The original scream queens who gave giallo its… | Little White Lies

Women In Film

The orig­i­nal scream queens who gave gial­lo its fem­i­nist edge

20 Jun 2016

Words by Emily Gosling

A woman with reddish-brown curly hair peers through a partially open door, her blue eyes visible and a serious expression on her face.
A woman with reddish-brown curly hair peers through a partially open door, her blue eyes visible and a serious expression on her face.
Icon­ic stars like Ani­ta Strind­berg and Edwige Fenech are the thread that ties this deviant sub­genre together.

Char­ac­terised by vio­lence and beau­ti­ful woman, gial­lo is a genre that doesn’t appear to have much of a fem­i­nist bias. Gial­lo (‘yel­low’ in Ital­ian, ref­er­enc­ing pulpy yel­low-cov­ered crime books) films, which emerged in Italy dur­ing the 1960s, are nar­ra­tive­ly akin to thrillers, often cen­tred on crime, mur­der, para­noia and pow­er­ful sex­u­al­i­ty. Key direc­tors include Dario Argen­to, Lucio Ful­ci and Mario Bava.

The female stars that were to become the irre­sistible faces of gial­lo – Edwige Fenech, Mim­sy Farmer, Dag­mar Las­sander and Florin­da Bolkan, to name a few – car­ried a dichoto­my with their new star­let stature: they were at once pow­er­ful femmes fatales (align­ing with sim­i­lar sce­nar­ios in film noir) and typ­i­fied by a specif­i­cal­ly wom­an­ly form of mad­ness and victimisation.

Par­tic­u­lar­ly in the case of Fenech, roles for woman in gial­lo were often acces­sorised with psy­cho­an­a­lyt­i­cal or Freudi­an tan­gents: her per­for­mances fre­quent­ly fea­ture histri­on­ics, tak­ing things into Freudi­an ter­ri­to­ry as she deals with psy­cho­log­i­cal trau­ma in fright­en­ing­ly vis­cer­al ways. In Mario Caiano’s Eye in the Labyrinth, from 1972, the lead female role is search­ing for her miss­ing psy­chi­a­trist lover; and many oth­er titles fea­ture women cur­rent­ly or for­mer­ly in therapy.

How­ev­er, ana­logue film spe­cial­ists Cig­a­rette Burns have chal­lenged notions of gial­lo females as sole­ly objec­ti­fied hys­ter­ics. Co-founder Josh Saco says: The women in gial­lo, with­out sound­ing like I’m down­play­ing them, are the orig­i­nal scream queens. You watch these films because you want to see peo­ple like Florin­da Bolkan [the star of A Lizard in a Woman’s Skin and Don’t Tor­ture a Duck­ling]. These women are stun­ning and inter­est­ing; they play these crazy roles and you’re real­ly drawn to them. So many peo­ple find their way through gial­lo because of the actress­es: they’re real­ly impor­tant peo­ple in the genre.”

But for all the women’s impor­tance, so many gial­lo plots cen­tre around the mur­der of a series of attrac­tive women, which seems at odds with fem­i­nine pow­er. When you real­ly start to exam­ine the films, the ideas about misog­y­ny drift away,” says Saco. Often the women are killing as many peo­ple as the men: they’re the killers as often as they are the killed.

There’s a film called New York Rip­per which is con­sid­ered instant­ly misog­y­nist – it’s a pret­ty hor­ri­ble film – the killer is a guy who goes around killing women but he’s doing it because he feels like he’s failed as a man. He hates women: there’s no ques­tion that he’s a mon­ster, he’s so obvi­ous­ly flawed that it stops it being misogynistic.”

So can we real­ly view gial­lo as pro-women, if their mad­ness is con­demned to histri­on­ics, they’re so fre­quent­ly vic­tims, they’re always always beau­ti­ful? In Piero Schivazappa’s 1969 film The Fright­ened Woman, we see a rich, S&M‑obsessed man who delights in his pow­er over women. He abducts a female jour­nal­ist – Maria, played by Dag­mar Las­sander – who ulti­mate­ly usurps her cap­tor and proves her­self to be ulti­mate­ly more pow­er­ful. While her route to pow­er was through male abuse and oppres­sion, the con­flict is resolved in favour of female prowess. 

View­ing the genre through a camp lens serves to dis­si­pate its sex­ploita­tion’. If, as Susan Son­tag says in her 1964 essay Notes on Camp’, camp is, a vision of the world in terms of style – but a par­tic­u­lar kind of style. It is the love of the exag­ger­at­ed, the off’, of things-being-what-they-are-not,” then that fits gial­lo per­fect­ly. By being the most per­fect­ly stylised, glam­orous and bomb­shell-esque of every­thing about gial­lo, women are placed at the heart of the big, pow­er­ful, overblown and ridicu­lous dra­ma of their scenes. These siren-like women find them­selves to be the root of the film’s pow­er; a fem­i­nist force to be reck­oned with, as direc­tor John Car­pen­ter con­cludes in the doc­u­men­tary Dario Argen­to: An Eye for Hor­ror: In his films the heroes are women. But he cou­ples vio­lent death with sex­u­al beau­ty, and that’s extreme­ly dis­turb­ing to me.”

Argen­to him­self nat­u­ral­ly takes things even fur­ther, offer­ing up a les­bian read­ing of Sus­piria in an inter­view for Xavier Mendik’s book Bod­ies of Desire and Bod­ies in Dis­tress’. In Sus­piria I wasn’t pri­mar­i­ly inter­est­ed in the theme of moth­er­hood but, rather, in women’s lives. In fact, if you want to give a deep­er read­ing of the film, it can be seen as a vague­ly les­bian sto­ry; where les­bian­ism has a cer­tain impor­tance, or, more pre­cise­ly, where the rela­tion­ships between women are some­times of a les­bian nature and are char­ac­terised by pow­er strug­gles. There aren’t any male char­ac­ters to speak of in the film; among those that do appear, one is blind, anoth­er is mute and the oth­er is gay… All there is are pow­er rela­tions between women.”

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