The Mise-En-Scène of a Decade: Visualizing the 70S Adam Charles Hart

REVUE D’ÉTUDES INTERCULTURELLES DE L’IMAGE JOURNAL OF CROSS-CULTURAL IMAGE STUDIES IMAGINATIONS JOURNAL OF CROSS-CULTURAL IMAGE STUDIES | REVUE D’ÉTUDES INTERCULTURELLES DE L’IMAGE CONTRIBUTORS ANDREW PENDAKIS Publication details, including open access policy NATHAN HOLMES ISSUE 9-1 COLIN WILLIAMSON and instructions for contributors: K. R. CORNETT FRASER MCCALLUM http://imaginations.glendon.yorku.ca THE MISE-EN-SCÈNE OF A DECADE: VISUALIZING THE 70S VISUALIZING DECADE: A OF THE MISE-EN-SCÈNE ADAM CHARLES HART KAITLIN POMERANTZ SEB ROBERTS The Mise-en-scène of a Decade: Visualizing the 70s October 29, 2018 REVUE D’ÉTUDES INTERCULTURELLES DE L’IMAGE JOURNAL OF CROSS-CULTURAL IMAGE STUDIES THE MISE-EN-SCÈNE OF A DECADE: VISUALIZING THE 70S ISSUE 9-1, 2018 To cite this article: Roberts, Seb. “Strange Vices: Transgression and the Production of Difference in the Giallo.” Imaginations, vol. 9, no. 1, 2018: Web (date accessed), pp. 115-131. DOI 10.17742/IMAGE.p70s.9.1.9. To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.17742/IMAGE.p70s.9.1.9 The copyright for each article belongs to the author and has been published in this journal under a Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial NoDerivatives 3.0 license that allows others to share for non-commercial purposes the work with an acknowledgement of the work’s authorship and initial publication in this journal. The content of this article represents the author’s original work and any third-party content, either image or text, has been included under the Fair Dealing exception in the Canadian Copyright Act, or the author has provided the required publication permissions. STRANGE VICES: TRANSGRESSION AND THE PRODUCTION OF DIFFERENCE IN THE GIALLO SEB ROBERTS Abstract | The giallo, an Italian genre of horror film that he giallo was a particularly fleshy style peaked in the 1970s, is infamous for peddling shock and of horror film from Italy that began in slaughter. Under the graphic sex and violence, however, the the early 1960s and flourished during giallo expresses popular anxiety surrounding the transgres- Tthe 1970s: a blood-soaked spectacle identified sion of social and sexual norms in modern Italy. Superficial- with cheap thrills and frequently low produc- ly, the giallo seems to suggest that social and cultural turmoil tion values. Despite this, the giallo was shrewd- necessarily produces death. Yet the giallo foregrounds the ob- ly perceptive in its projections of social anxi- vious excitement and attraction of transgression, allowing eties during the most violent decade of Italy’s that transgression could in fact be generative of positive, in- postwar history. In transgression, the giallo vigorating difference. saw thrilling possibility and dangerous disor- der, and in hegemony, stability and suffocation. Résumé | Le giallo, un genre de film d’horreur italien qui a These films largely regarded the upheaval of connu son heure de gloire dans les années 70, a la réputation modernity with ambivalence while neverthe- de mélanger choc et massacre. Sous l’aspect pornographique less generating much of its diegetic tensions et violent, toutefois, le giallo exrime l’anxiété populaire qui from the instability of social norms—partic- entoure la transgression des normes sociales et sexuelles dans ularly those surrounding gender. Trafficking l’Italie moderne. En surface, le giallo semble suggérer que in sleaze, shock, and slaughter, the giallo ap- l’agitation sociale et culturelle conduit nécessairement à la peared to argue that the volatility of modern mort. Cependant en mettant en avant l’excitation et l’attrait life necessarily produces death. However, this évidents de la transgression, le giallo permet à cette trans- impression is but a first glance. A more incisive gression d’être porteuse de différences positives et tonifiantes. examination of how the giallo presents trans- Mots-clé: giallo, transgression, mondernité, violence contre gression as a production of difference reveals a les femmes, cinéma d’horreur. different understanding of social turmoil: as a generative force to be embraced. STRANGE VICES the giallo to cinema’s pre-grammatical roots as a popular attraction (Gunning 738; Wag- staff 48), but they also constitute, according to Pier Paolo Pasolini, “the dominant artistic na- ture of cinema, its expressive violence, its onei- ric physical quality” (172). Such apparent privileging of spectacle over coherent narrative and characterization has earned the giallo a degree of critical disdain. Anthony Mann claims the outbursts of extreme Fig. 1 sex and violence “reveal the director’s fear that the audiences get bored” (qtd. in Wagstaff 245), The giallo is not simply a horror film that hap- comparing the erratic rhythms of the films to pens to have been made in Italy. It is a cine- the “electrocardiogram for a clinic case” (qtd. matic filone, expressed through a constellation in Wagstaff 245). This mistrust of the specta- of tropes, including (but by no means limited tor’s focus may have been true in certain cas- to): a black-gloved killer, pursued by an ama- es: director Umberto Lenzi once lamented that teur detective; women undressed and in dis- prosaic exposition “distracts the audience’s at- tress; a backdrop of jet-setting bourgeois mo- tention” (68), suggesting that “the spectator bility; skronky free jazz or pulsating prog rock; prefers spectacular events to turgid screen- and ubiquitous bottles of J&B whisky.1,2 Yet the play” (68). However, there is also a historical most recognizable—arguably, the definitive— and economic basis in Italy for films that es- feature of the giallo is the excessively savage chew classical formalism in favour of fitful and sensational murder scene, a scene whose spectacle. Christopher Wagstaff notes that, “[s] bloody sadism is often matched only by its bi- ince the Second World War, the Italian exhi- zarre inventiveness. The giallo murder scene is bition sector had grown accustomed to having an irruption of spectacle that forgoes classical too many cinemas and too many films in cir- notions of narrative necessity, characterization, culation at any one time” (249), causing “a rel- and even visual coherency (Totaro 163), giv- atively low level of exploitation of a relatively ing filmmakers a chance to experiment and large number of films” (249). This meant short- indulge their wildest creative urges. Including er initial theatrical runs, and thus a film’s earn- serrated shadows, off-kilter framing, slow mo- ings depended largely upon where—that is, to tion, first-person perspective, extreme zooms, what market—it was exhibited. To ensure that impressionistic editing, cacophonous music, they could “repay their large production costs and ghoulish sound effects, a broad variety of before interest payments [ate] away into rev- available techniques are employed to heighten enue” (Wagstaff 247), films with bigger bud- the shock and awe of a giallo murder. In these gets and financial backing would typically be scenes, when the filmmakers abandon natural- screened in first-run theatres, known asprima ism in pursuit of visceral charge, the giallo ap- visione: urban cinema palaces that drew from a proaches a kind of affective ecstasy. These mo- broader pool of potential spectators and could ments of frenzied sensation not only connect therefore command significantly larger ticket REVUE D’ÉTUDES INTERCULTURELLES DE L’IMAGE JOURNAL OF CROSS-CULTURAL IMAGE STUDIES ISSUE 9-1, 2018 · 116 SEB ROBERTS prices.3 Less prestigious pictures with smaller rhythm of Italian popular cinema: the film as production, marketing, and distribution bud- a unitary work was less important in gratify- gets were often relegated to terza visione, third- ing the audience (thereby creating repeat cus- run theatres with depressed ticket prices com- tomers) than intermittent eruptions of excess, monly found in peripheral and rural areas.4 shock, surprise, and spectacle. At every tier of the exhibition sector, the surfeit Thus, the specific attraction of thegiallo lies of screens and high turnover in programmes precisely in its hyper-stylized and grotesque required a steady stream of film product to depictions of sex and death. To bemoan the keep customers coming back. Therefore, Wag- giallo’s lack of fluid pacing, scrupulous plotting, staff argues, “the whole structure [of the Ital- naturalistic acting, and so on, is to miss the ian film industry] depended on repetition. point. Consider Jonathan Rosenbaum’s review The audience had to return to the same cin- of Sergio Martino’s Torso, a.k.a. I corpi presen- ema the next day. It had to be offered some- tano tracce di violenza carnale (1973): thing different but providing the same gratifi- cations. In other words, a repetition with vari- This well-dubbed, lightweight horror ation” (254). For this reason, postwar Italian opus supplies us with everything that it cinema has been characterized by formulaic thinks we need: pretty girls in various cycles, called filone, wherein a single box-office states of dress and undress, a steel gui- smash could unleash a torrent of imitations. tar on the soundtrack to establish men- Targeting prima visione and terza visione au- ace, lectures on Italian sculpture, tasteful- diences alike and churned out at an industrial ly elliptical dismemberments and mutila- pace, the filone typified whatever trend prom- tions of body parts…a gratuitous lesbian ised the easiest money at that moment, wheth- sequence, and enough red herrings to er it was farcical comedies, sword-and-sandal keep a German restaurant in business for epics, spaghetti westerns, or ersatz James Bond a week. (qtd. in Koven 32) capers (Frayling 70-71). Rosenbaum astutely surmises that sex and vio- The “repetition with variation” of filone re- lence are not excesses to distract from the film’s quired that filmmakers rely upon not only ho- technical or intellectual shortcomings—they mologous themes, narratives, and characters, are exactly what the film thinks we need. Ac- but specific techniques and devices that would cording to conventional critical criteria, Mikel reliably gratify the audience.

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