if you attack the world with sufficient violence, it ends up spitting its filthy lucre back at you; but never, never will it give you back joy
(Houellbecq)
Kissing your landlord means your dog will kill your father (Il nuovo caso Matarazzo, 2)
the dark precursor is not a friend
- G. Deleuze
14 minutes into 1952's Nobody's Children (I figli di nessuno), whose story reaches its women's prison riot conclusion in 1955's The White Angel (L'angelo bianco), a man who owns a quarry and a woman whose father guards that quarry are kissing in a stone storeroom.
Around them are hanging coils of rope, tools leaning. He has just told her that he is going away for a while. She's wide-eyed, a little pissed, nervous. The film cuts back and forth past their shoulders as he and his careful mustache reassure her. She voices doubts. They both half-turn their heads screen left, stretching the elastic band of their eye contact - and hence swelling their doubt - until her face is framed again over the shoulder, and a hand grabs her chin and tilts it up. Her head is on his chest. Profile face-off once more. He keeps clasping her, her hair in an airy false grip, her upper arms. Periodically, his fingers reclutch, they knead and press. He's playing her like an accordion. Their bellows are both heaving a bit. And so they are kissing again. This time it gets hotter and heavier. Keep positioning their hands, squeeze out all the negative space between them, heads all jammed up. His hand snakes around her back's middle, and her hand begins to slide downward.
Just then, just as her hand moves down, her father exits the house and moves down the stairs. He calls her name a few times, muttering at first. Doesn't sound so hot. Elsewhere, earlier, he complained about his lungs. He was reassured - by the man kissing his daughter - that he wouldn't lose his job. Their dog lies along the triangle formed by the steps, but he stands up, barks in the direction where the storehouse lies. It is raining, or at the least, the film is streaked by lightly pulsing lines of white. No impact or collisions of water, however.
At this point, it's merely an issue of cross-cutting. Luisa came down these same steps and stepped directly into the storeroom. Her dad walks down those same stairs. He is looking for her. Presumably he will continue down them and enter the frame where she and Guido are grabbing at each other. Or she will hear his voice and take the few steps back to him. Presumably he will have bad news - this is, after all, a melodrama - that will wedge a wrench into their gears. And the next shot preserves the logic of cross-cutting between two discontinuous spaces with a limited causal connection: Guido and Luisa now exit the storeroom, having heard her dad's voice, which must, given the time elapsed by her previous passage from stairs to his arms, be no more than ten feet or so away, just around a bend. The voice passes from that space, aiming right, they exit, listening left.
Even here, though, something is off. There is a sense of transference between those two passages - their kissing and the dad walking down the stairs - that exceeds simply picking out the voice through the rain. Most basically, it's a diagetic transference, shoved together: she is missing because she is off doing this, therefore her father will search her out. Not what is going on in the storeroom but merely her presence there provides the occasion for her father to exit the house into the rain.
But more than that, it seems something has blown leftward as well, from their kiss to him, less her absence from the domestic zone and more a scent of lust picked up on its own wind. As though the father just sensed - nostrils widening, hair pricking up - that arm pulling closer, that hand going south, and both he and the film as such step in abruptly, with perfect prohibitionary timing ("remember, you're still a daughter, and I'm sick and old!"). It's a necessary dodge that both prevents things from getting too tawdy and insists that they have done exactly that. Until the film returns a too-brief 10 seconds later and spoils the fun, that cut away both spares-denies us the sight and indicates just what is going on (read: they knock boots). The cut is equally necessary in providing a necessary interruption to what otherwise would have no internal moment of breakage: how could that kiss end, other than in what won't be shown, or in that continuous thrum of high-pitch affect, those mawkish/horny tears that are intolerable every time they appear in these films. It cannot break itself free. One cannot decouple.
Although they do decouple, far more than can be imagined. For this will be the end of them as a couple that touches one another. It will be the last time they really kiss, not even 15 minutes into a 196 minute slog of piety, shame, missed connections, nunnery, a whole lot of not getting over one other, and a whole lot more of not doing much of anything to change that fact.
(As far as melodramas go, this two-film span ranks up there with Max Ophüls' Letter From an Unknown Woman in terms of sheer dumb deferral and solitary pining away, such that what stops you from getting your very obvious object of desire is little more than, in the Ophüls, your preference for flirting by constantly standing outside his house and, in these films, the fact that lust, admiration, and love aren't allowed to quite merit de-habiting a nun, even if she is that nun. Needless to say, these films lay the sexed groundwork, in viewers' memory banks and in the common imagery of upturned face, bosom-stretched-to-burst black serge, and bleached wimple, for a very different sort of film to come, more closely associated with Jess Franco, Joe D'Amato, and Norifumi Suzuki. They are a prolegomena to any future nunsploitation.)
This will be their last hopeful kiss. After all, it does kill her father.
For as soon as she exits screen left, after kisses and promises of reunification, the film cuts to her father dead on the ground. The dog ("il cane Full") paws at the corpse and then begins to bark. It's a startling, and deeply comic cut. Her father was not in the best of health, but the film refuses any transitional sequence that might show him tumbling or clutching his chest. He was on a dark stairway, alive, with a dog. He is on the flagstones, dead, with a dog. It's a cut that flawlessly contrasts with the incapacity of lovers to leave one another, to break contact and all their weepy hugs, all that lingering. This, instead, is mercenary effective. His act of death won't be marked, or remarked upon, other than as a given fact. We don't watch him die.
However, despite the time traversed previously, her quick missing steps to where Guido stood, Luisa now runs along a long stretch of track toward the camera, from the depths, through a space that was not there whatsoever before, along chunks of marble, fleeing from the man who owns all that stone to the man who guarded it all. As if thrown askance by the death she hasn't yet seen, that disjunction produced by that sudden corpse produces a matched wrinkle in the film's space. A hiccup of a nightmare.
And no wonder this distance, which traverses between two incommensurable moments: she enacts in time the area, the filler, skipped by that montage that slammed together kiss and corpse. It's there she runs, alongside the detritus of the quarry, on tracks which prescribe a fixed path of motion over which we've shuttled unaware.
And it is only to be walked alone, doubling in her movement the story followed throughout all of the Matarazzo work, in which the film - and the characters themselves - inserts distances, blockages, passages, and obstacles in the way of what could otherwise be solved easily. (Most commonly, it could be solved by a conversation, by speech, the very hallmark of melodramatic staging. It is not. It is blocked by the written word, which is missing when it is needed or capable of being read against its "intent." Writing on this problem of writing to come soon.)
Luisa moves toward her father, spies something - him - off-screen and rushes toward it, out of that long track, and into a closer framing near the stairs, checked dress and blowing hair a clash and blur in front of dirty rock:
This ramps up all the more the exceptional space of that strange movement along the tracks: a movement from background to foreground, as opposed to the horizontal axial movement that shapes the rest of the sequence. It brackets the house as discontinuous, just as that storeroom was, a stage different from spaces that can be inserted as durations but which can and will be excised when need be. Such that their occurrences - a kiss, a corpse - can be crushed together in spite of their non-contact. They become collisions of billiard balls which in fact, are not even on the same table, in the same room.
From all this, two other lines to follow.
First, as brief as the point it makes: the obsession with saving time, with dumping info as fast as possible. All to get back to what we're there to see (Yvonne Sanson wring her hands in a bed with her dark hair falling around her, weaponized children coming to torment their parents with pathos, sloppy cluttered spaces opening onto white walls and prison bars, wipes and dissolves). In many cases, it resorts to whatever devices necessary, such as the visual declaration that, yes, our leading man is indeed in London:
In this instance, though, the whipcrack pace of transition from kiss to corpse, the removal of all ligament and gradation, produces effects other than a streamlined film.
The second inquiry is of the consequences of that sort of pacing: namely, the accordance of filmed events, the ramping up of coincidence toward a world in which all aspects (separate events, discontinuous spaces, restricted information) will come to function as if part of a unified causal chain or a predetermined string of occasions. This isn't necessarily uncanny or comic as such, and most genre films, as well as the major swath of mainstream film, turn on this. One too rarely sees a film in which, for example, the two gunfighters just don't quite wind up in the same saloon, or that you just don't happen to be sitting next to the wise guru/celebrity musician (whose opinion you respect for reasons that are never justified) on the airplane, who gives you some sage advice about how much work it is to have a good relationship and how despite all the drugs and women, he still thinks about that one he let get away and how you aren't going to let her get away, are you man? because nothing - and I mean nothing - is worth that loss.
Accordance is the sense of a chaining together, a torqued form of Kuleshovian montage, in which we don't get a + b or ab or a as determinant of b's affective or symbolic potential or vice versa. Instead, something that oscillates between
1. a and b are varieties, modulations, of the same substance (the clutchy kiss is of the same order of sadistic sentimentality as is the death of her father),
2. a and b may be distinct but any sort of intermediary distance between them utterly collapses (as in, the rapidity with which Matarazzo moves things along compresses into a chained, consequential sequence what otherwise would be cross-cutting), or
3. a causes b in a much more direct way than can be rationally explained (that kiss killed, or, wait a minute, what of that dog...)
The first option is the general texture of melodrama when it fires on all cylinders. And when it does, it can allow for some breathing room: it will insert visual textures or light relief (minor subplots, children who say idiotic things but at least are not ceaselessly clinging and crying Mama, why did you have to leave me now?). It's only in the wilder and more hurried directors that this dissolves into the stranger, and often funny, space of the second. In many ways, it produces an obscure match cut. Even if you don't find Dad's death as funny as I do (it is difficult not to), the affect generated indexes a form of humor, because it produces a semblance of causality where there should be none, merely by dint of extreme proximity. In that way, it has a key function of preserving the integrity of the melodramatic moments (they don't fall apart under their own weight, after all) while giving us a necessary breather from them. This will be the function of the wipe as editing technique in Matarazzo's films, a strangely prevalent one, in which a scene is not "cut" or dissolved but is rather kept entire as it is slotted out, shoved aside, allowed to remain whole and merely displaced.
The third mode of accordance mentioned deserves more space, especially in terms of the full fledged deployment of overly literal metaphors - "storm of emotion" - into diagetic materials and settings. In this context, what stands out is the sense of consequences that follow but can neither be explained nor explained away: you betray your class and kiss the Count who owns the quarry, your old father dies. Despite other instances in which characters are reassured in the mode of "don't blame yourself, even if he came out in the cold to find you," here that doesn't obtain. We remain with such an extreme complicity and proximity of actions and a collapse of diagetic transitional spaces that what obtains is:
the impossibility of not blaming
the incoherence of spaces and durations (raised to further extremes elsewhere in the Matarazzo films, such that it is only a child getting a whole lot bigger that allows us to index a duration
the simultaneous elevation and dissolution of separation (those spaces cannot be traced between, because we do not see the passage between them, and the actions can only occur as a chain of isolated incidents. However, that separation exists as an impossible stop-gap, compromised by the lack of material between occasions, and leads instead to a contagion and transference of information, enmity, and affect. See also this wipe as an instance of that piling up of separate zones.)
Therein lie some of the more Catholic aspects of these films, although we should take them as much closer to a world of dark forces that have immediate consequences, rather than a balance sheet before St Peter. And worse, there are no coherent rules that govern them. We don't know why exactly your kiss killed your father. But we cannot doubt that exists in a chain of causation. There is little analytical editing/ decoupage in these films compared with the Hollywood melodramas against which they stand out, but there is a placing in temporal sequence actions and sites that don't belong to the same filmed space: in short, there is a somewhat occluded return to forms of montage more closely associated with silent cinema, at least in the big narratives of a history of film style. This is, then, a cinema in which montage isn't concerned primarily with how these things combine or evoke or illuminate through generative dissimilarity. This is not cinema of metaphor. It is a cinema of pressing effects and collisions, of hidden causes.
Of those hidden causes, one remains present in the film, perhaps as a flight to a different kind of cinema, yet exerting tension on the load-bearing generic structures at hand. That is, normally, in the grammar of a film, if a character enters a dark space alive with something that has sharp teeth and, in the next shot, is dead beneath the paws of that fanged something, we have reason for suspicion. And so, even while il cane Full is the devoted companion, the film's compounded syntax and insistence on hustling ahead at top speed can't shake off a different thought about who's to blame.
And strangely, this counter-reading is borne out in the film. Without descending into fantasies of canine revenge or conspiracy, the dog has appeared before in cross-cutting connection both with these bouts of making out and with bad turns of event.
Guido and Luisa are having a furtive little encounter of kissing and telling each other how they feel about each other. Film cuts from Guido leading Luisa to sit down on the grass...
to Full settling down himself on the grass, as a match on action from Luisa, such that he is necessarily coded as her double and extension.
Cut back to them, who start to kiss, and right when it hits that certain pitch of grasping and clinging...
... cut to Full, who covers his eyes with his paw.
Full here is carrying a lot of weight, because he functions as a second Luisa, ashamed at what she is doing; as a proxy for us the audience, ashamed doubly at the inanity we're sitting through and at how much we enjoy it; as the comic relief from that which will be experience as torrid, tedious, or both; as a furry approximation of how editing is experienced, looking and then blocking out sight, opening again onto a different set of objects. Yet he is also something peculiar. For it is shortly after this that Anselmo, the manager of the quarry and the minion of the Guido's countess mother who ruins it all for the lovers, appears to spot them.
And so the other possibility hangs there, that the dog is not only transition, not only breathing room, but, as a consequence of the extreme compression of data, an agent that exerts unclear effects, a precursor who can't be tied properly to a range of consequences. That it is his shame, his renunciation of watching, that impels another to come and see who can use that sight to ruinous effect. That, in fact, it was he who killed the father, who stewarded his death and stood over his kill. He who enacts what we truly want to see, this covering of our eyes, this barking laughter. This need to break the stymied air that stifles us all the more given that we choose to breathe it, that no matter how we protest, we are, after all, here of our own volition.
- G. Deleuze
14 minutes into 1952's Nobody's Children (I figli di nessuno), whose story reaches its women's prison riot conclusion in 1955's The White Angel (L'angelo bianco), a man who owns a quarry and a woman whose father guards that quarry are kissing in a stone storeroom.
Around them are hanging coils of rope, tools leaning. He has just told her that he is going away for a while. She's wide-eyed, a little pissed, nervous. The film cuts back and forth past their shoulders as he and his careful mustache reassure her. She voices doubts. They both half-turn their heads screen left, stretching the elastic band of their eye contact - and hence swelling their doubt - until her face is framed again over the shoulder, and a hand grabs her chin and tilts it up. Her head is on his chest. Profile face-off once more. He keeps clasping her, her hair in an airy false grip, her upper arms. Periodically, his fingers reclutch, they knead and press. He's playing her like an accordion. Their bellows are both heaving a bit. And so they are kissing again. This time it gets hotter and heavier. Keep positioning their hands, squeeze out all the negative space between them, heads all jammed up. His hand snakes around her back's middle, and her hand begins to slide downward.
Just then, just as her hand moves down, her father exits the house and moves down the stairs. He calls her name a few times, muttering at first. Doesn't sound so hot. Elsewhere, earlier, he complained about his lungs. He was reassured - by the man kissing his daughter - that he wouldn't lose his job. Their dog lies along the triangle formed by the steps, but he stands up, barks in the direction where the storehouse lies. It is raining, or at the least, the film is streaked by lightly pulsing lines of white. No impact or collisions of water, however.
At this point, it's merely an issue of cross-cutting. Luisa came down these same steps and stepped directly into the storeroom. Her dad walks down those same stairs. He is looking for her. Presumably he will continue down them and enter the frame where she and Guido are grabbing at each other. Or she will hear his voice and take the few steps back to him. Presumably he will have bad news - this is, after all, a melodrama - that will wedge a wrench into their gears. And the next shot preserves the logic of cross-cutting between two discontinuous spaces with a limited causal connection: Guido and Luisa now exit the storeroom, having heard her dad's voice, which must, given the time elapsed by her previous passage from stairs to his arms, be no more than ten feet or so away, just around a bend. The voice passes from that space, aiming right, they exit, listening left.
Even here, though, something is off. There is a sense of transference between those two passages - their kissing and the dad walking down the stairs - that exceeds simply picking out the voice through the rain. Most basically, it's a diagetic transference, shoved together: she is missing because she is off doing this, therefore her father will search her out. Not what is going on in the storeroom but merely her presence there provides the occasion for her father to exit the house into the rain.
But more than that, it seems something has blown leftward as well, from their kiss to him, less her absence from the domestic zone and more a scent of lust picked up on its own wind. As though the father just sensed - nostrils widening, hair pricking up - that arm pulling closer, that hand going south, and both he and the film as such step in abruptly, with perfect prohibitionary timing ("remember, you're still a daughter, and I'm sick and old!"). It's a necessary dodge that both prevents things from getting too tawdy and insists that they have done exactly that. Until the film returns a too-brief 10 seconds later and spoils the fun, that cut away both spares-denies us the sight and indicates just what is going on (read: they knock boots). The cut is equally necessary in providing a necessary interruption to what otherwise would have no internal moment of breakage: how could that kiss end, other than in what won't be shown, or in that continuous thrum of high-pitch affect, those mawkish/horny tears that are intolerable every time they appear in these films. It cannot break itself free. One cannot decouple.
Although they do decouple, far more than can be imagined. For this will be the end of them as a couple that touches one another. It will be the last time they really kiss, not even 15 minutes into a 196 minute slog of piety, shame, missed connections, nunnery, a whole lot of not getting over one other, and a whole lot more of not doing much of anything to change that fact.
(As far as melodramas go, this two-film span ranks up there with Max Ophüls' Letter From an Unknown Woman in terms of sheer dumb deferral and solitary pining away, such that what stops you from getting your very obvious object of desire is little more than, in the Ophüls, your preference for flirting by constantly standing outside his house and, in these films, the fact that lust, admiration, and love aren't allowed to quite merit de-habiting a nun, even if she is that nun. Needless to say, these films lay the sexed groundwork, in viewers' memory banks and in the common imagery of upturned face, bosom-stretched-to-burst black serge, and bleached wimple, for a very different sort of film to come, more closely associated with Jess Franco, Joe D'Amato, and Norifumi Suzuki. They are a prolegomena to any future nunsploitation.)
This will be their last hopeful kiss. After all, it does kill her father.
For as soon as she exits screen left, after kisses and promises of reunification, the film cuts to her father dead on the ground. The dog ("il cane Full") paws at the corpse and then begins to bark. It's a startling, and deeply comic cut. Her father was not in the best of health, but the film refuses any transitional sequence that might show him tumbling or clutching his chest. He was on a dark stairway, alive, with a dog. He is on the flagstones, dead, with a dog. It's a cut that flawlessly contrasts with the incapacity of lovers to leave one another, to break contact and all their weepy hugs, all that lingering. This, instead, is mercenary effective. His act of death won't be marked, or remarked upon, other than as a given fact. We don't watch him die.
And no wonder this distance, which traverses between two incommensurable moments: she enacts in time the area, the filler, skipped by that montage that slammed together kiss and corpse. It's there she runs, alongside the detritus of the quarry, on tracks which prescribe a fixed path of motion over which we've shuttled unaware.
And it is only to be walked alone, doubling in her movement the story followed throughout all of the Matarazzo work, in which the film - and the characters themselves - inserts distances, blockages, passages, and obstacles in the way of what could otherwise be solved easily. (Most commonly, it could be solved by a conversation, by speech, the very hallmark of melodramatic staging. It is not. It is blocked by the written word, which is missing when it is needed or capable of being read against its "intent." Writing on this problem of writing to come soon.)
From all this, two other lines to follow.
First, as brief as the point it makes: the obsession with saving time, with dumping info as fast as possible. All to get back to what we're there to see (Yvonne Sanson wring her hands in a bed with her dark hair falling around her, weaponized children coming to torment their parents with pathos, sloppy cluttered spaces opening onto white walls and prison bars, wipes and dissolves). In many cases, it resorts to whatever devices necessary, such as the visual declaration that, yes, our leading man is indeed in London:
The second inquiry is of the consequences of that sort of pacing: namely, the accordance of filmed events, the ramping up of coincidence toward a world in which all aspects (separate events, discontinuous spaces, restricted information) will come to function as if part of a unified causal chain or a predetermined string of occasions. This isn't necessarily uncanny or comic as such, and most genre films, as well as the major swath of mainstream film, turn on this. One too rarely sees a film in which, for example, the two gunfighters just don't quite wind up in the same saloon, or that you just don't happen to be sitting next to the wise guru/celebrity musician (whose opinion you respect for reasons that are never justified) on the airplane, who gives you some sage advice about how much work it is to have a good relationship and how despite all the drugs and women, he still thinks about that one he let get away and how you aren't going to let her get away, are you man? because nothing - and I mean nothing - is worth that loss.
Accordance is the sense of a chaining together, a torqued form of Kuleshovian montage, in which we don't get a + b or ab or a as determinant of b's affective or symbolic potential or vice versa. Instead, something that oscillates between
1. a and b are varieties, modulations, of the same substance (the clutchy kiss is of the same order of sadistic sentimentality as is the death of her father),
2. a and b may be distinct but any sort of intermediary distance between them utterly collapses (as in, the rapidity with which Matarazzo moves things along compresses into a chained, consequential sequence what otherwise would be cross-cutting), or
3. a causes b in a much more direct way than can be rationally explained (that kiss killed, or, wait a minute, what of that dog...)
The first option is the general texture of melodrama when it fires on all cylinders. And when it does, it can allow for some breathing room: it will insert visual textures or light relief (minor subplots, children who say idiotic things but at least are not ceaselessly clinging and crying Mama, why did you have to leave me now?). It's only in the wilder and more hurried directors that this dissolves into the stranger, and often funny, space of the second. In many ways, it produces an obscure match cut. Even if you don't find Dad's death as funny as I do (it is difficult not to), the affect generated indexes a form of humor, because it produces a semblance of causality where there should be none, merely by dint of extreme proximity. In that way, it has a key function of preserving the integrity of the melodramatic moments (they don't fall apart under their own weight, after all) while giving us a necessary breather from them. This will be the function of the wipe as editing technique in Matarazzo's films, a strangely prevalent one, in which a scene is not "cut" or dissolved but is rather kept entire as it is slotted out, shoved aside, allowed to remain whole and merely displaced.
The third mode of accordance mentioned deserves more space, especially in terms of the full fledged deployment of overly literal metaphors - "storm of emotion" - into diagetic materials and settings. In this context, what stands out is the sense of consequences that follow but can neither be explained nor explained away: you betray your class and kiss the Count who owns the quarry, your old father dies. Despite other instances in which characters are reassured in the mode of "don't blame yourself, even if he came out in the cold to find you," here that doesn't obtain. We remain with such an extreme complicity and proximity of actions and a collapse of diagetic transitional spaces that what obtains is:
the impossibility of not blaming
the incoherence of spaces and durations (raised to further extremes elsewhere in the Matarazzo films, such that it is only a child getting a whole lot bigger that allows us to index a duration
the simultaneous elevation and dissolution of separation (those spaces cannot be traced between, because we do not see the passage between them, and the actions can only occur as a chain of isolated incidents. However, that separation exists as an impossible stop-gap, compromised by the lack of material between occasions, and leads instead to a contagion and transference of information, enmity, and affect. See also this wipe as an instance of that piling up of separate zones.)
Therein lie some of the more Catholic aspects of these films, although we should take them as much closer to a world of dark forces that have immediate consequences, rather than a balance sheet before St Peter. And worse, there are no coherent rules that govern them. We don't know why exactly your kiss killed your father. But we cannot doubt that exists in a chain of causation. There is little analytical editing/ decoupage in these films compared with the Hollywood melodramas against which they stand out, but there is a placing in temporal sequence actions and sites that don't belong to the same filmed space: in short, there is a somewhat occluded return to forms of montage more closely associated with silent cinema, at least in the big narratives of a history of film style. This is, then, a cinema in which montage isn't concerned primarily with how these things combine or evoke or illuminate through generative dissimilarity. This is not cinema of metaphor. It is a cinema of pressing effects and collisions, of hidden causes.
Of those hidden causes, one remains present in the film, perhaps as a flight to a different kind of cinema, yet exerting tension on the load-bearing generic structures at hand. That is, normally, in the grammar of a film, if a character enters a dark space alive with something that has sharp teeth and, in the next shot, is dead beneath the paws of that fanged something, we have reason for suspicion. And so, even while il cane Full is the devoted companion, the film's compounded syntax and insistence on hustling ahead at top speed can't shake off a different thought about who's to blame.
And strangely, this counter-reading is borne out in the film. Without descending into fantasies of canine revenge or conspiracy, the dog has appeared before in cross-cutting connection both with these bouts of making out and with bad turns of event.
Guido and Luisa are having a furtive little encounter of kissing and telling each other how they feel about each other. Film cuts from Guido leading Luisa to sit down on the grass...
Cut back to them, who start to kiss, and right when it hits that certain pitch of grasping and clinging...
And so the other possibility hangs there, that the dog is not only transition, not only breathing room, but, as a consequence of the extreme compression of data, an agent that exerts unclear effects, a precursor who can't be tied properly to a range of consequences. That it is his shame, his renunciation of watching, that impels another to come and see who can use that sight to ruinous effect. That, in fact, it was he who killed the father, who stewarded his death and stood over his kill. He who enacts what we truly want to see, this covering of our eyes, this barking laughter. This need to break the stymied air that stifles us all the more given that we choose to breathe it, that no matter how we protest, we are, after all, here of our own volition.
She stuttered (Il nuovo caso Matarazzo, 1)
Working on a long project on Italian melodrama with my friend Erik. In particular, I have been spending a lot of hours with Rafaello Matarazzo, who is
a) very Catholic, in the full spectrum of allegedly incompatible tendencies that fall beneath that,
b) deserving of posthumous shot to the mouth,
c) a lynchpin figure in making sense of a post-war period in which national cinemas tried, consciously or lumbering, to forge a language that was not identical to that shilled out by Hollywood's relative dominance of cinematic export (particularly dramatic in Italy in that period, which had only a few years of self-imposed development before the war, and largely due to a fascist conception of autochthonous film industry),
d) should be watched by any and all, considering that these are some of the most arduous, maddening, and somatically effective melodramas made (if not producing tears, as they don't for me, then producing a voice, a voice that finds itself talking to a screen with all the urgency of the standard don't open the closet! warning)
and e) around whom the long-circling debates - above all, on stupidity, the popular, and on whether or not the work of negation finds a better point of departure with self-authorized critical cinema or with cinema that fully, and perhaps unabashedly, embodies the contradictions of capitalist culture - are still crucial. They found a reappraisal by Jacques Lourcelles and other French theorists (around Positif and Presence du Cinéma) and were picked up again in '76 Italy in what came to be called il caso Matarazzo - the Matarazzo case, as if set before revisionist judge and jury - and bore on the sloppy intersections of genre film and realism, particularly of the neo- bent.
There's more to be said, all the more now, even if not "about now' - as in, while fully rejecting that ever-awful move, what does Matarazzo tell us/communist theory/film studies/formalists now?". (Here's a hint, particularly when folded into that list of "us" is "The Left": nothing whatsover.) Better, as ever to ask: what do we want to tell ourselves, that we wouldn't if we didn't have that particularly dissolve, that dog hiding his face, that storm, those wipes that pass through the frame like night trains? What have we not known needed saying, whatever its scale or consequence?
As such, this is the first in a short series of posts on those films. And to start things right and lay a first grammar:
This is what should be meant by a dissolve. (Dissolute lust unrequited and spurned by the schemings of bad mothers <---> torch-bearing mob of quarry workers led by the count who owns the quarry, in search of the woman who won't be found, even though her image is still there and walked through by their horror movie antics.)
And this is what will be meant by a wipe, of a shot away, but not cleanly, by the same figure set elsewhere, barging in. A stutter.
A Dangerous Woman / The Woman Who Needed Killing
Final version released to public and glued to walls:
Scrapped initial draft version tucked in archive:
1929. Object lesson in how differently images appear, how they sit in our skulls, depending on the accompanying text. There's nothing of the pulpy noir pleasure, that slight sense of oh sure, a bit regressive, but sure it's cool in the latter. That smile is a death's head.
And more, we don't forget the fact that the final title was used does not erase the fact that outside of the shimmer field of catsuits and sniper rifles and inside the vast world of those whose lives are hard and who often look like it: a woman who is considered dangerous, for near any reason, will be considered structurally as the woman - the target, the one as opposed to an other, the marking the shift into a precise targeting of a general set - who needs killing. Whose killing can be excused as a killing, that which was justified but which simply happens to those who are dangerous. (The word danger is derived from the word for power of a lord or master: those who are dangerous are those who take on for themselves authority without asking nicely enough for it.) In short, for all the slight gasp at the gaucheness of Paramount coming close to writing something "unacceptable," the titles carry the barest of difference. We bear the rest.
Scrapped initial draft version tucked in archive:
1929. Object lesson in how differently images appear, how they sit in our skulls, depending on the accompanying text. There's nothing of the pulpy noir pleasure, that slight sense of oh sure, a bit regressive, but sure it's cool in the latter. That smile is a death's head.
And more, we don't forget the fact that the final title was used does not erase the fact that outside of the shimmer field of catsuits and sniper rifles and inside the vast world of those whose lives are hard and who often look like it: a woman who is considered dangerous, for near any reason, will be considered structurally as the woman - the target, the one as opposed to an other, the marking the shift into a precise targeting of a general set - who needs killing. Whose killing can be excused as a killing, that which was justified but which simply happens to those who are dangerous. (The word danger is derived from the word for power of a lord or master: those who are dangerous are those who take on for themselves authority without asking nicely enough for it.) In short, for all the slight gasp at the gaucheness of Paramount coming close to writing something "unacceptable," the titles carry the barest of difference. We bear the rest.
"But reasons of Party - You - The lie, the truth - in short -"
"Look, your friend certainly did not care for us..."
"No, I suppose not, but he made a fetish of his opposition and inasmuch as the Revolutionary Part is the opposition... He respected it, in a word... And when he talked with me, when I advised him to talk with Amar - advice that he surely expected from me - he said there was no other way."
"Indeed," the Vice-Secretary said ironically. "There was no other way: talk to Amar out of the mouth of a revolver."
"Incredible. Enough to drive one out of one's mind," Cusan said.
"Read the reports," the Vice-Secretary said.
Cusan read them.
"But why kill Rogas?" he demanded. "Why not hear him, put him on trial?"
"Reasons of State, Mr. Cusan. They still exit, as they did in the time of Richelieu. And in this case they coincided, let us say, with reasons of Party... The agent made the wisest decision he could make: to kill Rogas, too."
"But reasons of Party - You - The lie, the truth - in short -" Cusan was stammering.
"We are realists, Mr. Cusan. We cannot run the risk of a revolution's breaking out." And he added, "Not at this moment."
"I understand," Cusan said. "Not at this moment."
Il contesto, Sciascia
"Reasons of State, Mr. Cusan. They still exit, as they did in the time of Richelieu. And in this case they coincided, let us say, with reasons of Party... The agent made the wisest decision he could make: to kill Rogas, too."
"But reasons of Party - You - The lie, the truth - in short -" Cusan was stammering.
"We are realists, Mr. Cusan. We cannot run the risk of a revolution's breaking out." And he added, "Not at this moment."
"I understand," Cusan said. "Not at this moment."
Il contesto, Sciascia
Strike therapy
"Our assessment of conflict must change. It is a physiological not pathological aspect of an economy undergoing continuous and accelerated change. Conflict must neither be repressed nor checked; rather it is a good thing that it is openly expressed. Although one should not deny the importance of preventing conflict, more emphasis should be given to its regulation by the parties concerned than to state coercion in the resolution of the differences leading to conflict."
- Carlo Donat-Cattin, Christian Democrat, in a debate on the Statuto dei Lavoratori passed in 1970.
You know, just let them get out there and run around a bit! Let them experiment! It isn't pathological, it's a perfectly natural, healthy reaction for workers their age (to be upset and excited about the continued degradation of their lives). Just, you know, don't let them overdo it. Monday comes fast.
Warm War Modern
"Tricontinental only stopped printing around the turn of the 1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, when Cuba literally ran out of ink."
Remarkable collection of Tricontinental covers, front and especially back, at Bidoun, thanks to Cartographies for the compass reading. Part of the growing work of entirely demolishing conceptions of what anti-imperialist and communist art, design, and god forbid, aesthetic sense has, and might, mean and do.
Despite the fact that the snow does not fall on the sea
The other night, left the place that's become home over the past years for what will be at least a year. And despite all my shit-talking, despite the fact that you've tried your damnedest to wear down my resistance and innate sneer when I see a flier with the words toddler pilates, despite how many of your inhabitants dress like toddlers, despite the fact that I no longer talk like I'm from where I'm once from, despite the fact that the trephination drill will have to slip and plunge deep into wet grey matter before I could get used to the word hella, despite the fact that the snow does not fall on the sea, still - it's a dislocation that will be felt with all the subtlety of that slipped drill. At the very least, I'll miss a certain kind of fog and, far more, a certain set of people. Those who know who they are, we'll be in touch.
Now though, I'm in a city that swaps out a certain haze for that fog and other people, who, as always, are not other people, but specific ones - a non-set, not equivalent because equivocation is not friendship, it is value, and I do not "value" my friends - who I miss when away from them. (And soon, in another city and country, where they burn trash, not to dispose of it, but because it doesn't get disposed.) As I've said and felt too often, there's too much earth between places, and the ocean is not made of ice. It isn't a frictionless slide between islands.
Here's to heat death, then, at least until the absolute point that all matter becomes motionless. Until then, we'll take schooners mounted on long running blades, catching gusts and scraping up and down the coast, faster than soil.
Until then, let's get better at hot-wiring real fast cars, "borrowing" helicopters, harnessing deer. And at not putting up with, not settling down, and at getting done with all this, all this drudge and miring that stands between us and works itself up under our eyelids, that you can't just blink away like a mist, no, not at all.
New era action painting
The streets will run red. And mauve and puce and viridian, feldfrau and urbolin, fulvous and ceil...
[A reminder that not all "aesthetic protest" roads end in sea turtle costumes...
His shoes are shining and they are black, the tuxedo is black. And yet he is not a man, despite those hands. He is a bird, he is turning. Near him there has been a dead bird already.
Follow-up to a previous proposal that was not forgotten:
See above for source material. Text in progress.
[Brief note: the specific prose of cinema, or at least its time signature, must turn on the has been. At least insofar as we are talking of cameras that can track or pan, and especially of the moves that came to be called decoupage: the dissection and plotting of spaces already present and not constructed from scratch, not a montage of disparate elements. That white bird has been there. It turns out to be still.
Where cinema hits us bodily, uneases the guts, is the fact that it was here in front of us, triangulated somewhere between where we look and the eyes of the bird mask, and we could not see it. Even if one were to protest and say, yes, but we didn't see the full field first, that close framing on those shoes means that the appearance of both the mask and then the white bird are of the order of different shots, such that camera movement performs the same work of splicing, one would protest back: who ever said that any shot could ever establish the full field? As if there weren't always things off to the side, waiting in the wings, or, lest we forget, directly behind us.
And what's wrong is to think this has much of anything to do with realism.]
Recapitation (On beheading, Hammer, match cuts, and the surprising voracity of an acid bath)
“Take off the head, it's no use to me...”
The Hammer Frankenstein films – seven of them, stretching from '57 to '74 – constitute cinema's most committed body of work on adding and subtracting heads. Not because they have the “best beheadings”: even restricted to the small galaxy of Hammer, something like the lopping pop of the worse/sexier of the titular Twins of Evil takes that prize. Not because any of them “thinks well” about headlessness. Yes, there are guillotines, of a properly counter-revolutionary stripe, and there are hack and saw doctors, of a indeterminately revolutionary bent. Above all, there are heads: heads that get themselves removed, scythed, heads that go missing, heads that house the wrong brain, heads in picnic baskets, heads that are trepanned, heads that square off against bone drills, heads that disapprove, heads that get stuck on top of white armoires and command others to murder, heads to be held aloft in the springtime air while you speak to them in the throaty neckless voice of the body from which it came.
“It's the head that's the problem.”
No. These films are films of – not about – decapitation because they are only such as a sequence. Even taken one by one, they hang like multiples, able to be ordered only by the degree to which the boredom and fatigue of those involved can be detected or ignored. Taken as a series, then, the films work out the act of decapitation as 1) belonging to a set of many, always plural 2) an injunction to make that set grow, 3) the production of a left-over with which to be dealt, an unwanted that belongs to the set but is never the right one, and 4) the insistence that removing the head is not a subtraction but the founding additive gesture, the freeing up to be worked on. That is, the first move of montage.
(They work decapitation out, they do not “think” it. For such a thought is not, like some philosophy that dreams fitfully of being corrosive, an acid bath of clarity. It has been dropped entire into the acid, and what remains is just the compulsion to keep going and the fizzing grey-pink froth of past matter.)
Let us begin from the beginning, the origin that doesn't take correctly, from The Curse of Frankenstein (1957).
Unlike the Universal films, this strain cares not a whit about generation. Father – the one who is supposed to express the hope for a “son for the house of Frankenstein,” thereby disowning the naughty necroparthogenic son he already has – is nowhere to be seen. He's a blurry mark at best, such that the young Baron (already the imperious asshole he will blossom into) is the one to make the hiring decision on the tutor his father had selected for him. When a woman does emerge on the scene, it is not with the weighty doom and avoidance of an encounter fated to end in an infant. No one is much concerned whether or not the Frankenstein name will live on, even before it comes to mean something suspect. No, Elizabeth comes to live with Victor for reasons we are not given to discern: maybe a lingering hold-out of social propriety, perhaps the abstract sadism of not being a proper sadist to one who, for all intents and purposes, seems to be asking for that recognition.
Rather, she simply stays on the scene, as do women throughout the series, until Frankenstein Created Woman gives a woman real agency (read: ability to cut off a head). Not pushed to the side, merely unregistered and occasionally pushing into the screen with increasingly baroque productions of cleavage in a failed attempt to get the Baron to break that hawkish coldness. To impel him to see her as more than just another spray of pattern and ornament, albeit one that does not, like his whirring tubes, spinning flywheels, and clicking hydraulics, serve a putative purpose in the project to separate and put back together.
Rather, she simply stays on the scene, as do women throughout the series, until Frankenstein Created Woman gives a woman real agency (read: ability to cut off a head). Not pushed to the side, merely unregistered and occasionally pushing into the screen with increasingly baroque productions of cleavage in a failed attempt to get the Baron to break that hawkish coldness. To impel him to see her as more than just another spray of pattern and ornament, albeit one that does not, like his whirring tubes, spinning flywheels, and clicking hydraulics, serve a putative purpose in the project to separate and put back together.
For the problem, from the start, is not creation, bringing forth, growing, or production as such. Rather, it is management, allocation, distribution, organization, combination, selection. It is economics, in its proper rooted sense. What to do with what is, not how to make what could be. It is of how to make wholes from parts, not how to create from scratch, seed, or homunculus.
“People just aren't dying off as quick as they used to... It's the welfare state.”
However, it's a world with too few spare parts. The ones that can be found are reeking and inadequate, scarce or still attached to other bodies attached to being whole and alive. Such that you must pull parts. The prospect of a fully demystified science disdainful of the human animal will depend on salvage operations. Such operations are not difficult. The protestations of those from whom you will borrow or who find such work to fly in the face of God's labors aren't particularly loud or resistant. What is insistently, perniciously hard to handle is all these leftovers. It is an endless problem of disposing of scrapped bodies, of swapping brains around, of tossing into the fire, and, above all, of dropping into that acid bath which punctuates the series like a guillotine. That's the full auto-consumptive fantasy, matter chasing its own tail into naught, such that you can have negation with no trace. But the only time it works, it works against the Baron, against the project of construction out of negation. Evidently an acid bath – the consumer of evidence – is not the best place to hide the sapient trace of your experiments from meddling authorities and clumsy children. As in the voracious swallowing of plot, character, and sense that ends Hammer's Scream and Scream Again and the very sequence of British Horror from which these films can't be untangled, once you introduce a corrosive into your work, it will not go away. Things will go missing.
“Forget the whole. No, we must take the part.”
In the first instance, it is the body of a thief hung high, any crucifix echoes wrecked in the potato sack thud of the corpse hitting the wagon bed when the Baron and Paul cut its tether. And the plan is not, initially, to use it partially or even to take it as a stripped frame on which to build, substitute, or add. It is to be taken entire, laced through with tubes and hydraulic pressures til its dull heart slurs back into motion.
“Well, the birds didn't waste much time, did they? The eyes... Half the head is eaten away.”
Indeed, there are holes in this head. And so begins the first decapitation, sawed through slow. From a hole to a line. The Baron removes the head, diligently, and bears it to the acid bath. With a plop and fizz, the entire apparatus of the sequence – not the narrative arc but the structure that wrenches the narratives in and out of place – begins.
[The head, coming apart, is not shown: at the moment of its immersion, the camera cuts to Paul, the shot's frame cutting his head loose as well, and his sick shock is a pathetic registration of the pecked head. A sympathy of decapitation, from one head busy turning to foam and one that is turning to sludge in its attempt to make sense of that.]
For when the head, removed after death, hits the acid, there begins the fundamental miseconomy of the enterprise: we have a body without a head, but we don't need another body, we just need another head. But to get another head, we will need to sever it from a whole body, thereby producing another body without head. (Herein lies the similarity of these films to their French counterpart, Georges Franju's Les Yeux Sans Visage.) This cannot be made right, other than by a proliferation of decapitations. After all, every prospect of recapitation requires an act of decapitation.
The axiomatic refrain then, is: one head too few, one body too many...
In this way, these films become a sequence. A severing – and a dissolving – of a head inaugurates a circuit of repetition, a repeated circulation of rotten corpses, corpses to be, and money, all predicated upon the fact that the head that was not severed to start was not adequate.
“No, it simply won't do.”
The first cut therefore removes what was not enough of a head. Decapitation is just the pruning of the inessential. Yet it produces the driving force – the drive to sever, saw, swap, and stitch – on which the arc is composed.
And from there out, the bent of the sequence will be to not solve this lop-sided economy, for it cannot be solved, and to not leave it alone or stop reproving its absent thesis. (The severing isn't just instrumental: it is a requisite act to be repeated again and again, until the cut goes wrong and decimates either the body or the head, until there is finally an equivalence. But such is not to be the case in this series) Insofar as it has a task, it will be: how to get rid of those pesky remainder bodies, those buried in your flower bed and brought to fetid light when the water main bursts, those which may be burned but which bear their traces in the brains planted elsewhere, those which interfere, nag, misbehave, and do not rot fast enough? How is it all to be done away with?
And how to produce by subtraction.
Because there is a making, and it is in the name of the production of one whole body. To thereby restore a unity never there to start and to assemble, via montage and binding, a mocking, shambling refraction of a body not originally carved up, not badly glued together after the fact. It is in the name of the production of this whole, this composition that sneers at the very project of being whole, that coherent wholes will be taken to pieces.
“And yes, you should expect some scarring.”
And think here of how it took a guillotine and thousands of heads rolling, lopped off and staring still, to finish paring the head off the king’s body. To take off that thing which, of course, was diffuse, cloudy, and which, of course, smoothed over its joints and declared itself both One (the manifest will of the people) and the One and Only (the untouchable, the pinnacle above the stinking hoi polloi). Gilding doesn't just make it shine: it makes flat. Such that it takes a whole lot of cuts to peel back that surface and find the seams, the junctures. Until a guillotine is designed to deal with a hydra in disguise, things do take a while.
Here, it is a guillotine that ends the first film, that begins the second, that dominates the fourth, and that looms over them all.
[Spoken drunkenly]”We are going to make a people – I mean a person...”
Because the problem is not, as it might seem, the inversion of regicide: take apart a person (the king) in order to make a people. Rather, it's that slippage – we are going to take apart a people (including the king) to make a “person.” Like a non-culinary Modest Proposal, this is a demotic, mass severing, all under the banner of a new, built from scrap First Man: the subject of capital.
In other words, the collective singular, not ended at 21 feet per second, but born of it.
“I’ll get another… and another… and another...”
Which is of course to say, we’ll chop another and another and... And it is to say, there can be no end to this “getting,” because consumption and possession here only serve the accelerated decomposition of a body, via a very particular application of force. The sooner you own, the sooner you will ruin.
In this way, so too the logic of these films, which emplpys a general logic of seriality as a counter-measure to that initial act of making incoherent (the head is no use to me). If you can't make sense, you can at least make more, repeat the moves until they pass from a boredom of the same to a strangeness of that same. We've seen it all before, and that's why it's so wrong.
More importantly, these guillotines, this attempt to go forward from a first cut in the medium, points up the fact that if the series is “about” cinema in any way, it is about editing. And not because Frankenstein's creature is a facile analogue for “putting together pieces into a work,” but because it understands that once you inaugurate the logic of editing at all, once you make film not just an unbroken, unreeling registration of what pours out of the factory at the end of the day, once you break the position of vision and relocate sight elsewhere, once you cut, all wholes are tattooed with dotted lines, just waiting for the axe to fall. The viewer's head, in speculation, floats off and occupies an infinity of positions, plans, POVs, cranes, and pans, and with the decisive sshhhhiikkt! of a guillotine larger or small finds itself tossed, in sight, into those positions.
The head was and is the problem. But only because there will be a body without one: the reels of film, the field of all that might be seen and won't, not dark or impossible, but simply unwatched. That's a wet topped mass that cannot go unadorned and unregarded. It has not learned to make sense of or from itself, and so cries out for another head (the head that doesn't exist until it is cut). It demands a cleaving to bring about that stitching back together, no matter how ugly such an affair may – must – turn out to be.
And that is the story that follows, the plot that eclipses any particularities of who is threatening whom, which assistant is in love with which woman, who is deformed and will take on another body.
(How right the Tribune's scathing review of the film in '56: "Character and story have faded into the background, suspense and surprise simply do not exist, plot has become a perfunctory filling-in of time between each macabre set-piece.” How wrong that this was written as a condemnation.)
What, though, of the modulations of this bare bones plot, its dressing up into different names, faces, and actions?
Revenge of Frankenstein (1958) opens onto a guillotine, hanging behind neon crimson text, the same color as that which announced the title and credits:
In the year 1860, Baron Frankenstein was condemned to death for the brutal murders committed by the monster he had created...
The whole continent breathed a sigh of relief when the guillotine was called upon to end his life of infamy.
The guillotine is figured as explicit answer to the monster (both the editor-artist Baron and his creation). Beheading here is already displaced from the private labor of the Baron, who stood unbesmirched by labor and state intervention until thrown into jail. Now decapitation is institution, a law-bound regulation of the order of what should and shouldn't be made, ready to take off the head of the arch-decapitator, because he goes so far as to recapitate. The technocratic invention of death alone can deal with the not-quite dead and interrupt this disrupted economy by taking it down at the source.
Or that's how it's supposed to go. Further bolstering his role as Robespierre echo in dress, conviction, tone, and indissociable linkage to the guillotine, the Baron manages to get himself out from under the blade and put a priest in his place.
When he resurfaces, he is established in society – rather than aristocratically outside/above – as a doctor to the rich and to the poor, tending gratis to the latter in a filthy, crowded hospital in which an elevated frequency of amputations won't be especially noticed. Or more accurately, this salvage from the rabble will be noticed, but the protestations will not be heard by any with the power to intervene, until the “unwashed” band together and give him a long-overdue and vicious beating with arms, legs, stumps, and canes.
The major shifts borne out across the series are present here already.
It will come to be about life: living tissue and still-warm limbs, scrapped while the donor's heart still pumps, or swapped between two bodies such that one of those two will be discarded at end. (In this case, the contorted, disfigured body of Karl, who helps the Baron in exchange for the promise of a new body, is burned by Karl himself, if the transfer of the brain counts as continuity of subjectivity, in a new hunky body built from the scraps of the poor.)
The Baron will get older, more tired, and poorer. (The Baron is no longer an “independent researcher” using his estate to hit up the black market or his social standing to commit unnoticed murders. He is now a practicing doctor, forced to work for that bit of respectability and required to find loopholes – i.e. general deafness to the protests of the poor – to get his materials.)
It will introduce a practical primacy of spirit, even in the pseudo-material form of “the brain,” over the matter of the body. Although it is partially blamed on a stiff beating he receives, Karl's transformation is a revenge of the intellect against the success of manipulating matter, his new body deforming into an approximation of his previous twisted shape, with the addition of murderous appetite to boot. Yet it comes in the defense of the body. The conservative impulse therefore tries to have it both ways:
No, we're not just piles of meat, we have unique essences – we have distinct content – that allows us to “be us” even in different form!
No, that content cannot be dissociated from its original form: it will insist on remaking its perverse new frame in the lost image of the spirit's rightful home!
The film ends by laughing it off, transposing it onto a profound gag, as the brain of the Baron, rescued from his red mess of a body after the attack, is moved to a new body, one itself built from the parts harvested from those very attackers. (One of the more sublime iterations of the endless capacity of the master to recuperate and incorporate the antagonism of its underclass opponents.) The operation is a success, insofar as the film ends not just with the Baron setting up shop elsewhere with a new name and an old commitment to keep doing this, but impossibly, with the Baron still played Peter Cushing, distinct only in having picked up a rakish mustache and a prison tattoo. As if, given enough time, the brain will rearrange the body in full to accord with what it remembered to be the case.
(There is Evil of Frankenstein in '64, but for a number of reasons, it willfully places itself outside the general drift of the series. I leave it there, to shuttle around in its own awkward orbit.)
“Do it now! Come on, it’s my head, you’re going to have it off anyway.”
'67 is Frankenstein Created Woman, a scrappy, kinky, savage film of broke characters and broken lineages. The guillotine is back where it belongs, right at the start, removing the head of Han's belligerent, joking father who badgers the priest, harangues the executioner, and only loses his blowhard cool when he realizes his son is about to watch the whole thing (bringing out those questions of fathering previously absent and pointing them out as all the more incapable of explaining what is to follow). Like Karl of Revenge, the signs of a damaged spirit are externalized and worn on the body in the scarred and bent Christine: her head declared, by the social world, to be also “not enough of a head” but without those pecking birds. Rather, she has a clot inside the brain: a scar without surgery, without even a cut.
Like everyone in this world (including Christine herself) other than Hans, her lover /witness to his father’s execution, the Baron neither wishes to acknowledge this nor ignore it. He swerves instead to new heights of immateriality, plus a defense of both vital urge and particular arrangement of subject buried within but independent of its charnal bonds. (Some of his experiments, we see, consist of freezing himself to death for lengthening periods of time to see how it is that he is still himself after being revived.) His burned hands unfit for surgery and dependent on the nervous blustering fingers of his assistant, he's not content just severing the spirit from the body. He wants to sever it from the head, to unhouse the intellect. In this instance, to parse it into floating balls of energy that bear the essence of an individual, through the capacity to make the transfer with the head already missing. The body as such, give or take a head, is the new seat of the soul, and it can be unsettled.
But there are those who remember the fact of beheading and who keep an eye on those missing heads. Those who won't let it go so easy. The film tells of their revenge, their insistence on not letting the miseconomy of one head too few, one body too many be settled so cleanly or with so little blood. The children of the guillotine and their lovers hence continue the abandoned project.
(Which is to say, they pick up the scene of that intermittent anti-political project: something along the lines of an acephalic insurrectionary modernism, which demands of the foundational act – the severing, that barbaric technocracy and destroyer of kings! – that it remain no certain foundation. For what it brings about is the bad simultaneity of the too few, too many. It inaugurates a broken set which is, however, the only way to actually count masses, crowds, and hordes, to take stock of that which is neither a people nor a person, not even a persons (as the sloshed Baron slurs in a later film). Just a collection of material, a collection of wills, perhaps gathered together under one or more abstractions, and the potential operations that may follow. This project insists that nothing is ever settled without the constant vigilant work of recounting, rekilling the king, recalibrating, revolting.)
So after the decapitation of Hans at the guillotine (just like Daddy), and the consequent suicide of Christine, after the transference of Han's soul/anima into the body of his lover, after they fix Christine’s limp and hunch and face scars (and inexplicably, make her bottle blonde for good measure), after she kills the first two aristocratic fops responsible for the death of her ex-lover who is now also incorporated into her, we find just where that head has gone, and just where it can go.
Namely, impaled on the decorative top spike of a white armoire, commanding her to kill the last murderer. (Therein a different historical echo of the beheaded, less Francophile and more homegrown Brit: Cromwell's head impaled on a spike 20 ft above Westminister Abbey. Vengefully severed after his posthumous exhumation, dragged through the streets in an open coffin, and hanged at the injunction of Charles II, it was stuck on high and remained there, weather-beaten, for a full 24 years until a storm tossed it to the ground.)
Yet this head, literally stuck where it does not belong, jammed into an absurd man-furniture hybrid, is not a singular shot. It is the second half of a match cut, the gasping conclusion – the recapitation – of the first cut. From the exhumation of Hans' body and the voiced question “Where has the head gone?” to the purely answer to that question: well, there it is. This is a red thread between locations that do not line up, and it’s a tremendous whiplash. It produces the sympathetic wrenching of our necks as we pass smoothly between what matches up indeed (the missing head in speech, the found head in sight) and what indeed does not stop being a cut (the space between the expectation and the shock of finding it).
If there is a formal hallmark to the entire series of these films, it is the match cut. Fisher is consistently demeaned as being not much of an auteur, too “workman-like”. What is actually meant by this is that he is a skillful editor. His films are consummately put together, and they tend not to draw attention to the medium. He is one who matches cuts together, who knows how to enjamb and enjoin, such that we both keep the beat and gain a shudder, a laugh, and a twist in the process. Such that when Christine swings the axe down on the writhing body of an aristocrat, it will not touch him. It will make contact only on a log, the wood splitting like meat, hours away, in another house where she and we alone recall the starting point of that falling swipe.
And then there is the cephalophoric moment, perhaps the most striking of its kind in horror, when she stabs the last of Han’s murderers and raised her lover’s head from of a basket. (At which point we realize she’s been carrying it around for a while…) At which point she speaks to the severed head in the voice of that head, when she speaks as Hans, in the body of his lover (after she has gone about seducing and murdering men in his name), to Hans. The film, understandably, pulls back from this: it is at that moment when Christine has most vanished, that the Baron calls to her and brings her back to herself. She drops the voice, the head, and, in a few moments, herself off a cliff edge.
Still, at the end of the film, she – the one who has never been an acephale even as she has been a cephalophore, carrying the head that became her own but which was never lopped off her body – claims that she knew what she was doing all along. That this was not fugue but project. With her decapitational picnic basket and all the loneliness of the one who knows she has been lied to, so she speaks to a head with no throat, in the hissing calm tones of the falling blade.
By the time we hit Frankenstein Must be Destroyed (69), that basket is now a special head-shaped bucket and the blade – a sickle – is right for the task. It is heads we sever, that is what we do, and it’s no longer of the exception or breakthrough, but the mundane, the chore. Brain transplants into bodies living or dead is no surprise, with few kinks to be ironed out. And that collapse of surprise, there’s little remaining desire for vindication or to become a celebrity in the field. At most, just the old habit of a low-level fuck you to the doubters. And so it is here, in the film that sees the Baron most conclusively terminated (carried into a burning house by the one whose brain he swapped), that series as such spells out, with a rather bemused plainness, its basic logic:
“I must therefore transfer it to a healthy body to keep it alive. When the recipient is fully recovered, I shall operate again to cure the insanity.”
“You can’t mean any of that. You can’t!”
“I mean every word of it.”
“But that would mean you’d have to remove someone else’s brain to do it.”
“Of course, Karl. How else?”
“But that would be murder!”
“You’re used to that by now.”
Indeed, he is, they are, and we are too. Frankenstein must be destroyed, perhaps, but the only way to save a head is to give it another body. And, in its weary matter-of-factness, this film returns a base materiality to it all, cutting back against Revenge’s and Woman’s version of a damaged brain that produces a damaged body yet which leaves the subject intact. In Destroyed, a brain isn’t just trapped in a body. It is strangled by it, slowly choked out such that the I becomes imbecilic. The head was never a single unit in the series, but here the gap between form (skull) and content (brain) becomes a toxic one. The brain must be saved from head, and so, late in the game, we get a destroying that saves, as the Baron and Karl turn to trephination, slowly grind a bone drill through the skull to “let the brain breathe.” The brain in question is that of Professor Richter, an old colleague of the Baron’s who still has the knowledge necessary to work out those last kinks in the transplant process. At the very start of the series, they couldn’t find a head in decent shape to save them. Now, saving their project requires putting holes in another head and leaving it unusable.
Nothing much changes in the last film of the series, Frankenstein and the Monster From Hell, other than the Baron’s very weird coiffure. We cycle back through the options and permutations of living dead, poor, following the lead of Destroyed and taking the bodies of the insane, particularly ones that are very large and hairy. The creature will look more like a werewolf, and he, rather than the Baron (himself a patient, merely with some special privileges), will be taken to pieces by the patients. But for the most part, he wasn’t made of their parts: he simply was a hulking brute, with a key additions to retrofit him to the purpose of idiotic rage. The only labor of the many lies in that tearing to bits, not in the significant, albeit unwilled, contribution of the unwashed collective in Revenge. It’s fitting, as cutting and repairing here can no longer be a solitary enterprise. Frankenstein's hands, burned earlier in the series, are inoperative. As such, for his surgical operations, our cutting and splicing editor becomes merely a director, here in the last film that Fisher directed. As the Baron puts it when reviewing what went wrong, “Too much reliance on surgery and too little on biochemistry.” And isn’t this a renunciation of cinema itself, of montage, of the way that decapitating and recapitating never really meant to reproduce a whole? And so we get the familiar gag at the end of the film, when the Baron brushes off the death of the creature.
“Oh, that's of no importance. The best thing that could have happened to him. He was of no use to us or to himself. But... next time.”
“Next time?”
“Why, of course! We'll discuss the details later. For the moment, we must get this place tidied up so we can start afresh. Now we shall need new material, naturally.”
But for once, there may be actually something new here in the stated declaration to have done with surgery, although it is a line that won’t be followed past the end of the series. It won’t be answered here, and not by Hammer, busy falling to pieces in the years of this film, but it gestures further ahead toward different processes of the production of images and wholes, closer to biochemistry and that which does not need to cut, which won’t have to start with chunks of what already exists. That is, if the primary special effects of the Hammer Frankenstein was not the squirt of blood or the caked make-up but the basic logic of the match cut, taken to its extreme, made into a principle that resonates from micro to macro, to leave behind surgery is to point toward a world of CGI run amok, of things cooked up in laboratories that require no cuts because they don’t exist outside of this genesis. Of combinations with other footage that involves no montage but merely intertwining, green screens, and overlays. There may be cuts, but they will often be simulated, just a weightless shift from one weightless field of pixels to another. There’s not a scar in sight.
That, though, is another story, and this one ended more properly in the film between Destroyed and Hell, where the burning of the Baron was answered by a black comedy reload of sorts, The Horror of Frankenstein (1970), where we have neither Fisher nor Cushing. Instead, a return to origins and, fittingly, painting them as joke all along. It slots in the absent sex, it declares as comedic what was already funny, and, above all, it ratchets up the frequency of those match cuts until they provide nearly every transition between sequence. Almost no question is left hanging without a wrenching shift to a new locale and a verbal or visual answer to it. Nothing, of course, is new, and the attempt to remake what had already been a remake and about remaking means that it can only collapse under its own weight.
Or, in this case, dissolve in whole at the site in which this whole miseconomy began, in the acid bath that first abolished the head we’ve been chasing since then. Trying to hide his creature from the investigation of Lieutenant Henry, the Baron convinces him to climb into giant empty acid bath in his work-shop, vats of acid poised precariously above. And despite the questioning, there’s no evidence to be seen of his labor. He’ll get away with it all, and he’ll continue his work, keep buying cut-rate dead bodies, keep cutting them up, keep making cut-rate wholes.
But the young daughter of Henry, bored with being ignored by the adults, pulls the rope tied to the acid and “accidentally” floods the bath. There is a sound that rushes and hisses. Only the Baron knows what it means, and he is alone when he climbs to the side of the bath and watches two shoes bob up from the gurgling brown froth. He makes a face to the camera that is supposed to be meaningful but which remains inscrutable. Yes, he will go on after all. No, he’s had enough. Yes, there is still cutting to be done. No, cinema has not had enough. For there’s no bath big enough to dissolve all those stitches.
Or, in this case, dissolve in whole at the site in which this whole miseconomy began, in the acid bath that first abolished the head we’ve been chasing since then. Trying to hide his creature from the investigation of Lieutenant Henry, the Baron convinces him to climb into giant empty acid bath in his work-shop, vats of acid poised precariously above. And despite the questioning, there’s no evidence to be seen of his labor. He’ll get away with it all, and he’ll continue his work, keep buying cut-rate dead bodies, keep cutting them up, keep making cut-rate wholes.
But the young daughter of Henry, bored with being ignored by the adults, pulls the rope tied to the acid and “accidentally” floods the bath. There is a sound that rushes and hisses. Only the Baron knows what it means, and he is alone when he climbs to the side of the bath and watches two shoes bob up from the gurgling brown froth. He makes a face to the camera that is supposed to be meaningful but which remains inscrutable. Yes, he will go on after all. No, he’s had enough. Yes, there is still cutting to be done. No, cinema has not had enough. For there’s no bath big enough to dissolve all those stitches.
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