The selection “Series B” : SIX WOMEN FOR The MURDERER

To help you make your choice in the multitude of series B generated by the cinema operating for the past fifty years, here is a selection of films distinguished by their high degree of improbability, their errors of taste assumed, and their leadership qualities-works well known.

In the heyday of exploitation cinema Italian, there was Mario Bava and others. The others were craftsmen, to which we can recognize today a sure efficacy in the stories and a self-help useful to wrap up the shooting in spite of their lots of contingencies, technical and budgetary. Mario Bava was an artist, such as painters are artists, like the illusionists, the fairground, the bateleurs of the ghost trains are indisputably artists. One could almost believe in a student’s filmography that Bava artist, thought to every one of its choices of directors on the basis of aesthetic traditions that he wanted to infuse the genre cinema. With the Mask of The Demon, Bava launches the wave of the movies the gothic in Italy. With The Girl who knew too much, it allows the giallo, this type of intrigue-criminal connotations of the sexual, to switch from libraries to cinemas district of the country. With The Bloody Bay, the graphic violence is, and it foreshadows the american genre of slasher.

Curious place as SIX WOMEN FOR The MURDERER, as in the filmography of Bava that in the history of the giallo. In 1963, the filmmaker poses the codes founders of the genre with The Girl who knew too much, which, as its name indicates, takes up the story archetypal of the troublesome witness (hi tonton Hitchcock ! ), to establish the perverse game of cat and mouse, between a killer and a damsel in distress. SIX WOMEN FOR The MURDERER) comes out next year, and already the evolution of Bava within the genus is palpable on the screen. He would have been able to settle into the aesthetic of black-and-white gothic he knew up until then, but still chose the color, or more precisely, the colors, to continue the growth and development of the giallo.

In the framework codified in the giallo, Bava develops a form of abstraction of the threat by this lack of face, so identity of the killer.

Giallo ? You said “giallo” ? Yes, because it is obvious that we are here in the presence of a specimen, representative of the genre, where it is before any question of sequences of the murders at once violent, disturbing, and mannered, the story emerging as a pretext to link together these pieces of cinema in a raw state. However, it is generally a question of a killer driven by sexual urges in a canonical approach to the genre, here it is difficult for me not to spoiler the final revelation, without entrust to you, however, that the motives of the guilty are in reality financial. Again, this is to replace this story, a policeman in the trajectory of the accounts invested by Bava to understand that it foreshadows the killing game that will be in 1971, The Bloody Bay, where the low considerations in real estate and monetary world bourgeois deleterious (such as the world of haute-couture around which revolve the six women), are the symptoms of a loss of moral compass that is conducive to murder the wild.

And it’s not in the story, that the experiments “giallesques” are felt ; the choice of visual in the representation of the killer is also a fascinating element since it is rampant hidden by a cloth (a sock or a clingy female ? ) giving the disconcerting impression that he is devoid of face. Before the subjective camera of Dario Argento and others, code from experienced of the kind, who could show the least possible the mysterious assassin, Bava had already developed a form of abstraction of the threat by this lack of face, and therefore identity.

But what seems more strange, it is the importance of the scenery magnified by the lights of the baroque, where the pink of a prior plan, dare to overlap with the glaucous green of the background, or vice-versa. To believe that the filmmaker has chosen to counter-balance the abstract form of the killer, loading up the decor of a personality that is immediately visible on the screen, by providing him with the visual identity, so to say, the face of the work. The writer and critic Tim Lucas has chosen a beautiful tune for the extensive work he has devoted to Mario Bava : Colors of the dark. The vision of SIX WOMEN FOR The MURDERER), one understands that better than Lucas sees so many stunning colors in this film the dark.

Arkham

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