CoP: Lecture - Film Theory 3

“A forkful of westerns: industry, audiences and the Italian western,” Christopher Wagstaff 

• prima visione and seconda visione – cinemas that attracted a middle class sophisticated audience usually in major cities, audience selected a film to watch

• terza visione – less populated areas, cheaper tickets, audience went to cinema based on habit rather than selecting a film. Films were more 
formulaic and popular films 


The good the bad and the ugly
Sergio Leone 1966


Use of sound

• Use of Music
• Lack of dialogue
• Use of eye line and cutting
• Differences in scale
• Use of camera to tell a story • Fragmentation of body
• Catholic references 

Literally meaning “yellow”, the term giallo here references the cover design of pulp fiction novels first produced by Italian publishing house Mondadori in the late 1920s. Initially, these were mostly translations of crime/mystery stories by writers like Agatha Christie and Edgar Wallace, but it wasn’t long before home-grown literary gialli began to appear. Director Mario Bava is widely recognised as the father of the genre’s cinematic incarnation and Koven offers both Bava’s La ragazza che sapev troppo (The Girl Who Knew Too Much, 1962) andSei donne per l’assassino (Blood and Black Lace, 1964) as texts which establish and fix in place the textual conventions of the genre. Koven looks at a wide range of giallo films by more than 25 directors, but he points out in his introduction that the book’s interest does not lie in an auteurist study of this body of work. Rather, his book is an exploration of the giallo from a synchronic perspective with particular attention given to some of the thematic concerns which arise from textual study of these films.

The giallo’s defining themes and motifs are cited with regularity in dedicated exploitation cinema fanzines and journals, and the existence of these critical collecting communities might be held responsible for sustaining interest in these great films long enough for academia to catch up. Nigel Burrell and Paul Brown’s 2005 Giallo Scrapbook magazine introduces the uninitiated with a kind of list: to qualify as a giallo, a film must have at its centre a deranged and perverse character whose killings are both inventive and peculiar; there is some past, primal scene which fuels the psychosis; he/she is dressed to kill – black trench coat and sometimes a black hat, but nearly always black leather gloves; weapons are sharp, the victims are hot and the blood flows, splatters and sprays like you’ve never seen (2). But not always; as La Dolce Morte concedes, this formula is consistently derailed by gialli which do not conform to these parameters.

http://sensesofcinema.com/2007/book-reviews/la-dolce-morte/

Giallo Killers
• Black Gloves
• Black Hat
• Black over coat
• Disguises gender
• Priests often used as part of gender confusion