Beloved among cult horror devotees for its signature excesses of sex and violence, Italian giallo cinema is marked by switchblades, mysterious killers, whisky bottles and poetically overinflated titles. A growing field of English-language giallo studies has focused on aspects of production, distribution and reception. This volume explores an overlooked yet prevalent element in some of the best known gialli--an obsession with art and artists in creative production, with a particular focus on painting. The author explores the appearance and significance of art objects across the masterworks of such filmmakers as Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci, Sergio Martino, Umberto Lenzi, Michele Soavi, Mario Bava and his son Lamberto.
Contributions by Donald L. Anderson, Brian Brems, Eric Brinkman, Matthew Edwards, Brenda S. Gardenour Walter, Andrew Grossman, Lisa Haegele, Gavin F. Hurley, Mikel J. Koven, Sharon Jane Mee, Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns, Émilie von Garan, Connor John Warden, and Sean Woodard The giallo (yellow) film cycle, characterized by its bloody murders and blending of high art and cinematic sleaze, rose to prominence in Italy in the 1960s and 1970s. Beginning with Mario Bava’s The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1963) and Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1970), giallo films influenced the American slasher films of the 1980s and attracted an increasingly large fandom. In Bloodstained Narratives: The Giallo Film in Italy and Abroad, contributors explore understudied aspects of gialli. The chapters introduce readers to a wide range of films, including masterpieces from Argento and overlooked gems, all of them examined in close detail. Rather than understanding giallo as focalized exclusively in Italy in the 1970s, this collection explores the extension of gialli narratives abroad through different geographies and times. This book examines Italian gialli of the 1970s as well as American neo-gialli, French productions, Canadian horror films of the 1980s, and Asian rewritings of this “yellow” cycle of crime/horror films. Bloodstained Narratives also features interviews with two giallo film directors, including cult favorite Antonio Bido. Rather than fading from the cinematic stage, gialli serves as a precursor and steady accomplice to horror-thriller films through the twenty-first century.
Since the release in 1929 of a popular book series with bright yellow covers, the Italian word giallo (yellow) has come to define a whole spectrum of mystery and detective fiction and films. Although most English speakers associate the term giallo with the violent and erotic thrillers popular in the 1960s and 1970s from directors like Mario Bava, Dario Argento, Lucio Fulci and others, the term encompasses a wide range of Italian media such as mysteries, thrillers and detective stories--even comedies and political pamphlets. As films like Blood and Black Lace (1964) and Deep Red (1975) have received international acclaim, giallo is a fluid and dynamic genre that has evolved throughout the decades. This book examines the many facets of the giallo genre --narrative, style, themes, and influences. It explores Italian films, made-for-TV films and miniseries from the dawn of sound cinema to the present, discussing their impact on society, culture and mores.
In this groundbreaking work, author David Scott Diffrient explores largely understudied facets of cinematic horror, from the various odors permeating classic and contemporary films to the wetness, sliminess, and stickiness of these productions, which, he argues, practically scream out for a tactile mode of textural analysis as much as they call for more traditional forms of textual analysis. Dating back to Carol Clover’s and Linda Williams’s pioneering work on horror cinema, film scholars have long conceptualized this once-disreputable category of cultural production as a “body genre.” However, despite the growing recognition that horror serves important biological and social functions in our lives, scholars have only scratched the surface of this genre with regard to its affective, corporeal, and sensorial appeals. Diffrient anatomizes horror films in much the same way that a mad scientist might handle the body, separating and recombining constitutive parts into a new analytical whole. Further, he challenges the tendency of scholars to privilege human over nonhuman beings and calls into question ableist assumptions about the centrality to horror films of sight and sound to the near exclusion of other forms of sense experience. In addition to examining the role that animals—living or dead, real or fake—play in human-centered fictions, this volume asks what it means for audiences to consume motion pictures in which actors, stunt performers, and other creative personnel have put their own bodies and lives at risk for our amusement. Historically grounded and theoretically expansive, Body Genre: Anatomy of the Horror Film moves the study of cinematic horror into previously unchartered waters and breathes life into a subject that, not coincidentally, is intimately connected to breathing as our most cherished dividing line between life and death.
In a now-famous interview with François Truffaut in 1962, Alfred Hitchcock described his masterpiece Rear Window (1954) as "the purest expression of a cinematic idea." But what, precisely, did Hitchcock mean by pure cinema? Was pure cinema a function of mise en scène, or composition within the frame? Was it a function of montage, "of pieces of film assembled"? This notion of pure cinema has intrigued and perplexed critics, theorists, and filmmakers alike in the decades following this discussion. And even across his 40-year career, Hitchcock's own ideas about pure cinema remained mired in a lack of detail, clarity, and analytical precision. The Art of Pure Cinema is the first book-length study to examine the historical foundations and stylistic mechanics of pure cinema. Author Bruce Isaacs explores the potential of a philosophical and artistic approach most explicitly demonstrated by Hitchcock in his later films, beginning with Hitchcock's contact with the European avant-garde film movement in the mid-1920s. Tracing the evolution of a philosophy of pure cinema across Hitchcock's most experimental works - Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds, Marnie, and Frenzy - Isaacs rereads these works in a new and vital context. In addition to this historical account, the book presents the first examination of pure cinema as an integrated stylistics of mise en scène, montage, and sound design. The films of so-called Hitchcockian imitators like Mario Bava, Dario Argento, and Brian De Palma are also examined in light of a provocative claim: that the art of pure cinema is only fully realized after Hitchcock.
First critical exploration of the history and endurance of masks in horror cinema Written by an established , award-winning author with a strong reputation for research in both academia and horror fans Interdisciplinary study that incorporates not only horror studies and cinema studies, but also utilises performance studies, anthropology, Gothic studies, literary studies and folklore studies.
Popularized by the hit television show, the phrase “breaking bad” is defined in urban slang as someone who challenges convention, defies authority, or rejects moral and social norms. Running from 2008 to 2013 on AMC, Breaking Bad featured one of the most unforgettable characters in television history: Walter White, a high school chemistry teacher, husband, and father, who is diagnosed with terminal cancer. For five seasons, fans watched as Walter White tried to secure financial security for his family by using his chemistry skills to manufacture drugs. Throughout the series’ run, Walter White was the epitome of the phrase “breaking bad”, as he broke the law and continually rejected the social mores that he had dutifully followed until his cancer diagnosis. Taking its cue from Walter White, this volume explores the various ways in which artists, patrons, and art historians throughout history have broken bad by defying authority, challenging convention, or rejecting the norm. For example, artists also sometimes break away from tradition by using unconventional iconography, as is the case in Chapter Two, which investigates how Etruscan tomb reliefs show mourning rather than celebration. The book also includes a chapter in which an art historian breaks bad by challenging the conventional interpretation and date of an object, thus eschewing tradition and defying authority. In this case, Chapter Three disputes the largely accepted Hellenistic date and interpretation of the Tazza Farnese, and instead asserts that the cameo must be Roman. Spanning the art of ancient Etruria to the twentieth century, the eight chapters here explore the theme of breaking bad from a variety of time periods and artistic media, from Etruscan mirrors and Roman cameos to Baroque portraits and Italian Pop Art. Scholars approach the topic of breaking bad from a number of perspectives, including examining the artist, patronage, reception, propaganda, iconography, methodology, and use.
Sir Charles Eastlake, a former president of the British Royal Academy and director of the National Gallery, was one of the world's foremost experts on the techniques of painting. A painter of considerable renown himself, he devoted years to traveling throughout England and Europe, where he searched through museums, monasteries, universities, and libraries, gradually amassing a collection of rare manuscripts from which he was able to reconstruct the technical secrets of the great painters of the past. In this comprehensive treasury (two volumes bound as one), Eastlake presents the results of his researches. He offers detailed discussions of Greek and Roman art methods, medieval techniques, tempera painting, the revolutionary use of oil paints by Hubert van Eyck, Flemish methods of preparing colors, and the methods of Reynolds and other 18th-century British masters. The second volume focuses on the technical secrets of members of various Italian schools, including such masters as Leonardo, Raphael, Perugino, Correggio, Andrea del Sarto, and many others. Rounding off the book are more than 100 pages of professional essays covering a wide range of subjects—from "Life in Inanimate Things" and "Neutral Tints in White and Other Draperies" to "Venetian Process" and "How to Compose and Paint a Single Head." Students, painters, art historians, and any lover of fine art will find Eastlake's work invaluable, both for its source material and its painstaking coverage of the technical evolution of painting. Dover (2001) unabridged republication in one volume of the work originally published by Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans in two volumes in 1847 as Materials for a History of Oil Painting.
