Mikel J. Koven, in his book La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film, gives us one definition of what the “classic” giallo looks like:
“The year 1970 is generally considered the key threshold for giallo cinema, due to the international success of Dario Argento’s THE BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE … which takes the innocent eyewitness who becomes an amateur detective through a grisly series of murders from Bava’s GIRL WHO KNEW TOO MUCH and adds the graphic violence and iconically dressed killer (black hat, gloves, and raincoat) from Bava’s BLOOD AND BLACK LACE. It is this combination that really defines the giallo film as it is more commonly understood.”So one thing this “classic” giallo structure provides is an audience proxy, a stand-in for us — for our interest in the mystery playing out onscreen. In the “classic” giallo that stand-in is the protagonist Koven describes, the “innocent eyewitness” who is forced to become the story’s “amateur detective.” That single main character gives us someone to root for, to worry over, as we watch him investigate the film’s mystery-horror landscape.
When I watch Argento’s BIRD, my interest in unraveling the mystery is inextricably tied to my interest in watching main character Tony Musante and his investigation of that same mystery. If the film works, then his compulsion to understand what he has “mis-seen” (in the film’s famous art gallery attack) must somehow transfer to us, the audience.
So, what is perhaps most interesting about Duccio Tessari’s 1971 giallo THE BLOODSTAINED BUTTERFLY is the degree to which it resists this dominant giallo formula.
Not only does the movie not have as its protagonist an amateur detective — whose eye-witnessing of a murder compels him to solve the crime — it lacks a main character of any kind.
In one scene we might be led to believe that it is Silvano Tranquilli, playing the police inspector. In another, troubled piano genius Helmut Berger. In yet another, Wendy D’Olive, who plays the daughter of the man on trial for murder.
But as soon as we start to identify with one of these characters, with their investigation, that character “gives way” to another. No single character is afforded the screen time, or the kind of dramatic weight, necessary to be our stand-in.
What we get instead is a decentralized ensemble cast whose movements through the plot seem, more often than not, inexplicable. Even when their actions do provide traditional, concrete clues — think the woman in the park who swears she saw the killer’s face from her car — the movie then undercuts these “facts.”
Its diffuse structure leaves us stranded in the information we see, not sure who it is we should be identifying with, or whose solution is the most likely to come true.
I would argue that the effect of this structure, of having this missing main detective, is to shift the role of amateur detective right through the fourth wall and onto the audience. From start to finish, Tessari’s film makes cinematic choices that put the onus of a “solution” on the viewer. In the absence of an onscreen detective, the audience is made into that detective — and in a way that few other gialli could pull off.
[IT STARTS WITH THE OPENING CREDITS …]
BUTTERFLY’s opening credits signal the structure for the rest of the film:
We watch stylized, carefully choreographed shots that first frame the film’s action through the outline of a butterfly, and then provide a character “cheat sheet,” using text on the screen to tell us how one character relates to another.1 The credits introduce the idea that we, as the audience, may be charged with “keeping score” as the mystery develops, and they highlight the lack of a single protagonist.
In a “classic” giallo, the likely candidate for amateur detective would be the accused man, played here by Giancarlo Sbragia. He could easily follow in the footsteps of the Musante mold, as part of what drives Musante’s investigation in BIRD is the initial pressure put on him by police — they withhold his passport and interrogate him in a way that suggests he’s a suspect.
The suspicion pointed at Sbragia’s character in BUTTERFLY goes even further, as he is arrested and tried for murder. But what we find after he’s accused is that the film’s ensemble structure largely reduces him to a non-entity. He does not conduct his own investigation à la BIRD. He does not discover key evidence that will clear his name (and only begrudgingly reveals a secret that might set him free).
And he does not engage in any of the thrilling set-pieces we have come to expect as part of the genre (as, e.g., when BIRD’s killer tries to silence Musante by sending an assassin after him). For much of the film, Sbragia does little but look distressed, in the dock, as he listens to the evidence mounting against him.
(It is also important to note here that the sheer amount of screen time devoted to the courtroom procedural and “closing arguments” suggests that we are actually part of that courtroom audience — that we are being invited to find for ourselves whether Sbragia’s character is guilty. It is another technique the film uses to shift us further into that role of the missing detective.)
Our stand-in also can’t be found in the aforementioned Silvano Tranquilli,2 in the role of the official police. His investigation consists larger of interrogation scenes, which try to reconstruct the murder through flashback. They seem for a bit as if they will be our path to a solution, but as we watch, we learn that the flashbacks carry little basis in fact. The “truth” of one flashback turns out to contradict the truth of the next. And, once the case does go to trial, key elements of those flashbacks get voided by new evidence.3
On the one hand, these competing flashbacks align BUTTERFLY with the Argento-style template as established in BIRD, where a giallo protagonist spends the movie trying to comprehend something he has mis-seen or misunderstood. BUTTERFLY’s flashbacks seem like they serve the same purpose as those in almost any post-Argento giallo:
To flag up the unreliable nature of seeing. To emphasize the deep-rooted inability of people, especially those languishing in the malaise of the modern world, to comprehend what they see “with their own eyes.”
This is the fundamental trap introduced by Argento into the giallo:
The unreliable nature of our senses. And our resulting inability to ever truly understand the world around us. This becomes the very instability of our world, the worldview of the giallo — one that emphasizes the role that past trauma plays in our lives.
And what is key in these post-Argento gialli is the way that this worldview unsettles, even terrifies the film’s main character (and, by proxy, the audience).4
But here Tranquilli is no Musante, which means the audience isn’t attached enough to him, or his (lack of) charisma, to see him as a surrogate of our unsettled state. In fact, his inadequacy as our stand-in gets underlined early on:
We watch mother Ida Galli and daughter Wendy D’Olive, while they watch a TV news report detailing the film’s first murder. The news crew is filming live as the police process the crime scene. During this broadcast, Tranquilli becomes aware that he’s being filmed by the news crew and actually looks directly into their camera. This breaks the fourth wall in two ways:
He appears to be looking directly at Stewart and D’Olive, as they watch him through the TV, and, more importantly, he appears to be staring directly at us, the people watching the film.
His look into our eyes conveys annoyance, impatience, a desire to have this spotlight removed from him; even in a genre full of ineffectual male leads, Tranquilli’s look suggests him to be particularly inadequate as ours.5
Another candidate for our stand-in is the character played by Helmut Berger. But his candidacy quickly wilts when we consider:
- The real meaning of his investigation is mostly withheld from us, even as it occurs, obliquely, before our eyes (again, aligning us with the stock genre-ism of the main character being incapable of understanding what they see).
- And, even more troubling, it involves him committing a second “sex-maniac” murder to solve the mystery of the first. How can we see him as our surrogate once we learn that he’s willing to brutally murder a random person in the name of finding the truth?6
He seems to exist in the story only to provide a tortured love interest for D’Olive’s character. Or to offer some critique of the older, Italian ruling class, as in those scenes with his father: Berger playing the disaffected trust-fund kid, insulting his “bastard” dad. These scenes — the bulk of his time in the film — seem to have absolutely zero to do with the main mystery. Only when we get to the “big reveal” at movie’s end do we begin to understand.8
[… AND CONTINUES TO THE FILM’S VERY LAST FRAMES]
It is an ending that simultaneously “solves” the mystery and finally clues us into the significance of the movie’s disconnected ensemble of scenes. Finally we get the context to understand Berger’s brooding movements. The scenes with his father. Why he breaks up with D’Olive. Why he lies to the police.
And, stylistically, it is an ending that uses the camera to cement our role as detective:
Berger and Sbragia, after they have been mortally wounded, after they have revealed the last pieces of the film’s puzzle, stagger away from each other. As they do, the camera suddenly comes unmoored, alive.
Its p.o.v. swings wildly back and forth between the two dying men.
The camera behaves like a person turning his head in wide sweeps, from person to person, shocked by what he’s witnessing.
In a genre full of first-person p.o.v. camerawork, the p.o.v. here reads like a stand-in for our own reaction, insinuating us into the scene with the movement of its (our) reeling gaze.
At no other point does the film more deliberately align us, and our personal reactions, with the detective’s quest. The camera reacting to what we (and it) are seeing as if we are there. It is a penultimate (and experimental) intrusion of style-as-substance, one that reinforces what the film’s structure has been building to all along.
And, it is a final confirmation that we the audience-detective have been forced into that same giallo trap:
Though we have come to a “solution,” it solves nothing in our worldview. Even though we’ve come to “the end,” we haven’t understand a single thing we’ve seen.
The guilty man is punished, but another person must commit multiple crimes (also: sacrifice his own life) to bring about this punishment. And the family of the guilty man — who had seen their family unit restored when the courts declared him innocent — is now left with a family unit shattered again.
Instead of a resolution, we have realized a world where parents callously betray their own children, and where lovers are forced to destroy themselves in the name of love. What we have solved is a bleak, experimental, existential giallo, whose solution challenges our very belief:
That anything can be solved at all.
Leonard Jacobs
(revised and updated by L.J. January 2020)