Genre, Gender, Giallo: the Disturbed Dreams of Dario Argento
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GENRE, GENDER, GIALLO: THE DISTURBED DREAMS OF DARIO ARGENTO COLETTE JANE BALMAIN A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Greenwich For the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy JANUARY 2004 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This thesis is dedicated to my parents, Oavid Balmain, and Peggy Balmain, and my sister, Louise Balmain, without whose emotional and financial support and belief in me, it would not have been possible. I am extremely grateful to a wide number of people who have supported, encouraged and enabled me to produce this work. My special thanks go to my supervisor, Carolyn Brown, for her time and effort and unstinting encouragement during the process of writing. I also thank my ex-colleagues at Greenwich University who all contributed in some way to the intellectual space of this thesis - in particular: Oavid Pattie; John Williams; Oenise Leggett; Peter Humm; Susan Rowlands and Ann Cormack. I am also particularly grateful to Ann Battison and Mavis lames for helping me negotiate the administrative backdrop to the final production of this thesis. My colleagues at Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College have also played a part in enabling me to complete - Ruth Gunstone; Lois Orawmer; Alison Tedman; John Mercer and Andy Butler in particular. Also thanks to Lorna Scott for her help with proofreading and printing. Finally special thanks must go to my examiners: Professor Sue Golding (Greenwich University); Or Simon O'Sullivan (Goldsmith's College, University of London) and Or Jenny Bavidge (University of Greenwich). Or Colette Balmain January 2004 - Ill - ABSTRACT This thesis presents an examination of the giallo films of Dario Argento from his directorial debut The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970) to The Stendhal Syndrome ( 1996). In opposition to the dominant psychoanalytical approaches to the horror film generally and Argento's giallo specifically, this thesis argues that the giallo, both textually and meta-textually, actively resists oedipalisation. Taking up from Deleuze's contention in Cinema 1: The Movement Image that the cinematic-image can be consider the equivalent to a philosophical concept, I suggest that Argento's giallo are examples of what Deleuze calls cinema of the "time-image": provoked and extended ""philosophical" acts of imagining the world which opens up a theoretical space of thinking differently about questions of gender and genre in horror film, which takes us beyond the fixed images of thought offered by traditional psychoanalytical and feminist paradigms of horror. In the opening chapters of this thesis, I argue that the cinematic-image has to be thought ""historically", and that it is only be understanding the emergence of the ""giallo" in the 1960s within the wider picture of Italian national cinema, that we can understand Argento' s films as specific cultural expressions of thought, which are not reducible to paradigms based upon analyses of the more puritan and fixed American horror film (via Mulvey et all). In my subsequent discussion of Argento's ""Diva" trilogy, I consider an assemblage of Deleuzian becoming and poststructuralist feminist thought (Kristeva I Cixous I Irigaray) as a mechanism through which to explore the increasingly feminised and feminist spaces of his later work. This thesis concludes by assessing Argento's critical and creative legacy in films such as Toshiharu Ikeda's Evil Dead Trap (1988) and Cindy Sherman's Office Killer (1997). In these terms, a Deleuzian ""approach", enables a set of readings, which open up the texts to a more productive consideration of their appeal, in a way which other more traditional approaches do not, and cannot, account for. The close textual and historical analysis demanded by Deleuze is both a reconsideration of the [feminist] politics of Argento' s work, and a response to criticisms of misogynism. - IV - CONTENTS Page .. Declaration 11 Acknowledgements Ill Abstract IV Contents V Illustrations VI Introduction Argento: Philosopher I Practitioner 1 Chapter 1: Italian Film History: iconography, aesthetics and politics 26 Chapter 2: Giallo: Bava's The Evil Eye and Blood and Black Lace 61 Chapter 3: The Difficulty of Detection: The Bird with the Crystal Plumage 102 Chapter 4: Sight and Sound: The Components of the Image: The Cat O'Nine 134 Tails Chapter 5 The powers of the false: Four Flies on Grey Velvet 167 Chapter 6 The crisis in the truth: Deep Red 189 Chapter 7 The end of his-story: Tenebrae 218 Chapter 8 Coldness and Cruelty: Opera 250 Chapter 9 Abjection and Anorexia: Trauma 274 Chapter 10 The Laugh of the Medusa: The Stendhal Syndrome 301 Conclusion Argento's legacy 322 Bibliography 334 Filmography 349 - V - ILLUSTRATIONS Figure Title Page Figure 1 Woman as Corpse in Suspiria 2 Figure 2 Dario Argento: Philosopher I Practitioner 7 Figure 3 Abject terror personified: Sally in The Texas Chain Saw 15 Massacre Figure 4 Theatrical constructions of space in Rome, Open City 37 Figure 5 ""All the world's a stage": horror as theatre in Michele Soavi's 38 Stagefright Figure 6 ""Pulp Fiction": The most recent video cover for Visconti's 46 Obsession Figure 7 Opening sequences of Obsession 48 Figure 8. Desire outside the binary: Lo Spagnalo and Gino in Obsession 52 Figure 9 Giovanna as ""la dolente" in Obsession 57 Figure 10 A picture of ""suffering": Giovanna and Gino in Obsession 69 Figure 11 The torture of Manfredi: piestic imagery in Rome, Open City 83 Figure 12 Nora as ""the final girl" in The Evil Eye 97 Figure 13 The female body as commodity in Blood and Black Lace 99 Figure 14 The "Blank Mask" of terror in Blood and Black Lace 109 Figure 15 The ""caging" of the ""colonial other" in Bird with the Crystal 129 Plumage Figure 16 Monica as Lady Macbeth in The Bird with the Crystal Plumage 129 Figure 17 Sight and Sound in The Cat 0 'Nine Tails 158 Figure 18 The deconstruction of faciality in Four Flies on Grey Velvet 169 Figure 19 Murder as performance in Four Flies on Grey Velvet 172 Figure 20 Gender transgression in Four Flies on Grey Velvet 179 Figure 21 The death of the "Jew" in Deep Red 200 - VI - Figure Title Page Figure 22 Uncovering the truth in Deep Red 206 Figure 23 Recalling the iconography of fascism: the "square" in Suspiria 210 Figure 24 Arthur Kamffe's painting, January 30, 1933 212 Figure 25 The earth erupting in Bionchi's Burial Ground 214 Figure 27 The past as oneric flashback in Tenebrae 229 Figure 28 Jane's "becoming-other in Tenebraz 241 Figure 29 The "art" of death in Tenebrae 243 Figure 30 The murderer as performance artist in Soavi's Stagefrighi 244 Figure 31 Staging the scene in Mario Bava's A Bay of Blood 244 Figure 32 "Mad Artistry": The Crucifixion scene in The Silence of the 245 Introduction Argento: Philosopher/Practitioner Any filmmaker working in this [horror] genre will acknowledge an influence 1 from Dario Argento. (Lustig, Williams, 1997 ) If the killer has over time been variously figured as shark, fog, gorilla, birds and slime, the victim is eternally and prototypically the damsel. Cinema hardly invented that pattern. It has simply given visual expression to the abiding proposition that, in Poe's famous formulation, the death of a beautiful woman is the "most poetical topic in the world". As horror director Dario Argento puts it, '"I like women, especially beautiful ones. If they have a good face and figure, I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or man." (Clover, 1992: 42) The fact that the name Argento 'has almost become a brand' to his legion of fans suggests that he is a director of some importance and stature. His critical reception, as a director of horror films, has been considerably less enthusiastic. Repeatedly accused of misogynism and exploitation, Argento has struggled to achieve the same sort of success critically as commercially. Working at the edge of the acceptable, Argento' s films are noted/notorious for their violent imagery in which there seem to be no limits to the innovative and bloody '"set-pieces" of murder and mutilation. A notoriety no doubt helped by the banning of his 1982 film Tenebrae as a direct consequence of the 2 "video nasty debates" of the early 1980s. Without doubt, irrespective of critical responses to his work, Argento is one of the finest technicians of cinema, pushing at the boundaries of both the technologically 1 Cited in Dario Argento: An Eye for Horror (1997). Dir. Leon Ferguson. Video. MIA Video Entertainment: UK. 2 The 1984 The Video Recordings Act meant that videos had to classified for home viewing. This was partly a response to films such as I Spit on Your Grave (Meir Zarchi, 1978: USA) and Driller Killer (Abel Ferrara, 1979: USA). The most notorious example is of course Child's Play 3 (Jack Bender, 1991: USA). Released uncut in Japan, Tenebrae was banned due to its graphic violence and only recently released in this country onto video. A full list of all the films banned, and their present status, is available at The Melon Farmers ... Watching the Censors Watch What We Watch. Banned: The Video Nasties List. [Online]. Available at: http://www.tnelonfarmers.co.uk/nasties.htm - I - Introduction Argento: Philosopher/Practitioner and the visually possible. It is not surprising therefore that well-known American directors such John Carpenter, Francis Ford Coppolla, Brian de Palma and George A. 3 Romero , noted for their cinematic technique, can also be counted as "fans" of Argento' s films. His understanding of cinema as a technology of vision, and not just a visual means of telling stories, is one of the defining features of his work: in the uncut version of his 1996 rape-revenge film The Stendhal Syndrome, there is a shocking shot of Alfredo (the male antagonist) peering at Anna (the female protagonist) through a hole in a recently murdered woman's face.