Sleepless (2001)

From http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/6/6a/Sleepless_(2001_film).jpeg

Dir. Dario Argento

First of all, after Opera (1987), my viewing of the films of Dario Argento has been spotty with a few gaps. Yet to see Mother of Tears (2007), haven't seen Trauma (1993), The Phantom of the Opera (1998) and Dracula 3D (2012). Aside from this, I've seen all the important films of his. All there is left, beyond those mentioned above, is the obscurer works. If a drop of quality has taken place, it's not the horrible downward spiral that I've heard others describe his career as having become. Instead it's a wider issue, beyond even Italy's genre cinema having declined taking its toll on his aesthetic rigor, but horror cinema in general being underused. This issue is in fact part of cinema in general, regardless of there being a climb or decline within it. If you can make a film fully through how you desired it to be, it'll be a miracle. A director with films under their belt are not safe from outside factors. Less budgets, cheaper camera, popular tastes that'll date films etc. Argento is a working filmmaker, in a profession first, that involves for more production costs than other mediums, and is an auteur secondly through the fans and critics, us, that see his films. And there are also times when the audience may have missed something that wasn't an outside influence or necessarily bad either. Once having found quite a few of his films, on the first viewings, dull, which I openly confess to having thought before rewatching those specific films, I've had a more complicated experience in my admiration for the director's work, able to see his major work at least twice. Argento has always skirted the schlocky and absurd in his prime era of giallos and supernatural horror - hockey plots, out-of-the-blue plot twists, obvious special effects. His films are legitimately great because of his style and that he can take these potential flaws in any other director's work and clearly embrace them in a baroque tone intentionally. And it's clear how deliberate it can be as well.

He would have seen having his protagonists be amateur sleuths in trying to solve murder cases, over the police, as fantastical in nature, but it's clearly done on purpose and I cannot help but think of the suspense of disbelief that exists in genre, especially crime stories. Unfortunately the virtues of suspending disbelief and embracing the clearly unrealistic has been lost on me for some time before now. It's also been lost in a lot of genre cinema. I blame the desire for realism and logic in narratives for having done this, even though both of them are mythical creatures in films purporting to be documents of reality. To embrace suspension of disbelief, which finds its biggest reservoir within the pulpiest of works, knowing flagrant in realism, is to intentionally enjoy films (or books, games etc.) that play within their own made-up realities. Even The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (1970), Argento's debut and most restrained work, has absurdities within it. Then he eventually went as far as having a monkey welding a razor blade in a film a decade later and likely knew how ridiculous it was. The Bird With The Crystal Plumage and The Cat O' Nine Tails (1971) were films I liked on the first viewing, and the likelihood was that they are the most streamlined and less-tangent filled films by him. After ...the Crystal Plumage, the films became more and more expanded, more tangent filled and clearly breaking to pieces the narratives they had on purpose and probably from the haphazard nature of many Italian genre cinema of the time. The most obvious example of this, was Deep Red (1975) and its extended screwball comedy sequences with David Hemmings and Daria Nicolodi; the fact that most of it was removed from the shorter English language release of the film more than likely altering how viewers would react to his film, not seeing how tongue-in-cheek and peculiar he actually was. Plots in his films were lurid and not logically rigorous, more inclined to the spectacle of pulp, Four Flies From Grey Velvet (1971) getting its title from a scientifically impossible concept to catch the killer straight from sci-fi or Victorian gothic literature. If there was a peak for this expanding and divisive excess it was undoubtedly the eighties. Inferno (1980) is the most abstract film of his, Opera pulls the carpet under its viewers' feet, and Phenomena (1985) is clinically insane. And that's not discussing the use of Iron Maiden and Saxon in the mid and late eighties films.

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A film like Giallo (2009) still carries the hallmarks of this auteur. As does The Card Player (2004), The Stendhal Syndrome (1996) and, returning to the film of this review, Sleepless. I don't see a sudden damnation in mediocrity to the pit of the worst of cinema fans have proclaimed it to be with him. Filmmaking, even from an outsider who hasn't picked up a camera, is such a chaotic, arbitrary bastard of a career to be an artisan in when public taste, money and resources are variable and have such a drastic effect on the final product. Those who've been championed in horror cinema especially have been just as effected by this - see John Carpenter, Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, George Romero and so forth. Add European directors like Jess Franco, whose career was a roller coaster. Or go further, and beyond just horror films, like with Takashi Miike, a self proclaimed working director who, at one point making five films in a year, is clearly dependant on making films to live and has to do so by following what he will be able to work on, which is something I am having to accept with my disappointment with his later mainstream films. Auteurs or people with unconventional ideas are a pain in the arse for producers to work with, and as new talent exists, older veterans have ended up being ignored. A director who can keep a rich filmography usually works with whatever their budget is, even if its low, and is the equivalent of the mad lord isolated in a tower by themselves, sustained by those who've cared to listen to them. Yes, Argento and many director are countable for some really bad ideas in their weaker films - Adrian Brody's wonky accent(s) in Giallo for starters - but it's probably hell to get these productions off the ground let alone with little compromise. We forget as viewers it's a job, which can be as arbitrary as any other job we have, paid or unpaid.

A series of murders from 1983 have seemed to begin again many years later. The killer was said to have been a man with dwarfism, yet the fact that he apparently committed suicide, and the newest killings follow the originals' traits exactly, suggests that this was likely wrong. The son of one of the original victims Giacomo Gallo (Stefano Dionisi) is brought back to Turin, reacquainting himself with a crush of his past and intending to find out who actually killed his mother. Also brought back in is the original detective of the case Ulisse Moretti, played by the legendary Max Von Sydow, long retired but bringing himself into the case again as memories and his desire to close it too returns to him. The film's a throwback to Argento's first giallo films, less about who the killer turns out to be, but the labyrinth of the plotting. Giallo are more inclined to the notion of spectacle - the effect of the plotting, throwing its protagonists in the deep end, the gory deaths. It's a nasty film when it wants to be, a strange balance of cruelty and the absurd. Absurd is the right word. Argento has a clear bombastic ridiculousness to his work, sincere but winking. The same here. The spectacle of the first act, where a prostitute inadvertently gets involved with the killer and an incriminating blue file, shows the director's virtue of the elaborate. A prolonged set piece on a train. Two women involved. An inherent creativity to Argento that, dare say it, was found up to Giallo for all its failings. This is of course the film where Goblin, the Italian progressive rock band that created haunting scores for Argento's most well known films, came back together in some form to create another. The title theme sends shivers up the spine with the guitar lick that carries it, but again it proves great metaphor for an intentional, mischievous pomposity in Dario Argento's work. Music to shake the ground with but embracing excess like a starving man to food.

From http://www.mondo-digital.com/sleepless2big.jpg

The problem with Sleepless, if any, is not to do with the film's story or structure. His best work, including Suspiria (1977) and Inferno, is full of lengthy dialogue scenes and expedition. Odd tangents with no connection to the main plot. My original boredom with a lot of his films was because he got more excessive with this sort of thing, which I didn't go in expecting when I wanted lean, taught thrillers. The implausible nature, the lashings of said exposition, all the tangents, and it's clear, especially here, that Argento is in adoration of this as much as making the most stylish or tense work possible. I cannot but suspect, as we have scenes of Sydow by himself and his pet tropical bird figuring out old information on the murder case, explaining it to himself and us the viewers implausibly, that the director adores and fetishes the junky, over explained tones of a pulp paperback as much as their heightened tones and the mystery. Once you jettison the conventions of "good" narrative writing, it's obvious Argento loves the clearly implausible, the pointless, the all-the-sudden, the inane, and far from a detraction, it actually here is shown to be one of his best auteurist traits once you embrace it.

The real problem with this film is seeing how it occasionally looks daub visually. Thankfully this film has the style of the older films. But I have to get through the obvious flaw that, from around this point, and The Stendhal Syndrome, something was clearly an obsacle he put up as a director or outside groups forced upon him where his films lost their lustre from the past films. Not surprisingly it mirrors how  horror cinema became more and more obviously treated like the fast food of the medium, which effected many of the old auteurs' films. Yes, films were churned out in the days before I was born, but its feels even more obvious within the last few decades when directors known for distinct personalities in their work are minimal. Moments in this film, there are the troubling signs of how cheaper his films were becoming at least in look if not budget, clearly a compromise from the films of decades before. When you're a director known for style and elaborate camera movements, a restriction in making the films is not a good thing. The good news is that, while it would unfortunately begin to really undermine his films from The Card Player*, the style of the earlier films is still here, such as a lengthy tracking shot following along a carpet to an event that is magnificent. What has to bared in mind is that, when he started, Argento was working with Vittorio Storaro as his cinematographer, who the same year as The Bird With The Crystal Plumage did the same task with Bernardo Bertolucci's The Conformist. This is the same in other areas of the film's production, with Ennio Morricone as the composer. The older eras of horror cinema had a fluidity between actors to technicians switching between art and pulp cinema, particularly with Italy and Japan, without bias against either. Unfortunately Argento has to work with what he has now. With this film though he was still able to make material that shines. Considering the cinematographer for this film, Ronnie Taylor, shot his film Opera, it makes sense for the style to be there still. And of course, speaking of acting, there's Von Sydow. Sydow can leave any film with his stoic dignity shining through, as a great actor able to be good in even an awful film, as can be proved in seeing him in Judge Dread (1995) with Sylvester Stallone. The transition from Ingmar Bergman to his later films is surprising, but to bring his gravitas to this film was inspired, and in seeing him add conviction to the sillier aspects, proves why he's such a good actor. In fact no one is bad in the film in a jarring way to be honest. The cheesy English dubbing is far from the worst I've seen and still adds a lot; I'm endured much, much worse.

From http://hotdogcinema.files.wordpress.com/2012/04/sleepless-backstage.jpg

The modus operandi of the story is how a pretty nasty nursery rhyme penned for the film by Asia Argento, the director's daughter and actor/director in her own right, and from the very Grimm end of children's literature, infects someone enough to carry out a series of murders inspired by it against women. It's bizarre, but Argento has revealed in the bizarre plot ideas for four decades or so now. Taken seriously, as a director criticised for his violence, the notion of a work corrupting someone both returns back to the plot of Tenebrae (1982), and the result here becoming a playful nod to the more exaggerated of stories that does nonetheless reflects on this issue even for a lurid plot thread. Argento did consider the notion of the dangers of a piece of creative art at least with his work. The dwarf character blamed for the original murders becomes more of a tragic figure, ostracised for what he looked like when, frankly, the killers with the exception of Phenomena have been normal people hiding corrupted minds. And, without spoiling Phenomena, even that film is a lot more complicated, for an intentionally silly film, on that matter too. It says a lot of where the director/co-writer's heart lies in his preferred stories when this character is said to have been a pulp thriller writer who read aloud his latest creations gladly to the neighbouring children, the mix of the sick and the fun apparent especially here in Sleepless. Length and structure wise, the film does feel stretched, but it escalates quickly and, surprisingly, closes out its epilogue with end credits playing over the footage. Abrupt defiantly, but at the same time, it befits the material as much that it ends with the macabre jolt and soon after finishes so that it stays in mind.

It's unfortunate Dario Argento's work has dropped in quality over the years, but it's somewhat of a parody that, the further a director's career is, the more divisive and in danger of compromise it is. Its less that directors loss their creativity, too variable in individual cases for me, and I'd argue that with Argento, though he may be guilty in his compromise, that clearly the effect of less resources have plagued these films too. The circumstances to get these films made were likely to have had a drastic effect on what we would see. It's clear here as well that the intentionally silly and fun side of the man, even for the sadistic violence, was made more pronounced in a film like this. Maybe Giallo, with Adrian Brody sucking a whipped cream can nozzle at one point within it, was actually meant to be a comedy, and Argento wasn't covering his tracks? I'll see Dracula 3D when it's possible to acquire it, and be baffled by why a giant CGI mantis was included, but unless he has completely gone mad, I can't help but think he must have found that mantis people were able to see in a leaked production trailer to be funny as well as what he wanted for the scene. It comes apparent that, as well as the potential problems in making these films that is inherent in the industry, the knowing absurd of the man's work that has always been there has made itself more obvious as the films continue. As fans we've probably taken Argento's work too seriously in tone when they may have been ultraviolent romps in plot twists and abrupt surprises as Sleepless is. It makes complete sense of great moments from his first films that were nonetheless strange. He started with an extended dialogue scene whose punch line was that someone was sustaining themselves by raising cats to eat, and that should remind us of this side of the director that we've ignored, and realise its been in all the films he made afterwards.

Note: * Which makes no sense since Benoît Debie, of Spring Breakers (2013) and Enter the Void (2009), was the cinematographer. I'm baffled by this despite actually liking the film.

From http://www.dvdactive.com/images/reviews/screenshot/2009/7/sl2.jpg

Representing Italy: Four Flies On Grey Velvet (1971)

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Dir: Dario Argento

To watch a giallo, which Dario Argento impacted with his debut with the power of an electric bolt, is to expect the unrealistic. Its fantasy. A tricky knotting string of narrative. It only works as it does in form by being as absurd as it is as well as logical to some extent. The giallo, as I come accustomed to it, is a subgenre that could only make sense in cinema, willing to jump to unexpected places as abruptly as possible as well as have real logic to them. Befitting Argento the former film critic, giallo even when its middling is all about the lack of a clear vision, lost in the web of narrative for the protagonist and the viewer. Red herrings are there, one of them or someone else entirely behind the murders. A "gimmick", a McGuffin, or a nagging aspect for the person trying to solve the crime is always there, and the resolve is far from the original placement of one's expectations. In most other subgenres, it's possible that going to A to B hasn't even gotten past A by the end credits. Giallo on the other hand, unless it's so bad you don't care, feels like a journey.

From http://hotdogcinema.files.wordpress.com/2012/07/four-flies-mask.jpg

This was the missing piece in the puzzle of Argento. There are other films that were obscure, but Four Flies On Grey Velvet was the noticeable absence. Notable because it's in the beginning of his golden period of giallo and supernatural horror films. Notable because it was the final film in the unofficial Animal Trilogy, including his famous debut The Bird With The Crystal Plummage (1970) and The Cat O'Nine Tails (1971). Now available officially, the only truly obscure film in his filmography is The Five Days (1973), his sole excursion outside of horror and mystery thrillers, a historical comedy of all things. Four Flies On Grey Velvet certainly crams a drastic amount of shifts and pulls of subjective reality as it goes along. The drummer for a band Roberto Tobias (Michael Brandon) finds himself accidentally killing a stranger in a theatre, a mysterious figure above them capturing the incident on camera and using it as blackmail. However the figure doesn't want money. As he resists, Roberto tries to figure out what is going on, realising that blackmail isn't enough to explain what is going on, and so much more is taking place behind his back, not at least bodies that are slowly piling up. It plays with its form, but it's not the bombastic camera tracks and stylistic lighting of the later Argento films. Its sly, playful; after the great, but simple and economic first film The Bird With The Crystal Plumage, he suddenly raids every technical idea he could come up with to test himself. The heavy prog rock by Ennio Morricone, in contrast to his previous scores for the first two Animal Trilogy films, is very much a mirror for the film as a whole. This is a Mr. Bungle song sat at the end of two considered jams in this unofficial trilogy. The plot is even more ludicrous than the other two, its title from a gimmick later in the narrative that borrows from the history of mystery fiction, but feels even more ridiculous for being so suddenly introduced near the end of the film. The playfulness of the film is signaled immediately in the opening credit prog jam when there's a first person shot from inside a guitar that's there for the sake of it. Even next to the fantastic and bravado shots or images from the likes of Suspiria (1977), Inferno (1980) and Opera (1987), this film is the closest to a quirky film in his filmography, with how it presents itself, while still being a full blown giallo.

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The whole film feels so different from a lot of his early and later films. Another character instead of Roberto does the investigation of the leads. There's romance between Roberto, already married, and his wife's sister that isn't actually frowned on or highlighted as a grand plot push. The characters around Roberto are broad and intentionally exaggerated, from a downtrodden postman who keeps delivering porn to the wrong house, to a friend (Bud Spencer) who is nicknamed "God", introduced with a chorus singing "Halleluiah!" that drastically differs from anything in Argento's work barring the bawdy orchestration that follows Daria Nicolodi out a door as she teases David Hemmings in Deep Red (1975). Argento's films can be very fun, and there's comedy in others, but most of them are played deathly serious. The entirety of Four Flies On Grey Velvet feels more knowing of itself, more openly silly. Clearly in trying to reach a new level of experimentation he could implement for his films afterwards, Argento made a film here that took some risks that he wouldn't attempt again. It's not part of his supernatural films, which even Deep Red is partially of, but how does that explain where the reoccurring images of a beheading leads to in its meaning? It sets up tropes that would be ran with in later works, but there are things that are never continued in the ones I've seen. Our protagonist never looks into the case for himself, completely lost barring clues others find for him. Its everything around him that shifts without much of his influence, and results of it completely take him down.

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As Argento films go, it's good because of this and because it's still very much a rock solid giallo. Its full of clever, eye popping uses of the camera and the Morricone score is great. The last moment of the film may be one of the director's best for just knocking the viewer out. And the story is good as what a giallo usually is - it's not the mystery that's of interest, it's how it done and how things such as coincidences are welcomed rather than rejected for only logical explanations. Its full of pulp uses of psychological babble as other giallos, the same obsessions with clues and sociopaths, and in this film the added playfulness takes them to a different tone and makes the film stand out separately from the others. To Argento's credit, all of his films, from what I've seen, have been different from each other, never wanting to repeat himself in tone and presentation even if continuing with similar ideas. Finally accessing Four Flies On Grey Velvet not  only completes a key part of his career for me but also adds a new layer to how distinct he can be.

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Grilled Fried Proletariat (Death Laid An Egg (1968))

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Dir. Giulio Questi

France-Italy

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The line between the lurid and avant-garde blurs with Italian genre films. Peter Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio (2012) showed this, the film, for an improvised double bill, that I watched before Death Laid An Egg for a night’s viewing, a fitting signpost before the discordance of this one. Giulio Questi has an incredibly slight filmography, really only consisting of this, the infamous Django Kill! If You Live...Shoot! (1967) and experimental shorts that he has been making more recently at his own home, all of which I need to get around to. Death Laid An Egg however is a film that I have been wanting to see for years since I first heard about it from Mondo Movie, one of the first (and still one of the best) cult film podcasts in existence. The title sequence of Questi’s film, of chicken eggs being ovulated and chicken foetuses set to an abstract noise score, instantly sets up how confrontational and divisive it will be. Only a few will like it, but it lived up to its reputation for the bizarre fully.

From http://b.vimeocdn.com/ts/422/176/422176842_640.jpg

Death Laid An Egg is not what you would view as a typical giallo, which became more popular during the seventies, more closer to a politically layer story of greed and deceit...that just happens to be set in the poultry industry. Jean-Louis Trintignant, a face for cinema if any on the silver screen, is the husband of a rich woman (Gino Lollobrigida) who owns a chicken farm, a man with a peculiar sexual perversity. His wife Anna becomes suspicious of him while her cousin Gabrielle (the blonde, waif-like beauty Ewa Aulin) may be far less innocent then she acts to be. Eventually the strands connect together by the film’s end, but Questi’s film, edited and co-written by Franco Arcalli, is clearly designed to wrong foot the viewer from the beginning, to unsettle and attack them. I have heard it being compared to Jean-Luc Godard’s Week End (1967), and it is not close to that film in tone, but is just as abrasive. You are kept back from the characters, by their cold personalities or questionable attitudes, and the reality of the film is, a critique capitalist Italy of the time in an absurdist genre movie, is that literally, as some illustrations show, the chickens seen crammed in Anna’s mechanised battery farm are us. The human characters are victims of their vices or trapped in their repetitious lives. The constant clucking and shifting head movements of trapped chickens is no different from Trintignant’s awkward body language as he goes from place to place. That the film goes as far as having mutant chickens – a plot point I will not go any further with to not spoil – emphasises this idea in an intentionally ridiculous way. With the tone of an episode of the British series Brasseye (1997), which had a similar idea as a joke in one episode, the weirdness of this sequence adds to the coldness of the business, willing to break moral boundaries, as well as potentially showing what the people could become if they let themselves stay in their predicaments.

From http://gialloscore.com/img/films/43/grab1.jpg

With a cold, distant look, the film is not accessible, but is striking. Utterly strange, its political message seems more noticeable. The atonal noises of the score by Bruno Maderna, percussion going on its own new rhythms and trying to harm the listener on purpose, chips away at conventionality while the editing breaks time structure so that numerous periods and moments can exist within the same minute of each other. You will be baffled by it, maybe laugh at the mutant chickens, but you realise Death Laid An Egg is a genre film being intentionally strange for impact, its world of industry and the middle class extravagance completely peculiar and off to be trustable or to be populated by anyone vaguely human except the skittish Trintignant trying to understand what is going on around him. It is an art film with a capital A but its pretensions make it the stronger and more a true cult film than if you were expected the usual blood and nudity. It’s something the Surrealist movement would have praised if it wasn’t only made in the Sixties after them.

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Terror At The Opera (1987)

From http://annyas.com/screenshots/images/1987/terror-at-the-opera-title-still.jpg

Dir. Dario Argento

Italy

Terror At The Opera like actual music is about the vivid images that a song or piece of music generates for the listener even if they don’t make logical sense. Re-seeing the film, I realise that my coldness to the film originally was because it completely goes against the grain of what one expects with this sort of narrative. Since his beginning as a director, Dario Argento’s films have been curveballs which don’t go in unexpected directions – tangents in Deep Red (1975), the abrupt ending of Cat O’Nine Tails (1971), and Suspiria (1977) as a whole – long before the eighties and his more divisive films. They’re the same identical curveballs of his later, divisive films like The Card Player (2004) and Giallo (2009), with only the material around them up to debate. Even The Bird With The Crystal Plumage (1970), kicking off the giallo genre, has unexpected directions, the kind that would be dismissed as bad screenwriting to some, but are the dreamlike and abstract tones people adore his films, and Italian genre cinema, for. Viewing Opera, without bringing up the music choices, raises attention to an age old question – do we view cinema through the lense of theatre and novels, needing a full narrative, or do visuals and juxtapositions of everything there (visually, audibly, tonally) mean more?

From http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_bHSVCs9rX0A/TMsPhJBuccI/
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An understudy becomes the lead in a major operatic performance, only to be the victim of a killer who forces her to watch them murder people close to her. The film does not follow convention. It is various fragments connected into one sum – horror, voyeurism and pleasure, theatricality and the questioning of the protagonist’s state of mind all together in a loose story. It is intoxicated by its aesthetic and cinematic style, an exceptional creation which contains elaborate camera movements and clever use of what we the viewer can and cannot see. It is not mere aesthetic fetishism however, as it is clear, despite the problems he had making the film, that Argento is making the structure purposeful. It is clear we are not that separate from his supernatural films viewing Opera, within the same tone of Suspiria and Inferno (1980). The best of Italian cinema, including auteurs like Federico Fellini, work on a logic of waking dreams and everything connected to them – bright, deep textures and colours, fetishes, sexuality and power, individuals as representations – and you could view it as a cop-out to defend the apparent plot discrepancies, but when compared to awful abstract films from Italy (like Luigi Cozzi’s Demons 6 – De Profundis (1989) which attempted to be a film in Argento’s cinematic world), this seems more purposeful. If so, what does this mean? As a horror film, it is meant to terrify or unsettle you and that is Opera’s main concern. The displacing of what we expect to happen in a narrative like this knocks us out of our comfort zone. That the protagonist can have a cold attitude to just seeing a person killed may suggest that, actually, we’re being steered through the story by a character that is not in a mentally stable internal atmosphere, which Argento pushes, leaving us stranded. The only stable beings in the film are not even human but the ravens that dominate the theatre environment and influence how the murders are settled.

It is stripping down the typical plot line into a sensory effort. The scenes of tension, especially one in an apartment with a discomforting mistaking of identity, are effective if you give yourself up to the tone of the film, visually stunning beautiful grotesqueness, but it is completely abstract. Suspiria, even Inferno, even thought the latter especially is a fully abstracted work, have supernatural tones to make the curveballs and unexpected pulls back and forth more acceptable. Terror At The Opera plays within the same area within the vein of a obsessive killer plot, something we expect to be more conventional and realistic in a pulpy cinematic standard. That his influences, such as Edgar Allen Poe, were as much about the mental states of the characters and how it effects the environments around them help magnify this fact in Dario Argento’s work, making a drastic rewatching of his filmography, and covering up the gaps in my viewing, a necessary thing to do in the future. Hell, even the use of heavy metal music makes sense when you view the film like this.

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Videotape Swapshop Review: Don’t Torture A Duckling (1972)

From http://annyas.com/screenshots/images/1972/dont-torture-a-duckling-title-still.jpg

Dir. Lucio Fulci

Italy

Another Videotape Swapshop review link for the night for Lucio Fulci’s second film to be covered by myself, in some form, from the early seventies. During the last week or so, I’ve decided that, while I’m going to cover as eclectic a number of films as possible, that I’m also going to become a little obsessive with my covering of as many films as I can from different countries or genres. You may have noticed the frequency of Italian films covered in the year so far, and Italia and its vast amount of films, from Federico Fellini to Fulci, will be one of the countries obsessed over for this blog.

Review Link - http://www.videotapeswapshop.co.uk/12764/don%E2%80%99t-torture-a-duckling-%E2%80%93-1972-director-lucio-fulci/

From https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhl896IaKbqfHHKL2NqfojKl7EPE8HKAhjzR4GWbDRkAR14NW47au0OT-yQS8Uy7BhQHacAHl8MqGDmzPQUmpdm6fuo9w3wH08zLg5y76t8N2cD8N2NwDOtEeUbS-NRbqcFUwhj-oscVCL3/s1600/pdvd958.png

...live well for less than you can remember. [Footprints On The Moon (1975)]

Immediately in the gate, and there was a hiccup. Originally the opening film for this Halloween project was the 1974 erotic vampire movie Vampyres (directed by Jose Ramon Larraz), but the film turned out to be a middling chore to sit through not worth a full review. Like many genre films from the United Kingdom, (even as a Brit who wants to love the concept of them as a fan and in a patriotic way), they, the older ones especially, can be immensely disappointing and tediously made – dull story, pedestrian cinematography and editing, strung together by dull exposition dialogue and, with Vampyres’ case, a stilted take on sexuality and the erotic (bar the humbly beautiful Sally Faulkner who is far more interesting and physically attractive in her ordinariness on screen than the generic, forced beauty of the lead actresses Marianne Morris and Anulka who get top billing above everyone else in the cast). There are of course exceptions which are great British genre films, but consistency has probably been the problem that has prevented us from having a continuous flow of films being made until the 2000s onward. British cinema can fall into an inadvertent awkwardness with the quality of the films which causes many to be poor as a result...which digging through the barrel of 1970s films especially means that, for every fascinating one (such as the famous cinematographer Jack Cardiff’s bizarre Freaks remake The Freakmaker (1974)), there’s many more bad ones.

I had a replacement thankfully at hand, the original choice for the Tuesday 2^nd film, not a horror film in the conventional sense but something worth its weight amongst the potential inclusions later down the line. With its cold, strange air it was the perfect choice to start off the monthly series...

From http://i19.fastpic.ru/big/2011/0413/e5/c81fadd174dec2dba7fb0501120160e5.jpeg

Footprints On The Moon (1975)

Dir. Luigi Bazzoni

Italy

Film #1, for Monday 1^st October, of Halloween 31 for 31

From http://s3.amazonaws.com/auteurs_production/images/film/footprints-on-the-moon/w448/footprints-on-the-moon.jpg?1336315890

Fittingly the debacle with Vampyres perfectly sets up the virtues of the curious Footprints On The Moon. Everything Vampyres does so flatly, the Italian mystery drama did right and feverishly. Following the confusion of a woman Alice Cespi (Florinda Bolkan) as she suffers from three days of her life missing from her memory, the film is an immensely slow-burner, one which requires great patience but rewards in the end.

The Italian genre films especially in their boom in the 1970s seem far more consistent than their British equivalents from what I’ve seen. Of course, there are plenty of terrible films but probably one of the biggest advantages they had was that the quota of talented individuals in directing, scriptwriting, composing, cinematography and many of other areas of film production was far more noticeable on surface level. Even figures like Lucio Fulci, who are as well known for the varying quality of his work as well as his best amongst his fans, backed up his reputation with the creativity (and a nihilistic personal voice) to craft together even the lowest of budgeted material into something memorable or legitimately great. As the first film I’ve seen from director-writer Luigi Bazzoni, co-written with the author of the original novel (and possible co-director of it) Mario Fanelli, he is a capable director worth looking into. Their script is the best of the work. Delving into the well worn clichés of a main character potentially having a double, or is losing her sanity, bluntly, they yet avoid a laboured work by shaping it into a quietly moody, unbelievably quiet and gentle paced, potboiler  which is immediately unconventional from the first few minutes on. The considered but cold air of the film, in pace and story threading, is matched by an ever growing string of threads. Alice goes to the island of Garma for most of the film, a place she hasn’t been to but may have had, time wounded by holes within its linear line in which either duplicates exist or even a timeloop in the reality exists, and even if the film stays grounded within a realist logic to its tale, following Alice’s perspective and the mood of the film leaves us in a mindframe where anything could happen – reality doubling over itself, replicate itself, remove parts of Alice’s actions from existence, or putting it in random order – and time’s sense of cohesion is smashed to pieces, like the rhythms of music are broken and rearranged into new orders by an experimental rock band of the period, while still remaining in its original shape behind the elusive veils that throw us off. Footsteps... pushes itself into further reaches of the peculiar writing choices by Alice’s constant dreams of an astronaut being left stranded on the Moon as a guinea pig for a survival experiment. Said to be memories of a film she found too distressing to see all the way through, the film splits its own skull, its brain, in a meta-textual way with the fictitious movie, moving between On The Silver Globe-era Andrzej Żuławski images on the Moon itself and scratchy, black and white scenes of scientists watching the proceedings on TVs and controlling them. Is Klaus Kinski, playing the corrupt scientist Blackmann who orders the proceedings, actually playing himself within-a-genre-film-within-a-genre-film, his dubbed-in English voice played on by the presence of non-English subtitles translating his words, or is it merely a twisted fever dream of Alice’s mind in celluloid form, the best kind of material form even above television to have nightmares through? Kinski was already in many genre films by 1975, including Italian spaghetti westerns, so the inspired tangents Bazzoni and Fanelli created for the film possess an ability to self-reflect on themselves - as merely cinematic tropes - as well as pull the rug out from under the viewer continually without fail. That the UK DVD, the only release, to my knowledge, that is available globally, is a hybrid of the best surviving materials of a sadly neglected film adds to the intangibility of the final product. Picture quality can suddenly shift, and for certain scenes that may have been removed to trim the running time down, the English dub is suddenly dropped for Italian dialogue with subtitles for characters who were speaking English seconds before, an accidental flourish of inspiration when the protagonist translates speeches from one language to another, into text form, as a profession. If a better print could be salvaged, it would be for the better, but Footprints... continual sidesteps, until its neither showing its hand or being elusive about its plot, a half space inbetween where the oppressive but mysteriously compelling atmosphere pulls you further onwards, allows technical issues with the source prints and their availability to increase its abstractness.

To Italian genre cinema’s help as well was that the best in its country’s cinematic talent truly did work on the films and put their best work out within it as well as in prestige films. Ennio Morricone’s genre compositions are as well loved and praised as his work for his later compositions for prestige films or for the legendary Sergio Leone westerns. For Footprints..., not only is the editor Roberto Perpignani, who has worked with Bernardo Bertolucci to Miklós Jancsó, and contributes a lot to the film, but for cinematography Bazzoni had the legendary Vittorio Storaro. Within the same year of 1970 Storaro contributed vital work in crafting the masterpiece that would be Bertolucci’s The Conformist and worked on Dario Argento’s debut The Bird With The Crystal Plummage, a strong contender for Argento’s best film, showing the flexibility and craftsmanship the Italians had to switch from varying types of cinema, within bias, and create pieces of art. Vampyrs suffered from the same problem many films from around the world, ever area of cinema, every era include the current one, have in that it defensively goes with a ‘safe’ conventional style of scene capturing, the handheld of now or the static camera work of the 1970s that it is made of, consisting almost always of mid-to-close up shots of the actors and the actions taking place without real purpose, no sense of playing or tampering with the form to create effects, and more problematically, never letting the viewer sink into the environments and ‘feel’ the space of the locations and sets the plot is set in. You don’t have to have a Film Studies knowledge of types of camera shots like I had at college to notice this problem in many films – think how very little you actually ‘see’ in most films on screen, even those that claim to be expansive epics, and how repetitious it is (action film fans already know of this through the almost complete hatred of shaky cam fight scenes after an entire 1980s full of fights shown in their fullest on screen) and how a film like Footprints... thanks to  Storaro lets the buildings and architecture tower Alice from the distance and in close-up. Even with the jungle sets of Apocalypse Now (1979) and the comic book adapatation Dick Tracey (1990) and its primary colour, cartoon noir, Storaro is obsessed with space on screen as much as he is with colour and light, and within Footprint...’s abstract story the sense of space adds to the tensions Alice feels as conspiracy, doubles and a monochrome Kinski tormenting astronauts meld together. It also adds a romantic but elegantly distant framing to the events that pulls it away from its bizarre roots but makes it far more unsettlingly weird in its almost sweet and beautiful cinematography. This, combined with a score from Nicola Piovani, heightens the quality of the film, the music just as vital in taking you by the hand along in the disrupted threads of the story but also in its beauty causing the whole film (intentionally) to feel more alien in tone. One of the most potent examples of ‘odd’ cinema, as someone who was compiling a list of the ‘Cinema of the Abstract’ on this blog before this project, and will add this film to it, are those which match their unconventionality to a serenity and beauty in the quality of the work. From David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) to even Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975),  when the truly stunning contributions to image, sound and music are added to material that is surreal, disturbing, and in the case of Salo, the utterly vile and horrifying, the mix of the different sides of the coin are strange bedfellows who are yet inseparable and may be twins and the same. Alice’s journey by the end of the film is both deeply unsettling but – from the first images of a space shuttle spinning closer to the Moon, the dated effects adding to the off kilter nature of it – gorgeous to view. That even a Frankenstein print, toiled on with clearly great strain and love from Shameless Screen Entertainment, clearly as well film fans who desperately wanted to pluck this obscure gem from the mire because they loved it and pass it onto other film fans like me, actually adds to its beauty as well as abstractions makes it a rare film. Whether you can get with its slow pace, almost complete lack of blood and sex compared to other genre films from the country (the 18 certificate for the UK DVD is for the trailers for all of Shameless’ back catalogue they put on all their discs), and its desire with mood than rationality is up to you, but these divisive factors also can be said to be virtues as well. That Shameless released this as a ‘giallo’ on its back cover blurb is an understandable attempt to fit in into an established frame to entice the curious when the film itself is on its own existence. I thought it would be a giallo going into it but, despite my slim knowledge of the sub-genre, this is far from what I was expecting. Even compared to Argento’s least conventional contributions, Footprints On The Moon is either the most elegant and elusive siren within the Italian murder mystery fold I’ve seen, sat on a mass of intangibility in the clouds alongside the classical The Bird With The Crystal Plumage to the crassness of Umberto Lenzi’s Eyeball (1975), or in keeping with the astronautical theme, is on a completely different satellite in space to the entire sub-genre.