Blood on the Streets, Blood on the Screen
Giallo and the return of Italy's repressed historical nightmare.
So far, this newsletter has been dedicated to wrapping up unfinished business from the podcast’s first season. I’ll definitely be circling back to Berlin in the ’20s—Weimar Germany left plenty of its business unfinished—but research for season two has begun in earnest, and The Haunted Screen is preparing its own march on Rome, except it comes bearing movies, not fascism.
Right now, the plan is ambitious but tentative: I want to cover the evolution of Italian film from the late 1940s through the 1970s, tracing the neorealists’ urgent response to the wreckage of World War II, on through the passionately existential and unimpeachably chic cinema that coincided with the miracolo economico of the 1950s and ’60s, and then down into the dark disaffection that found its way onto the screens and the streets during the turbulent Years of Lead. It’s quite possible (probable?) that my proverbial eyes are bigger than my stomach, but whatever the project’s ultimate parameters, it’s provided a great excuse for my wife Laura and I to go ahead and book a month-long stay at a Rome Airbnb this summer. Strictly for research purposes. I swear.
This means that you can expect the newsletter to take an increasingly Mediterranean focus as I spend my near-to-medium term future reading Italian history and mainlining Italian movies. There is, of course, a lot to learn. A nation that’s won 14 Oscars for Best Foreign Language Film (more than any other country! eat it, France!) and produced geniuses like Antonioni, Rossellini, and Fellini doesn’t need a guy on Substack to hype its cinematic output. But my path to Italy actually didn’t run through the -inis. I got there through Italian cinema’s shady back alley: giallo.
In American film circles, giallo is usually understood as a particularly stylish branch on the horror family tree, and not without reason. The psychopathic serial killers in films like The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), A Bay of Blood (1971), and Deep Red (1975) are, well, horrific, and were a major inspiration on the American slasher craze of the 1980s. But in Italy, gialli carry a connotation closer to mystery or thriller, albeit of an especially grisly strain. After all, the name giallo, meaning “yellow,” comes from the traditional hue of the covers on Italian pulp crime novels. That colorful appellation is appropriate; these movies are known for vivid color palettes that veer toward the psychedelic. Just look at the reds, blues, and purples in the stills above and below. Other defining traits include labyrinthine plots, flashy camerawork, and black-gloved murderers stalking beautiful women. Though the most famous giallo, Suspiria (1977), centers on a dance academy run by witches, the motivations of the killers are more frequently Freudian than occult. Echoing the interests and structure of Hitchcock’s Psycho, gialli often close with a methodical, if facile, explanation of whatever primal trauma unleashed the villain’s id on the good people of Rome.
My tastes are broad, but I have a special affection for movies that take a flamboyant approach to macabre material. There’s a reason I launched the podcast by diving into expressionist classics like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari and Nosferatu. I’ll follow Ryan Murphy wherever he’s interested in leading me, and if you’ve got an evening to waste, I’m happy to explain why Midsommar is quite possibly my favorite movie of the past decade. (Luca Guadagnino’s 2018 remake of Suspiria is in the hunt, too!) It was probably inevitable, then, that I’d get around to spending some time with giallo’s greatest hits.
Despite the stench of ’70s exploitation cinema that can cling to these films, there’s a lot that’s interesting about their fusion of grindhouse and arthouse. At the AV Club, Noel Murray put the work of giallo auteur Dario Argento in conversation with the canon of Italian cinema, praising The Bird with The Crystal Plumage as a film that “was as chic as [Michelangelo Antonini’s Palm d’Or-winning] Blow-Up, but easier to understand.” For what it’s worth, Argento even has the Criterion stamp of approval. His Inferno is on their streaming service right now.
The 1970s marked giallo’s golden age, and that decade also formed the heart of Italy’s Anni di piombo—its Years of Lead. Caught up in 1968’s global wave of militant protests, Italian students occupied campus buildings and shut down their universities. The following year’s Hot Autumn strikes roiled the country’s industrial north. Fearing this newly resurgent left, neofascist groups collaborated with right-wing elements inside the government to pursue a “strategy of tension,” exacerbating political animosities and enflaming the general air of disorder to provide justification for an authoritarian takeover.
On December 12, 1969, this strategy took the lives of 17 people and left another 90 or so wounded when a far-right paramilitary group bombed the Piazza Fontana in Milan. Despite the involvement of members of the state security service, government authorities initially insisted that it was the work of left-wing terrorists. Scores of known anarchists were arrested. Among them was the railway worker Giuseppe Pinelli, who “accidentally” fell to his death from a fourth-story window during police interrogation.
The war was on.
According to the Italian Ministry of the Interior, the years between 1969 and 1987 saw nearly 15,000 acts of politically motivated violence. Almost 500 people died in what amounted to low-simmering civil war. Bombings, assassinations, and arsons became routine parts of civic life. With the alleged support of the CIA, the reactionary monarchist Edgardo Sogno led a failed coup attempt in 1974. Four years later, the marxist Red Brigades kidnapped and executed former prime minister Aldo Moro.
The confluence of the Years of Lead and the golden age of giallo wouldn’t have surprised the German critic Siegfried Kracauer. As I wrote at LitHub last month, in his book From Caligari to Hitler:
Kracauer argues that film is unique among the arts because since its birth in the late 19th century, its intended audience wasn’t some rarefied class of elites. Movies have always been aimed at the masses—“the anonymous multitude.” The films that resonate with their audience, then, are effectively the dreams and fantasies of an entire culture.
Or, I guess, that culture’s nightmares. In his excellent book Blood in the Streets: Histories of Violence in Italian Crime Cinema, Austin Fisher puts forward a historical reading of giallo that goes deeper than simply observing violent times produce violent movies. He sees both the era’s surge in terrorism and the 200 or so films that constitute the giallo subgenre as something like the return of the repressed, a festering of unhealed wounds dating back to Mussolini and World War II.
Though less famously than France in the west and the Soviet Union in the east, Italy served as a major front in the war, with the Allies first taking Sicily in 1943 and then sweeping north through the mainland over the next two years. Liberation brought with it a “settling of accounts”—the resa dei conti—where between 12,000 and 15,000 were killed as people took vengeance on neighbors who’d collaborated with the fascist regime. But as in much of Europe, memories of authoritarian barbarity and the retaliation against it were quickly brushed under the rug as Italy made a “suspiciously painless transition” to Western-aligned liberal democracy. With the country moving from indigence to affluence at a dizzying pace, it proved more convenient to bury the collective pain and unresolved hostilities than to process them.
As any good horror fan will tell you, though, old traumas have a way of resurfacing. Even in the 1970s, many left-wing Italians were still bitter that the Communist Party hadn’t leveraged its strength in the immediate post-war period and launched a full-scale revolution, and a large segment of the political right had never lost its affection for Mussolini’s Republic of Salò. (The title of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1975 anti-fascist horrorshow Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom—perhaps the most infamous film in the history of the medium—is no coincidence.) As the pace of economic growth slowed, the fragile peace between the two sides began to crack.
This national psychodrama seeped into the country’s cinemas. Though few gialli addressed the scars of World War II directly, Fisher observes that many “overtly focus on past traumas, fragmented memories and the unraveling of supposed facts.” When the protagonists of Deep Red and The Bird with the Crystal Plumage struggle to find firm footing in their shifting and unstable memories of the murders they witnessed, they were acting as avatars of the Italian people. The violence of the past was revived in the present.
At their roots, the story of the Years of Lead doesn’t start with the bombing of the Piazza Fontana and the story of giallo doesn’t start with the generally accepted ur-text of Mario Bava’s 1963 film The Girl Who Knew Too Much. Both begin in the chaos, rage, and despair of Italy’s experiences during and immediately after the Second World War. For now, at least, that’s where the next season of the podcast will begin, too.
Odds & Ends
The Haunted Screen newsletter was featured on the Criterion Collection’s weekly roundup last week!
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I love this, very well done and with engaging intellectual content. I always seemed to think giallos were trashy exponents of cinema and never moved into watching them, so I’m looking forward to hearing more.