After horror convincingly demonstrated in the 1960s that it could be successful not only as a B production, but also as a high-budget project, as demonstrated by Rosemary's Baby (1968), the genre powerfully entered the space of explicit exploitation and blockbuster expansion in the 1970s. With a predominant desire for commercial success, the authors expressed the metapoetic themes inherent in horror less through direct focus and more through implication and allegorization. In this issue of Art, we will deal with Italian examples of this general situation, and in the next one, mostly American ones.
As the end of his career approached, in the manuscript Maria Bava there was an intriguing change of accent: with the abandonment of the deliriously graceful camera movement in favor of a fanatical zoom, as if style had been replaced by a worldview, which actually offered a substantial redefinition of the author's metapoetic position. Horror went from a generic framework that, with its thanatological symbolism, still guaranteed beauty (even in hallucinatory catatonia, oneiric trance, elegance that could be found even in bloody destruction), to an exposition of ugliness, primarily human inner ugliness, of anthropological disavowal. The 'poetic' reverie transformed into a hurried fixation of the director's misanthropic description: the metaphysical constellation became depressingly social.
Chain reaction (Chain Reaction, 1971) brings Bava's signature theme of greed to a visceral climax, to a 'fabular' frenzy. 'Chain reaction' means that all the film's protagonists - both those directly involved in the machinations surrounding the sale of the land and those who know nothing about it - are involved in the murderous course of events, that the spiral of violence leaves no one aside: the narrative is nothing more than a chain of one crime after another. Bava's view of the world crystallizes in this insane cause-and-effect mechanism, the progressive degradation of everyone's reactions: the end Chain reaction in which children inadvertently kill their parents who have just succeeded, through crime, in becoming heirs to an estate, should structurally be taken as a grotesque, but still happy ending.
As Bava did earlier in La frusta e il corpo (The Whip and the Body, 1963), so is Serge Martino sa All the colors of the dark (All the Colors of Darkness, 1972), a populist film turned into an iconodulist study of the deepest relationship between the director's mise-en-scène and the heroine, between enunciation and the female figure, between film form and the female form, with an inevitable metapoetic resolution. This means that it was a work whose iconographic and semantic center was precisely the beautiful Edwige fenech: Martin's signifying power is most pronounced in those scenes in which the camera obsessively follows and 'catches' Jane, in which tension, psychological charge, erotic transgression and thanatological threat are organized through an interaction that is equally repressive and idealizing, thus a sadomasochistic cooperation between the cinematic apparatus and the heroine.
The Argents psycho-slasherand are, on the other hand, most often based around subtle mystification and ambiguous concealment of the killer's gender and sexual status. This opens up an inspiring space for the director's baroque procedures, since he is allowed to play intelligently with the entire cinematic system of surveillance, which is why the director, at least in his best period, always produces an additional metapoetic dimension: his most important films are structured in such a way as to offer an internal commentary on how the point of view is articulated as a generator of suspense and horror.
The aforementioned setting is most exemplarily visually processed in his key yellow achievement, Deep red (Deep Red, 1975), in which the classic detective story is signified and deepened. As would be the case in some of Argento's later films, the denouement occurs when the visual knot is broken, more precisely, when the witness remembers that his vision already contained the figure of the murderer, thus establishing a structural and ironic parallel with the film's opening sequence in which the medium 'sees' the events just before she is killed.
Even when the primary interest was purely commercial, the exploration of the possibilities offered by the genre could lead some authors to a deeper incorporation of metapoetic conclusions into what at first glance was a purely utilitarian, even sexploitational framework. Certainly the most prominent film from that ban was Emanuelle in America (1976) in which he is already notorious Joe D'Amato erotic pleasure, probably the only purpose of the series Black Emanuellle, crossed with the most violent context.
D'Amato's favorite, courageous photojournalist whom she 'impressively' embodied Laura Gemser here he examines - oh, when did our supposedly unscrupulous director push the values and achievements of investigative journalism in exposing the corrupt political elite! - the possibility of the existence snuff films. The 'normal' sexualized director's iconography in Emanuelle in America It is 'upgraded' by a poignant (sic!) juxtaposition of footage - Emanuelle finds evidence on a US senator! - that brings forth horrifying scenes of torture and rape of women in what could be a military prison, and which go further in openness than the final shots. Pasolini's masterpisa came out (1975)
The raw stylization of these shots really does give an extremely mimetic, almost authentic impression, especially when compared retrospectively with the previous ones. hard core scenes (the only ones that D'Amato admitted he didn't film!), even if they are taken as a kind of meta-commentary on the subgenre in which the Italian director worked.
The enormous contribution he made to the metapoetic discussion in Italian horror Lucio fulci in the seventies it is reflected in the meta-genre tendency and culmination in his three yellow achievements. Director's research yellow The territory possesses a developmental consistency, so that its definitive and sharpened transition into horror in the late seventies should be viewed in terms of a deserved culmination, an expansion of visual expression and violence. From this perspective, the author's arrangement of his genre projects is particularly interesting, the mode in which an internal inclination and tension was completed.
Namely, A lizard in a woman's skin (A lizard in a woman's skin, 1971) most closely resembles the director's classics in its excessive staging that mixes psychedelic abnormality with schizophrenic dissipation, and the imagery tends towards fantasy and sexualized 'deviation'. 'Mediatorski' You don't torture a little duck (Don't bother the duck., 1972) - by shifting anxieties from lesbian to the sphere of male homosexuality and pedophilia - possesses a stronger social 'engagement' and can function, among other things, as Fulci's cynical play with 'sacred' Italian topos (primarily, the Catholic Church).
Seven notes in black (Seven Black Notes, 1977) - completing the author's analytical trajectory - descends into the very narrative foundations of the (sub)genre, to the structural 'zero point', more precisely to the 'bare' mechanism of suspense, and thus to metapoetic causality: Fulci convincingly testifies to how precisely this 'mechanistic' dimension is equivalent to fatalistic description. In Seven notes in black the director is guided by the rationalist logic (which also has a literal claustrophobic effect) of storytelling and plot closure: when Fulci reached the end of this process, an imaginative, violent, surrealist eruption of his 'pure' horrors followed, breaking through a new horizon.
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