GIALLO SOURCE CODE [UPDATE: The Perfume of the Lady in Black & Repulsion]

I've been reading the expanded edition of Maitland McDonagh's BROKEN MIRRORS/BROKEN MINDS and I've gotten to the CAT O' NINE TAILS/FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET chapter. One of the strengths of the book is due (to use a phrase I sometimes fall back on) to the depth and breadth of its analysis. Her writing, on Argento films that I'm already well-familiar with, is so impressive because it's so illuminating, shedding light on aspects of the films—thematic connections, visual and narrative codes, production history—in a way that isn't just dry essaying, but that actually adds to my understanding of films I thought I knew inside and out. (In this way, her Argento insights remind me very much of Thomas Rostock's, in his masterful audio commentaries for TENEBRAE and DEEP RED. Reading her book makes me want to seriously re-evaluate those "golden-age" Argentos that I've never been too terribly taken with, with CAT at the top of that list ...)

Making my way through the half of the chapter devoted to FOUR FLIES, I came upon this passage:

"FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET takes from THE CAT O' NINE TAILS some surprisingly specific material, particularly apparent in the way it uses certain sexual motifs; in this respect the films appear almost a pair. Incest, for example, plays a part in each film. While it's not utterly essential to the plot (some other form of aberrant sexuality could have been substituted), it is of considerable formal importance ... FOUR FLIES, of course, is driven by the notion that Nina has married her father in Roberto's guise, and there's a further link to the incestuous couplings of CAT through a tantalizing fragment of conversation between Arrosio and a doctor at the Villa Rapidi, the mental institution to which Nina was confined as a child. 'After her father died,' says the doctor, 'all symptoms of emotional disturbance disappeared. It was our opinion that the patient was completely cured. However, there's one important point I would like to emphasize: we suspected the man wasn't the patient's real father.'"

A few points here, re: the previous Source Code entry linking PERFUME OF THE LADY IN BLACK & REPULSION:

• Mimsy Farmer's appearance in FOUR FLIES in the role of Nina connects this film to PERFUME, where she plays a similar female lead, a character whose traumatic parental past is the lost information underlying (and, ultimately, explaining) all of her otherwise secret and inexplicable actions;
• Further, the "father" in PERFUME that pursues Farmer's character, from half-suppressed flashbacks to her nightmare-mined present day, is also, the flashbacks tell us, very likely not to be her real father (certainly, he is not the father in the photo that opens the film, and that connects it to the end-credit use of the photo in REPULSION).
• Still further: all three films feature key sequences with childhood photographs of their female lead—photographs that hold the submerged legend (legend, as in key to the map) that could allow the viewer (as well as the other characters in the movie) to properly navigate the mysteries in front of them. 

McDonagh describes the image in FOUR FLIES as a "photograph of a child whose sex cannot be guessed." (And though it doesn't seem to follow the pattern of the photo from the other two films—showing a daughter staring off-puttingly at her father—the more I looked at the photo on the right side of the album, the more it seemed that in its smeared background I could see [in the same way you can see faces in clouds] the figure of a man standing behind his child.) Imho, the photos, esp. because of their condition, hold in them something uncanny, unsettling, that exists in the same realm as those in PERFUME and REPULSION.

McDonagh puts it this way: "Mad Nina, caught between conflicting gender messages, trapped in a displaced Oedipal triangle, is the nexus of this disordered state: all roads lead from her, and all roads lead back." In the same way, I'd argue, all roads lead either to or from the photos so key to the understanding of the Barilli and Polanski films. One film opens with the unnerving childhood photo. The other ends on it. What lies between serves as cinematic gloss (in more than one meaning of that word) on the totemic photos themselves.

#008 KRIMI POCKET REVIEW [THE MONSTER OF LONDON CITY aka DAS UNGEHEUER VON LONDON CITY (1964)]

There must have been something in the air in 1964. Not only did the Krimis begin to relax the embargo on onscreen nudity, two of the Bryan Edgar Wallace adaptations from this year—this and THE PHANTOM OF SOHO—show a strong affinity with the seminal Giallo BLOOD AND BLACK LACE, all three echoing some of the same style and iconography re: the construction of the "black-gloved killer". (Some brief examples of  these visual similarities are suggested here.) They'd make for quite the triple bill.

[Note: This is the twelfth post in a continuing series discussing and analyzing all the Krimis and Gialli I've seen. As with every post on this site, SPOILERS SHOULD BE EXPECTED. ALSO, SOME IMAGES IN THIS POST ARE NSFW.]

My Krimi Rating: ★★★★½ (out of 5★)
Subcategory (if any): 
     i. Proto-Giallo Krimi
     ii. Ingénue in Distress Krimi
 Who Portrays the Detective (amateur or official): 
     Hansjörg Felmy (amateur); Manfred Grothe (official) 
Who's the Ingénue: 
     Marianne Koch
 In My Krimi Top 20 (Y/N): Yes (Letterboxd link)


I've watched this twice now, in the past two months. The first time I was fatally distracted by the truly annoying comic relief, what constitutes an entire subplot with a husband-and-wife team of private eyes bungling all their attempts to win the reward for the capture of the film's “Jack the Ripper killer”. (To be precise, the English dub suggests they’ve yet to get married because of lack of funds. Not that it matters, in terms of story or characterization.) We get cartoonish scenes of their domestic “bliss,” with (for instance) the couple filmed in bed beneath an enormous pillow blanket, each pulling at the other's share because of how cold it is in the apartment. We get the boneheaded insertion of the team into the film's play-within-a-play, first the husband posing as one of the play's Scotland Yard bobbies—he shows up on stage during the wrong scene and goes headfirst through a prop window as he’s laughed off-stage—and then the wife, posing as a big-bosomed wannabe starlet who’s intent on replacing the play’s lead female, once the real-life Ripper murders her. As with Eddi Arent's worst performances in the genre, this broadly comic, cringe-inducing "relief" can be deadly for a given picture's effectiveness.

(On a related note—one further reinforcing the through-line from Krimi to Giallo—I have this same problem with Argento's films, even some of his most acclaimed. FOUR FLIES ON GREY VELVET, despite it constantly upping the style ante, the experimental-detective-story ante—despite the fact that I find the hyper-slow motion ending that gives us Mimsy Farmer's blinking decapitation-by-truck-bumper to be one of *the* key, all-time Giallo moments—I find the jokey subplot with the tramp “God” character and the mustachioed mailman almost unwatchable. And there are plenty of other examples: the ridiculous, sitcom arm-wrestling match between Hemmings and Nicolodi in DEEP RED [also, in that movie, the running gag with her car]. Or all the time spent in BIRD WITH THE CRYSTAL PLUMAGE building up to the reveal that eccentric painter Mario Adorf fattens up his cats because he eats them [and has just fed one to Tony Musante]. These tonal shifts don't work for me in the best examples of the genre, and are certainly one of the reasons that I find movies like TENEBRAE and OPERA to be so superior to the rest of Argento's Gialli. Because they do that rarest of things in the genre: They actually integrate their comedy in organic and effective ways.)

So, before writing MONSTER up, I decided to revisit it and see if I could get past this distractingly bad humor and instead see the merits of another Bryan Edgar Wallace entry in the genre. And … to a great extent, I did. 

[MURDERS FROM THE FUTURE]
Like PHANTOM OF SOHO, MONSTER OF LONDON CITY excels in the forward-looking stylization of both the murderer and his crimes. The inky silhouette that he strikes in the frame. The angles of his black hat, black trench, and black, grasping, razor-wielding hands. Everything about him not only shares several aspects of the template-making look of Giallo killers (as established in the same year's BLOOD AND BLACK LACE), but feels, repeatedly, like it prefigures the iconography used by any number of later slashers and psychothrillers (more than once I flashed on De Palma's DRESSED TO KILL while watching the killer here). The screen time and visuals devoted to the stalking, slashing, and Jack the Ripper-mutilating (only described, off-screen and after the fact) very much feels like proto-Giallo territory, and cements it firmly in the “non-old-fashioned-feeling” category of Krimis I’ve seen. (Some of this is down to simple chronology, but even some of the later entries—say, 1967’s THE COLLEGE GIRL MURDERS—feel hopelessly dated in the face of earlier entries like ROOM 13 or DER HEXER.)

[CHARACTERIZATION & CASTING THAT SHOWS SURPRISING DEPTH]
It’s a cliché to say that genre films often suffer from thinly drawn characters, z-grade casting, and a complete lack of narrative interest in anything but fashioning (as David Sanjek described it, in conjunction with Wallace’s writing) “event-filled, breathless narratives”. Narratives that then became even more event-filled and breathless in their Giallo permutations, showing a “tendency to engage in technical and narrative experimentation as a response to market forces which encourage violent excess and visual bravado as convenient means of capturing a public easily wearied by standard cinematic fare.” (The idea that Krimis and Gialli were competing with each other for market share, and that this competition for ticket sales was, as much as anything else, the condition that allowed for such radical experimentation in an otherwise pulped genre is one of Sanjek’s most interesting observations.)

Just like it’s old hat to see someone argue that “you don’t watch an Argento movie for the acting!” (or, they’d argue, the story), it feels like old hat to expect these Krimi stories to be populated with stock, one-dimensional ciphers whose plot function trumps any understanding (or presentation) of who they might be as fictional human beings (with an accompanying interior life).

That assessment/expectation is pretty spot on when it comes to the comedy duo in the movie—also some of the more obvious red herrings, including the stiff-upper-lipped, morally outraged  member of Parliament—but not, when we get to the male and female leads.

The film's female lead, played by Marianne Koch, is the niece of the prudish, egotistical Parliamentary “Sir” (Fritz Tillmann). She has had a long-running relationship with the Scotland Yard doctor who has been tasked with doing the autopsies on each victim (Dr. Morel Greely, played by Dietmar Schönherr). At some point during this relationship, we learn that Koch has fallen out of love with the doctor and has fallen *in* love with his best friend, the damaged actor who portrays Jack the Ripper each night on stage, Richard Sand (garnering both governmental outrage and controversial, public acclaim; here he's played by Hansjörg Felmy). The love triangle subplot is not worth noting in itself, but the way that she moves within the potentially tired confines of this plot makes things feel more layered, more distinctive.

As is par for the Krimi course, the narrative landscape is crowded with red herrings. Red Herring #1: Could Koch’s puritanical Uncle (Fritz Tillmann) be the repressed killer? Why does he dress up like Jack the Ripper and sneak out of the house each night?

Red Herring #2: Could Sand's shifty assistant-slash-stage manager be setting up his boss to take the fall?

Red Herring #3: Could the play’s producer be murdering women as a means of ensuring the success of his play?

Red Herring #4: Or could it be the narrative (and historical) ringer—the police doctor, Dr. Morel Greely, whose professional knowledge grants him the precision and skill that keeps showing up in the mutilation of the bodies?

For one, Koch isn’t done up in a way that suggests she’s supposed to have the pinup good looks of a Karin Dor. She’s presented as the film’s chief “love interest” in a way that seems more mature, more realistic, more believable—in a way that seems as interested in who she is as a person (her personality) as mere “ingénue-in-distress eye candy”.

One way this manifests in the movie is in her reaction to her Uncle’s sexism. Because he is a man, a powerful man, a government minister, and—most of all—her legal guardian, he presumes that (by all the power vested in him by patriarchy) he can control her life as he likes. Once he learns that she's in love with the degenerate Jack the Ripper actor—Uncle has pledged to get the government to shut the play down, to stop the moral outrage and public menace that it (and he) represents—he matter-of-factly forbids her to ever see him again. Despite the fact that Sand professes his love for her—and she his love for him—her Uncle believes he can simply tell her to turn that love off because he doesn’t approve of it.

Sir Uncle, looking askance at the damned, degenerate actor.

The love triangle, from left: Dr. Morel Greely (Dietmar Schönherr), the man tasked with doing the autopsies on the butchered victims; Ann Morlay (Marianne Koch), the doctor's love interest (who is no longer interested); and actor Richard Sand (Hansjörg Felmy), the doctor's best friend *and* his new rival in love.

The wonderful Ms. Koch. It took me till the second viewing to realize that she was the same actress who plays Joachim Fuchsberger's dissolute, bisexual wife in Antonio Margheriti's masterful Gothic mood piece THE UNNATURALS (aka, SCREAMS IN THE NIGHT [1969]).

Her reaction when her Uncle passes his edict on her life? She rolls her eyes, smiles condescendingly, happily, like you might at a child who has no idea what he’s talking about. Her unperturbed, even giddy response—not taking her Uncle’s authority over her love life seriously—forcefully and cleverly lays his identity bare for what it really is: An empty male fantasy. One that her passionate, unflappable awareness (also: assertion) of her own identity simply won’t acknowledge as being a valid response (or a real system that anyone can force her to live under).

Without overstating it, it feels like a surprisingly progressive take on the “damsel in distress” aspect of most female leads in these two genres (Edwige Fenech, e.g., would go on playing such damsels, wholly reliant on male help, on male authority, for years to come). And makes her seem an actual character, actually drawn.

And that’s not to say that she isn’t also an alluring presence, a sensual presence, as the film’s female lead. Part of this allure comes in the abovementioned way that she carries herself. Part of it comes in moments like the one where she kisses Sand, open-mouthed and full of abandon, even as Greely and her Uncle wait in a nearby room, liable to discover them in mid-kiss at any moment. (Plus also details like the way she’s dressed here: in a plain black dress that has a star-shaped “keyhole slit” resting on her cleavage).

Tryst, and aftermath.

[MISCELLANEOUS WHAT'S LEFT]

• Plus other things that feel more modern: 1. There’s a subplot that involves a mystery man hidden away in an asylum because he has gone mad from an unnamed venereal disease. 2. There’s a pretty effective handling of the stage play scenes, both in terms of the public's shocked reaction to the infamy of the play, and as a window into Sand’s ever-eroding psyche, as he is forced (by his own success) to continue to play a role, night in, night out, that inches him ever closer to a relapse in his past. (I could say more about his character as well, in terms of nuance—the genuinely pained expressions that play across his face as it becomes ever clearer that Scotland Yard suspects him of the murders; his growing suspicion that the “blackouts” he keeps experiencing may in fact be his rational mind’s way of hiding his culpability from himself; the way he projects a fragile and unsure sense of self in the small physical details that come across, like the self-defeating way he ties his house robe, etc.—but, again, I don’t want to risk overstating the vibes I got from these performances in the film.
• It’s also maybe more than coincidence that I ended up discussing Argento’s OPERA and Edwin Zbonek’s MONSTER in such close proximity here on the site. Both take the tried-and-true play-within-a-play mystery formula—wherein the backstage “channel” that runs from the characters-in-the-movie playing additional characters in a play (that's occurring inside the frame movie) provides the “narrative bleed” between staged crimes and actual crimes—and manage to wield it in ways that achieve satisfying effect.
• The movie repeatedly pairs its pushing of the nudity envelope with the broad comedy of the detective couple. Here, they sneak around backstage, only to find a naked actress running out of a scene:

Later, when the male comedy boob blunders his way on stage, he encounters an actual one:

• And then there's the film's DEEP RED moment: In Thomas Rostock’s commentary on DEEP RED, he spends a fair amount of time discussing the scene in Mark’s apartment, when he is sitting at his piano composing. As he sits there, we’re given shots of the killer finding a way to break into the apartment. At some point, Mark realizes that this is going on, and that the murderer is making his way toward the piano to (presumably) murder him.
  
  There is a moment when the camera captures the killer’s shadow, coming through the doorway into the room where Mark sits at his piano. The way the scene is shot, it would seem to be physically impossible for Mark *not* to see the killer and/or the killer's face. Rostock argues that this is the moment when the movie tips into full-on dream logic, rejecting any kind of objective “solution” to the story—any kind of objective detection methods that can still be used to solve anything, any kind of objective physical reality—and instead fully embraces a purely subjective world for the characters, one where they not only fail to understand what they see (or hear), but one where they can no longer trust that what they’re seeing and hearing exists anywhere but in their traumatized minds.
  
  Though I’m sure it’s only coincidence, a surprisingly similar moment occurs when Koch spies on her Uncle during one of his mysterious nighttime excursions. Her Uncle looks directly at the doorway to his study. It is opened a crack, and the outline of someone standing on the other side of the glass is clear (even if the person’s identity isn’t; even with the subpar video quality on the DVD, it's easy enough to see Marianne Koch, standing only partially hidden behind the door; both her pajamas are visible where the sliding doors are slightly ajar, and the smudgy outline of her body through the frosted glass itself). Her Uncle stares at her in the doorway, and then proceeds to act as if he hasn’t seen anything at all. He continues sneaking out of his study as if there's no chance that he's being watched. It’s a moment that has felt oddly unexplained both times I’ve watched the movie.

Here, after donning his Jack the Ripper-ish hat and cape, he turns back toward the doorway where Koch is *clearly* visible. And yet … he acts as though he can't see her there, staring at him. Despite the fact that, as he exits his study, it appears as though he is continuing to stare directly at the doorway where she's standing. From a narrative standpoint, it makes no rational sense that 1. He wouldn’t be able to see her and 2. That he wouldn’t react somehow to her, as he can now no longer sneak out of the house undetected. Unlike Rostock's DEEP RED explanation, here, it’s less clear what the moment is supposed to mean.

Furthermore, somehow Koch remains invisible even as her Uncle’s confidante, his house maid, covers his tracks in the den. She crosses the room twice, with Koch in full view, standing in the opening of the door (that’s the back of her head there, leaving the right-hand side of the frame in the middle cap). Again, this makes no literal sense, and suggests that something else, something more subjective, perhaps even internal (i.e., the pov from inside someone’s head) is going on.

If the movie were able to marshal this kind of forward-looking, surprisingly layered, presciently subjective sort of narrative for its entire running time, I’d be talking about it in regards to my top Krimi spot. As it doesn't, instead I see it (still) somewhere in my top 10.

Leonard Jacobs

October, 2014

[SHOW NOTES]

VERSION WATCHED: The Image Entertainment DVD (which now appears to be OOP); it's full of problems, the worst being part of the Felmy/Koch kissing scene that gets spliced into a wrong spot, later in the movie. | LANGUAGE: The English dub; like the dub of PHANTOM OF SOHO, I didn't find it that distracting, which is an exception when it comes to these movies (still, I'd very much like to watch it in German). | DIRECTOR: Edwin Zbonek  | WRITER(S): Robert A. Stemmle, Bryan Edgar Wallace | MUSIC: Martin Böttcher | CINEMATOGRAPHER: Siegfried Hold | CAST: Hansjörg Felmy (Richard Sand); Marianne Koch (Ann Morlay); Dietmar Schönherr (Dr. Morely Greely/Michael); Hans Nielsen (Dorne); Chariklia Baxevanos (Betty Ball); Fritz Tillmann (Sir George); Walter Pfeil (Horrlick); Peer Schmidt (Teddy Flynn); Kurd Pieritz (Maylor); Elsa Wagner (Housekeeper); Adelheid Hinz (Maid); Gerda Blisse (Assistant); Manfred Grothe (Detective); Kai Fischer (Helen Capstick); Gudrun Schmidt-May (Evelyn Nichols)  

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 film—that 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)