Giallo (film genre)

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The Giallo (from Italian giallo "yellow", plural: gialli ) is a specifically Italian subgenre of the thriller , which was founded by Mario Bava in the 1960s and reached its peak in the 1970s. The plot revolves mostly around the uncovering of a series of murders. The staging emphasizes detailed murder scenes and suspense scenes through stylish camera work, equipment and music.

history

The name is derived from the Italian term for crime literature, letteratura gialla ("yellow literature"), which goes back to the yellow cover of the booklet series Il Giallo Mondadori . The German Edgar Wallace films , which in non-German-speaking countries are also summarized as "(The) Krimi" , are considered to be an early influence of the Giallo film .

The Giallo was significantly influenced by Mario Bava's works La Ragazza che sapeva troppo (literally: The girl who knew too much) and Bloody silk ( Sei donne per l'assassino , 1964). The latter already offers the entire catalog of common motifs, elements and aesthetic strategies, which numerous other directors - including the most prominent: Dario Argento and Sergio Martino - took up and developed further in the following years. From 1970 the genre reached its productive peak with a multitude of releases that slowly declined towards the end of the decade.

The Giallo and in particular the work of Bava are seen as the forerunners of the American slasher film . Some directors such as John Carpenter ( Halloween ) and Sean S. Cunningham ( Friday the 13th ) confirmed in interviews that their films were directly linked to those of Bava.

Genre features

The focus of the plot is often a (often masked) serial killer, whose acts are usually in the context of a psychosexual pathology and who murders under clearly ritualized or fetishized signs (e.g. black gloves, phallic weapons). The victims are often attractive young women.

The murders, which are often spectacularly staged, are the main attraction of the film, while the criminological and investigative aspects of the crime story are treated clearly of secondary importance. This creates a direct connection to Hitchcock's Psycho , who served as a decisive inspiration for the first Gialli. Above all, however, this tendency to “number revue”, to string together individual murder scenes, gave the critics of Giallo grounds for accusations of glorification of violence and misogyny .

Often the Gialli are visually very attractive and efficiently staged. Some works may be counted among the great classics of Italian genre cinema. Almost every prominent Italian genre director has practiced in the Giallo, which for a long time was one of the most popular genres in Italy alongside westerns and horror films .

Films (selection)

literature

  • Christian Keßler : The wild eye. A foray into the Italian horror film. Corian-Verlag, Meitingen 1997, ISBN 3-89048-311-9 .
  • Mikel J. Koven: La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema And the Italian Giallo Film. Scarecrow Press, 2006, ISBN 0-8108-5870-3 .
  • Denny Corso: Giallo - The Color of Death: A Comprehensive Chronology. 2007, ISBN 978-3-931608-82-8 .
  • Peter Scheinpflug: Emilia wants to murder Virginia. Bad girls in the Italian crime series Giallo. In: Renate Möhrmann (Ed.): Rebellious - desperate - infamous. The bad girl as an aesthetic figure. Aisthesis Verlag, Bielfeld 2012, ISBN 978-3-89528-875-3 , pp. 389-408.
  • Peter Scheinpflug: Formula cinema. Media studies perspectives on genre theory and the Giallo . Transcript, Bielefeld 2014, ISBN 978-3-8376-2674-2 .

Web links