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

[PULP ART IDEA MILL #13] Chris Offutt's “My Dad, the Pornographer”

Writing, in recent years, has become a kind of self-defeating ritual for me, a trade whose craft is as important, as integral to my life, as anything else, but whose actual practice has become weighted with anxiety, stalled momentum, and (at the risk of overstating things) a kind of personal doom. Part of this stems from the quicksand that my day job's become (the need for a paycheck and health insurance trumping any “groaning in the spirit” that the tedium, mental antagonism, and office-politics bullshit induces in me; and, hey, I'm not so wrapped up in my own experience to not realize that, in many ways, I'm one of the fortunate ones: i.e., I actually have a job and paycheck; I actually have access to healthcare).

But even this awareness doesn't do much to shake the feeling that I'm not only spending my life doing something that is, ultimately, meaningless, but that I'm spending my life doing something that most certainly wasn't meant for me. I've tried (and mostly failed) to form small writing communities, writing relationships with like-minded folks—to foster support, enthusiasm, an environment that bolsters new work and skill. I've tried to form “social networks,” to seek out and support places that could become a home for my work.

And whether it's because, at heart, I'm an inveterately antisocial person—or because I've not managed to be discerning enough in seeking this kind of fellowship—any success I've had as a writer (whether alone or in a community) has been modest at best.

That sense of isolation (also a general loss of enthusiasm for endlessly submitting work to unresponsive parties) was one of the reasons I started this blog last year. I simply wanted a space to write about whatever I wanted to write about, regardless of readership, oblivious of monetization, no longer giving too many shits about what particular niche my writing supposedly fit.

I say all that to say that my conception of writing—and any opportunity one might have to do it for a living—has shifted dramatically in the past 10 months or so. The shift became more tectonic when I rediscovered my love for pulp paperbacks earlier this year (well-documented in the Spillane and Pulp Art Idea Mill posts of late), and began picking up some of the discarded ideas of my writing past, for use in possible new work. 

In the midst of this pulp rediscovery, I ran across Chris Offutt's “My Dad, the Pornographer”. A memoir-ish article detailing Offutt's recovery work in charting, sorting, and cataloging the porn fiction prodigiously written by his father (also some of the accompanying, incredible covers):

“In the mid-1960s, Dad purchased several porn novels through the mail. My mother recalls him reading them with disgust—not because of the content, but because of how poorly they were written. He hurled a book across the room and told her he could do better. Mom suggested he do so.”

The least interesting thing about the article (imo) is when the story being told exists mostly in relation to its author, “the Pornographer's” son. Far more interesting is its descriptions of trade-craft; of the ways that Andrew Jefferson Offutt V (and his 17 pen names) fashioned a system that allowed him to write and publish “more than 400 books”. Including novels whose plots sound straight out of Giallo lore:

“The plot was a clever conceit. Someone had murdered a model for a bondage shoot, and the model’s sister was investigating the crime by posing as a model herself, which allowed for soft-core descriptions of restrained women.” 

Or when the son takes the time to provide a kind of genealogy for his father's peculiar sense of authorship:

“His primary pseudonym, John Cleve, first appeared on ‘Slave of the Sudan,’ an imitation of Victorian pornography so precisely executed that the editor suspected my father of plagiarism. Dad found this extremely flattering. He concocted his pen name from John Cleland, author of ‘Fanny Hill,’ considered the first erotic novel published in English. Over time, John Cleve evolved into more than a mere pseudonym. Dad regarded John Cleve as his alter ego, a separate entity, the persona who wrote porn. Dad was adamant that he did not have 17 pen names. Dad had John Cleve, to whom he referred in the third person. It was John Cleve who had 16 pseudonyms, in addition to his own wardrobe, stationery and signature.”

Or when Grove Press publisher Barney Rosset asked “Cleve” to write a “pornographic historical series about a single character during the Crusades”. His response, in letter form, carries with it both an “outsider art” kind of authenticity and a clear understanding of the dilemma faced by every “serious writer”:

“‘I do not know if this is or could be my thing or not. I have difficulty with series. Like, I get bored and want to go back to creating. It is most difficult for me to write as if cranking the arm of a copy machine.’ He continued: ‘Let us not bandy terms. I am an artist, whether these series books will be “art” or not.’” 

So I've started writing fiction again, and submitting. To what end I have no idea.

Leonard Jacobs

May, 2015