8.28.2014

GIALLO IDENTIKIT #001 [TENEBRAE, aka TENEBRE, aka UNSANE (1982)]


[Note: This is the second post in a continuing series discussing and analyzing our favorite Krimis and Gialli (some of the reviews started as rough drafts on my Letterboxd account). As with every post on this site, SPOILERS SHOULD BE EXPECTED.]


My Giallo Rating: ★★★★
Subcategory (if any): 

     i.
Meta-Giallo (aka, Experimental Giallo)
     ii. Sleaze-Art-Sleaze Giallo 
In My Giallo Top 50 (Y/N): Yes (Letterboxd List) 



I know quite a few people who dismiss this movie. They take the over-the-top gore, the seemingly flattened, overheated characters (I’d call them Grand Guignoled), the surface-goofy surface-disco Goblin score, etc. etc., and roll their eyes and move on to something else. They argue that it’s simply Argento going through his Giallo motions, running out of things to say within the trappings of the genre (ending up being trapped). They argue that, even with flourishes like the bravura Louma crane shot, there simply isn’t enough to take seriously or hold one’s interest.

I can see and acknowledge all of those arguments pretty easily; in truth, I felt something along those lines when I first watched the film. Watching it a few times and really paying attention though— especially watching it after listening to the Thomas Rostock commentary—keyed me into just how much more is going on above, below, beyond the sometimes ridiculous-grotesque surface. How much more, on a narrative level, is being accomplished. And how, because of this, it stands as one of Argento’s most complicated works.

Let me point out a couple examples below (and again, these comments are deeply indebted to Rostock’s commentary, something really worth listening to; if you’re interested at all, you should stop reading this review and seek out his commentary [his DEEP RED commentary, available on the OOP AWE/Another World Entertainment disc, is tops as well]).

On the one hand, the intricate, extensive doubling that shows up in TENEBRAE is hermetic, sealed off unto itself inside the film. On the other hand, it is a doubling that points to iconic scenes that exist outside of it, in cinema past. One of these is the infamous "woman on the beach" sequence from SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER (1959), here reincarnated as the beach flashback that features the introduction of Eva Robins' character. In the interest of keeping this website from veering into NSFW territory, I've not included the corresponding scenes from TENEBRAE, though anyone familiar with the film will be able to picture them. More images from the original 1959 sequence show up below.
 
[A DOUBLE UNIVERSE]
Rostock outlines, for instance, the almost mind-boggling extent to which Argento pursues the notion of doubles and doubling in the filmthat this is indeed one key to understanding and appreciating the film’s movement as a film. (The fact that I mostly missed this on a first viewing [other than to think to myself, Hey, doesn’t that incidental character look a lot like that other incidental character?] really caused me to appreciate just how attuned Rostock was to what Argento as a filmmaker was accomplishing.)

Rostock points out that nearly every character in the film has a double—visual double, narrative or plot-functional double—and that some of the characters (the main character Peter Neal and his secretary Anne, e.g.) have multiple doubles. 

Rostock also points out how nearly every significant object or location or plot point in the film is also repeated, multiplied, etc.:

E.g., there are two traffic accidents; two significant and mysterious scenes featuring a phone booth; the appearance/arrival of two typewriters in Neal’s apartment; two prominent (somewhat identical) pieces of sculpture that figure into the plot; two murderers; two menacing bums; two plane rides; two missing rings of keys; etc. etc. etc.

Perhaps the most effective use of this doubling comes in Argento’s casting of Eva Robins as the “woman on the beach” in the film’s flashbacks. Turns out that Eva Robins is a transgender actress/model very famous in Italy. In the flashback scene she teases a group of four adolescents on the beach; later she is killed by one of the film’s two murderers. She is clearly meant to wind up critics that accuse his (Argento’s) films of sexism, the male gaze, misogyny. But we literally, in this physical, actual person, get the ultimate doubling:

She is both male and female, both sexually attractive and (potentially) sexually repulsive. (And is narratively significant both for the fictional character that she plays in the film AND the non-fictional life she leads outside of that film.)

The beach that these flashback scenes are filmed on was apparently a spot known for “illegal, and taboo sexual acts”—a spot that some Italian viewers w/could recognize immediately as a real-life location of “aberrant” sexual rendezvous and crimes. Further, the way the scene is shot heavily references the Tennessee Williams’ film SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER, in which Elizabeth Taylor acts as the sexual temptress on the beach in order to ensnare adolescent males as sexual partners for her cousin Sebastian.



Three more examples of the "woman on the beach" scene. The use of overlapping, "dream-wiping" images for the entire flashback is a technique that's also used again (the closeup on Taylor's face in the bottom corner is the film's "present action," wherein she narrates the flashback that is coming to life in the rest of the frame). This style was used, to almost the exact same effect, in Robert Aldrich's LEGEND OF LYLAH CLARE (1968), where a past trauma is brought back into the film via the undulating images of the present narrating past.



Another visual quotation? The top image is from the 1946 noir THE LOCKET (a startlingly good noir at that). Watching it, I couldn't help but think immediately of probably the best-known image from Argento's film, the moment before Tilde's death.

[MINDING THE GAPS]
Something else to notice: the overwhelming presence of frustrating and mysterious gaps in the film’s continuity (frustrating both in terms of mystery genre conventions, and frustrating in terms of the viewing experience).

E.g., in TENEBRAE the use of accepted, recognizable detective plots are telegraphed from the beginning of the film as being key to understanding and following its plot. Peter Neal is a writer of detective fiction; he quotes from Sherlock Holmes as a way to better understand or solve the murders in the film; the Italian inspector investigating the case is an avid mystery reader who constantly brings this up; etc. etc.

What’s great, though, is that Argento subverts all of these through the actual filmmaking—through the actual shaping and visual rendering of the plot. Beyond the double and dream-logic stuff that the Rostock commentary cites, Argento uses some of the same “narrative gapping” that can be found in a number of his other films, most notably FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET and DEEP RED. The best and most sustained example of this occurs when Peter Neal is scheduled to do a TV interview about his book. The interview is mentioned in the first 10 or 15 minutes of the film. Twenty or thirty minutes later, after a number of murders, it finally appears that it’s going to happen. I would argue that it can be broken down into four or five pieces:

  1. Neal goes with his agent Bullmer to the TV station; both are waiting in the hallway for the host of the TV show. When he arrives, he says to Neal “I’m going to do about 20 or 30 minutes with you.” Neal asks, looking around the hallway they’re sitting in: “Here?” The host laughs, almost dismissively, and replies “No.” What follows is a pre-interview that lasts 5 or so minutes and never really goes anywhere. During this time a technician comes and declares that it’s time for the interview.
  2. Cut to Neal and the TV host in a long shot in the studio, with Neal’s agent Bullmer standing 10 or 20 feet away. As Bullmer looks on, we hear the host say in the background: “I’d like to start with a resume of your work…” Just as it appears that the interview proper is about to start, the police inspector and his assistant come into the studio and stand next to Bullmer. Bullmer notices them, says something like, “They’re about to start—they’ll probably be 20 or 30 minutes so why don’t we go outside…”
  3. Cut to Bullmer and the two police officers walking through the hallway and having a fairly throwaway conversation about the fact that the police can’t figure out how Peter Neal is connected to the murders.
  4. Cut to Peter Neal outside now, apparently 20 or 30 minutes later, post-interview, leaning on the roof of a car and talking to the police inspector, without Bullmer, without the police inspector’s assistant. The spatial and temporal dissonance that this causes is amazing to me—clearly a significant amount of time has passed, clearly several characters have moved in and out of the different spaces we’ve just seen; at this moment, they are operating and existing somewhere else in the film (importantly, a somewhere else that we, as viewer, have no access to on account of the way that the scene, up till then, has been edited).

Through the editing, Argento basically edits around what was presumably supposed to be a centrally important scene—either centrally important because of the exposition one could expect in it, or centrally important as the “site” of some sort of major plot point or reveal—and instead gives us only the secondary and tertiary action happening around it. It manages to be disorienting and complicated and sophisticated all at once, and in the middle of a movie probably best remembered for the T&A that shows up in the lesbian murder scene …

The long and short of it is: TENEBRAE is a film that bears repeat viewings very well, a film whose repeat viewings reveal the depth and breadth of what Argento can get up to. It features an efficient, economical narrative that is also, at the same time, ponderously ornate; a hyper-dense, hyper-layered surface packed and repacked with violence, nudity, eroticism, duplicity, detective conventions, fictional conventions, narrative and anti-narrative tendencies. All at once.


All of it creates a frisson, a momentum that propels you, in an increasingly complex line, toward the horror of its climax (it's no surprise that Daria Nicolodi's seemingly endless scream, which is the last shot of the film before it fades into the credits, feels so visceral, so physically felt). Argento's style and sensibilities may have fallen down completely since circa 1987, but TENEBRAE rubs up against the outer edges, the perceived limits, of a genre too often dismissed for its lowest-common-denominator examples.

Currently holds the #1 spot on my Giallo List over at Letterboxed.

NOTE: Currently Rostock’s commentary can be found on the Arrow Blu-ray/DVD of the film. One caveat: The current release, a limited steelbook edition from Arrow, has quite impressive a/v (based on the same transfer used for the equally impressive picture on the French Wild Side release). The previous Arrow release, though, is to be avoided. It is unfortunately afflicted with what so many cult Italian releases have been ruined with, rampant "machine noise."

The only other release to look out for will be the one planned from Synapse (there's also quite a bit of hope for their planned 2015 release of SUSPIRIA, considering how flawed the previous Blu-ray releases of that title have been).

Leonard Jacobs
August, 2014

[SHOW NOTES]
VERSION WATCHED: The second-issue Arrow Blu-ray with the superior Wild Side transfer | LANGUAGE: English soundtrack | DIRECTOR: Dario Argento | WRITER(S): Dario Argento | MUSIC: Massimo Morante, Fabio Pignatelli, Claudio Simonetti | CINEMATOGRAPHER: Luciano Tovoli  | CAST: Anthony Franciosa (Peter Neal); Christian Borromeo (Gianni); Mirella D'Angelo (Tilde); Veronica Lario (Jane McKerrow); Ania Pieroni (Elsa Manni); Eva Robins (Woman on the Beach); Carola Stagnaro (Detective Altieri); John Steiner (Christiano Berti); Lara Wendel (Maria Alboretto); John Saxon (Bullmer); Daria Nicolodi (Anne); Giuliano Gemma (Detective Germani)



  

8.26.2014

#001 KRIMI POCKET REVIEW [CREATURE WITH THE BLUE HAND aka DIE BLAUE HAND (1967)]


[Note: This is the first post in a continuing series discussing and analyzing our favorite Krimis and Gialli (some of the reviews started as rough drafts on my Letterboxd account). As with every post on this site, SPOILERS SHOULD BE EXPECTED.]

My Krimi Rating: ★★★½ (out of 5★)
Subcategory (if any): 
     i. Inheritance Scheme Krimi

     ii. Ingénue-in-Distress Krimi
     iii. Kinski-as-Grotesque Krimi 

     iv. Old Dark House Krimi
Who Portrays the Detective (amateur or official):
     Harald Leipnitz(official); Klaus Kinski (amateur)

Who's the Ingénue: 
     
Diana Körner
In My Krimi Top 20 (Y/N): No (Letterboxd link)


I'm about 20 movies into the Krimi genre and there are a certain number of objections that seem to recur in those who find themselves new to the genre, objections that seem to be stumbling blocks that keep them from being able to "fully take to" the genre. *Some* of this comes (I think) because genre fans are encountering the films in reverse.

I.e., a lot of people seem to come to the Krimi by way of the Giallo, a genre that comes after it both chronologically, and in terms of how far past censorship the movies could push. Because Gialli are, almost by definition, sleazier, gorier, more explicit, I think it is sometimes hard to then pull back from this level of explicitness and return to a genre that was much more hamstrung by the censorship of a slightly earlier time. (It's also true of course that, as movies came later and later in the Krimi cycle, their onscreen presentation of nudity, sexuality, gore, violence did increase; so much so that one of the more leery and explicit Gialli—WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE?—is in actuality a Krimi co-production.)

Another, related stumbling block comes in terms of the Krimi worldview. A worldview that asks us to believe in (or, at least suspend our disbelief in) something that feels too often dated; anachronistic; out of touch. That is, less drenched in the dream-logic of the Gialli, and more prone to giving itself over to eye-rolling kitsch. So it often feels like the hyper-stylization that makes the best Gialli so memorable, so oneiric, here gives way to a style that feels like a punchline (and an stale one at that).


Sometimes this problem stems from the degree (and broadness) of the genre's entrenched comic relief, or the way in which the plots—even when done with impressionistic flair and giddy experimentation—seem kitschy or too old-fashioned to believe.

Part of this has to do with the era (often the 1920s) in which the source material was being written—the problem of trying to adapt and "update" the context and norms attached to something from four decades earlier. The author of the blog Giallo Fever puts it this way, while discussing a Krimi I've yet to see:

"As with most krimi films The Black Abbot has that strange sense of temporal and cultural displacement stemming from being a 1960s German evocation of a 1920s England that was probably already half-mythical at the time of its creation."
Say all that to say, even as I've found myself "taking to" the genre quite a bit, I've still found the examples I've watched incredibly uneven (even moreso than with Gialli). A full half of those I've seen so far feel like unjustifiable "fails," while only a handful feel as accomplished, as delirious, as exciting as anything else I've discovered in the under-explored corners of the genre world. CREATURE WITH THE BLUE HAND skews toward the top of the heap, even if its occasional clunkiness keeps it from being an unqualified classic.

At this point in the cycle (1967), it's no surprise that Krimi regular Alfred Vohrer is comfortable ticking off all the familiar genre devices. Here we get, among other things:

1. A convoluted and murderous inheritance plot;

2. Ostentatious, narratively unnecessary style, e.g.:

 
Look at the blue wash of fogged lighting that accompanies escaped convict Kinski's return to his home (blue, as one might expect from the title, is expertly employed as *the* dominant visual motif throughout).
Or the cache of hanging mannequins, whose presence literally cannot be explained by the plot (the story tries, a bit weakly, but they only make "sense" as one prong of a larger strategy of outre and macabre stylization).


Or, look at the way inanimate objects are used to emphasize the more salacious elements of the plot, as in the pronounced use of the keyhole striptease, or the extreme foregrounding of the spiked glove in frame ...

 

... these same objects are used also to distort and stylize characters, as when the "Lady of the House" (Ilse Steppat, from ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE) has her face filmed through the swishing liquid of her wine glass.
3. A sinister manse where much of the action takes place, replete with secret passages and ancient dungeons;

4. The oft-employed "ingenue in distress," who is being threatened in order to get her to give up an unknown inheritance (here played by Diana Körner; more often, the role is played by Karin Dor, perhaps as much because she was married to one of the chief Krimi directors of the day [Harald Reinl] as anything else); 




5. A masked killer who dispatches his-or-her victims in gruesome and overcomplicated ways and makes each, next appearance more theatrical and weird than the last;

6. A strong investigative element, either in the form of Scotland Yard or an amateur sleuth (unfortunately *not* played by Joachim Fuchsberger here);

7. the prominent use of doubles or twins. Kinski plays twin brothers, one accused of murder, the other a pillar of the upper-crust; of course Kinski's presence is its own familiar element; he's been in nearly half of the entries I've seen this year; 



8. a mental hospital run by a corrupt doctor who uses the facility as a front to either hide or discredit other characters in the plot (Carl Lange plays the doctor, he who played Christopher Lee's ghoul sidekick in THE TORTURE CHAMBER OF DR. SADISM);

9. Martin Böttcher's musical signature—jazzy, experimental, bombastic (even while being compressed, clipped, and undercut by surprisingly electronic flourishes);

10. and more red herrings than you can shake a stick at.

There are also Giallo connections. The medieval murder weapon—a suit of armor's gauntlet that deploys stunted Wolverine claws—points to both the gauntlet used in BLOOD AND BLACK LACE and the one in DEATH WALKS AT MIDNIGHT. There's also a clear obsession with voyeurism, with looking and being looked at. Both in a sexual context (that gratuitous inclusion, twice, of the stripper doing her routine in her cell at the mental ward) and in a proto-"stalk-and-slash" context. In the credit sequence alone, there are at least five extreme closeups on eyes looking through openings (the single eye-hole in the mask, a keyhole, a secret opening in a wall, etcet).







Despite all this, it feels, toward the end, as if it's missing a little something, some intangible that keeps it from being in a Top 5. Also, despite the fact that it doesn't strongly feature a comedy sidekick (there's no Eddi Arent in sight), the movie's overall tone feels a bit too insubstantial or "light".

Still lands in a respectable spot, on the Letterboxd Krimi Quest list.

Leonard Jacobs
August, 2014

[SHOW NOTES]
VERSION WATCHED: Bootleg | LANGUAGE: German with English subs | DIRECTOR: Alfred Vohrer | WRITER(S): Edgar Wallace, Harald G. Petersson, Herbert Reinecker | MUSIC: Martin Böttcher | CINEMATOGRAPHER: Ernst W. Kalinke | CAST: Harald Leipnitz (Inspektor Craig); Klaus Kinski (Dave Emerson / Richard Emerson); Carl Lange (Dr. Albert Mangrove); Ilse Steppat (Lady Emerson); Hermann Lenschau (Rechtsanwalt Douglas); Diana Körner (Myrna Emerson); Albert Bessler (Butler Anthony); Richard Haller (Edward Appleton / Die Blaue Hand); Ilse Pagé (Miss Mabel Finley); Fred Haltiner (Wärter Reynolds); Peter Parten (Robert Emerson); Thomas Danneberg (Charles Emerson); Heinz Spitzner (Richter); Siegfried Schürenberg (Sir John)

GIALLO SOURCE CODE [The Spiral Staircase & Tenebrae]

Plenty of people have drawn connections between specific sequences in Argento's films and the movies that influenced his filmmaking. One such film is Robert Siodmak's 1946 noir THE SPIRAL STAIRCASE. Below are some caps from the first murder in STAIRCASE, and how they compare to (and, I have to think, inspired) Tilde's murder in Argento's TENEBRAE (1982).






THE IMPULSE HAD BECOME IRRESISTIBLE [Introductory Notes]


As the blog title suggests, this space will be used first and foremost to examine (marvel at, obsess over, celebrate) the narrative conventions of both the Krimi and Giallo genres. The rampant passages of dream-logic. The technically assured (sometimes uncanny) narrative experimentation. The genre-defining sound designs. The erotic and grotesque chunks of narrative, strung or stuck together until they amount to (in the best cases) something deliriously innovative (i.e., pure cinema).

We'll chronicle the tried, true, ingrained tropes. And plot points. And literary origins. And recurring cast and stock characters. We'll feature posts on the iconic visuals and the classic films from which they're often being quoted, appropriated, reclaimed. We will, above all, share our enthusiasm for all the site can contain. Share details of production history and the best home-video releases we know. Link to like-minded sites, forums, posts. 


That is our first truth.

Our second expands into other genres, other corners, other neglected dark attics and basements of what keeps us interested in cinema. The Eurogothic, the Eurowestern, Eurocrime. The Japanese New Wave. The work of the Polish Ex-Pats. Ozploitation. Body Horror. Existential, telekinetic sci-fi. The longstanding (and almost always in play) tradition of ero guro nansensu (erotic grotesque nonsense), and all that that entails. Not only in Japanese art and literature and film, but also as it has seeped into the groundwater all around the world: Djuna Barnes' NIGHTWOOD. Andzrej Zulawski's POSSESSION. Elio Petri's whole body of work. Neonoir like NIGHT MOVES. Etcet. Etcet.

What it boils down to is that we love genre. And that all stories, hard or soft stories, narrative or not-stories, are part of a genre. ("Realism" is a genre; "literary fiction" is a genre; "arthouse" and "pulp" and "thriller" and "collage film" and and and ...) All genres, attached to an entire "decision tree" of related and sub-compacted other genres. Iterations. Homages. Riffs and steals.

And this: We don't want to waste energy arguing. We want our creative humors pumping not from trollish, a-hole-ish insecurities and bullshit. But from our shared, communal enthusiasm for that of which we speak. So let's get to it.


Leonard Jacobs
August, 2014