of bored, slumped posture that suggests he has no more emotional stake in that fact than he does in the Mets' current woes.

What Williams doesn't know is that he's just been given a serial killer case, or should I say he's been handed the case, because y'know, the fact that there was a hand, it's like a pun. In fact, New York is about to be plagued by a series of killings committed by a person whose only persistent identifiable characteristic is a tendency to speak in a voice like a psychopathic Donald Duck. A more psychopathic Donald Duck, anyway. After the next violently mutilated body shows up, of a woman (Cinzia de Ponti) slashed through the genitals, Williams calls in an expert on maniacs, Dr. Paul Davis (Paolo Malco) of Columbia University. The two of them begin to develop a plan to find and stop the killer, though Williams is so hard-boiled and resigned to a world of shit, and Davis so generally callous, that neither of them are trying very hard. Eventually, the case starts to break when one victim, Fay Majors (Almanta Keller) manages to survive wounds, and with her boyfriend Peter (Andrew Occhipinti, under the American market friendly name of Andrew Painter) begins to endure an entire series of failed attempts by the Quacking Ripper on her life. Though even this proves to be less use than it immediately seems; the man she's able to identify as her attacker, Mikis Kalenda (Howard Ross) is revealed rather soon after to us as merely the procurer for the actual Ripper, finding the kind of "dirty" or otherwise morally compromised women that the killer prefers.

In its bones, then, this is basically just a routine giallo, a nice urban murder mystery. It came out in the Slasher Era, which means that the focus is less on psychological discombobulation (the spine of all the very best gialli), and more on evocative, high-impact violence, but it's not like the gialli were exactly squeamish about such matters. Still, the quantity and degree of the violence in The New York Ripper is quite impressive: enough to get the film banned in Britain during the Video Nasties days, despite it not being on the Nasties list itself. In fact, the violence in the film is so prominent and so pronounced in its impact that it's kind of hard to talk about anything else. That is, in fact, the nugget of the argument of the faction that decries the film as lesser, if not indeed outright terrible Fulci (having developed a good-sized cult in the years after its toxic early reception, this remains the most divisive of the director's movies): that it is nothing but an exercise in watching brutal acts of highly creative and wicked acts of violence against women, a torture porn film years and years before anybody even thought of suggesting that was a genre. It's no fun to side with the prudes, but I absolutely have to, in this case: The New York Ripper is a squalid, joyless exercise in extreme gore, with a ridiculous fig leaf at the end when it reveals the killer and explains his motives in a way that could potentially serve as a sign that the movie is indicting acts of male violence against women, if only it didn't come after the specific 85 minutes of cinema preceding that reveal.

I am irresistibly drawn to compare the film to William Lustig's Maniac from two years earlier, for the two films resemble each other closely. Both are set in a version of New York that focuses on the shabbiest, filthiest corners of that city during one of the nastier periods in its history, and both depict acts of horrifying cruelty against women. Neither is a film that's much fun to watch in anyway, and anybody suggesting that it might be is probably worth avoiding in small group settings, but for all that it is a sick, slimy affair, Maniac at least feels like it has some depth and purpose. It's rubbing our faces in the worst of humanity with the exact point of making us feel degraded and awful about it; it comes from a place of thematic and sociological nihilism, but it has themes and sociology. The New York Ripper doesn't manage quite the same feat: it depicts more disgusting acts but with less visceral implication of the viewer. It presents torture for us to watch, it doesn't assault us with torture. And because of this, it's basically an empty exercise. Not that, God knows, I think that every good horror film needs to make us feel awful about death and violence, or anything like that. I am a huge, even starry-eyed fan of The Beyond, which has plenty of extreme and foul-minded scenes of violence, and it makes absolutely no claims to thematic depth at all. But it has artistry behind it: it imparts mood using its visuals about as well as any horror film I can name, and even if it's basically just spectacle, it's spectacle that's emotionally transporting. The New York Ripper is just a wallow in bad behavior, too wearying to even make one angry. It's not in the least scary, it's gross. Emphatically and unapologetically gross, and there's no art to that.

The gulf between The New York Ripper and Maniac, or The Beyond, or a hundred other, better violent horror movies, is typified by its sex show scene. By the mere fact that it has a sex show scene, in which a woman named Eva (Zora Kerova) and a man with no name at all (Urs Althaus) are onstage in one of the seediest adult theaters in the blighted hellhole of early-'80s Times Square, having sex for an audience that includes Kalenda, and a smartly-dressed woman we'll later learn is called Jane Lodge (Alexandra Delli Colli), the latter of whom masturbates while watching, the camera cutting from the sex act she's watching to extreme close-ups of her mouth twisting in pleasure. Which is, to be fair, the most classy, artful way to film a scene of a woman masturbating at a Times Square live sex show that you could possibly hope for.

But then, the question arises, is this actually a scene that a film like The New York Ripper requires? If so, is it a scene that needs to go on for as long as it does (notably, most of the censorship the film has undergone pertains to its sex, not its violence - which opens up a whole other conversation, but still)? Probably not and no, respectively. And even then, the scene is a masterpiece of narrative concision compared to the later scene in which Jane is foot-raped in a bar. These are lingering, sordid moments, ones where sex is glared at with a blank, disinterested focus by the filmmakers, and it feels more like something out of a Joe D'Amato picture than anything I'd associate with Fulci in his prime. Not a complimentary comparison, in case the name "Joe D'Amato" doesn't mean anything to you right off.

Having thus telegraphed its willingness to stomp around in the most gratuitous kind of sex and linger on sexual humiliation in what I think might be a scene played for comedy, the film thus gets that much ickier when the time comes to kill Jane off - this came as an unpleasant development to me, for her first handful of scenes, I was actually expecting her to turn out to be the real Ripper, since there was no obvious reason otherwise for her to take up so much screentime (and sure enough, she's absolutely not an important enough character for the energy the film takes in building her up) - and does so with a level of unblinking violence that outdoes anything else I have seen in Fulci. Including what might be the single most upsetting moment of eye violence in the filmography of a director who treated eye violence the way Spielberg treats shooting stars. It's immaculately staged, and brilliantly executed - on the level of craft, I'll cop to being in absolute awe of it - but it's so leering, so filthy, and so distasteful in the context of how the film views women and Jane in particular, it's not valuable or entertaining, it's just pitiless and rancid.

That the killer speaks like Donald Duck immediately connects The New York Ripper with 1972's Don't Torture a Duckling, whose Italian title contains a more explicit reference to the Disney character. That film is one Fulci's greatest works, though not because it kindly; where The New York Ripper is cruel, Don't Torture a Duckling is outright nihilistic. But that nihilism develops cleanly from the film's unrelenting social commentary, and I kept hoping, right up to the pretty much indefensible close-up of Jane's nipple being cut in half by a razor blade, that the link between the two films on the Donald level mean that The New York Ripper would eventually turn into something similar. It doesn't; there's the outline of a something about men wanting women to be impossibly perfect, but if I were inclined to defend the movie, it would be out of admiration that it pulls no punches and knows exactly what it is, not because it has any meaningful level of thematic depth or sophistication.

And there's another line of defense, I guess: unlike all of the later Fulci films I've seen, The New York Ripper is actually well-made. Even extremely well-made: it was the second and last film Fulci made (after a gap of eleven years!) with cinematographer Luigi Kuveiller, a great talent in the Italian film industry of the '70s, and his depiction of the squalor of New York and the nightmarish corners of it is fantastic; there's a brief scene in a subway with screaming red lights that is the most inspired part of the entire movie, almost solely through its lighting, and a weird sequence in a movie theater where the mood lighting is almost as important as Fulci's staging of the unseen film as a surrealist collage of sounds (I mentioned two great scenes in my opening paragraph: there you have them). So no matter what's going on, the film looks fantastic. And as a police procedural and mystery, Fulci and crew keep the film tight and tense, with Hedley doing excellent work as the bleak, weathered Williams (Malco's Davis - eventually revealed to be gay in a very bizarre and pointless scene that I think is meant to explain his amoral glossing over the dead women - is much less consistent or interesting). That the film eventually follows slasher rules rather than giallo rules in outing and disposing of its killer means that this angle on the film is a bit of a dead end, but it's pretty great while it lasts. Nothing else is, though; I could possibly attempt to overlook everything vile in the film if it was genuinely horrifying, but The New York Ripper is ultimately more rote and banal in its storytelling than it is repellent, and that's the worst kind of combination.

Body Count: 6, which is almost exactly the right number for a Ripper-based thriller. I am not counting the dead body at the very beginning of the movie, of which we see only a hand.

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SUMMER OF BLOOD: GIALLI

There's nothing as fascinating as an utterly inexplicable mash-up, of the sort we get with The Perfume of the Lady in Black from 1974: basically, what we have here is Roman Polanski's Repulsion filtered through the heavy stylistic lens of the gialli, Italy's genre of gorgeous, atmospheric, usually inscrutable murder mysteries from the '60s and '70s. The film ends up being neither exactly one thing nor exactly another, and that's entirely for the good: it feels essentially alien and unpredictable in ways that even most giallo can't manage, despite how frequently the better ones feel like they've been beamed to the screen directly from the filmmakers' collective id.

Simply getting one's head around the film is difficult enough, so let me start off with a fairly easy observation: The Perfume of the Lady in Black (oh, those Italian genre film titles! I just want to rub them all over my naked body) is a psychological horror film that is more fixedly about psychology than most of the movies that typically earn that generic label. And, for that matter, more fixedly about horror: despite not depicting the first onscreen death for all of 80 minutes out of 99, and suggesting very little that's actually threatening for the first hour, the movie inhabits the mind of a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown with a focus on the terrifying, out-of-control feeling that comes from not being entirely sure what's real and not, what's past and what's present, and who if anyone can be trusted, and this focus gives the movie a guttural, visceral level of raw terror that all the bloody makeup effects and all the masked psychos with knives can't match. In short, The Perfume of the Lady in Black portrays a mental breakdown from the inside, on the assumption that nothing more genuinely horrifying than that could possibly exist. And for the most part, I think the film makes an excellent defense of that assumption.

The protagonist is a biochemist named Sylvia Hacherman (Mimsy Farmer, an American actress whose biggest roles and films were all in Italy), whose past holds an ugly secret involving her mother, dead since 1952. Apparently, this secret has been weighing down on her extra-heavily of late; it's putting a cramp in her affair with Roberto (Maurizio Bonuglia), who seems like enough of a tetchy, garden-variety oversexed European male that even a little cramp is a pretty big problem, and getting in the way of her work. Very nearly the entire film follows Sylvia around as she grows increasingly obsessed with her past trauma and starts to see it bleeding into her daily life; this first takes the form of an increasing paranoia that all the people around her are involved with some plot to do her an unstated harm (traces of another Polanski film, Rosemary's Baby), but as the film goes on it turns into a complete break from reality, as she begins to receive visits from her younger self (Lara Wendel, under the name Daniela Barnes), dressed in an echo of the title character Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and acting with a dictatorial cruelness towards the woman she'll grow up to be. And while she's not being controlled by her younger self, Sylvia is experiencing uncomfortable visitations, always through a mirror or keyhole other otherwise separated from her physical reality, from her dead mother (Renata Zamengo), wearing a black dress and lathering herself with perfume from a cut glass bottle. Well, the title had to come from somewhere, I guess.

We have here the unusual spectacle of a murder mystery without a murder - or rather, in which murder is a symptom of the plot rather than a cause of it - and a horror film with absolutely nothing explicable at stake. There's no real "plot", just time we spend with Sylvia as she is agitated by the return of memories and knowledge that deeply bother her - it's difficult to say if anything takes place outside of Sylvia's limited and increasingly unreliable perspective, even the scenes that she's not witnessing, adding nothing either than an escalation of the film's sense of nightmare. First-time director Francesco Barilli, co-writing with Massimo D'Aval - their main work prior to this was the script for Ur-cannibal film Man from Deep River - brings to bear all the usual tricks of Italian horror, but above and beyond all the flashes of baroque color and lighting, what's most impressive about the way he and cinematographer Mario Masini assembled the film visually is how intently limited it is: this is a film about Sylvia, through Sylvia, of Sylvia, and bound by Sylvia, and even when we see things she can't or doesn't, it has a distinct feeling of being bound - most gialli have at least flashes of being staged in a theatrical sense, where the sides of the frame cut off the edges of the world, but The Perfume of the Lady in Black is especially pronounced in feeling like a shadow-box. Or better yet, a display case: one weird throwaway moment finds Sylvia and her friend Francesca (Donna Jordan) buying Roberto a beautiful butterfly pinned under glass for his collection, and from that moment on it's hard not to notice how many scenes put Sylvia near or against the back plane of action while holding back at a distance. Watching her pinned down for display herself, basically, and it's as uncomfortable and distressing as any of the film's overt breaks from reality to see it.

For all that the giallo, as a form, is obsessed with psycho analysis, it's not usually as heavily invested in The Perfume of the Lady in Black, whose thematic and narrative analogues are not, at any rate, found much in horror (there's more of Bergman than there is of Argento in the scenario here). And yet those themes are explored entirely through the aesthetics of the gialli, with an emphatic reliance on oversaturated color, expressionistic compositions, punctuation-like close-ups, ethereal music. Oh, such ethereal music! I cannot say enough about Nicola Piovani's score to do it justice: it's maybe the most important element of the whole film, frequently sweet and beautiful, sometimes overtly sweet while sounding deranged, always touched with just the slightest hint of music box delicacy. It's a weird energy for a horror film, but the combination of the sound and the desperation in the visuals works well to imply Sylvia's rattled state. As, for that matter, does Farmer's excellent performance, all small-scale terror and confusion, and entirely reactive; yet she never feels like the film is driving her. There are sharp edges and manias in her characterisation, and with the entire movie resting on her presence and ability to project an evolution of mental disintegration, Farmer brilliantly gives The Perfume of the Lady in Black a spine it requires and cannot get from any other place, no matter how effectively Barilli elaborates that disintegration through visual means.

Which he absolutely does, of course. In a context where realism and low-key filmmaking were already considerably undervalued, The Perfume of the Lady in Black still stands out as unusually stylish - not, maybe, unusually stylized, as the extreme whorls of hue and shape that typify the most garish and gaudi gialli are largely absent. Colors, generally speaking, are those which would be found in the real world in those places, and that alone puts us at least a step down from the most urgently vivid of gialli, even as that genre stood in 1974. What Barilli does provide, more than I can name in any movie before Suspiria, is the sense of sharing perception with a mind in turmoil: there's no distinctly illogical visuals until the jarring finale, with its weird costuming and lighting, and an out-of-place stately tracking shot, but there is a consistent sense of things being off. Camera angles are too acute, making everything seem sinister; much of the blocking feels overtly staged and aritifical. It's a beautifully lit and appointed world in the film, but the deeper we go, the more we feel that we can't trust it or even know for sure what's going on. And having that lack of certainty, following along with Sylvia as her grip on reality ebbs and flows, makes The Perfume of the Lady in Black one of the most tense, and delectably unfathomable Italian horror films ever made. It's as pure as any cinematic depiction of descent into insanity that I've seen, and it surely ranks with the most successful.

Body Count: Well, that's not a straightforward question at all. Let's say 5, that's close enough.

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MASTERS OF ITALIAN HORROR: MICHELE SOAVI GOES TO CHURCH

Part of the Italian Horror Blogathon at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies

Michele Soavi only made four horror films in a career that wasn't very long (he took many years off to care for his unwell son), which surely explains why his profile isn't higher. There's no good argument, certainly not one based on those of his films which I have seen (which does not include the third, The Sect from 1991), why he shouldn't be spoken of with every bit of the enthusiasm that horror fans toss at Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci. Especially considering that Soavi's work was all done in the '80s and '90s, when those men were at or heading towards their career nadirs.

There's no more vivid example of how much higher than the rest of the industry he was flying than The Church, produced by Argento (Soavi's mentor), who also contributed the story, and who intended for the film to serve as the third entry in the trilogy begun by Demons and Demons 2, also produced by Argento, and directed by Mario Bava's son Lamberto. I enjoy those movies more than most people, and certainly more than they deserve, but the titanic gulf in quality between them and The Church is almost impossible to quantify, and I think it's fair to regard the movie as Soavi's attempt to prove that you could take something as junky as the plot for Demons 3 and turn it into horror art on the level of anything produced in Italy's long and massively respectable tradition of fantastically visual genre films. Certainly, if you hold it at the right angle and squint, you can see exactly how this was meant to fit in with the first two ("demons in a movie theater", "demons in an apartment complex", and now "demons in church"; the general shape of the plot structure is even the same, with the demon outbreak happening shortly after the halfway point). And just as certainly, Soavi does everything in his power to keep the film from sinking to their level; there's only so much that can be done with a movie that has to include the questionable monster effects that pop up in the last 40 minutes of The Church, but within those limits, Soavi was able to make a gorgeous neo-Gothic horror film that, like his debut, StageFright: Aquarius, takes its cues from an established genre and style, but manages to be something far different and more personal than that genre would ordinarily permit (and, in fact, Soavi's efforts to push this film in new directions started a schism between Argento and himself).

That we're in the middle of something special is quite obvious from the very first scene, which should not work, and has not worked in many, many films: somewhere in the Middle Ages, a group of Teutonic Knights has concluded that a village has a Satanist problem, and they go about killing everyone and everything, dumping their bodies into a pit and covering it with a huge stone cross to seal in the evil. It's hokey as all fuck, and not helped by a vigorously synthetic piece of adventure music on the soundtrack (I'll have more to say about the score later), but the way Soavi shoots it is so haunting and poetic that it manages to work regardless of how much it acts like every cheap fantasy movie of the '80s or '90s. It's both dreamy and vivid, cut by editor Franco Fraticelli in a particularly implicit and elliptical way to give the whole thing a distinctly "off" feeling, and Soavi and his cinematographer, Renato Tafuri, find unique ways to stage the action to give it that much more of a detached, at times impressionistic quality. Say what you will about cheesy fantasy movies, not many of them would come up with such a striking image as the POV from a Knight's helmet, looking through the cross-shaped visor at his demon prey:

Cross imagery, as you'd expect from something called The Church and produced by a Catholic-majority country, is found throughout the film. Not usually in a specifically religious way (it's not a terribly Christian film, all things considered), but in a manner that beautifully ties the whole thing together visually - Soavi, in fact, finds a whole lot of different ways to tie the movie together, including the very deliberate use of blue lighting, center-framed images of horrible beings, and a certain similarity between all the film's wide shots of its various interior spaces that gives the whole thing a sense of structure and repetition that firstly, emphasises the ritualistic nature of what happens in the plot and clarifies that this is essentially a film about order versus chaos, and secondly, gives shape to a movie that is absolutely written as "stuff happens involving different people OH MY GOD DEMONS the end". I don't even quite know how to synopsise the plot: in the present day, there's a man, Evan (Thomas Arana) who's just been hired at the church built over the site of the Knightsl massacre as librarian. There's an art historian, Lisa (Barbara Cupisiti), working on restoring the heavily damaged art throughout the church. There is a little girl, Lotte (Asia Argento, all of 12 years old, which I assume would not have prevented her father from putting her in a nude scene, if he was directing), who looks exactly like the last of the Knights' victims, daughter of the church's characters, who likes to sneak around and see things she oughtn't. There are priests scuttling about, worrying about the oncoming evil that is always waiting to burst out of the church.

As a story, The Church doesn't even function, let alone function well, but as much as any Italian horror film I have ever seen, it's not about story but about how Soavi creates a total, apocalyptic sense of dread that never leaves even the most domestic moments of the film, or its handful of moments of comedy (a scene I deeply treasure: as Evan studies an ancient parchment of unlocking total evil, Lisa - the two are lovers by this point - watches him, bored, before picking up a Mickey Mouse comic). It helps that the church itself is such a threatening, brooding presence, a beautiful combination of a genuine old cathedral and terrific sets designed by Massimo Antonello Geleng, and even the most innocuous moments, and blandest set-ups looking through the inside of the sanctuary have been shot by Tafuri to look so dark and threatening. In the places where there's actually creepy stuff (like the weirdly terrifying statues of monks, their faces invisible beneath hoods), this same aesthetic pays off in moments that are far creepier than they have a right to be.

When it comes time to actually start paying off all this mood by showcasing the real demons and devils, Soavi is even better. The chances of The Church turning into tacky crap must have been high, to judge from the uniformly low quality of the monsters we see, but Soavi modulates this by showing them in what amount to freeze frame jump scares that manage to both situate the horror inside characters' minds (and thus make it more psychological than paranormal) and to make the weirdness of the props an asset (no such luck with a lengthy shot of his devil costume near the end, though by that point the film has built up enough mood that it plays as something strange and alien rather than as a wobbly movie effect). And he also spends the most time lingering on the single best effect, a pile of bodies rising from Hell itself that looks more like Bosch than anything out of Fulci or even Argento's more freely violent horror.

The effect of all this is a depiction of apocalyptic horror that's not exactly like anything else, no matter how many movies it has affinities with. It isn't as overwhelming as, say, The Beyond, but it's in the same ballpark: a film so full of inexplicable and terrifying moments that it feels like the whole world is crumbling. If I prefer that be done in the more cosmic structure that Fulci sets his own cinematic hellscapes, that's not to say that Soavi's isn't fantastic; indeed, by limiting himself to a single building that devours and destroys, he's able to make his film more specific and effective on a human scale, instead of simply plunging us into an endless nightmare.

And now, if I may close things out, the score: performed and composed by Keith Emerson and Argento's beloved Goblin, the music is generally good when it's not too audibly artificial, but the thing that really stands out is the use of several instantly-recognisable cues, motifs, and complete passages from Philip Glass's Koyaanisqatsi score. I'll freely admit that the first time I saw the movie, that's all I was able to think about, and it absolutely took me out of the experience: why is Goblin playing Philip Glass? All I can think of is highway traffic now! A second viewing hasn't convinced me that this is the best choice that could have been made, but I have to admit that absent my own immediate associations with some of the most instantly-recognisable music of the '80s, it works within the film: the driving, mechanical urgency of the music, given a savage electronic gloss by the artists performing it here, perfectly evokes the constant, pulsating tension that doesn't abandon the movie until beyond its final shot. Whatever else is true of the music, The Church would be a far less intense experience without it, and I would not want to change any element of this film for any reason.

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MASTERS OF ITALIAN HORROR: LUCIO FULCI IS ALL SKIN AND BONES

Part of the Italian Horror Blogathon at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies

There's an argument to be made that Lucio Fulci had the most varied career of any director in history. Certainly, among those filmmakers chiefly known for their contributions to the Italian genre machine, I can think of no-one who directed films in such wildly different styles and registers: sex comedies, Westerns, political satires, gory horror films, and more than a little bit of shading within those extremes (I believe he made at least one of every commercially viable subgenre of horror available during the span of his career except for an exorcism movie, for example). But his fandom rests on his great horror films, which he produced in two waves: four gialli dribbled out between Perversion Story AKA One on Top of the Other in 1969 and Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes AKA The Psychic in 1977, followed closely by a much more compact grouping of zombie-esque films from '79 to '81 (after this, he continued to crank out quite a lot of stuff, though I think that we can confidently assert the adjective "great" rarely to never needs to be brought up in discussing them).

Today, we are gathered to pay tribute to the second of his gialli, and perhaps the most exemplary among the four, A Lizard in a Woman's Skin AKA Schizoid. Though if anybody has used the latter title since American International first released a compromised cut of the film in the U.S. in 1973, I cannot imagine why, because it's fantastic. The film is something of a snapshot of the giallo as it existed in 1971: situated in the cultural hangover from the Swinging '60s, set (and shot) in a version of London that nevertheless feels unmistakably Italian in attitude and tenor, driven by sexual perversion and repression. And, too, it is snaspshot of Fulci's career as it had evolved by that point: enthusiastically sleazy with just enough outré imagery that you can't quite call it exploitation, fascinated by violence to a rare degree even for an Italian genre director, driven by sexual perversion and repression.

That A Lizard in a Woman's Skin is all about the id could not be any clearer from its very first scene: a brunette woman that we'll eventually learn is named Carol Hammond (Florinda Bolkan) is trapped in a writhing bisexual orgy, driven to the brink of outright madness by the ecstatic looks on the revelers all around her. It doesn't take more than a second or two to figure out that this is a nightmare, and it proves, indeed, to be a recurring one: Carol has even been seeing a psychotherapist, Dr. Kerr (George Rigaud) to find out why she's so obsessed with this setting, which she associates with another resident of her apartment complex, the libertine hostess Julia Durer (Anita Strindberg, probably the most prominent cast member, though that wasn't the case when she made this film, only her third, and the first under that name). You don't need that medical degree, or even to know the tropes of a giallo, to grasp that Carol is being torn into emotional pieces by her desire to be more sexually adventurous, or that her repression ends up being a primary force in the mystery to follow.

You can also guess, based on the title, that her sexuality is to a certain degree vilified, though I'm not absolutely certain how much that holds. There's never a real sense that the film thinks of the orgiastic free-for-all she sees in her mind's eye is healthy, and Julia (the film's embodiment of liberated female sexuality) is surely not presented as being an especially nice or sympathetic human being. Still, the problems in Carol's life all come from her denying her sexual appetites, and if she'd just own up to what she wants, there'd be far less to build a movie around. Probably, Fulci and his fellow writers weren't really thinking in those terms: to be a giallo in the early '70s was necessarily to be involved in corrupted sexuality, and that's not really what A Lizard in a Woman's Skin cares about.

If anything, the film's alternate U.S. title gives us the best clue what the film is really about: the perception of a disturbed, fragmentary mind. One night, Carol's dreams involve Julia's violent death, as a pair of dead-eyed hippies (Penny Brown and Mike Kennedy) watch; a few days later, Julia's body is found, having been dead for most of a week, and under the exact circumstances that Carol dreamed of. The head investigator from Scotland Yard, Inspector Corvin (Stanley Baker) immediately starts to put details together and concludes that Carol must be the primary suspect, though his attempts to prove this are stymied by her politician father, Edmond Brighton (Leo Genn) and her devoted teenage stepdaughter Joan (Ely Galleani) - Joan's father, Carol's husband Frank (Jean Sorel) is too busy having affairs to give a damn. Carol goes from "high strung" to "paranoid" in the blink of an eye, and spends the rest of the movie in something of a fugue state, seeing things that can't be there, experiencing places that can't exist, and having no idea if she's responsible for Julia's death or not, but sure as hell not wanting to take the fall for it.

There is one critical flaw with A Lizard in a Woman's Skin that's enough of a piece with the bulk of gialli (where sensation mattered a little bit more than narrative logic, though not to the degree of Fulci's later "Gate to Hell" movies) that it almost shouldn't matter: the ending doesn't work. It's the kind of thing that makes it openly impossible for most of the film up to that point to have actually taken place in the way we've seen it take place, given what certain people should know and thus how they should behave when we see them alone. I think that's vague enough to be meaningful without spoiling the 42-year-old genre classic.

Now, nobody needs to point out that gialli aren't particularly known for sticking the ending, or making anything that resembles coherent psychological sense. Is A Lizard in a Woman's Skin particularly obnoxious in this regard? Probably not. I think it's more that the first 85 minutes or so of the film are so terrifically above-par that for it to slide into stock genre nonsense at the end is a bit more disappointing than if the whole thing had just been an average giallo comme une autre. At no point does the film give Don't Torture a Duckling* a run for its money as Fulci's greatest work in the subgenre (though it is certainly more typical of the things the giallo does best), but at its best - where it frequently lives - this is one hell of a heady rush of terrifying imagery filtered through Carol's distressed mind. The dream sequences are obviously impressive, warping physical reality itself in a series of stagings that resemble dioramas of sex and murder (cinematographer Luigi Kuveiller, who wouldn't work with Fulci again until after his descent began, does some wonderful camera tricks to distort the image with genuinely dreamlike obscurity), but the way the film starts to break Carol's awake reality are even more impressive. The infamous scene of vivisected dogs (make-up artist Carlo Rambaldi had to demonstrate how he created the effect in court, to save Fulci from doing jail time for animal torture†) is the most obvious example, but the later sequence of Carol running through the bizarrely industrial spaces of the Alexandra Palace is even better, depicting a nonstop stream of huge, hellishly abandoned rooms that spill into each other with only the vaguest sense of physical continuity.

Fulci was not, at this point, as invested in the conscious surrealism of Bava or Argento, and in particular his attention to gory effects, far above and beyond those men (he was easily the most bloodthirsty of the major Italian horror directors), grants A Lizard in a Woman's Skin a grounded, visceral realism that makes its psychedelic excesses far more punch than they might have had. Which is not to say that his approach is any better, only that it leaves the film fare grungier, and that gives it a hell of a lot of personality and impact. By making the film grounded in physical actuality and more lingering, disgusting gore, Fulci and Kuveiller and the rest of the filmmakers were able to make the moments of drug or psychosis-induced fantasy pop that much more, and somehow, having just a little insanity ends up making the whole film feel more deranged than if it always occupied that heightened place. For as long as it works, A Lizard in a Woman's Skin does as good a job of exploring what a mental breakdown might actually consist of as well as any giallo ever did, and given the genre's huge enthusiasm for psychiatry, that's one heck of an achievement.

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MASTERS OF ITALIAN HORROR: RICCARDO FREDA'S DIRTY LITTLE SECRET

Part of the Italian Horror Blogathon at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies

The phrase that I have chosen, "Masters of Italian horror", doesn't entirely describe the work of Riccardo Freda, surely not a name spoken of in the same breath as Mario Bava, Dario Argento, and Lucio Fulci. But his historical importance is such that he's worthy of elevation to the status of, if not Master, then at least Father. Freda, you see, was the director of the first Italian horror movie of the sound era, 1956's I vampiri (though his cinematographer, Mario Bava, took over at a certain point), and of the second, 1959's Caltiki, the Immortal Monster (though his cinematographer, Mario Bava... hey, wait a second), and we cannot help but assume that Freda thus had some measure of influence over how these films turned out, and the whole corpus of Italian horror that built upon those films' model.

Eventually, Freda even made horror movies all by himself without Bava having anything to do with them at all, of which the most prominent is easily The Horrible Secret of Dr. Hichcock, sometimes rendered in English more bluntly as The Horrible Dr. Hichcock, and always rendered with that distinctly "T"-less spelling that makes my fingers itch every time I type it. The horrible secret, we learn reasonably early, is indeed horrible, enough of a cinematic taboo in 2013 that I can't even imagine how it played in 1962, to say nothing of how the censors of any country in the world stayed asleep at the switch long enough for it to see release to paying audiences in the first place. I speak of necrophilia, though even that isn't quite as fucked up as what the film depicts: in its opening sequence, set in London in 1885, we meet the Hichcocks, notable surgeon Bernard (Robert Flemying) and his wife Margaretha (Maria Teresa Vianello), who like to have sex while she's drugged into a coma on his revolutionary new anesthesia. And I do very much mean they like it: the expectant grin she gives to her husband as he starts to pull out the equipment to give her a shot makes it absolutely clear that this is not the first time they've played this game, and it's very much consensual.

By this point, mind you, we've already seen that Dr. Hichcock's interests don't lie solely in pseudo-necrophiliac monogamy: the opening scene reveals him sneaking into a graveyard to fondle a corpse he finds there. This matters later.

The Hichcocks are aided in their kink by the housemaid Martha (Harriet Medin), whose own little smirk of pleasure when the doctor gives her the unstated command to hurry his wife up through the party she's hosting downstairs states just how much she's not offended by this arrangement. And presumably, things could be ever thus, with the married couple engaged in their weird, non-reciprocal pleasures, and Bernard sneaking off to play around with dead girls in the cemetery every now and then, except that one night, the doctor decides, quite consciously but for no obvious reason, to give his wife an extra-large dose of anesthesia. This triggers a frightening and unpleasant choking reaction from the terrified Margaretha, and Dr. Hichcock is unable to help her, despite his transparent horror at what's happening. He is so heartbroken that he decides to leave the house immediately after the funeral.

Twelve years later, a remarried Hichcock decides to try and resume his life, bringing his young bride Cynthia (Barbara Steele) back to his large London home. It takes all of one night for Cynthia to realise that things in the Hichcock home are severely fucked up: a screaming woman in an unseen room that Martha promises is her sister, people creeping around at night, and her husband revealing certain threatening predispositions that she doesn't know what to do with, all make for an unpleasant living situation that only gets worse as secrets begin spilling out, and Bernard decides to start practicing his old sexual habits again, whether his new wife is in on the game or not.

It is known of The Horrible Dr. Hichcock that Freda and writer Ernesto Gastaldi (both of them, incidentally, hiding under pseudonyms; the idea seems to have been to convince the Italian market that the film was an American or British import, as those were still bigger draws) had a lot more exposition and explaining ready to go, but the shoot went over schedule, and those bits were the first casualty, leaving us with a film where a lot of motivations and backstory doesn't exist except through implication. I will freely acknowledge that the film turned out better as a result. We don't need to know exactly how the Hichcocks' marriage worked, or every thought that crosses through Bernard Hichcock's mind; the only question that genuinely feels wanting to me is why Martha kept the secret of Margaretha's survival (which the film wants to pretend is a secret, but of course it's not) from Dr. Hichcock all those years. Everything else is communicated well enough through the film's visuals, and I suspect that everyone complaining that The Horrible Dr. Hichcock leaves a lot of things unclear is really just admitting that they don't like films that do important parts of storytelling exclusively through imagery.

But that is exactly what we like about Italian horror films, and I find that this particular movie strikes a splendid balance between being cryptic and weirdly-written after the fashion of so many later genre films from that country, and having all of its images grounded in explicating the plot and characters, rather than just being gorgeously baroque for the sake of it. The thing about Dr. Hichcock that's special even among Italian horror is how much of its effect is based in acting - traditionally the last thing you'd rush to praise in one of these movies - especially the acting done by Flemyng, who later claimed to hate the film, indicating that he'd done everything he could to sabotage it with his performance. Mission emphatically failed, if that was truly the case: the one constant throughout the whole film is that Flemyng's face, in just a handful of frames, communicates the inner workings of his character with a force and impact that would have taken pages and pages of screenplay to cover verbally. And since the film trades extensively on the massively fucked-up sexual peccadilloes that dominate Hichcock's life, having a quick means of communicating the shadings of his psychology to the audience is absolutely essential. There are other good bits of acting in the film - the only generally ineffective performance is that of Silvano Tranquilli as the colleague who starts to realise that Hichcock is up to No Good - although I wish that Steele had a bit more to do than recoil in horror; but the film lives and dies with Flemyng.

Of course, Freda does a lot to help the actors along. His aesthetic does not show noticeable influence from Bava (this film was shot by Raffaele Masciocchi, whose bread and butter appear to have been in the peplum, or sword & sandal epic): like early Bava, the emphasis is heavily Gothic, but the extreme phantasmagoria of Bava's films is nowhere in evidence, and Freda generally keeps his camera much closer to the thing he's depicting. The effect is something closer to naturalism, which is useful in two ways: one, because it allows the spikes of outright fantastic imagery to land with quite a bit of force (the way that a room suddenly explodes with red light when Hichcock spots a dead young woman to violate; a stunning shot of Cynthia pounding on the glass window in a coffin, trying to beg for help, and succeeding only in steaming up the glass with her breath). Two, because the creation of a fairly grounded visual normalcy means that the necrophilia material is much harder to escape than it would be in a more vividly imaginative horror setting; though obscured by many decades, the film is plainly depicting something like the real world, and this gives its kinky sexuality far more potency than I know what to do with, even 51 years on.

Ultimately, everything that is most fascinating about The Horrible Dr. Hichcock has to do with sex. It's a good horror film, mind, though the last ten minutes with their series of Shocking! reveals, and the gradual reduction of Cynthia to a screaming, running victim take a lot of the sting out. But it's even better as a film of psychological exploration - I will not even call it "psychological horror", since the film takes careful pains to never depict the sexual behavior of the Hichcocks as aberrant or immoral. It is simply a fact of their existence, and only once Dr. Hichcock has to look elsewhere to get his rocks off do the really terrifying behaviors start up. The film's vagueness about anything we don't directly see makes this a lot more unnerving than it might be, since we're never entirely clear what happens to Cynthia, or what happened between her and Hichcock before their arrival in London; we might have suspicions, but we don't know what he's been up to with corpses, or how those corpses get made; we surely don't have much sense at all what's going on in Margaretha and Martha's heads, and that leaves itself open for all kinds of interpretation.

It's possible to read the Hichcocks' marriage as the ultimate example of Victorian repression, or the ultimate violation of it; as something uniquely benign or especially unhealthy. The film's triumph is that it gives us just enough certain knowledge that we can start to make all kinds of alarming assumptions for ourselves, and it uses the striking visual contrast between the desperate Flemyng and the fragile Steele as a catalyst to make sure that those assumptions will all be unpleasant ones. It's quite a trick to have the driving force behind a plot be implication and innuendo, and while there's a lot to like about the film as pure Gothic horror (that coffin scene will stick with me for quite a while), it's at its very best when it's asking unresolved, uncomfortable questions about sexual behavior and power imbalances between men and women.

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MASTERS OF ITALIAN HORROR: MARIO BAVA, BEHIND THE MASK

Part of the Italian Horror Blogathon at Hugo Stiglitz Makes Movies

I don't imagine that Black Sunday - to give the film its standard English title, though strictly speaking that name only appears on the version released by American International Pictures in the 1960s, now thoroughly superseded - needs any help from me in getting the word out, but as I have elected to spend some time investigating key works by the biggest names in Italian horror, it can hardly be denied its place in that conversation. For it's the official directorial debut of Mario Bava (who'd already directed huge portions of two movies credited to Riccardo Freda, on which Bava served as cinematographer), perhaps the preeminent name in the genre. It's also one of the very best genre films ever made in Italy, while being significantly different from most of the big-name films to follow it in enough ways that it stands out, more than half a century later, as one of the most unique films of its era - pulling inspiration from a number of different sources without directly replicating any of them. It's a Gothic horror film superficially resembling the work that Hammer Films was riding to such great success at the same time in the United Kingdom, with black-and-white imagery positively drowning in deep black shadows that go far beyond the Expressionism-influenced horror and noir in America over the preceding decades. There's an emphasis on the impact of imagery-over-narrative that's pure Bava, though at the same time it has a coherent, tight screenplay like nothing else in that director's career, nor those of his countrymen. For this reason, it probably serves as the best gateway drug for Italian horror that I've ever seen, fully justifying its traditional position as the effective starting point for the history of that genre after the embryonic I vampiri and Caltiki, the Immortal Monster.

In fine Gothic ghost story tradition, the movie's plot begins in the 17th Century, at a witch burning. The Moldavian princess Asa (Barbara Steele) has been found guilty of consorting with the agents of the devil, in the form of Javuto (Arturo Dominici), and the both of them are set to be burned to death, after having spiked masks nailed to their faces in the tradition of that region. The ritual is forestalled when a freak storm puts out the flames, but the witches are both dead enough thanks to the Mask of Satan that the locals bury them anyway, making extra-certain to keep Asa's body kept safely contained in the wake of her vow to come back to wreak revenge on the descendants of her brother, overseeing her execution.

Cut to: 200 years later, though not, quite at this second, to those descendants. First, we meet a pair of doctors, Thomas Kruvajan (Andrea Checchi) and Andre Gorobec (John Richardson), traveling through the countryside. Hoping to cut some time off their journey to a conference, Kruvajan demands that their coachman takes a little-used road through the woods, which of course leads to the coach being scuttled on a pothole; as they wait to get moving again, the doctors are taken by curiosity to investigate an ancient cemetery nearby. Here they find Asa's curiously-interred remains, and also Asa's very spitting image, Princess Katia Vajda (Steele), the youngest member of the dwindling royal family living in a decaying castle nearby. The doctors then head off to the local village to sleep the night, not at any point having realised that Kruvajan, in fending off a bat, accidentally managed to spill a few drops of blood into Asa's casket. And we all know what that means.

Black Sunday is hardly the most innovative story imaginable, though it tells its tale of revived vampire witches, beautiful young innocents being made the vessel of a malevolent ancestor, and terrified villagers speaking whispered rumors of local horrors with elegant simplicity and clarity; it's basically a folkloric story, and Bava and screenwriters Ennio De Concini and Mario Serandrei treat it with exactly the right amount of archetypal distance: the characters are simple stock figures, but not boring clichés, the situations familiar but sufficiently distinctive enough to be memorable (the Moravian setting takes care of that all by itself, bringing with it an ability for the Italian filmmakers to depict a presumably made-up form of Christian observance that reads as fantastically "other", and have it not seem stupid or impossible). It's a ghost story, above and beyond everything else, but a really good one, where even an ability to get ahead of the storytellers doesn't significantly affect how one responds to the crawling creepiness as the characters get tangled up in things.

What really makes Black Sunday a top-tier horror film and spooky campfire story, though, are the visuals, as you'd pretty much have to expect given that it was directed and shot by Bava, among the most visually distinctive filmmakers in the history of any country, and any genre. Black Sunday is especially unique in his career even in that regard, as one of the few black-and-white films he made (surely I'm not the only Bava fan whose first thoughts of his style are the florid colors in Blood and Black Lace and the like), and certainly the most phenomenally chiaroscuro-addicted of those I've seen. The cemetery, the rotting castle, the crypt, and so on - all of these are already richly-designed spaces, courtesy of Giorgio Giovannini, but it's the otherworldly lighting and gloom that makes them come to life as the best sort of place to host a ghost story, looking far more authentic than their obvious "movie set" qualities should allow for.

And it's not just lighting and sets - the images are throughout of the best, most elemental horror sort. Barbara Steele, one of my candidates for cinema's all-time most beautiful women, is used magnificently for her looks, radiating virginal delicacy as Katia and frozen cruelty as Asa, even aside from her acting, which is awfully good, allowing that the part doesn't really ask for anything in the neighborhood of "nuance". There is a neat make-up effect near the end where Bava takes advantage of Steele's looks by distorting them, creating an exceptionally weird and disturbing effect of dying flesh. And that's far from the only great bit of make-up in the film - the design of Asa's victims is pretty great as well.

The most vivid image in the film, though, is surely that of Asa's corpse, with the Mask removed - perfect flesh, empty eye sockets, and a disquieting pattern of deep holes where the nails were plunged, as scorpions crawl about. It's one of a small handful of scenes so enthusiastically unsparing that it seems impossible that censors anywhere in 1960 would have been okay with them (the most extreme effects - blood dripping when the Mask was applied chief among them - were cut from the early English-language prints). Intense gore also being part of the Italian horror experience, I take pleasure in thinking that this early masterpiece of the form would be, in its little way, intense enough that even after decades of increasingly explicit and imaginative bloodletting, Black Sunday still includes moments that can be genuinely unsettling. The hallmark of Bava's filmmaking is style, atmosphere, and alarming violence, and these things are all at their very best here, in his most approachable and perhaps even his most beautiful film. It's a tremendous start to what would end up being one of the most brilliant careers in all of horror, and one of the genres undeniable masterpieces.

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