GIALLO IDENTIKIT #009 [DAS NETZ aka THE NET (1975)]

FROM ONE FACADE TO ANOTHER. Starting with the title card in front of a stone wall, the camera climbs along the wall, up to sharp-tipped iron fencing, over and into the scene of classical ruins behind. This architectural wasteland then cuts—from one facade to another—to an extreme closeup on Mel Ferrer's face. He is the film's towering (but also shrunken, self-loathing) protagonist, whose first introduction to us has all the context of a forgotten emperor's bust, languishing in anonymity in these ruins. This deceptively simple opening sequence dials in the frequency of the film's stylization, its recurring interest in architectural space, and its fraught—both sympathetic and uneasy—relationship to Ferrer's character (esp. after his murders start).

Though it's possible it wasn't a deliberate stylistic choice, it's interesting that the names of all the key cast members appear over images of Ferrer's introduction. Emphasizing, perhaps, that they're important mostly *in their relation* to his character. Also interesting that the introduction of his character, an author, shows him writing something down, considering it, and then crumpling it up and throwing it away—his worldview in a nutshell. (And the fact that his fist is most clenched when behind Susanne Uhlen's name? Absolutely on the nose, once you see the film to the end.)

[This is the twenty-eighth post in a continuing series discussing and analyzing all the Krimis and Gialli I've seen. AS WITH ALL POSTS ON THE SITE, SPOILERS SHOULD BE EXPECTED FOR EVERY FILM DISCUSSED.]

 

My Giallo Rating: ★★★★½ (out of 5)
Subcategory (if any): 
     i. Meta-Giallo (aka, Experimental Giallo)
     ii. Sleaze-Art-Sleaze Giallo (aka, Exploitation Giallo)
     iii. Country Giallo
     iv. Psychosexual Outlier Giallo 
In My Giallo Top 50 (Y/N): Yes



Equal parts INVESTIGATION OF A CITIZEN ABOVE SUSPICION, WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO SOLANGE?, and DON'T TORTURE A DUCKLING (even WHO SAW HER DIE?), Manfred Purzer's DAS NETZ (THE NET; 1975) is one of the most unexpected (and unexpectedly satisfying) Gialli I've discovered since I started my quest a few years back to track down every Giallo ever made. And this a discovery totally by accident—I stumbled across the title while searching Amazon Germany for a Eurocrime starring Horst Frank (FLUCHTWEG ST. PAULI). In the "related films" tab there it was, with an illustration of Klaus Kinski's weirdly rendered face dominating the DVD cover. I checked if the disc was English-friendly (it has a dub, though sadly no subtitles for the German track), checked the rest of the cast (which included Mel Ferrer, Elke Sommer, Carlo De Mejo, and POSSESSION's Heinz Bennent), and decided to take a chance.

I assumed, from the summary I found over at Letterboxd, that it would be a fairly staid police procedural covering the murder of a prostitute. Instead what I found once it arrived (the package twice delayed by customs) was an Experimental Giallo that used a sophisticated flashback structure and a meta-approach to tell the story of a low-key, gray-haired, atypical serial killer (a fiction writer whose work overwrites his "real" life, as he begins to kill those whose morals he feels are atrophying society's appetite for his books). He kills a prostitute in Rome—goes into flashback to show the murder of schoolgirls in the countryside—all the while being paid to write a salacious, Giallo-like memoir detailing his killing spree. It's really something. And a film that, if you're willing to get on its wavelength (less Dario Argento, more Elio Petri), is extremely rewarding as an *nth* example of just how many different forms the Giallo genre can contain

[SITUATING IT IN THE GENRE]
And make no mistake, it is a Giallo. While watching it, I kept thinking of something I'd read in Maitland McDonagh's study of Argento, during her discussion of the influence of certain strains of detective fiction on films like TENEBRAE and OPERA. She cites Cornell Woolrich, Dashiell Hammett, Pierre Boileau, Thomas Narcejac, and Robert Aldrich's take on Mickey Spillane (who just seems to keep popping up here of late):

"A more apposite model of detection may be found in Robert Aldrich's film of Mickey Spillane's KISS ME DEADLY (Spillane is, significantly, also invoked in TENEBRAE). 'You find a little thread,' coos Aldrich's Velda to a singularly stupid and unimaginative Mike Hammer, 'and it leads to a string. You follow the string till you find a rope, and from the rope you hang by the neck until ...' Until indeed ... what following the thread, the string and the rope doesn't do is lead to a solution, a way of righting the wrong that has disrupted the flow of an otherwise orderly universe, because no such solution is possible. This is the network of ideas informing Argento's films ..."

A world of detection where true solutions—solutions that restore order, intelligibility, safety—aren't possible. Solutions that uphold nothing but how permanently unsettled—unsane (to borrow one of the many translated titles tacked onto TENEBRAE)—this cinematic world is. Its natural state: an unfixable, traumatic state that overwrites the lives of all its inhabitants, no matter whether they live or die. (And, not coincidentally, it's the same conclusion that David Sanjek comes to re: the permanently cracked worldview of the Giallo.)
 
Think the last, apocalyptic shot of KISS ME DEADLY, with an irradiated, gun-shot Mike Hammer stumbling into the drink, only able to stand because of Velda, both of them watching the end of the world (a dirty bomb detonating inside the beach house) happen before their eyes. Think Marc Daly staring into the abyss of the killer's blood at the end of DEEP RED, that blood transferring the hidden trauma of Carlo's life to his. Think Ingrid Thulin at the end of Lado's SHORT NIGHT OF GLASS DOLLS, shrieking into the camera as she watches her still-alive lover, Jean Sorel, get vivisected before her eyes (with the camera freezing as "THE END" gets thrown up over her desolated face). Or Daria Nicolodi, at the end of TENEBRAE, one-upping and perfecting that shot, that state. 

This is the worldview of the Giallo, whether or not there's a black-gloved killer in sight, and it is most assuredly the worldview of DAS NETZ. (And there are other Giallo-isms, including a number of the criteria I'm using to build my Giallo Master List; the Intro Page lists them.)

PRELUDE TO THE FIRST MURDER: Much time is spent on subtly stylized buildup, teasing the inevitable outcome (as Ferrer describes it sarcastically to Kinski, "Murder by sex fiend") ... but? The murder never arrives onscreen. Though it's committed, we see none of it. Only the crime scene in its aftermath, where we're introduced to the interconnected investigators—Heinz Bennent and Klaus Kinski—and the victim's fellow call girl, played by Elke Sommer. This withholding of the promised heart of each murder set-piece is the primary way that the film experiments inside the genre.

Notice also the way that the murderer and victim are doubled throughout the sequence. At the start they are both shown drinking (and watching) while at the restaurant. Later, at the victim's apartment, they are both shot watching each other in the reflection of the same mirror. This helps introduce another of the Giallo's key themes—voyeurism—into the story.

We go from Ferrer rejecting the woman's advances on the bed to ... the next morning, with the police already in her apartment investigating the crime scene, the murder already done. The method of killing (strangulation by telephone cord) is revealed to us only after the fact, through the conversation between the cops: A markedly different strategy than the "murder spectacle" of the typical Giallo.

[SO WHAT MAKES IT AN EXPERIMENTAL GIALLO?]
One of the things that I've argued "meta" or "experimental" Gialli tend to do is to invoke Giallo conventions—the devices those familiar with the genre have been conditioned to expect—only to subvert the expectations associated with them. Teasing the visceral, visual, stylistic allure of these conventions, only to withold or undercut their expected payoff. I.e., taking the conventions and doing "anti" examples of them.

Think of the way that an Experimental Giallo like Petri's INVESTIGATION opens with an elaborately staged murder set-piece—Volonté ritually murdering Bolkan's character, fleeing down a spiral staircase, all to the strains of idiosyncratic Morricone music—that sets up a Giallo expectation in the audience. I.e., that there will likely be more elaborately staged, ritually dressed murders in this thriller-mystery story.

But of course there aren't. Instead, Petri seems to fill the spaces where we would expect more murders with flashbacks that leak in and out of the film's "current action" (in ways that often don't make it clear what is and isn't flashback, a point that Lee Howard brought up in the Movie Matters podcast covering Petri's film). We get flashbacks of Volonté and Bolkan re-enacting other famous "sex crimes" (which we gradually learn was their version of foreplay), as well as reveries involving Volonté's character that play like weird sadomasochistic wish-fulfillments, scenes where he is happy—almost relieved—to submit to The Law whose punishment he's been teasing throughout the film (the end of the movie is perhaps the most potent example of this).

Likewise, DAS NETZ plays with the audience's awareness and expectation of such scenes. Each murder set-piece is staged in a familiar way, with the Giallo killer (Ferrer, committing the murders for confused sex- and mother-related reasons from his past) making contact with a physically attractive woman who will become his victim. The scenes often involve that woman disrobing, quite casually (even gratuitously), as Ferrer obliquely hints at his true reason for their meeting. And the *aftermath* of each scene shows the discovery of the murdered victim, usually still nude, in recognizable exploitation style; usually with some sort of vicious method employed to murder her (I'm thinking esp. of the phone cord strangulation of the lolling nude prostitute at the start).

But:

In all but one instance, Purzer withholds the actual murders from us. We do not see, onscreen, the elaborately staged act—the outre use of the weapon, breathless exertion, the onscreen gore—only its buildup and aftermath. Effectively this makes the set-pieces feel "off" somehow, as though they're missing the key information and images that would quality them as a Giallo set-piece in the first place. Purzer seems to know that we, as audience, have been conditioned to expect such visual information—Argento's dizzyingly executed DEEP RED was released the same year after all—and yet is intent on withholding it.

This achieves a couple of things: It shifts the focus of the film from "exploitation" to "experimental". It also invites us, through its conspicuous absences, to imagine this missing violence. Just as Ferrer is contracted to describe the sordid details of his crimes in his murder memoirs, we are invited to re-create those same details in our own minds. Drawing on a whole genre's worth of templates and examples to do so.

Further, it places an even greater emphasis on character—on developing, understanding, empathizing with the key cast members. Instead of watching an extended scene of a sputtering, heaving, flailing nude woman being brutally strangled with a phone cord ripped out of the wall, we spend time watching the complicated expressions flit across Ferrer's remembering face; the smirking, twitching, always cigarette-smoking rock'n'roll imp that is Kinski's scheming reporter; or the strange distances Susanne Uhlen seems to be searching out in her face. 

THE ONE MURDER WE GET IN FULL (AND STILL IT'S AT A REMOVE): I would argue it's no coincidence that the only murder we witness is the murder of the single most important female character in the film, played by Susanne Uhlen. Nor is it coincidence that because of the way the murder is shot, it at first appears that Ferrer is kissing Uhlen and not killing her.

[ON TO ITS OTHER GIALLO TRAITS]
There is an absolute embarrassment of riches when it comes to the film's cast. Not only remarkable names, but remarkable performances almost across the board:

Kinski!

Kinski!

Kinski!

Maria Tedeschi, who plays Ferrer's sphinx-like mother. Her presence, almost completely sans dialogue, is enough to cast a pall over both his childhood and his own self-worth. She should be recognizable to genre fans as Edwige Fenech's puritanical neighbor in THE CASE OF THE BLOODY IRIS, or as the shocked woman who warns Tony Musante about the meat cleaver in BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE.

Ubiquitous-in-Italian-films Claudio Gora, who plays the publisher of the magazine contracting Ferrer to write his memoirs. He's the arrogant witness with the faulty photographic memory in Umberto Lenzi's Giallo / Krimi Hybrid SEVEN BLOOD-STAINED ORCHIDS. He's the probably rotten uncle to Barbara Steele in AN ANGEL FOR SATAN. He's in Damiani's HOW TO KILL A JUDGE, Bava's DANGER: DIABOLIK, Tonino Cervi's QUEENS OF EVIL, Lenzi's MANHUNT IN THE CITY, and on, and on, and on.

Heinz Bennent (top) and Elke Sommer. If I had a complaint, it would be that both Bennent and Sommer feel a bit underused. Part of this is lack of screen time, esp. screen time that gives them something substantial to do (Sommer's character esp. seems like nothing more than an exposition device). Probably their "lack" also has to do with just how many key characters populate the story, and the juggling act it takes to keep their stories all compellingly "up in the air" ... In Bennent's case, some of this might be tempered by being able to hear him deliver his own lines, but he still feels like an ancillary character here. Esp. when you consider the smug dynamism of his performance in Zulawski's POSSESSION.

The greatest surprise in the cast (for me at least) was Susanne Uhlen, who is literally luminous in some scenes, playing the mysterious and aloof "local girl" who happens to live in a castle owned by parents we never see. She provides a possible bridge for Ferrer's character—from cynical misanthrope to a place of possible hope, hope in the younger generation, whose lack of classical intelligence and recognizable morals has served as his excuse to execute them. (It's maybe no coincidence that, to get to the Gothic castle that she glides in and out of, Ferrer must cross an ancient-looking stone causeway, late in a Gothic night.)

Her profound interest in his work as a writer—as well as a moment when she invites him to read her interest in him as also an amorous one—brings Ferrer momentarily back from his self-destructive brink, from his acquiesence to the market forces that have convinced him the only way to make money as an author is to kill people and then write about it. Her various appearances in the story feel at times like something out of a Gothic fairy tale. Each time she appears, she's wearing a distinctive, different "character costume"—mousy country local; alluring tennis player; gauzily lit high-society debutante; ghost of the Gothic past. This shifting persona (as coded by the at-time inexplicable costume changes) helps to suggest that she may somehow exist outside of the reality of the rest of the characters, outside of time (the scene in the castle esp. feels like it is a timeless restaging of a past Gothic encounter), or even as a kind of idealized version of all the women Ferrer's character has encountered (and killed) up till then.

[AND THEN THERE ARE THE TIMES WHEN PURZER'S STYLE *DOES* INTRUDE]
Just because it's an "anti" or "experimental" Giallo doesn't mean it lacks flash and style altogether. Or that the unusual weight it places on character development keeps it from showing off. After Kinski intuits (and makes contact with) the film's killer, he races to go see his magazine editor and finalize a contract for the killer to write his memoirs. Here the movie becomes suddenly frenetic, geometric, with Kinski's miniature body racing through oversized enviroments that reminded me most of Storaro's geometric compositions in THE FIFTH CORD:

There's the later drug happening / orgy scene that shows both the most sustained flesh in the film and some of the most impressive manipulation of the camera (and culminates with the introduction of Carlo De Mejo's [CITY OF THE LIVING DEAD, MANHATTAN BABY, TERROR EXPRESS, THE OUTSIDE MAN] character):

And finally there's Ferrer's suicide. It both extends the meta-, sophisticated structure of the narrative AND manages to create some of the most stylized images in the film.

Earlier on, we'd gotten examples of Ferrer funneled through various forms of media, mostly photographs:

THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE IS THE MEDIUM: As McDonagh argues for Argento's DEEP RED—"[Its] plot pivots on reflections of reality: photographs, drawings copied and recopied, events re-enacted like scenes from a play"—so DAS NETZ repeatedly returns to the mediation of images. There are the neglected photos of Ferrer's character's unhappy childhood. There are incriminating photos of him returning to the scene of the first crime after the body is discovered (not unlike Fabio Testi being photographed in the crowd that gathers around the discovery of the first body in SOLANGE). And, most importantly, there's the tour de force presentation of his suicide-by-8-millimeter.

Notice how the double-circle of the sight finder in the camera mimics the hand-drawn circles singling him out in the crowd in the first photograph.

This aesthetic is carried through to its logical end in Ferrer's suicide. We only learn that Ferrer's killed himself after the fact, and only get to see the manner in which he does it via Super-8 being filmed by a tourist who follows Ferrer, out of curiosity, from a local monument. He first takes notice of Ferrer because he sees the author "kissing" the stone columns (?!) of the monument he's visiting. The tourist breaks off from his group and follows Ferrer to a beach, where his bleached, handheld footage gives us the window onto the author's last moments: 

Ferrer flings his last manuscript pages into the air before wading out into the water. Once in the water—he seems disoriented, overwhelmed by the crashing waves—we get clipped glimpses of him pulling a gun and shooting himself in the head. Then more rushing waves. And a cut back to the film being projected in police headquarters. In effect, we are getting yet another version of story, a tiny bit of this tourist's "memoir," that serves as the end of Ferrer's own work (not to mention the film's):

Leonard Jacobs

April, 2015

[SHOW NOTES]

VERSION WATCHED: German DVD | LANGUAGE: English dub; the disc includes a German soundtrack, but no English subtitles | DIRECTOR: Manfred Purzer | WRITER(S): Hans Habe, Manfred Purzer | MUSIC: Klaus Doldinger | CINEMATOGRAPHER: Charly Steinberger | CAST: Mel Ferrer (Aurelio Morelli); Klaus Kinski (Emilio Bossi); Heinz Bennent (Inspektor Canonica); Susanne Uhlen (Agnese); Elke Sommer (Christa Sonntag); Andrea Rau (Herta Enzian); Carlo De Mejo (Francesco Vanetti); Claudio Gora (Carlo Vanetti); Sabine von Maydell (Bibliothekarin); Franz Rudnick (Canonicas Assistent)