From the opening half-hour-or-so of Demoni (Demons), one is apt to suspect that its director, Lamberto Bava, had inherited his mentor, Dario Argento's bloodlust but little of his subtlety. Just a cheap and tawdry pretender, gore-mongering schlock merchant who supplements Goblin keyboardist, Claudio Simonetti's electronic score with Saxon and Motley Crue. More Herschell Gordon Lewis than the Hitchock of horror. But Demoni is best understood as a comic satire on censorship and the 'Video Nasty' list which, the previous year, had resulted in two Argento films (on which Bava had worked as assistant director) being banned in the UK. In one scene a group of the protagonists stand around, trying to make sense of what is going on, "All this is the movie's fault," they're saying, "We've got to stop the movie!" It is a perfect parody of tabloid scapegoating of violent or horrific films. But the characters soon realise that destroying the movie wont do any good. "It's not the movie," say the blind man in the stalls, "It's the theatre." The blame for 'real life' violence should not lie with some imaginary identification-cum-repetition of screen violence, but in the contradictions in the symbolic order, the theatre of life. Michele Soavi's La Chiesa (The Church, sometimes called Demons 3), from four years later, is a far more stylish film, a much slicker production all round. Peppered with interesting bits of montage and nice camera moves soundtracked by a sophisticated electronic score, written by Philip Glass and performed by Goblin. However, politically, La Chiesa is far more dubious; it's twin messages being that the pursuit of knowledge is dangerous, and that the Teutonic knights, favoured military order amongst Nazis and Dan Brown fans, were in fact absolutely right to slaughter countless peasants because they really were demons. At one point a character even prays for assistance and his prayer is 'answered' when he immediately discovers a clue as to how to proceed. This sort of thing would never happen in an Argento or Fulci film.
When Eli Wallach's Tuco talks to his brother, the priest, in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, he sets up a structural equivalence between church and bandit. The central, unspoken third term here, as in Freud's A child is being beaten, is the state. Under Italy's postwar imperfect bipolarism, that left the Christian Democratic party in power, practically unchallenged, from the foundation of the republic after World War Two until the Tangentopoli scandals of the early nineties, there was a very real equivalence between church and state that may well have equivocated criticism of the former for that of the latter (just as when, interviewed in 1994, the year of Berlusconi's first abortive government, Lucio Fluci rails against the censors - "They should censor the news instead of my films" - there was a very real equivalence between the state and the news media). Anti-clerical themes would continue to pervade pulp Italian cinema throughout the seventies. If Fulci and Dario Argento tended to respond somewhat cryptically to accusations of anti-catholic imagery in their films, there is little doubting the intent of the sustained orgy of blasphemy that characterises such films as Bruno Mattei's L'Altro Inferno (ingestion of the eucharist leading a nun to vomit blood; a rotting, worm-ridden head in the tabernacle; nuns boiling babies, etc.).
There is a kind of direct continuity between the spaghetti westerns of the sixties and the gialli of the seventies - and if I use the term giallo in its broader, anglo-american sense, it is because their is an even greater unity between the urban thrillers of the early seventies - gialli proper - and the gore horror of the late seventies. This concatenation is marked most obviously by the music of Ennio Morricone and his repeated use of certain kinds of unorthodox instrumentation (such as the harmonica in Once Upon a Time in the West and L'ultimo treno della notte). In fact there is a remarkable continuity of personnel and production: Lucio Fulci made several westerns before switching to horror and Argento wrote westerns (contributing the memorable opening scene to Once Upon a Time in the West). Leone's editors on the Dollars trilogy, Eugenio Alabiso and Giorgio Serrallonga, went on to work on several gialli, as did their assistant art director (graduating to production designer in the process). Also, the production company behind the Django series went on to make a number of successful gialli. What links these two filoni is this certain reference, alluded to, in relation to gialli, in a previous post, to the Lacanian Real.
Before Jodorowsky's El Topo, Leone had already captured the hallucinatory potential of the desert though the lens flares and dizzying photography of Clint Eastwood's ordeal in The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. The desert becomes itself a character and, like the Overlook Hotel, a merciless one. Driving through a "sidereal" America, Jean Baudrillard describes a desert denoting "the emptiness, the radical nudity that is the background to every human institution . . culture as a mirage . . . The desert is a natural extension of the inner silence of the body. If humanity's language, technology, and buildings are an extension of its constructive faculties, the desert alone is an extension of its capacity for absence, the ideal schema of humanity's disappearance." Preceding the desert of the Real, the Real of the desert; a Real at once compulsive and pulsional, like the undead persistence of a cat re-animated by another's murderous impulses in Il Gatto Nero, the hysteria of murder in Tenebrae, the knot of a memory that refuses reinscription in Profondo Rosso and L'uccello dalle piume di cristallo.
If Hitchcock's rule of suspense states that the very terrifying thing that everything in the montage is leading you to expect must never actually happen, in the gialli cycle of films that spanned Italy's long 1970s, the thing almost invariably does happen, and usually in a manner even more gruesome and terrifying than we were led to expect (the death of the drunk in Lucio Fulci's Il Gatto Nero is exemplary here). But if these films differ from the Hitchcockian model in this sense, they nonetheless share that "specifically visual intelligence" that Fantastic Journal saw in the Red Riding Trilogy on Channel Four. Like Hitchcock's films, gialli almost always tell their entire story, even the characterisation, anything, in fact, that might be of interest, through the images (or rather through a combination of image, music and sound design that specifically excludes dialogue). Interviewed in 1994 at a U.K. horror convention, Lucio Fulci apologised that the only uncut print of his film, Zombie Flesh Eaters, available for the screening was in Italian and without subtitles, "But the dialogue isn't really important. The dead speak the international language."
It is partly this absence at the linguistic level that sets the gialli apart from the American film noir they are so often compared to. Despite having a similarly pulpy literary source, gialli and film noir differ on a number of levels: for the hardboiled language and frequent recourse to voice-over in noir, gialli substitutes minimal, superfluous speech; for noir's succession of cops and professional private eyes, gialli offer up a series of bumbling amateur detectives (Tonino Valerii's Mio Caro Assassino, being a rare exception), who often cause more death than they prevent; in place of the complex psychology of motive evoked by noir to explain its murders in terms of the symbolic order's own inherent transgression, murder in a giallo film is often explained in terms of a highly libidinised supernatural phantasy (the Lacanian Real); and for noir's long shadows and chiaroscuro lighting, gialli substitute a predilection for bright, over-saturated reds and yellows (giallo is Italian for 'yellow', a reference to the yellow covers of the Mondadori publishing house's yellow-backed paperback thrillers of the 30's and 40's). It may be instructive to compare the cool, reserved, minimalism of Jacques Tourneur's (1942) Cat People, in which nothing is ever quite seen, with the lurid maximalism of Fulci's (1981) Il Gatto Nero, in which everything is always seen, and usually in unpleasantly tight focus. Despite similar thematic ground, the style and sensibility of the two films could scarcely be more different.
From the opening half-hour-or-so of Demoni (Demons), one is apt to suspect that its director, Lamberto Bava, had inherited his mentor, Dario Argento's bloodlust but little of his subtlety. Just a cheap and tawdry pretender, gore-mongering schlock merchant who supplements Goblin keyboardist, Claudio Simonetti's electronic score with Saxon and Motley Crue. More Herschell Gordon Lewis than the Hitchock of horror. But Demoni is best understood as a comic satire on censorship and the 'Video Nasty' list which, the previous year, had resulted in two Argento films (on which Bava had worked as assistant director) being banned in the UK. In one scene a group of the protagonists stand around, trying to make sense of what is going on, "All this is the movie's fault," they're saying, "We've got to stop the movie!" It is a perfect parody of tabloid scapegoating of violent or horrific films. But the characters soon realise that destroying the movie wont do any good. "It's not the movie," say the blind man in the stalls, "It's the theatre." The blame for 'real life' violence should not lie with some imaginary identification-cum-repetition of screen violence, but in the contradictions in the symbolic order, the theatre of life.
Michele Soavi's La Chiesa (The Church, sometimes called Demons 3), from four years later, is a far more stylish film, a much slicker production all round. Peppered with interesting bits of montage and nice camera moves soundtracked by a sophisticated electronic score, written by Philip Glass and performed by Goblin. However, politically, La Chiesa is far more dubious; it's twin messages being that the pursuit of knowledge is dangerous, and that the Teutonic knights, favoured military order amongst Nazis and Dan Brown fans, were in fact absolutely right to slaughter countless peasants because they really were demons. At one point a character even prays for assistance and his prayer is 'answered' when he immediately discovers a clue as to how to proceed. This sort of thing would never happen in an Argento or Fulci film.
