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Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey)
Username: Ramsey

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 195.93.21.74
Posted on Thursday, June 24, 2010 - 05:25 pm:   

I hadn't realised the term "giallo" as applied to films such as Bava's and Argento's more elaborate psycho movies doesn't have that narrow significance in Italy. Apologies if I've been misusing it!
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Thursday, June 24, 2010 - 05:34 pm:   

It means yellow doesn't it and refers to the covers of a famous series of crime books. I think I read that somewhere?
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Kate (Kathleen)
Username: Kathleen

Registered: 09-2009
Posted From: 213.122.209.76
Posted on Thursday, June 24, 2010 - 05:45 pm:   

There was a squabble about it over on the Vault of Evil.
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Gary Fry (Gary_fry)
Username: Gary_fry

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 82.26.154.208
Posted on Thursday, June 24, 2010 - 06:40 pm:   

A squabble? On the Internet?

No, Kate, I think you must be thinking of some other medium.
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Hubert (Hubert)
Username: Hubert

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 78.22.234.38
Posted on Thursday, June 24, 2010 - 07:35 pm:   

Yellow journalism? The Yellow Kid?
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 75.5.12.109
Posted on Thursday, June 24, 2010 - 07:49 pm:   

There's always room for giallo.
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Giancarlo (Giancarlo)
Username: Giancarlo

Registered: 11-2008
Posted From: 85.116.228.5
Posted on Monday, June 28, 2010 - 07:35 am:   

Yes, a "giallo" novel or movie is understood, in Italy, as having a crime plot, nothing to do with horror or gothic though borders may be evanescent sometimes. The term "giallo", meaning yellow, comes from the serial publishing of news-stand sold crime novels having yellow covers, hence the extension of the term.
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Giancarlo (Giancarlo)
Username: Giancarlo

Registered: 11-2008
Posted From: 85.116.228.5
Posted on Monday, June 28, 2010 - 01:03 pm:   

...more precisely, a "giallo" can be thought of as a classical "whodunit".
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Monday, June 28, 2010 - 01:08 pm:   

And many of what are considered horror films, like 'Profondo Rosso' or 'The Case Of The Bloody Iris', are, in fact, macabre murder mysteries. Agreed.
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 75.4.253.120
Posted on Monday, June 28, 2010 - 04:24 pm:   

... Which makes the first FRIDAY THE 13TH a giallo...?

No, wait - someone actually has to be actively trying to solve the mystery, I think, for it then to be a giallo - there has to be someone aware there even IS a mystery, the detective character, for giallo....
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 82.17.252.126
Posted on Wednesday, June 30, 2010 - 02:01 am:   

Good point, Craig, 'Friday The 13th' does have many of the giallo qualities while the almost equally enjoyable Part II was more your straight masked slasher flick.
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 75.4.226.237
Posted on Wednesday, June 30, 2010 - 03:09 am:   

Another one in this genre, Stevie, if I'm remembering it correctly: I saw it as THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED, but its original Spanish title is LA RESIDENCIA - which I remember as being a superior... slasher? giallo? horror? A little of all, but not quite one of them alone....
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Giancarlo (Giancarlo)
Username: Giancarlo

Registered: 11-2008
Posted From: 85.116.228.5
Posted on Wednesday, June 30, 2010 - 09:21 am:   

In fact, from its original Italian meaning of a yellow-cover whodunit, the word "giallo" has underwent the fate of an accordion being stretched or folded in the wake of feelings.
A "murder mystery" where a yet unknown criminal must be discovered in the characters-circle by some detective, even of the would-be sort, is the closest definition of the "giallo" genre, imho.
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Wednesday, June 30, 2010 - 05:55 pm:   

I got another few classic "giallos" for you: 'The Cat And The Canary' (1939), 'And Then There Were None' (1945) & 'The Spiral Staircase' (1946) - amongst other old dark house mysteries (but they are the finest).

Classics like those are the real precursors of Bava, Argento, et al...
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Giancarlo (Giancarlo)
Username: Giancarlo

Registered: 11-2008
Posted From: 85.116.228.5
Posted on Thursday, July 01, 2010 - 01:35 pm:   

Yes, Bava, Argento, Freda...I like the movies but I never rooted for giallos of classical intrigue. I know A. Christie to be a great writer but my imagination always stayed indifferent to typical giallos, even if of good or even excellent style. My turf, in adolescence, was sci-fi. The sci-fi equivalent to news-stand giallos was then the sci-fi Urania series, where I met with such ones as John Wyndham, Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, for instance. They set my mind akindle, though, of course, I don't know how accurate the Italian translation could have been. And I went to movies: I loved even such brick as Reptilicus...then I discovered HORROR, in the person of Edgar Allan Poe, at first, as I was led there by Roger Corman's movie adaptation of his tales.
I'll go on with my case-history when time allows, if anyone's interested.
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Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey)
Username: Ramsey

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 195.93.21.74
Posted on Thursday, July 01, 2010 - 01:55 pm:   

Do, Giancarlo!
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Kate (Kathleen)
Username: Kathleen

Registered: 09-2009
Posted From: 213.122.209.76
Posted on Thursday, July 01, 2010 - 02:27 pm:   

I saw it as THE HOUSE THAT SCREAMED, but its original Spanish title is LA RESIDENCIA - which I remember as being a superior... slasher? giallo? horror? A little of all, but not quite one of them alone....

Also known as The Boarding School. It's really pretty rubbish, Craig. We got it after loving Serrador's Who Can Kill a Child? but were hugely disappointed in this one. It's more like a women-in-prison film with the usual "sexy" boarding school contrivances. And a wholly predictable climax.
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Weber (Weber_gregston)
Username: Weber_gregston

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 194.176.105.55
Posted on Thursday, July 01, 2010 - 02:56 pm:   

A women-in-prison film with a predictable climax??? There are so many jokes possible from that statement
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Thursday, July 01, 2010 - 04:20 pm:   

Please do, Giancarlo!

Anyone on this site will tell you that I consider Italian cinema to be the greatest in the world. I think they understood the full melodramatic/operatic power of cinema to really move an audience, emotionally, visually and musically, with unashamedly broad primal strokes. Silent cinema led the way in that respect but, for me, only the Italians followed through on that early sense of joyous creativity that connects all people everywhere.

Even when they did realism they did it with glorious ambition and a sense of true Shakespearean tragedy, e.g. 'The Bicycle Thief' or any of Rossellini's flawless masterpieces.

The national temperament of Italy is for high emotion which is my theory why your natural understanding of cinema (as popular entertainment & Art) is the right one. Just think how many of the great American directors have been Italian-Americans... I rest my case.
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Craig (Craig)
Username: Craig

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 75.4.252.26
Posted on Thursday, July 01, 2010 - 04:26 pm:   

Kate, I'm sure your assessment is right: it was a long time ago I saw it - saw it on Elvira, Mistress of the Dark, too... maybe I'm remembering her more than I am the actual film....
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Giancarlo (Giancarlo)
Username: Giancarlo

Registered: 11-2008
Posted From: 85.116.228.5
Posted on Friday, July 02, 2010 - 08:13 am:   

Yes, thank you for your assessment about Italian cinema. De Sica, Fellini, Visconti, Antonioni, Rossellini (his movie about San Francesco is sublime, the only authentically religious movie in cinema history, beside Pasolini's "The Gospel according St. Matthew" and, possibly, the Japanese masterpiece, "The Burmese Harp"...director's name is escaping me.) But what about Monicelli's human epic, "The Great War", powerfully played by Alberto Sordi and Vittorio Gassman? I don't know how many are aware of Pietro Germi's signing "Divorce the Italian way" (M. Mastroianni masterfully playing all typical Sicilian tics), and a great "whodunit" "That Bad Mess in Via Merulana" where the post-war Roman soul of the poor people was inexorably flayed in a unique style comprising both human cruelty and compassion. Too vast a thread to be properly trodden.
Pupi Avati's local horror movies are staying memorable and, of course, that precious rosary of Italian horror movies extending from Bava to Argento, Riccardo Freda, Giorgio Ferroni and Antonio Margheriti impossible to ignore in the track. Too short a season that was, alas. We are capable of doing them no more! And then that huge one, Sergio Leone...I'd better leave here, it's a subject matter of endless expanding.
I'll come back with my personal falling in love with horror as soon as time allows and inspirational memories come back to me.
(I hope I'm writing readibly as English is a second language to me.)
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Ramsey Campbell (Ramsey)
Username: Ramsey

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 195.93.21.74
Posted on Friday, July 02, 2010 - 01:30 pm:   

You are indeed, Giancarlo! I was watching Il Trovatore last night on DVD and had the curious notion that the inextricable combination of horror and lyricism prefigured the same element in Bava and especially Argento (who, of course, actually uses Verdi in - well, you know which film).
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Thomasb (Thomasb)
Username: Thomasb

Registered: 03-2008
Posted From: 69.236.170.165
Posted on Sunday, July 04, 2010 - 12:18 am:   

Giancarlo: Interesting list there. To that short list of truly religious movies, I'd like to add Bergman's "The Virgin Spring" which I saw again recently and found to be a stunning experience.
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Giancarlo (Giancarlo)
Username: Giancarlo

Registered: 11-2008
Posted From: 85.116.228.5
Posted on Monday, July 05, 2010 - 07:50 am:   

Yes, Ramsey, the "va' pensiero" aria from Aida was the lyrical comment to gruesome murders in Argento's INFERNO. It's my suspicion Argento's genius was strictly connected to Mario Bava who worked as his photography director. His last flick, THE THIRD MOTHER, was way too halloween-ish. Have Argento's movies started to slide down after Bava's demise? Only an eccentric opinion: I am really waiting, and hoping, for Argento to come back to his own creative self.
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Giancarlo (Giancarlo)
Username: Giancarlo

Registered: 11-2008
Posted From: 85.116.228.5
Posted on Monday, July 05, 2010 - 07:54 am:   

Yes, Thomas, THE VIRGIN SPRING was an inexcusable omission! But can't we perceive a darkly religious subtext even in Pasolini's SALO'? Movies and religion, that would be a nice thread to start about!
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Stevie Walsh (Stephenw)
Username: Stephenw

Registered: 03-2009
Posted From: 194.32.31.1
Posted on Thursday, July 08, 2010 - 04:22 pm:   

Hard to believe that Wes Craven's 'The Last House On The Left' was a remake of 'The Virgin Spring'!

If we're talking films with a palpable religious power then look no further than Carl Theodor Dreyer. All his works have that quality but in particular; 'The Passion Of Joan Of Arc' (1928) & 'Ordet' (1955) - astonishing masterpieces that show what Cinema as Art is truly capable of imho.
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Giancarlo (Giancarlo)
Username: Giancarlo

Registered: 11-2008
Posted From: 85.116.228.5
Posted on Monday, July 12, 2010 - 01:27 pm:   

Agreed, Stephen! I'd add, anyway, Rossellini's "Francesco, giullare di Dio" (Francis, the Minstrel of God" 1950) and Ichikawa's "The Burmese Harp" (1956).
Maybe an inverted thread would be more fruitful: supposedly religious movies with no power to budge our Soul, such as Zeffirelli's semi-musical "Brother Sun, Sister Moon). I'd never be converted by that! Or "Bernadette" (but casting great Jennifer Jones and sardonically supercilious Vincent Price), or "The Robe" (making you take sides with Caligula)....

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