Criminology, due to its inherent association with deviance and transgression, is particularly prone to Gothicisation. It is not a coincidence that it originated in the second half of the nineteenth century, in conjunction with the resurgence of the Gothic novel, and that its founding father was the Italian physician Cesare Lombroso, who has been labelled by historians of crime Nicole Rafter and Per Ystehede as a truly ‘Gothic scientist’ (265). Lombroso's highly controversial theories of deviance as biologically determined and identifiable on the basis of physical traits – expanded and developed by his collaborators, who formed the famous Italian school of criminal anthropology – transcended national and disciplinary boundaries, reinforcing the symbiotic relationship between biology and transgression that continues to haunt contemporary Western cultures.

Lombroso's science aroused so much interest, attracting and repulsing at the same time, not only because it was built on common prejudices and widespread anxieties that were fuelled by literature and the press, but also because it was imbued with Gothicism. As Rafter maintains, Lombroso shifted criminology's focus ‘away from the mind (a construct compatible with the idea of an immortal soul) to the brain (an organ whose physicality ruled out metaphysical speculation of any sort)’ (87), thereby severing criminology's connection with morality and religion. His theories destabilised accepted boundaries and traditional assumptions about human identity and sexuality, converting ‘Gothic anxieties’, such as the spectre of degeneration, the bestiality within humans, and the divided nature of the self, into ‘scientific concerns’ (Rafter and Ystehede 276).

Starting from the premise that the fin de siècle was distinguished by the interplay of scientific and Gothic discourses, in this chapter I will explore precisely why and how Lombroso's criminology is deeply Gothic in its methods, applications and implications. Focusing on the literary, visual and occult components of Lombroso's multifarious and far-reaching work, I will seek to show how Gothic narratives on the construction of deviance influenced Lombroso's criminological thinking, ultimately transforming the transgressor from, in Karen Halttunen's perceptive words, a ‘common sinner with whom the larger community of sinners were urged to identify in the service of their own salvation’ into a moral monster ‘from whom readers were instructed to shrink, with a sense of horror that confirmed their own “normalcy” in the face of the morally alien’ (4–5).

INTRODUCTION

The ability to define, demarcate and identify the ‘past’ as distinct from the ‘present’ is a significant way in which history manifests itself. Parallel cinema has often been described, both in journalese and in academic discourse, as social realist; the fictional world created by the films that are identified under this category seems to imperceptibly flow into the present, and meld into the contemporary social world. Parallel films such as Samskara (Funeral Rites, 1970), Kaadu (Forest, 1973), Ghatashraddha (The Ritual, 1977), to arbitrarily name a few, or even Ankur (The Seedling, 1974), do not explicitly mark the events as historical, or demarcate the fictional world as the past or as something that prevailed in the past, which has since ceased to be so in the present (that is, the present when the films were made in the 1970s). This is not to suggest that the issues that they deal with such as caste, the practice of keeping concubines, or feudal land relations, were of the past, and the films erroneously make them seem contemporary. Rather, my point has to do with the method of treatment of their subject, whether it is caste, or feudalism, which is approached and critiqued as a contemporary problem.

It is here that Shyam Benegal’s Nishant (Night’s End, 1975) appears to me to be slightly different from the films named above, or even many other parallel films. Not only in the title does it indicate an ‘end’ (anth in Hindi means end/cessation) to the darkness that it delineates, but in the film too, right at the outset, the time of the film’s action is clearly marked as 1945, that is, some thirty years before the time of the film’s making. To mark out the film’s action world as a specific time in the past is not necessarily to posit a break with the present; as opposed to a seamless, unmarked flow of time, it is to conceptualise a change that has taken place between a ‘then’ and a ‘now’, maybe even drawing from the past to transform the present.

Introduction: (Neo-)Giallo and Affect

Before discussing Luca Guadagnino's 2018 film Suspiria, which is the primary focus of this chapter, I will first address the renewed interest in the giallo film. Giallo, meaning yellow in Italian, referred to pulp fiction novels (with yellow covers) that featured stories such as murder mysteries, police procedurals, and stalk and slash narratives to which the American slasher film owes a deep debt. Drawing from the literary model, giallo films were, as Lindsay Hallam recounts, “made in high numbers throughout the 1960s and 1970s, gaining popularity within Italy while also garnering screenings and fans abroad.” The giallo, indeed, reached audiences far and wide—take for example, screening practices in Taiwan. Under the rule of the Kuomintang party, which established martial law from 1949 until 1987, the regime implemented strict censorship ordinances. To skirt regulations theater owners would insert illicit material—often smuggled from abroad, including giallo films—and splice them into sanctioned films. Theater owners established an array of mechanisms to alert the projection booth when government inspectors would arrive, allowing the theater to switch back to certified material. Seasoned audience members played right along with the whole routine, and even anticipated a disjunctive viewing experience. Edwige Fenech, one of the “sex goddesses” associated with giallo films, was a major draw for Taiwanese audiences. Newspaper advertisements merely needed to mention her name (which served as a nod and wink) to bring in audiences, who reveled at the prospects of seeing some sexually charged spectacle featuring Fenech, or other well-known starlets of the genre. In the American context, giallo films gained traction with videocassette distribution, and prior to that, as Raidford Guins observes, “were exhibited in limited release, or found on the midnight movie circuit, or at paracinema festivals, or at drive-in cinemas after their post-War glamour period had run its course.” Regardless, the point here is that spectators did not attend these screenings for coherent narratives as such, but rather were lured to the theater with the promise of seeing some sort of rousing spectacle.

While the hallmark of the giallo rested upon its promise to deliver audiovisual spectacles, the exact parameters of the genre are subject to some debate.

The most prolific period in Italian horror filmmaking is commonly classified into two main cycles or filoni: the Gothic of the 1960s and the giallo of the 1970s. While the former describes a key trend in domestic horror that is marked by a distinctive approach to the stereotypical Gothic themes and motifs, the latter refers to a nationally specific hybrid form that is defined by a strict coexistence of crime fiction and graphic gore. That said, this chapter seeks to add nuance to this acknowledged distinction by further exploring the Gothic influence on the giallo as well as the close intertwining of the two cycles in relation to their narratives and style. Internationally, this strict interrelationship has also served to differentiate the Gothic and giallo film production from its Anglo-American models and make it one of global popular culture's most iconic trademarks.

The purpose of this investigation is twofold. On the one hand, this chapter provides a critical understanding of both the Gothic and the giallo in a domestic context by outlining their historical phases, the dynamics of their production system as well as their major thematic affinities and shared practices. On the other hand, this chapter focuses on the narrative tropes and stylistic practices that distinguish three of its most representative figures, namely Riccardo Freda, Mario Bava and Dario Argento, from their foreign inspirations. It explores how and to what extent these directors have served to shape the two cycles and earn them cult status.

The Dawn of the Italian Gothic Horror

The traditionally popular genre of horror ‘was as much a foreign narrative form in the history of Italian cinema as was the western’ (Bondanella 306). Unlike other Italian popular genres of the 1960s, such as the commedia all’italiana and the peplum, Italian horror film did not develop from an earlier cycle during the era of Italian silent cinema (1905–30). Throughout this period the domestic production companies were uninterested in the genre, the costume drama and the historical epic being the industry's most popular and profitable investment (Bondanella 5).

FILM NOIR IN THE ANTIPODES

In the late 1960s, producer-entrepreneur Reginald Goldsworthy (of Goldsworthy Productions) brought American television director Eddie Davis to Australia to make three feature films: It Takes All Kinds (1969), Color Me Dead (1970) and That Lady from Peking (1970). Generically similar crime-thrillers, each film was made in collaboration with senior American partner, Commonwealth United Corporation, on a modest budget and with American actors mainly known for their work in television and B-movies in the lead roles (O’Brien 1970b: 35).1 The second film, Color Me Dead, stands apart from the others for being a direct remake of the film noir classic, D.O.A. (Rudolph Maté, 1949). Discarding the flashback structure of the original, Color Me Dead begins with an atmospheric night sequence, but soon settles into a routine (if convoluted) thriller in which the poisoned protagonist attempts to track down his own killer. While the Davis version closely follows the dialogue and plot of Maté's film, the form and style of the Australian remake owes less to its precursor than it does to post-classical noirs (such as Harper, Jack Smight, 1966; The Detective, Gordon Douglas, 1968; Lady in Cement, Gordon Douglas, 1968) and television noir (Dragnet, 1951–9; Naked City, 1958–63; The Fugitive, 1963–7). In this chapter we look at the Antipodean, cultural remaking of D.O.A., historically situated midway between its classic original (1949) and its second, neo-noir remaking, D.O.A. (Rocky Morton and Annabel Jankel, 1988). The Australian remake's television aesthetic – and US cable release – adds weight to the suggestion that, through the 1960s, the noir of the classic sensibility was kept alive mainly through television series and movies, some of which embraced an increased transnationalism. The Australian remake also demonstrates something of the way in which the development and expansion of ‘international’ film noir – as an ‘artistic impulse to represent global modernity and its psycho-sexual anxieties’ (Petty 2016: – extends well beyond France and the US.

In More Than Night, James Naremore describes the category of film noir not as a set of narrative or stylistic features, but as a discursive formation: ‘film noir belongs to the history of ideas as much as to the history of cinema … [I]t has less to do with a group of artifacts than with a discourse’ (Naremore 1998: 11).

Chekhov noted in a letter of 20 October 1888, shortly after he received the prestigious Pushkin Prize: ‘Everything I have written will be forgotten in 5–10 years, but the paths I have established will remain intact and secure, and this is my only merit.’ By the ‘paths’ he had ‘established’ Chekhov meant something very specific, namely his contribution to the genre of the short story and its reputation in the literary world and among readers. Yet over time, these words have acquired a much broader meaning, signifying the extent of Chekhov’s explicit and, most provocatively, implicit presence in the arts today, be it literature, theatre or cinema. This chapter offers three cases of contemporary American and Russian films – Michael Meredith’s Three Days of Rain (2002), Arthur Allan Seidelman’s The Sisters (2005), and Karen Shakhnazarov’s Ward No. 6 (Palata № 6, 2009) – which represent different models of adaptation and the transformation of Chekhov’s works on screen in the twenty-first century. Taken together, these diverse films demonstrate not only Chekhov’s pervasive presence in today’s cinema but also the complexity of cinematic adaptation where the filmmaker becomes both coauthor and interpreter of the original source.

CHEKHOV IN THE RHYTHM OF JAZZ

‘I love all films that start with rain.’ The poet Don Paterson, who wrote this line, would definitely admire Michael Meredith’s Three Days of Rain. This 97-minute film has few minutes free of rain. The rain’s transparent yet impenetrable walls separate characters from each other and the world around them. Different and yet somewhat similar in their misery, rich and poor, old and young, all of these characters are residents of Cleveland at the beginning of the twenty-first century. There is another feature that they have in common: almost all owe their existence to Chekhov, whose stories serve as the blueprint for the movie’s script. Some of these characters on screen are recognised immediately, others deviate more substantially from their literary antecedents.

This book aims to provide the first detailed investigation of Arab life writing as part of a cultural corpus of resistance literature. This literature, it contends, must be contextualised and understood within specific fields of power discourse. More specifically, this book argues for a reinvigorated post-colonial understanding of contemporary Arab women’s autobiographical writing as revolutionary and dissident cultural practice. In doing so, it also aims to promote a critical dialogue between the sub-fields of Arab women’s writing, auto/biographical theory and resistance literature. Modern and contemporary Arab auto/biography has flourished in contexts of diverse, yet overlapping, colonial and anti-colonial struggles, and thus situates its subject at a particular political and historical juncture (Nasser 2017: 2). In the twenty-first century Arab world, a volatile region marked by (post)colonial histories and ongoing manifestations of Orientalism, colonialism, (neo)imperialism and revolutionary resistance movements (uprisings/ḥirāks), autobiographical discourses have become important cultural vehicles which highlight the relationship between political movements and artistic forms of literary expressions. They constitute an important, and ever-emerging, cultural corpus for bearing witness, testimony and dissidence as well as for political responses which foreground the relationships between writing and fighting and between the activist writer and the writer activist.

However, there remains a surprising lack of sustained academic discussions on forms of Arab life writing as politically driven practices which emerge in contexts of revolutionary and dissident moments, particularly from a gendered perspective. The leading scholarly discussions on and conceptual frameworks of resistance literature do not give much attention to life writing forms, including Ghassan Kanafani’s seminal work ʾAdab Al-Muqāwama fī Filasṭīn al-Muḥtalah 1948–1968 (1966) (Resistance Literature in Occupied Palestine 1948–1966, 2013), Barbara Harlow’s classic Resistance Literature (1987) and, more recently, Karima Laachir’s and Saeed Talajooy’s edited collection of essays Resistance in Contemporary Middle Eastern Culture (2013). While the latter, the closest study to the context of my book in terms of conceptual framework and geopolitical scope, establishes an important and elaborate connection between cultural forms of expression and dynamics of power in some of the countries of the contemporary Arab world, its scope is broad in terms of media of artistic expression.

OUTBACK RELATIONS: WALKABOUT AND WAKE IN FRIGHT

1971 was a key year in the emergence of modern Australia cinema. Two seminal films, Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout and Ted Kotcheff's Wake in Fright, were screened in competition at the Cannes Film Festival in May and went on to become significant touchstones for the 1970s film ‘revival’, as well as the broader and ongoing iconography and thematic preoccupations of Australian cinema. These two films arose from the marginally more productive feature-film ecology that took root in the late 1960s and represented a way forward for the ‘national’ cinema in terms of style, theme, characterisation, filmmaking process and form, while also looking backwards, at times critically, to the largely international or ‘locationist’ productions of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. In Walkabout's emphasis on the transcendental strangeness and mysticism of the Australian landscape, as well as its troubled but ground-breaking incorporation and representation of Aboriginal characters, their culture and agency, and Wake in Fright's often grotesque, dark, dirty Gothic and deeply unsettling skewering of the foundational myths of Australian mateship and masculinity, it is also possible to see even deeper connections to key trends, forms and films of Australian cinema throughout the rest of the 1970s and into the 1980s.

Although both films are routinely listed as important works in various surveys of postwar Australian cinema – particularly after the rerelease of Walkabout in the late 1990s and Wake in Fright's rediscovery in the late 2000s – they also present a stout challenge to commentators proselytising for a national cinema that privileges, and even insists upon, key creative roles being filled by Australian practitioners and financing largely being sourced locally (see Lawson 1985: 175–83).

This aim of this chapter is to read Shyam Benegal’s adaptation of Dharmavir Bharati’s novel/novella, Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda (The Sun’s Seventh Horse), into a film of the same title, and attest to its role in the chronicling of Benegal’s achievement as a filmmaker par excellence. This chapter is a study and a consideration of the book, its cinematic remake, questions of adaptation, and the outcomes of the changes made by Benegal while transcoding the text to cinema.

Bharati’s book was first published in Hindi in 1952, and critically applauded for its formal and technical inventiveness. Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda follows a narrative technique that, like an Escher diagram, confuses the contours of the narrative so that, depending on how one looks at it, the novel can be seen as comprising one story or three interweaving stories. Because of repeated entries into the same narrative from different points in time, which thereby challenges temporal sequencing, the three stories may well be the same story told three times. Two narrators, each framing the other in turn, make the novel self-reflexive.

In 1999, Bharati’s novel was translated into English by Sachchidanand Hiranand Vatsyayan ‘Ajneya’ as The Sun’s Seventh Horse. In 1992, Suraj Ka Satvan Ghoda was made into a film by Shyam Benegal. It opened to mixed responses, as evinced in Sukanya Verma’s ‘Great film, no audience’. But the audience was not to have the last word on the fate of this film, which perhaps predictably enough, went on to receive the year’s (1992) National Film Award for best feature film in Hindi.

SHYAM BENEGAL

Born in 1934, Shyam Benegal shot to fame with Ankur in 1974. Meaning The Seedling, this film based on a real story became a milestone in the establishment of what is popularly known as parallel, or non-mainstream, Indian cinema. This was a genre associated with the well-known filmmaker Satyajit Ray, and is the genre within which many of Benegal’s films find their feet. Ankur won three national awards among several others and starred stalwart actors like Anant Nag and Shabana Azmi playing out a rural drama of caste and feudalism. It was to herald the start of an illustrious career in cinema for a brilliant filmmaker.

‘For the first time, here is an actor with a personality as big as the vast CinemaScope screen,’ enthused the British fan magazine, Picturegoer, in September 1956, predicting that Yul Brynner would become the biggest name in Hollywood as ‘the animal magnetism of the man is something that must be experienced to be believed.’ This was the year that catapulted Brynner to international film stardom through his roles as ‘the King of Siam’ in the Hollywood rendition of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, The King and I (Walter Lang, 1956); as Pharaoh Rameses II in the popular Biblical epic, The Ten Commandments (Cecil B. DeMille, 1956); and as a former Russian white general in Anastasia against Ingrid Bergman (Anatole Litvak, 1956): all three films were released within a period of six months. Although he had become a major Broadway star with the runaway success of The King and I in 1951, Brynner now seemed to be virtually everywhere, starring in eleven films and doing a cameo in a twelfth by 1960.

His was a novel film star aesthetic, one expansively and opaquely exotic, in-your-face masculine, and intense in its physical presence. ‘There are things about Yul Brynner which reach out and grab you,’ Saturday Evening Post reported in 1958: ‘First, there are his eyes – burning, hypnotic, ripe-olive brown. Then there's his head, which is (and this will come as a surprise to nobody) shaved as clean as a seven-and-a-half-pound egg.’ The mesmerized writer was not alone in his ruminations. Musing over the actor's ‘flattish nose,’ ‘flaring nostrils,’ and ‘fawnlike ears,’ Collier's concluded that his ‘totally hairless skull plus the electricity he discharges with his slightest movement give Brynner the effect of a young Tartar colonel in one of Genghis Khan's crack cavalry regiments.’

A head initially shaved for the Broadway premiere of The King and I was Yul Brynner's most striking singular physical feature that set him apart from his contemporaries and rendered him instantaneously recognisable. Yet his presence was identified as striking also more broadly: ‘Beneath that fabulous dome, fierce eyes smolder above Asian cheek-bones and brazenly flared nostrils,’ wrote the scandal tabloid, Hush-Hush.

INTRODUCTION

Class and class struggle have been profoundly dealt with in Indian cinema. This theme featured in Indian cinema whenever filmmakers tried to depict power struggles or power relations, be it in blockbusters or those films that simply made it to the various film festivals. However, it is not always that Indian filmmakers while dealing with power, power relations or class struggle, strictly adhered to the Marxist notion that the ‘history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggle’. Nevertheless, when it comes to critical analysis of these films, the Marxist perspectives indeed become ‘profitable lenses’, which help us differentiate depictions of class struggle in the ‘mainstream’ from those in ‘parallel’ cinema. While looking into those parallel films where the central theme is struggle, oppression, power, and so on, we encounter some conscious adherence to Marxist thinking. The notion of class struggle culminating in a proletarian revolution similarly features in these films, but stops short of propagating a full-fledged revolution, given the parliamentary democracy practised in India. The democracy practised within an essentially bourgeois state tolerates Marxian narratives only within the purview of the Constitution. Thus, filmmakers who venture into depiction of class conflict and class struggle need to abide by the golden rule of the futility of armed struggle against the oppressor and the ultimate faith in the supremacy of the law of the land even if that is appropriated by the bourgeoisie.

While discussing the plight of cinema vis-à-vis the Indian bourgeois state, Anirudh Deshpande draws upon the understanding of the Indian bourgeoisie as depicted by Marxist critiques of the Indian cinema. According to him, the Indian bourgeoisie comprises the lower middle class, the newly formed rich middle class and the traditional upper middle class. This division although utterly simplistic might give us an insight into the clientele of Indian films and the urge to depict the eventual futility of a protracted class struggle and a proletarian revolution. This desperation often leads the parallel filmmakers to end their films with a message of class reconciliation and the ‘righteous’ path of parliamentary democracy, where even communist parties can thrive and function.