KRIMI VS. GIALLO [What I’m Talking About Whenever I’m Talking About the Best Gialli and Krimis]

Reading the Arrow booklet that comes with their release of Yasuharu Hasebe’s MASSACRE GUN, a surreal-o-noir from 1967 that is every bit the brother of YOUTH OF THE BEAST and BRANDED TO KILL, I came across the following in Jasper Sharp’s essay on the film. In its own way, it’s just another way of saying everything I’m trying to talk about, when talking about how the best Gialli and Krimis operate. I.e., the oneiric and dream logic passages that distinguish the top-tier Gialli for me. The Stimmung and horror-mystery-grotesqueries that make the Krimi all part of that same dream. Basically, the phantasmagorical elements that, if they didn’t exist in these two, twinned genres, I wouldn’t be bothering with any of this writing here (emphasis added):

“... representative of a more hardboiled strain of Nikkatsu Action movie that became increasingly stylized and self-referential over the next decade. They often deployed the same acting talent, with male stars such as Jo Shishido and Hideaki Nitani moving from supporting to more centre-stage roles, and invoked mukokuseki (‘borderless’) onscreen worlds that, in their embrace of an aesthetic and iconography gleaned from the international language of foreign pulp cinema of the same vein, seemed more and more divorced from any recognisable, lived-in Japanese reality, while simultaneously expressing a sense of cynicism and despair at the path up which modernity was leading the country. When combined with some of the most striking and idiosyncratic monochrome widescreen scope cinematography seen anywhere in the world at the time, certain titles transcended their modest potboiler ambitions to find their place within the loftier echelons of cinematic artistry.”

So: Mukokuseki. Stimmung. Ero-guro-sensu. Oneirism and the logic of dreams. A whole cast of characters that share existence in the same universe, conjured in this peculiar flicker of film to do only one thing: Recur. And recur. And recur. 

That’s it that’s everything—what this site celebrates in a nutshell.

Leonard Jacobs

July, 2015