GIALLO IDENTIKIT [What Makes a Giallo?]

I know a lot of people (myself included) debate minutiae when it comes to whether or not a given Italian genre movie is a Giallo. Esp. when it comes to the more obscure, lesser-seen examples out there. 

Some people limit the genre very strictly, arguing that there are no more than 60 or 70 Giallo films in existence. Or that only films in the “Golden Age” of Gialli (often considered 1970-1975, begun and ended by the Argento bookends of BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE and DEEP RED) count as bona fide entries in the genre. 

Some people hold that a film *must* be made in Italy (or by Italian hands) to be counted as part of the genre (this argument completely ignores, of course, the fact that most of Argento’s early Gialli were nothing but “Euro-pudding” co-productions, with as much production money and writing and acting talent coming from outside of Italy as in).

That is, some people take a very conservative, even anemic, approach to “what makes a Giallo”.

I’m not one of those people.

I’ve been watching films in the genre—also reading, researching, tracking down, being *absolutely* compelled by these films—for nearly a decade now. I’m aware of the genre’s literary origins—the Il Giallo Mondadori, the Mondadori “yellow” paperbacks that translated into Italian the mysteries of Edgar Wallace, Agatha Christie, Conan Doyle, Cornell Woolrich, Fredric Brown, John D. MacDonald, etc. And the way that these books served as the jumping-off point for (also, often, the winking, meta-textual nod to) the cinematic genre that would come.

(As early as Mario Bava’s THE GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH [1963], we have the protagonist reading passages from a Giallo paperback, which goes on to color her perception of the real-life mystery that’s building all around her.)

I’m also aware of the Giallo’s extensive connection to previous cinematic traditions—German Expressionism, Film Noir, the German Krimi. And I’ve now seen the vast majority of English-friendly home-video releases in the genre … 327 films and counting ...

And the sum total of my appreciation is that, like probably all Italian genres of a certain era, the Giallo was, above all, *porous* when it came to its borders. That it was, above all, *plastic* in the ways it could be stretched, twisted—retrofitted and reborn—to absorb and rework other, competing genres of the day. It’s common knowledge, for instance, that the definition of a Giallo inside Italy can include very nearly any thriller ever made.

As Michael Mackenzie has pointed out on the Movie Matters Podcast, the notion that the Giallo includes a very specific, prescribed set of film conventions (represented by the work of Argento, Bava, Fulci, Martino, Lado, Ercoli, Miraglia, etc.) is a very non-Italian one, and has grown from the increasing cult embrace of these films outside of their homeland. 

One only has to look at Claudio Simonetti’s “Top Gialli” list, as submitted for the Movie Matters Giallo Special, to see how true this is. Simonetti is one of *the* architects of the Italian Giallo, through his revolutionary soundtrack work (both with and without the band Goblin) on film’s like DEEP RED (1975), OPERA (1987), and TENEBRAE (1982). And one of his top-three, all-time “Gialli” is Ridley Scott’s 2001 film, HANNIBAL ... a film that many Giallo fans wouldn’t recognize as part of the genre. 

Further, as often as not, market forces have had as much to do with the genre’s elasticity as anything. As David Sanjek points out, in his seminal article, “Foreign Detection: The West German Krimi and the Italian Giallo”:

“… the production practices of the commercial cinema in Italy led producers to seize upon whatever genre attracted the greatest immediate consumer interest … what sets Italy apart is its filmmakers’ readiness not only to mix together seemingly disparate genres, but also their … invention of ever more outrageous plots designed to fulfill consumer demand.”  

So where do you put your stakes down, re: the boundaries of the genre? I don’t go so far as to embrace the Italian notion of nearly *any* thriller being classifiable as a Giallo, but I do argue (and remain ever open) to the notion that the genre did not remain static at any point in its life. It may be true that the genre found its most compelling form in the by-now-iconic “black-gloved killer,” but even this seemingly inviolable Giallo convention didn’t stand still.

The first complete iteration of the black-gloved killer—widely acknowledged as Bava's BLOOD AND BLACK LACE (1964)—was, after all, a reaction to (and a porting over of) ideas and images from the German Krimi. (As I’ve already demonstrated, key Krimis from the same time period featured identical iconography and visual cues as the ones found in Bava’s cornerstone work, including MONSTER OF LONDON CITY, ROOM 13, and PHANTOM OF SOHO).

Also in terms of the black-gloved killer’s plot. Though what people most often take away from BLOOD AND BLACK LACE now is the still-shocking brutality of the violence (and the template it helps lay for the body-count movie), they mostly forget that the killer’s motivation is as old-fashioned (and Krimi) as it gets: It’s all down to an inheritance scheme.

Fast-forward to Argento’s appropriation of the same black-gloved imagery in BIRD: Though the killer, on the surface, looks like a redo of BLOOD AND BLACK LACE, the rationality of that film’s money plot is gone—replaced with a complicated and threatening reaction to trauma. Psychosexual entanglements and angst. Suddenly the personage of the black-gloved killer (and the genre at large) is about the limits of perception, the traditions of violence against women, the changing role of gender in society, the limits of the male gaze, the violence inherent in art.
  
And the genre’s fundamental, periodic overwriting of itself didn't end there:

Any number of “movements” bent, tweaked, wrenched-on what the Giallo was and could be. Argento’s obsession with the nature of seeing—centering the mystery around amateur (often ineffectual) detectives who have seen something they can’t understand, mis-seen something their mind can’t  *allow* them to understand, because it will wreck their orderly worldview—did eventually give way.

When the Eurocrime (Poliziottesco) genre started to threaten the Giallo’s box-office receipts, a spate of Eurocrime/Giallo Hybrids hit market—films like Dallamano’s disturbing WHAT HAVE THEY DONE TO YOUR DAUGHTERS?, Mario Caiano’s WITHOUT TRACE (aka, CALLING ALL POLICE CARS), Sergio Martino’s SUSPICIOUS DEATH OF A MINOR, Paolo Cavara’s PLOT OF FEAR, Duccio Tessari’s PUZZLE. Etc.

Even before that, the ascendancy of the Gothic genre in the 1960s required that one part of the transition to box-office prominence for the Giallo was any number of Giallo/Gothic Hybrids—stuff like Ernesto Gastaldi’s LIBIDO, Elio Scardamaglia’s MURDER CLINIC, Mario Bava’s HATCHET FOR THE HONEYMOON, Martino’s YOUR VICE IS A LOCKED ROOM AND ONLY I HAVE THE KEY, Antonio Margheriti’s SEVEN DEATHS IN THE CAT’S EYE, Giuseppe Bennati’s THE KILLER RESERVED NINE SEATS. Etc.

And the longer into the 1990s that the Giallo lingered, the more it was made to conform to what was popular in both US cinema and TV. Sergio Martino’s 1993 Giallo TV miniseries PRIVATE CRIMES plays, esp. in its early episodes, as nothing but a less-stylish, less-weird version of the mystery of Laura Palmer’s death in David Lynch’s TWIN PEAKS. And any number of Giallo films produced in the ’90s—Martino’s CRAVING DESIRE, Antonio Bonifacio’s BLIND DATE (aka, APPUNTAMENTO IN NERO), Ruggero Deodato’s THE WASHING MACHINE—unabashedly shift the Giallo needle to full-on Cinemax-style softcore.
 
Or you can look at the deforming pressure of the genre’s influence as it expanded, in its earlier phases, outside of Italy: 

In Spain (BLUE EYES OF THE BROKEN DOLL, THE CORRUPTION OF CHRIS MILLER). 

In Germany (not only the co-production of Argento’s early films, but also the reciprocal influence of the Giallo on Krimis like Alfred Vohrer's near-masterpiece SCHOOL OF FEAR; also other truly revelatory films like 1975’s DAS NETZ).

British Gialli like CRESCENDO and ASSAULT.  

American Gialli by the likes of Brian De Palma (BLOW OUT, DRESSED TO KILL).

Or, perhaps most famously, how the Giallo strain mutated once out in the wild, and became what we now call the Slasher (whole sections of the early FRIDAY THE 13TH films, their murder set-pieces, wouldn’t exist if they hadn’t first existed in Mario Bava’s seminal body-count Giallo, A BAY OF BLOOD).

Or, perhaps less famously, the way the Giallo tradition influenced filmmakers as far afield as the mammoth cinematic institution that is anime in Japan—Satoshi Kon’s sublimely weird, sublimely executed PERFECT BLUE being the best example. 

So that’s why you’ll find so many films that a Giallo purist might balk at in my growing MASTER LIST catalog. That’s why you’ll see me identify (as I have in three separate Letterboxd lists) ~600 films that can conceivably belong as part of the genre. And that’s why you’ll find me, on this site and elsewhere, trying to do whatever I can to raise awareness of the Giallo as an integral and ever-present entity in the history of film. From German Expressionism. To Film Noir. To the German Krimi. To the Giallo, in all its many-splendored forms:

It is a genre, a cinematic tradition, that’s as important, as far-reaching, as intricately networked as any other I’d care to explore.

Leonard Jacobs

January, 2016

ps. In addition to the criteria above, I've also worked out six key characteristics that exist, in greater or lesser strengths, in all films I identify as Gialli. These characteristics are: 

1. TRAUMA (childhood and/or sexual and/or historical),  
2. DREAM LOGIC (esp. at the expense of narrative sense),  
3. EXCESSIVE STYLE AND SET PIECES,  
4. TRANSGRESSIVE OR TABOO SEXUALITY,  
5. DETECTIVE FICTION CONVENTIONS (esp. Hard-boiled, Film Noir, and Krimi), and  
6. DISTINCTIVE SOUNDTRACKS 

They are explored in more depth in the MASTER LIST INTRODUCTION.

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

KRIMI VS. GIALLO [NOTES ON: Setting Some Terms re: Genre and Sub-genre]

[Note: This is a new series that I'll use to compile notes toward larger themes/ideas/arguments concerning the relationship of the Krimi to the Giallo. As with every post on this site, SPOILERS SHOULD BE EXPECTED.]

As I mentioned a couple posts ago, I've been going back and updating the Giallo and Krimi reviews on the site to add ratings, sub-categories, additional cast & crew info, etc. For the Giallo genre, I've identified 14 sub-genres so far. Sub-genres that help me categorize, think about, analyze, enjoy each, next Giallo as I watch it. They reside on the Giallo Master List page, but I'm going to reproduce them here as well, for reference sake. Additionally, I've begun to work out Krimi sub-genres that I think are key to better understanding the different forms the movies can take. I'm reproducing that here too, in lieu of the Krimi Master List page, which isn't yet live. Updates as they occur:

[GIALLO SUB-GENRES]

As I've watched more Gialli, and grappled with the question of which films are, and which films aren't, I've found myself organizing what I've seen into sub-categories. These sub-categories include:

• Proto- and Post-Gialli: Films who were a great influence on—or, conversely, *were* greatly influenced by—the Giallo boom. The "Post-" part of the category does not include Neo-Gialli proper (i.e., films that are expressly working in, and referring to, a recognized Giallo tradition), but films that occur chronologically after the boom, often outside of Italy. Think, for instance, Brian De Palma's DRESSED TO KILL. Or Donald Cammell's WHITE OF THE EYE.
• Neo-Gialli: Gialli produced post 1999.
• Krimi/Gialli Hybrids: Krimi movies that prefigure and/or display various conventions of the full-blown Giallo.
  
• Sleaze-Art-Sleaze Gialli: Gialli that deliberately push the envelope in terms of explicit sexploitation or gore elements elements (currently I'm doing a series of reviews on them, including SO SWEET, SO DEAD and AMUCK!). Aka, Exploitation Gialli.
  
• Inheritance Gialli: Gialli that skew toward the Krimi/Giallo plotting that is more concerned with rational motives (simple greed) than the psychotic, trauma motive of post-Argento Gialli.
  
• "And Then There Were None" Gialli: Gialli based on Agathe Christie's novel of the same name.
  
• Offshore Gialli: Gialli that take place largely at sea/on an island.
  
• Wetsuit Gialli: Gialli that feature wetsuited killers.
  
• Psychosexual Outlier Gialli: Non-traditional Gialli that focus less on the key iconography and plot mechanics of the "typical" Giallo (no black-gloved killer; no high body count; maybe no murder at all) and instead explore interior and psychosexual concerns (often related to the notion of the "hysterical woman").
  
• Country Gialli: Gialli that locate their action largely out of the modern urban setting that is the norm.
  
• Giallo/Gothic Hybrids: Gialli that are equal parts Euro-Gothic and Giallo.
  
• Giallo/Eurocrime Hybrids: Gialli that are equal parts Eurocrime and Giallo.
  
• Gialli Featuring Clergy: Self-explanatory; the clergy may or may not be the killers.
• Meta-Gialli: A Giallo whose sense of (critique of, comment on, invocation of, radical reworking of) the conventions of the genre are as integral to the film as any other element. Aka, Experimental Giallo. Sometimes qualifies as an Existential Giallo.
• Foundational Gialli: A Giallo that in some way, shape, or form did foundational work in establishing conventions that would later dominate the genre. 

[KRIMI SUB-GENRES]

• Ingénue in Distress Krimi: Krimis that center around the menacing of an ingénue character, most often because of a scheme to steal that character's inheritance. Karin Dor, Marianne Koch, Uschi Glas were three of the key actresses to portray this role. Key examples: THE SINISTER MONK, THE HUNCHBACK OF SOHO, and ANGELS OF TERROR (aka, THE CORPSE IN THE THAMES) are three examples.
• Inheritance Scheme Krimis: See above.
• Masked Monk Krimis: The main villain is a masked monk of some sort; key examples include THE SINISTER MONK and THE BLACK ABBOT. 
• Heist / Master Criminal Krimis: Often involves masked, larger-than-life villains who use outre gadgets to dispatch their enemies and/or overly complicated plans to pull off an impossible heist. Two specters are always in the background of this version of the master villain: Dr. Mabuse and (in a strange form of coincidence) Harry Lime. Conversely, this category can also represent the "gangland violence" strain of Wallace's work. DER HEXER, THE INN ON THE RIVER, FACE OF THE FROG, THE RED CIRCLE, THE TERRIBLE PEOPLE, and CIRCUS OF FEAR are chief examples.
• Boarding School Krimis: Both this sub-genre and the next are closely tied to the
  Ingénue in Distress Krimi. Usually involves a sub-plot that includes a white-slaving ring. The Dance Troop Krimi is a variation on the same idea. Examples include THE SINISTER MONK, SCHOOL OF FEAR, and THE HUNCHBACK OF SOHO.
• Dance Troop Krimis: See above. An example would be THE MAN WITH THE GLASS EYE or ANGELS OF TERROR (aka, THE CORPSE IN THE THAMES).
• Proto-Giallo Krimis: Incredibly prescient, forward-looking examples that help lay the groundwork for the conventions that would come to dominate the Italian Giallo genre. Two of the best examples are THE PHANTOM OF SOHO and THE MONSTER OF LONDON CITY.
• Arent-as-Villain / Arent-as-Human-Being: A variation on Arent's comedian personality that either adds nuance enough to make him seem like more than a pratfalling cartoon, or that uses that cartoon mask as a way to hide the fact that he's the film's villain. I reviewed a series of these, under the "An Arent Villain" tag.
• Arent-as-Comedy-Routine: Eddi Arent's default character.
• Kinski-as-Grotesque: Klaus Kinski's default character.
• "And Then There Were None" Krimis: Based on the Agathe Christie plot. A good example being THE INDIAN SCARF.

KRIMI VS. GIALLO [NOTES ON: The Question of Happy Endings; the Question of Closure]

[Note: This is a new series that I'll use to compile notes toward larger themes/ideas/arguments concerning the relationship of the Krimi to the Giallo. As with every post on this site, SPOILERS SHOULD BE EXPECTED.]

David Sanjek, in his essay “Foreign Detection: The West German Krimi and the Italian Giallo,” makes the following distinction between the narrative DNA knitting the two genres together:

“If the Krimi and Giallo resemble one another in their interpolation of established national and extranational visual and narrative codes, they differ in how their detective figures engage in a search for the truth, as well as in the ways in which the films resolve their often concatenated plots.”

In the Krimi, Sanjek argues, catching and identifying the movie's master criminal-slash-serial killer “more often than not resolves any anxieties or ambiguities that might complicate the plot. In effect, the Krimi allows the viewer to be only temporarily mystified. Faith in the dependability of the social order which the detective figure—often a police inspector—embodies remains unquestioned.”

The Giallo mold casts it differently though:

“The Gialli, on the other hand, often tend to center their mysteries on the fluctuating substance of the social contract—lovers or mates engaging in harassment or worse of their traumatized partners—or the undependable nature of human sense perception. The detective figure in a number of these films must uncover something he or she fails to see, hear, or understand, yet resolution of that epistemological conundrum fails fully to restore either the viewers' or the characters' faith in a coherent moral or perceptual universe.”

Later, in specific reference to Argento's work, he writes: “Most often Argento's Giallo narratives center around a detective figure who impotently attempts to comprehend something he has seen or heard, and they routinely deny the kind of narrative closure that typifies the Krimi.”

There's a lot of truth in what he says (a link to a PDF of his entire article is included in the post below). Watch enough Krimis (esp. starting with the earliest in the West German cycle) and you quickly lose track of how many “ingenues in distress” end the film in the smiling arms of either dashing detective Joachim Fuchsberger or dashing detective Heinz Drache.

Considering I've come to the Krimi by way of the Giallo (the wrong way around, so to speak), it's probably not a coincidence, then, that some of the ones I rate most highly deviate from the template that Sanjek describes. That they instead take a Giallo tact and resist a quick resolution for the anxieties residing in the viewers' (also: characters') worldview.

In my review of ROOM 13, I spent a fair bit of screencapping time focusing on the morale-defeating, despair-inducing final sequence, where we find that Joachim Fuchsberger's character not only doesn't get to join the rescued ingenue (Karin Dor here) in wedded, unflappable bliss, but actually has to admit that:

1. Dor's character was a hopelessly insane serial killer, and

2. his actions—his attempt to *prove* that she was a hopelessly insane killer—led directly to her death-by-suicide.

While series cornball Eddi Arent laments the damage done to his dear Emily—a mannequin that Arent has built as a stand-in girlfriend for himself—Fuchsberger's face registers the loss and hopelessness (the unfixable, irrational *wrong*) that now exists in his life, in the aftermath of Dor's suicide (at least partially, it has to be assumed, because of his role in it). The final, wordless shots of him driving away from the mansion where her body was discovered shows how clearly bereft his character is, and are nothing if not a startling counterpoint to the usually happy (or jokey) Krimi ending. (As evidenced by those smiling screencaps above.) 

PHANTOM OF SOHO is another prime example of this. There we get the female lead—not so much an ingenue, as a scrappy, self-made crime writer, whose books are bestsellers and whose love life is about to culminate in marriage to the chief of Scotland Yard—not only revealed as the mad Phantom Killer, but revealed to have been horribly, sexually attacked by not one, but multiple characters we've watched in the film. The trauma of being repeatedly raped by the rich and criminal on a "pleasure cruise" is the dreadful force driving her to kill (she was hired to work the voyage under the pretense of being a cabin steward—instead, once out to sea, she is forced to participate in what she learns is really a perverted sex cruise). Her portion of the film ends with her confessing, without apology, what she's done, and then taking her own life—out of despair, out of nothing else left to do—by biting down on a poisoned pill.

And though the “epilogue” that follows her death does offer a potentially happier ending—wherein we see one of the policemen profess his love for the dead author's sister, with the camera closing on a sweet (but also, imo, felt) shot of the two holding hands—this hopeful endorsement of "the power of love" can't help but be tainted by the fact that the author's sister, so happy in this moment, still has no idea that her sibling has committed suicide because of repeatedly being raped. Hard to have one's orderly worldview reinforced by an ending like that.

Leonard Jacobs

October, 2014