Capital and popular cinema: The dollars are coming! 9781784997335

Table of contents :
Front matter
Dedication
Contents
List of figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: national cinema and unstable genres
The time of popular cinema
The exclusion of giallo films from the history of Italian cinema
Mexico: the cinema of Fernando Méndez
The Hindi horror films of the Ramsay brothers
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Filmography
Index

Citation preview

V ITALI

Based on new research and making available, for the first time in English, new information on the work of Mario Bava, Fernando Méndez and the Ramsay Brothers, Capital and popular cinema will be of interest to second- and third-year undergraduate students, post-graduate students, researchers and scholars working on cult and exploitation cinema, genre cinema, national cinema, film and media theory, and in area studies. Valentina Vitali is Reader in Film Studies at the University of East London Cover: Cora Cinema, Stockholm, 1960. Author unknown. Source: Filminstitutet, Sweden via Wikimedia Commons

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

Capital and popular cinema

The book situates ‘low’ film genres in their economic and culturally specific contexts (a period of unstable ‘economic miracles’ in different countries and regions) and explores the interconnections between those contexts, the immediate industrial-financial interests sustaining the films and the films’ aesthetics. Through in-depth examination of what may at first appear as different cycles in film production and history – the Italian giallo, the Mexican horror film and Hindi horror cinema – Capital and popular cinema lays the foundations of a comparative approach to film; one capable of accounting for the whole of a national film industry’s production (‘popular’ and ‘canonic’) and applicable to the study of film genres globally.

The dollars are coming!

Popular cinema has mostly been approached from a ‘cult’ perspective that analyses or simply celebrates its textual and ‘transgressive’ qualities. In recent years a new generation of film scholars have begun to champion the study of popular genres but the question as to why these films may be worthy of study today – ‘what can they offer us now?’ – is rarely asked. Capital and popular cinema answers this question by responding to the need for a more solid historiographic approach.

Capital and popular cinema

The dollars are coming!

Va l e n t i n a V i ta l i

Capital and popular cinema

Capital and popular cinema The dollars are coming!

Valentina Vitali

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Valentina Vitali 2016 The right of Valentina Vitali to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for

ISBN

978 0 7190 9965 6 hardback

First published 2016 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

In memory of Paul Willemen

Contents

List of figuresviii Acknowledgementsix Introduction: national cinema and unstable genres 1 1 The time of popular cinema 10 2 The exclusion of giallo films from the history of Italian cinema 33 3 Mexico: the cinema of Fernando Méndez 77 4 The Hindi horror films of the Ramsay brothers 122 Conclusion158 Notes168 Bibliography185 Filmography201 Index207

Figures

  1 Advertisement for La ragazza che sapeva troppo, from Il Messaggero, 27 July 1963. 38   2 Advertisement for La frusta e il corpo, from Il Messaggero, 28 August 1963. 39   3 The Supercinema in Rome. 40   4 Nora lying unconscious at the feet of Trinità dei Monti. Film still from La ragazza che sapeva troppo (Galatea s.p.a. / Coronet s.r.l., 1962: director Mario Bava). 47   5 The church of Trinità dei Monti reflected upside down in a puddle of rainwater. Film still from La ragazza che sapeva troppo (Galatea s.p.a. / Coronet s.r.l., 1962: director Mario Bava).47   6 Film still from El vampiro (Cinematográfica A.B.S.A., 1957: director Fernando Méndez). 108   7 Poster for El grito de la muerte (Alameda Films, 1958: director Fernando Méndez). 114   8 Advertisement for Misterios de ultratumba, from Il Messaggero, 30 July 1960. 115   9 Advertising brochure for Ghutan (Ramsay Entertainment, 2007: director Shyam Ramsay). Courtesy of Shyam Ramsay. 137 10 VCD cover of Hotel (Vision Universal, 1981: directors Shyam and Tulsi Ramsay). Courtesy of Shyam Ramsay. 145 Every effort has been made to obtain permission to reproduce copyright material, and the publisher will be pleased to be informed of any errors and omissions for correction in future editions.

Acknowledgements

This book is dedicated to Paul Willemen, who encouraged me to write it by challenging my arguments with unique insight every step of the way. I would like to thank Jerry Pinto for discussing the Ramsay brothers with me and for facilitating my research in Mumbai, and Shyam Ramsay for interrupting his busy production schedule to talk about his films and for his permission to reproduce the advertising material included here. David Chapman read early drafts of the manuscript and offered valuable feedback, for which I am very grateful. Thank you also to Barbara Spina for compiling the index. The staff at the Bank of Italy’s library in Rome kindly allowed me to access periodicals that enabled me to trace the circulation of Mario Bava’s films. I am also grateful to the University of East London for sponsoring my research in Rome and Mumbai. Every effort has been made to trace the copyright owners of the illustrations included in this book; anyone claiming copyright should contact the author. Unless indicated otherwise, the translations of Italian, French and Spanish texts are mine.

Introduction: national cinema and unstable genres

In 1970 film theorists Paul Willemen and Claire Johnston wrote to Ian Cameron, founder of the British film journal Movie and, at the time, director of November Books, the publisher of the groundbreaking Movie Paperbacks series, proposing a book on Terence Fisher. Founded in 1962, Movie had elaborated an oppositional stand within and against film journalism by posing the question of critical method in relation to a practice that was then considered not to have artistic value: Hollywood cinema. As Willemen put it, Movie’s position: consisted of Leavisite literary criticism on the one hand, which, although dominant in departments of literature, became oppositional when mobilised in relation to something it had never been designed for, namely cinema; and, on the other hand, Cahiers du cinéma’s formulations of the politique des auteurs, the only precedent for a systematic oppositional polemic in favour of a ‘popular’ cinema. (Willemen 1983)

In the decade that followed François Truffaut’s 1954 essay ‘Une certaine tendance du cinéma français’, the term ‘popular cinema’ primarily referred to Hollywood cinema. During this period, it was Hollywood cinema that became a priority also for other publications, and it remained so until the mid-1970s, at least in the UK, where the focus of British film journals was essentially defined by the interests of small groups of intellectuals: Hollywood and British cinema (Movie, The Brighton Film Review, Monogram, Cinema), the avant-gardes (Cinema Rising, Afterimage), cultural theory (Screen). Of course each of these journals published essays on types of cinema outside their focal area, but the orientation of their criteria of relevance and the priorities within any given issue reflected relatively narrow and particular areas of interest. In this context, Movie Paperbacks published monographs on auteurs such as Jean Renoir, Claude Chabrol,

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Jean Vigo, François Truffaut, Roberto Rossellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, John Ford, Allan Dwan, Luis Buñuel and Eric von Stroheim. Cameron’s reply to Willemen and Johnston’s proposal to devote a volume to Terence Fisher was, accordingly, that he (Cameron) would ‘take a little convincing that there is enough in Terence Fisher to produce a book and enough of a market for such a book, were it produced’.1 That same year Raymond Durgnat, a contributor to the Movie Paperback series, devoted half a chapter of his A Mirror for England: British Movies from Austerity to Affluence to a critical appraisal of Terence Fisher’s work for Hammer Films, which sought to situate Fisher’s horror films in the context of contemporary British culture. This was followed three years later by David Pirie’s now classic A Heritage of Horror: the English Gothic Cinema 1946–1972. It was published, significantly, by Gordon Fraser, a publisher who specialised in offbeat topics. Five years on (in 1978), Roy Armes wrote a damning and dismissing profile of Fisher’s work in his A Critical History of British Cinema: Central to an evaluation of Hammer Films is the status of Terence Fisher … There are, as Pirie points out, links with the Gothic tradition in that the films are ‘peopled with key literary characters of another epoch …’ [(Pirie 1973: 166)]. But the relevance of such figures to the audiences of the twentieth century … is not altogether apparent, since the films eschew allegory and lack any social-political scheme of analysis … Ultimately … the weakness lies less in the Hammer formulas than in the personality of Fisher as revealed in his work. He is not an ardent Romantic fascinated by the dark recesses of the human soul, but a plodding and conventional director … Fisher … remains inexorably on the most pedestrian level of British commercial film making … the characters he presents so flatly are no more than stereotypes of popular fiction, depicted without psychological depth or complexity. (Armes 1978: 251–2)

The question posed, somewhat rhetorically, by Armes – ‘what may be the relevance of such figures to a contemporary audience?’ – is indeed worth asking for real, and it is to attend to that question that the pages that follow are devoted. For now, it is worth noting here that the criteria on the basis of which Armes proceeded to suppress the link between Fisher’s films and their historical context were a dismissal of ‘commercial film making’ as an essentially mechanistic set of operations, a Romantic idea of the author (Fisher’s ‘personality’) and the equation of ‘good cinema’ with narrative strategies derived from nineteenth-century European Realism (e.g. fully rounded characters). Our understanding of what falls within the category of ‘popular cinema’ has changed since Movie began to champion Hollywood

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films, and so have our attitudes towards films such as Terence Fisher’s, which we now call popular cinema. We may no longer dismiss such films; at least that is not the stated intention of most film historians today. And yet, since the publication of Armes’ A Critical History of British Cinema not much has changed in the way we discuss what we now call popular films: Romantic ideas of the author, nineteenth-century Realism and an undertheorised approach to the film industry’s complex relation to a country’s socio-economic fabric continue to block our understanding of popular films’ significance for the culture that produced them. James Curran and Vincent Porter’s British Cinema History, first published in 1983 and used for the first university courses in film studies, also devoted half a chapter to Hammer Films. But it took another twenty years for an academic publisher, Manchester University Press, to issue Peter Hutching’s Hammer and Beyond: The British Horror Film (1993). Two years earlier Sheffield Hallam University’s Centre for Popular Culture had published Tom Ryall’s British Popular Cinema, which was followed, in 1992, by Richard Dyer and Ginette Vincendeau’s Popular European Cinema, a Routledge publication based on a conference organised by its editors at the University of Warwick in 1989. Other academic publishers followed suit, gradually, with similarly themed volumes and collections,2 including Manchester University Press’ Inside Popular Film series, inaugurated in 1995 with Joanne Hollows and Marc Jancovich’s Approaches to Popular Film, and Eric Schaefer’s Bold! Daring! Shocking! True! A History of Exploitation Films, 1919–1959 (1999). Simultaneously, from the mid1990s British universities began to offer modules on popular genres, while academic conferences that took their cue from the University of Warwick’s 1989 conference started to proliferate. This sketchy outline of film historians’ position vis-à-vis Terence Fisher’s work and, more generally, popular films is not intended to offer a comprehensive account of the filmmaker’s nor commercial genres’ vicissitudes in relation to Britain’s national cinema canon. My point, rather, is that popular cinema’s acquisition (or not) of legitimacy has never been a linear process. Positions remained, for a long time, divided, and, to a lesser extent, continue to be so at the time of writing. And yet, while opponents to the study of popular genres are far from defeated, in 2015 it is clear that, during the last fifteen years, the tide has changed. Indeed, what are today customarily referred to as popular films have always been the object of study, but I am not concerned here with the immense body of non-academic writing and other activities on popular cinema – from such magazines as the French Midi-Minuit Fantastique and fanzines to film festival retrospectives and

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cinema websites. Rather, this book began as an attempt to identify the factors that have determined what may be a revealing shift within the canon of film studies. Why have European and North American academics begun to pay attention to films that, until the late 1980s, were beyond the pale of any educational institution? It is one of the contentions of this book that the changed attitude of Anglo-Saxon academia towards popular cinema is the symptom of a new relation between the (any) state (and the institutions it legitimates, including universities) and a specific cluster of interests within the broader, global economy. Canons change all the time. As Peter Wollen has written, ‘in general, only during periods of challenge is the canon actually made explicit’, but ‘the implicit canon is in constant flux’ (Wollen 2002: 218). The reasons for the fluctuations that have led to the recent rediscovery of popular films are not to be found within the institutions that legitimate (or not) these films’ inclusion in the film studies’ canon. Pressures to publish and, in that way, to buttress one’s position within academia may lead a new generation of film theorists and historians to explore and document academically uncharted terrain, but it does not explain the choice of material selected for the exercise. Film studies, like other institutions, merely registers and lends legitimacy (or not) to interests that are external to it. It is on these external pressures that my investigation focuses. It is an approach that has required me to adopt a longer-term historical perspective than I had at first envisaged and, in the process, to turn my original question around: why were certain genres and films – now defined ‘popular’ – excluded from the academic canon of film studies until the end of the 1990s? What factors enabled film historians until then legitimately to claim that films such as Terence Fisher’s, in spite or even because of their centrality to national culture, had no relevance for contemporary society? Throughout this book I refer to this large cluster of films as ‘unstable genres’, not because their generic features change (generic features always do), but because of the films’ unstable position within the canon. In spite of their recuperation since the mid-1990s, films belonging to genres such as horror continue to be studied separately: we have books and courses on specific national cinemas, and we have books and courses on popular film. Given that, as an industrial cultural form, any kind of cinema is, by definition, popular, it may be argued that, when applied to some films (e.g. horror movies) and not others (e.g. melodramas), the term popular has the function of sustaining that separation. The films of, say, Federico Fellini and Mario Bava are never studied as part of the same national cinema. The former can be found in any account of Italian cinema, the latter only in

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edited collections on the popular genres of a variety of countries, even if, as Italy’s 1960 biggest box office hit, Fellini’s La dolce vita / The Sweet Life must have been somehow more popular than Bava’s La maschera del demonio / Revenge of the Vampires / Black Sunday (1960). Hammer films, which have been included in accounts of British cinema more often than other unstable genres, and, to a lesser extent, the Italian western, which I discuss briefly in Chapter 1, are possibly the only exceptions among European and North American post-war cinemas. But as the contrasting positions of film critics and historians reproduced above show, even Hammer productions began to acquire some degree of (contested) legitimacy within and as part of British cinema only from the second half of the 1980s. Outside Europe and the United States this film historiographic two-tier sectorialisation does not necessarily apply: accounts of Mexican, Japanese or Filipino national cinemas regularly also feature films the generic categories of which would, in other national cinemas, be associated with popular (exploitation, cult, etc.) cinema. It follows that if we adopt a less parochial perspective, a further reformulation of my original question is in order: what are the factors that have led film historians to include horror, soft porn, wrestling and similarly exploitative, cheaply produced genres as part of some national cinemas and to exclude the same type of film from the accounts of the cinema in other countries? The scope of this book is, for lack of a better term, global. I advance an argument that brings into comparative perspective one single dynamic  – the relation between shifting economic interests, state policies and film historiography – as it plays out in different national cinemas. I am not in a position, nor do I intend, to offer an anthological approach that assesses the situation in each major film-producing country. In what follows I examine in detail three cases across three continents (Italy, Mexico and India) and briefly extend my argument to two others (Spain and Japan) in the closing chapter. What emerges is a pattern, a changing set of relations between institutions, interests and pressures that, taking into account historical particularities, can explain the priorities at work in the film historiographies of other national cinemas – priorities that determine film historians’ inclusion, or not, of popular genres into the national canon. Chapter 1 situates what most anthologies nowadays call popular films within a specific period – from the mid-1950s to the late 1970s – and offers a brief historical overview of the social changes that marked those years. Above all, Chapter 1 covers at some length the economic forces that underpinned the social and ideological climate of this period and indicates how they manifested themselves in the film industry. I outline a global

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e­ conomic pattern, even if the focus, at least in this first chapter, may appear to be the United States. This is partly because in these years (and after) it was the US economy and its performance that dictated, directly or indirectly, the economic trajectory of other countries, and partly because how precisely that global economic pattern materialised in other regions of the world is covered in detail in Chapters 2, 3 and 4. My main argument is: (1) that it was a particular mode of capital, what I call ‘radical capital’, that produced popular films, and (2) that their visibility or not within a nation’s account of its cinema depends on the state’s relation to (its legitimation or not of) that mode of surplus accumulation at a particular point in time. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 trace the differing nature of that state–capital relation in Italy, Mexico and India, and how this impacted both on the production of giallo (thrillers) and horror films in these countries and, importantly, on these films’ position within Italy, Mexico and India’s accounts of their national cinemas. This leads me to the issue of critical positions that I highlighted at the opening of this Introduction. Positions vis-à-vis unstable genres such as horror cinema have tended to be examined through the lenses of notions of morality and censorship. I take critics’ arguments for and against censorship, nudity, morality and such like to be the symptoms of a more fundamental set of factors. At one level there is the state and its institutions’ relation to radical capital. This relation (any relation between the state and economic blocs) defines the limits within which filmmakers operate, though, importantly, not precisely how filmmakers move within those limits. At another level, there is the fact that critical positions vis-à-vis how filmmakers move within the limits defined by the state must be informed by film theorists and historians’ awareness (or not) of that state–capital relation – and thus by film theorists and historians’ imbrication in, or critical distance from, the forces that conduct it. At the end of Chapters 2, 3 and 4 I therefore consider the conditions and pressures that shaped contemporary film historians’ attitudes towards unstable genres, as well as their positions within, and their attitudes vis-à-vis, those circumstances. Lastly, Chapters 2, 3 and 4 each present a differently specific historiographic dynamic and, with it, a different set of issues. The situation in Italy, examined in Chapter 2, is representative of much of the rest of Europe and the United States until the mid-1970s, where popular films formed a significant share of the industry’s produce but where, owing to a particular and enduring coalition of forces, they were excluded, until the end of the 1990s, from academic accounts of national cinema. Mexico, discussed in Chapter 3, presents a diametrically opposite position. There genres associated, in Europe and in the United States, with exploitation

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circuits and marginal operators, have traditionally been considered central elements of Mexican national cinema. Chapter 4, on India, reveals a pattern somewhat similar to Italy, where, however, the order of determination  – between political and socio-economic forces on the one hand, and film production and aesthetics on the other – raises the issue of asyncronicity, and, with it, questions about the relative autonomy of aesthetics. Although no state can determine how a filmmaker operates within the limits it sets, to the extent that such limits do operate they must somehow leave marks on the filmmaker’s work. It follows that we should be able to see such limits at work in the body of the films (in the film-texts), and if not the limits as such, certainly their effects. The exclusion of a film from the canon of the national cinema of which it is inevitably part, or the dismissal of whole clusters of films on the basis that their ‘relevance’ to contemporary audiences ‘is not altogether apparent’ (Armes 1978: 251–2), suggests that the critic who performs the exclusion is either not aware of the limits imposed (and the possibilities afforded) by the films’ social, political and economic context, or that he or she is not capable of reading, in the film-texts, their effects, or both. In Chapters 2, 3 and 4 I focus on a small sample of films. My analysis of these films is intended to show that the obtaining economic and political pressures can be more clearly identified than has customarily been the case in books on cinema, and that, when identified, they can be brought to bear on the analysis of the films. In other words, I intend to show that it becomes possible to see such pressures at work in the film-texts, not necessarily directly, as so and so diegetically staged pressures, but as narrative strategies, as a menu of aesthetic choices and unintended effects. To ascribe such choices and effects to an auteur or, indeed, to a filmmaker as metteur en scène, is simply to postpone the question. There is no need here to expand on Roland Barthes’ well-known essay on the ‘death of the author’ to remind ourselves that a text is ‘a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash’, ‘a tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture’ (Barthes 1977: 146). Simplistic readings of Barthes’ essay have had a tendency of producing the kind of historiographic relativism the only benefit of which is to further the career of the (self-appointed or institutionally sanctioned) critic. But Barthes’ argument stands, with the added cautionary clarification that the ‘centres of culture’ out of which the material to make a film is drawn are always many and multi-dimensional, but not infinite and certainly not relative. Not everything goes. Not to dismiss a film is to ask, with Michel Foucault:

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What are the modes of existence of this discourse? Where has it been used, how can it circulate, and who can appropriate it for himself? What are the places in it where there is room for possible subjects? Who can assume these various subject-functions? And behind all these questions, we would hear hardly anything but the stirring of an indifference: ‘What difference does it make who is speaking?’ (Foucault 1988: 210)

It seems to me that a new generation of film historians has rejected the indifference shown by historians such as Roy Armes as far back as 1978. It has returned to the questions first posed to popular cinema by Paul Willemen, Claire Johnston, Raymond Durgnat and David Pirie, among others, and decided that it does indeed matter ‘who is speaking’. At which point the question arises: how, precisely, do we qualify that speaking voice? In the chapters that follow I have sought to examine the modes of existence of a small cluster of giallo and horror films by pulling into my analysis a terrain that is as multi-dimensional as the limited resources and the space at my disposal allowed. Many of the factors I have taken into consideration do not belong to the domain of cinema or, indeed, of cultural production because I do not believe that movies exist in isolation. I have also explicitly adopted an order of determination that may appear, to some, as a little too close to economism. But to recognise the importance, even the primary importance, of socio-economic factors is not to say that aesthetics ‘reflect’ and/or are reducible to economic pressures. Aesthetics and economics are two different dimensions of existence; they will never be collapsible. Nor, however, are they fully autonomous: economics depends on language and cultural codes as much as films depend on industrial and financial circumstances. The question, rather, is: how do these two areas of experience communicate? Partly to pre-empt simplistic accusation of economic determinism, in Chapter 1 I outline the analytical frame that sustains theoretically the connections I draw in Chapters 2, 3 and 4 between the various domains of existence I pull into the equation: aesthetics, socio-economics, politics and so forth. I do not offer a comprehensive and detailed formulation of that analytical framework because it can be found in an essay originally written by Paul Willemen (2010). I have confined myself to showing that the frame he proposed in that essay can be put to productive ends in order to pursue this line of inquiry: which socio-economic dynamics precisely may be seen to be at work in any one film? And how do those dynamics present or express themselves as particular narrative or aesthetic orchestrations? It is a line of inquiry that may also enable us to understand why we have come to believe, rightly in my opinion, that films made in the 1960s and ignored by most since are still capable of speaking to us today.

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The increased visibility of popular cinema within academia needs to be traced with greater precision than has so far been done, if only because what makes us responsive, today, to 1960s popular films may well be the current dominance of the economic interests that, from the mid-1970s, have proceeded to transform popular films’ strategies and address from a marginal to a centre-ground modus operandi. Film historiography cannot afford to allow the industry to dictate historians’ priorities. As Michael McKeon has observed, ‘modern knowledge is defined precisely by its explanatory ambition to separate itself from its object of knowledge sufficiently to fulfil the epistemological demand that what is known must be divided from the process by which it is known’ (McKeon 2007: xix). The reappearance of popular cinema within the canon of film studies at this precise conjuncture does not require a simple judgement ‘for’ or ‘against’. It requires, rather, critical distance and an adequate historical explanation.

1 The time of popular cinema

For 80 per cent of humanity the Middle Ages ended suddenly in the 1950s; or perhaps better still, they were felt to end in the 1960s. (Hobsbawm 1995: 288)

An important characteristic of academic publications on popular cinema is that, by and large, they discuss films made between the late 1950s and the early 1970s. Occasionally, earlier pre-World War Two films are considered,1 but this does not contradict the fact that writing on popular cinema tends to cover the period from the end of the Korean War (1950–3) and the debacles of 1956 (Hungary, Suez, Aden) to the economic crisis of 1973. There are good reasons why these years have been the focus of anthologies on popular cinema. On the one hand, the cut-off date is connected with the mainstreaming in the mid-1970s, within North American cinema, of the generic features and other strategies associated with exploitation cinema (Cook 2000). Hollywood’s adoption of exploitation cinema’s generic menus and modes of distribution from Steven Spielberg’s Jaws (1975) onwards makes it difficult for cinema scholars to talk of films made from the second half of the 1970s and after that exploit the sales points associated with popular cinema as ‘popular’. I shall return to this point below. On the other hand, the developments that David Cook, among others, describes as having taken place in Hollywood from the mid-1970s onwards were part of a broader and longer constellation – a period that coincides with the installation of US hegemony after World War Two, not only in a Europe that was then in the process of reconstructing and was caught in the Cold War, but also in parts of Central America and in Japan. It is worth giving some consideration to particular features of this period. In the second half of the 1950s and in the 1960s, US hegemony was resisted for a variety of reasons by Cuba and other Latin American ­countries,

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as well by some Asian nations – for instance, the troubles around the Japanese government’s renewal of the security treaty with the United States in 1952 and, of course, the escalation of the war in Vietnam. The Cold War is a fundamental context for this period, for political and economic reasons.2 The direct rivalry between the United States and the USSR impacted greatly on the independence struggles in Africa, as well as on events such as the Cuban Missile Crisis. More importantly, the conduct of the Cold War cost the US treasury and those of its European allies high social costs in the form of aid, the development of high-tech weaponry and surveillance strategy, and propaganda. The Marshall Plan is a case in point: as the exemplary instance of Italy showed, it was intended to secure Western Europe for (Conservative, Liberal or Christian Democratic) capitalism in spite of the enormous prestige gained by the political left and the communist parties during World War Two. The Cold War also had significant repercussions on the economies of European and Asian nations. It was the Korean War, the first significant armed conflict of the Cold War, and the wave of speculative buying which it incited, that allowed Germany and Japan to initiate the first phase of economic booms. During the 1950s Germany and Japan emerged as the largest exporters of manufactured goods, primarily at the expense of (and into) the United States, which was at the time caught up in large-scale military spending (Brenner 1998). From the 1960s, as the effects of the Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Europe began to be felt, other European nations followed suit, France and Italy especially. As Eric Hobsbawm put it, the reconstruction of Europe and of Japan with US aid brought about the ‘death of the peasantry’. On the eve of World War Two Britain and Belgium were the only countries in the world where agriculture and fisheries employed less than 20 per cent of the population. Even in the greatest industrial economies, the United States and Germany, the agricultural population still amounted to about 25 per cent. In the most backward European nations, four out of every five inhabitants worked on the land. By the early 1980s no country west of the Iron Curtain, except the Irish Republic, had more than 10 per cent of its population engaged in farming (Hobsbawm 1995: 289–91).3 This shift coincided with hugely increased levels of urbanisation and industrialisation. The latter meant that a much greater share of the world’s working population than before World War Two worked fixed hours and had become entitled, as a result, to leisure time. From the mid-1950s the growth of disposable income for this expanding section of the world’s population brought about a new wave of industrialised culture,4 especially in fashion, in the music industry and in the realm of private transport (scooters, cars, etc.). Further, with the demise of the

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peasantry came the rise of occupations that required secondary and higher education. Before World War Two the combined population of Germany, France and Britain (150 million) contained no more than 150,000 university students (0.1 per cent). By the 1980s students counted in millions across France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Spain and the USSR, not to mention Brazil, India, Mexico, the Philippines and, of course, the United States (Hobsbawm 1995: 295–6). As Hobsbawm recalls, ‘all this was not merely new, but quite sudden … In fact, where families had the choice and the chance, they rushed their children into higher education, because it was by far the best way of winning them a better income, but, above all, higher social status’ (Hobsbawm 1995: 296). Full industrial employment and a consumer society aimed at a genuine mass market placed most of the working class in northern Europe well above the threshold below which their fathers had lived, when income was spent on basic necessities. Education and greater disposable income changed their horizon and expectations, and this, in turn, required new modalities of social regulation. Before World War Two certainly and, to a large degree, until the early 1960s, religion and religious organisations played a central role in attitudes towards, and regulation of, the socially permissible. As Stuart Hall has written, some of the offences decriminalised by the British legislation of consent – that is, legislation affecting the spheres of sexual and social conduct, and freedom of expression – ‘had, at one time, been ecclesiastical offences, before they were secular ones … Long after their full appropriation into the framework of the secular law, religion continued to exercise a critical influence in giving these offences, proscribed by law, a moral content and gloss’ (Hall 1980: 4). But if in the articulation of moral ideologies and in the regulation of moral practice the force of religion remained ‘vital and continuing’ well into the 1960s, in that decade ‘the more fundamentalist sects, with their hold over the moral ideologies of sections of the “respectable” working class and the old petty bourgeoisie … increasingly stood with their backs to the defences’ (Hall 1980: 6). What took hold, instead, was ‘a “double taxonomy” in the field of moral regulation’ whereby ‘increased regulation by the state and greater intervention in the field of moral conduct’ went hand in hand with the exemption of other areas of conduct from ‘legal regulation – and, so to speak, from the gaze of public morality’. Such areas ‘shifted to a different domain, to be regulated by a different modality of control: that of the freely contracting private individuals’ (Hall 1980: 17–18): The field of moral conduct was not dismantled or overthrown, but it was dislocated, rearranged: it received a new inflection. The pivot of this re-articulation

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was the public–private distinction. Around this couple, new modalities of regulation were made effective; a new balance was fixed between them. On the one hand lies the modality of ‘public morality’, which ‘keeps society clean’: a discourse whose key interpellation is the ‘man on the Clapham omnibus’ … On the other hand lies the modality of ‘private morality’, whose key interpellative structure is ‘economic man’, whose practical foundations rest on the exchange in private between equivalences. This modality is more individual – possessively individualist – and more ‘modern’. It is modern bourgeois man, market man. (Hall 1980: 19–20)

It is at this point that cinema emerged in Britain (and a few other European nations) as a terrain for debates about culture and politics, certainly, but above all as a crucial site of contestation, ‘of struggle where the boundaries and forms of these new control mechanisms were being fought for’ (Willemen 1983). The kind of cinema that most anthologies nowadays call popular cinema addressed not simply the 1960s but, more precisely, Hall’s ‘modern bourgeois man, market man’. This is not to say that, when films built on sales points such as nudity began to be made, such an addressee was already in place out there. The claim that so-called popular cinema – unstable genres such as mystery, horror and nudies – began to be made and circulated widely because this was the kind of film ‘that people wanted’ is not only very difficult to substantiate – the problem with such a claim is that it does no more than postpone the question: why did audiences begin to want to see these films? In the 1970s film historians brought this question to bear on their discussions and revaluations of some genres – for instance, the group associated at the time with the journal Screen and their engagement with (essentially Hollywood) melodrama. Some, such as Willemen and Johnston, also tried with Hammer films, but, as we have seen, this was a highly contested position. What matters here, and all that can be ascertained, is that horror and other cheaply produced genre films were made because they generated a profit, often a small one, but a profit all the same.5 The investment in, and the profit generated by, this kind of film was small because, until the mid-1950s, this was considered a limited market. Hall’s reference to ‘modern bourgeois man, market man’ as an ‘interpellative structure’ is useful because it implies that, with their address, horror and similar cheaply produced films mediated the ideological environment conducive to the changes in social relations necessary for sections of the ‘respectable working class and the old petty bourgeoisie’ to claim entitlement to areas of experience until then under the scrutiny of legal regulation and public morality. Risqué material was of course not a novelty, in cinema or in any other cultural practice. The 1940s ‘problem

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films’ and ­melodramas of Gainsborough Pictures are exemplary instances here. It is not simply that, for all their (1940s) sexiness, in most of them good ultimately triumphs over evil. Rather, although very successful at the box office, films such as The Wicked Lady (Lesley Arliss, 1945) were highly disliked by the critics, who regarded them as ‘inferior films … undeserving of the popular success they have won’ (Powell 1947). British producer and filmmaker Herbert Wilcox even called on producers to make ‘what one might call open pictures, unclouded pictures. We do not want sadism, abnormality and psychoanalysis. That sort of thing is no good for the average audience – they do not understand it and in most cases do not want to understand it’ (quoted in Aspinall and Murphy 1983: 6, 74). What was new from the mid-1950s was that larger sections of the population than before – Wilcox’s ‘average audience’ – came to be deemed entitled to be exposed to representations of situations that, until the end of World War Two, were considered safe only in the hands of the ‘cultured classes’.6 Films built on ingredients likely to challenge public morality have been made throughout the history of cinema. For instance, a wave of such films, produced by French company Éclair, swept the US market in the mid1910s. At the time, sectors within public opinion reacted against it, eventually leading to the ousting of Éclair and other foreign producers from the US market. But, as Richard Abel has shown (1999, 2004), the real trigger to these events was not public opinion. There was a concerted effort within the film industry to mobilise the more fundamentalist sectors of US civil society in order to legitimate ideologically the implementation of a code of industrial practice, the intended effect of which was the ousting of non-US companies from the domestic market and the securing of the US market for US product. If, as Hall correctly noted, in the early 1960s the more fundamentalist sects within public opinion ‘increasingly stood with their backs to the defences’ (Hall 1980: 6), then the question arises: to which economic pressures (interests and power blocs) precisely do we owe the change? What are the factors that made films likely to offend conservative positions a viable economic proposition? It is again Stuart Hall who points in the right direction when, in the same article quoted at length above, he argued that what was actually at stake with the 1960s reformist legislation was not a conflict between left- and rightwing positions. Rather: the crucial move in the game was to fix the limits to state intervention, to circumscribe the sphere of operation of the state: to define the state as junior partner in the state–capital alliance, and to shift the dynamic of economic and

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social life back, not to the sturdy independence of the rentier or small businessman but to the reformed impulses of big, managerialist, corporate capital. (Hall 1980: 36)

A very similar line of argument – which also refutes the customary reading of post-World War Two history in terms of a tension between the political left and the right, however conceived – was advanced by Régis Debray a year before Hall in an article that sought to trace the roots and assess the impact of May 1968: ‘Chaos’? Not at all. The most reasonable of social movements; the sad victory of productivist reason over romantic unreason … Industrialization had to be given a morality not because the poets were clamouring for a new one but because industrialization required it. The old France paid off its arrears to the new; the social, political and cultural backlog all at once. The cheque was a large one. The France of stone and rye, of the apéritif and the institute, of oui papa, oui patron, oui cherie, was ordered out of the way so that the France of software and super-markets, of news and planning, of know-how and brain-storming could show off its viability to the full, home at last. This spring cleaning felt like a liberation and, in effect, it was one … Spontaneously, the tide swamped useless barriers: the dead weight of tradition, the envy of the displaced, the comfort of routine. Look around you, in shop windows or at the television screen. The slogans, the books, the personalities and the ideas of May are ‘going very well’. (Debray 1979: 47–50)

The shift evoked above by Debray has been analysed with greater precision by David Harvey (2005) and Robert Brenner (1998, 2002). Cinema is an industry, and it is only through that level of precision that we can begin to unravel why, at some point and place, films are made that exploit particular generic features rather than others. What follows is based mainly on Harvey and Brenner’s widely accepted accounts. What emerges from both is not only the industrial constellation responsible for the proliferation of cheaply produced films exploiting guaranteed sales points such as nudity and gore, but, above all, a shift in the composition of the capitalist world’s economy. It is that shift which, I argue, was instrumental in the growing visibility of popular cinema in the film studies canon from the 1990s. The cinema from Keynesianism to neoliberalism The term ‘embedded liberalism’ is generally used to describe the economic policies that most industrialised countries adopted between the end of World War Two and 1970.7 It involved a compromise between two

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­ esirable but partially conflicting objectives. The first was to revive free d trade. Prior to World War One, international trade formed a large portion of global gross domestic product (GDP), but the classical liberal order that supported it had been damaged by war and by the Great Depression of the 1930s. The second objective was to allow national governments the freedom to provide welfare programmes and to intervene in their economies to, among other things, maintain full employment. This second objective was considered to be incompatible with a full return to the free market system as it had existed in the late nineteenth century. The resulting compromise was embodied in the Bretton Woods system, which was launched at the end of World War Two. The system was ‘liberal’ in the sense that it aimed to set up an open system of international trade in goods and services, facilitated by semi-fixed exchange rates. Yet it also aimed to ‘embed’ market forces into a framework where they could be regulated by national governments, with states able to control international capital flows by means of capital controls. New global multilateral institutions were created to support the new framework, such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. During the 1950s and 1960s embedded liberalism delivered high rates of economic growth in the advanced capitalist countries. The system set in place by the United States, which partly depended on the US being prepared to run deficits with the rest of the world and to absorb any excess production within its border, enabled other countries to expand their export markets – first Germany and Japan, then, in the 1960s, France and Italy, but also, unevenly, across Latin America and parts of South-East Asia. In the advanced capitalist countries, redistributive politics, control over the free mobility of capital, expanded public expenditures and welfare state building, active state interventions in the economy, and some degree of planning of development went hand in hand with relatively high rates of growth. A social and moral economy, often supported by a strong sense of national identity, was fostered through the activities of an interventionist state, which controlled the business cycle successfully through the application of Keynesian fiscal and monetary policies (Harvey 2005: 11–12). These were the policies that, throughout the 1950s and the early 1960s, produced the economic boom, socially and economically: the demise of the peasantry, greater industrialisation and urbanisation, disposable income and leisure time to spend it for a larger section of the world’s population, a new wave of industrialisation of culture and, within it, popular cinema.8 Hall analyses the shift towards a discourse of ‘permissiveness’ as it played itself out in England during this period of economic boom, but the newfound permissiveness in 1960s England (and other parts of Britain) was not

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an isolated phenomenon. Most of Europe, including Francoist Spain, as well as Japan, India, parts of Latin America, Africa and the Middle East also witnessed radical social and political movements. For Hollywood the 1960s was a difficult decade. From the early 1960s, mainly as a consequence of the dramatic reduction of trade barriers at the end of the 1950s, the growth of trade accelerated spectacularly and unexpectedly. US manufacturing producers suddenly found their markets, both abroad and at home, under hugely increased pressure from the lower-cost, lower-price exports first of Germany and Japan, and, by the mid-1960s, of other European countries. From the mid-1950s and throughout the 1960s, the feature film industry in the United States struggled to compete with television and with the decline of the domestic audience for theatrical films. But from the early 1960s, Hollywood also began to be forced to take into account the growing challenge of European competition. Western European productions were setting new artistic standards at one end of the market. As for the less sophisticated audiences, television eroded much of the cinema’s share at this end of the market.9 During the early part of the decade Hollywood thus made ‘a number of major miscalculations’ (Monaco 2001: 3): the enormously expensive flop Cleopatra (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1963)10 was only one instance in a strategy of very high investments across a smaller number of films that plunged the US film industry into a phase of overproduction.11 A more productive strategy, which was, however, in the 1960s not adopted across the board, was to invest in foreign, essentially European, productions – and as most countries would not allow US companies to repatriate the largest share of their revenues from co-productions, US capital was pumped back into local production. From the early 1960s European economies and, within those economies, a number of film industries, initiated a significant push to expand their market, internally and abroad. Unsurprisingly, producers sought to do so by making films built on ingredients that, for centuries, had proven to sell. Harvey and Brenner outline the forces energising that economic expansion and which, within it, orchestrated the popularising dimension of cinema’s mode of address. But if their account is anything to go by, the interests that produced that kind of cinema were, in the 1960s, still only an emerging and far from dominant block. Accordingly, and for all its alleged popularity, popular cinema remained marginal during that decade in relation to most film industries’ centre-ground. Keynesianism was the rule of the game then, also for the Nixon administration, and state intervention and regulation kept much speculative capital at bay, outside and within the US film industry. Films exploiting risqué sales points – though guaranteed

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to sell in a limited market, such as sex and horror – were made, but they were not anything with which the majors wanted to be, or were, associated with. They were ‘poverty row’ material. Films more conducive to the social reproduction of a system based on ostensibly traditional, family, national values were what the industry’s centre-ground produced. Hence the reactions to Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960) and the treatment meted out to Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960) and its director.12 It is only in the 1970s that things really started to change. By the end of the 1960s embedded liberalism began to break down. As a consequence of the downward pressure on prices, the United States had become unable to realise its investments at their previous rates of profit. Over-investment had led to over-capacity and over-production in manufacturing. Between 1969 and 1973, the process of intensifying competition that brought down profitability in the United States precipitated the collapse of the Bretton Woods system (of fixed exchange rates backed by gold reserves) and, with it, a major devaluation of the US dollar, which in turn led to a dramatic restructuring of relative costs internationally in favour of US producers. As the Deutschmark and the Japanese yen underwent major increases in value against the US dollar, soon profitability declined also for Germany and Japan. Gradually the crisis was extended to other European countries (Brenner 1998: 36) and signs of it were apparent everywhere. Unemployment and inflation both surged across the industrialised world, leading to a phase of stagflation that lasted throughout much of the 1970s. Tax revenues plunged and social expenditure soared: Keynesian policies were no longer working. With the Bretton Woods system in disarray (and finally abandoned in 1971), state boundaries became highly porous to capital flows. US dollars escaped US controls and were deposited in European banks. David Harvey outlines this critical juncture: Some alternative was called for if the crisis was to be overcome. One answer was to deepen state control and regulation of the economy through corporatist strategies … This answer was advanced by socialist and communist parties in Europe … Even in the United States, a Congress controlled by the Democratic Party legislated a huge wave of regulatory reform in the early 1970s … But the left failed to go much beyond traditional social democratic and corporatist solutions and these had by the mid-1970s proven inconsistent with the requirements of capital accumulation. The effect was to polarise debate between those ranged behind social democracy and central planning on the one hand … and the interests of all those concerned with liberating corporate and business power and re-establishing market freedoms on the other. By the mid1970s, the interests of the latter group came to the fore. (Harvey 2005: 11–13)

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From this point onwards the United States, with its markets at home and abroad under pressure from lower cost exports, redirected its economy towards the FIRE (finance, insurance and real estate) sector.13 Manufacturing did remain the foundation of the new capitalist order, but it turned global. The crisis of profitability in the United States left a lot of finance in search of more profitable investment and created an over-­ abundant liquidity, which was recycled as loan capital on apparently favourable terms to Second and Third World countries. This new regime enabled the United States to run large deficits in its balance of trade while reflating effective demand and investment, which in turn created an expanding demand for imports of those industrial products that US businesses no longer found it profitable to produce. During the following decade (mid1970s to mid-1980s), Third World regions thus increased their degree of industrialisation (relative to First World countries). Unlike in post-World War Two Europe, the economic expansion of Third World nations was financed by borrowing on the international money market. As Giovanni Arrighi, among others, has shown, the picture that emerged as a result was ‘one of a major widening of the already large income gap that fifty years [before] separated the peoples of the South from the peoples of the organic core of the capitalist world-economy’ (Arrighi 1991: 48). In almost all countries the post-World War Two settlement brought about the restraining of upper-class economic power and its greater distribution across a broader class base. By contrast, as Duménil and Lévy (2004) have demonstrated, neoliberalisation was, from the very beginning, a project to achieve the restoration of class power. What matters for the argument advanced here, is that neoliberalism gave free rein to a particular tendency within capital: the accumulation of surplus value irrespective of the long-term interests of the system. This is the trend customarily associated with the Chicago School of Economics and, more specifically, with Ronald Reagan’s economic advisor Milton Friedman, theorist of monetarism and advocate of a free market economic system with minimal state intervention. As became glaringly apparent in the late 2000s, it is also a modality that makes manifest the self-destructive tendency of capital. For Friedman’s particular brand of neoliberalism was not an entirely new discovery. Neoliberalism simply fulfilled one end of a tension that Karl Marx had identified as intrinsic to the functioning of capital as a mode of production. I return to this point shortly. If most film history books are to be believed, the post-World War Two period was characterised by tensions between the political left and right, however one conceives them. Accordingly, discussions of films falling

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within the category of popular cinema, more so than appreciations of a national cinema’s authorial canon, are steeped and, to a very large extent, trapped in tired debates as to whether a film is or is not ‘transgressive’, ‘progressive’, ‘radical’ and the like. The boundary to be transgressed is always one of permissiveness in matters of individual behaviour, and films that can be shown to go that way are taken to be ‘progressive’, challenging censorship and other forms of social regulation, even if, historically, very little has differentiated right- and left-wing positions on such matters. Such lack of clarity about these terms stems from the fact that, whether consciously or not, much film historiography has tended to proceed on the basis of a Cold War vision of post-World War Two history that has long been recognised as inadequate. David Harvey and Robert Brenner’s accounts (and not only theirs) of the dynamics that have shaped the second half of the twentieth century present an entirely different configuration. The main forces at work  – the ones that shaped not only the economy and cinema of most countries, but also the writing of those cinemas’ history – were not, as it is habitually maintained, a conservative or capitalist bloc striving to pull social relations back to pre-war standards versus a progressive or socialist bloc seeking to promote degrees of social liberalisation. Rather, the socioeconomic dynamics that produced the social environment for (the ‘interpellative structure’ of) popular cinema were the result of two contradictory tendencies within capital itself. On the one hand, there are the interests of capitalists as a class, which, represented by the state, also involve promoting measures that although not immediately conducive to capital accumulation are aimed at guaranteeing the reproduction of the social conditions for capital’s expansion, including the reproduction of a manageable labour force with some disposable income. On the other hand, there are the interests of individual capitalists, that is to say, the drive to generate surplus value irrespective of the longer term need to reproduce the ideal conditions for the reproduction of a system in which capital can thrive (Harvey 1999: 34, 94–155). The shorthand terms that I will use in this book to refer to the two poles of this internal contradiction are, respectively, ‘social reproduction capital’ and ‘radical capital’. It is the latter tendency – radical capital – that produced late 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s popular cinema. The emergence of radical capital in those years demanded important changes and remodulations in the boundary between – and in places even the ex novo creation of – the private and the public spheres. Radical capital and the marginal cinema that, among other things, it produced, sustained the gradual disruption of existing social relations, but it did not effect the shift, described by Brenner and Arrighi,

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from an industrial to a predominantly financial mode of capital accumulation, in the United States first and, shortly after, elsewhere. As a marginal force, in the 1950s and 1960s radical capital simply pushed to create the conditions for that shift. It did so with a measure of success that  – with radical capital then lacking legitimisation in a capitalist world that was married to Keynesianism – was highly inconsistent and short-lived. Blocs concerned with the long-term reproduction of the then dominant modes of surplus accumulation – essentially US, European and Japanese industrial capital – did not favour, and had the power to regulate against, individual entrepreneurs’ over-speculative initiatives. It is only when it became glaringly apparent that industrial capital’s existing modes of operation in these regions were no longer capable of generating the same or higher rates of return that legitimisation was granted to other, more radically speculative modes of surplus accumulation. During Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher’s administrations a tendency that had been kept to the margins until the early 1970s consolidated its position on the world’s stage. By the mid-1970s speculative financial capital, the discourse of monetarism and, eventually, neoconservatism (both of which legitimated finance capital as a dominant force within the US economy) made themselves felt also in the cinema. The restructuring of the US film industry that followed the ‘Paramount decrees’ (1948) had brought higher levels of risk into production and, by the end of the 1960s, an end to the steady, orderly pursuit of profits that had characterised the high studio era. Instead, and: increasingly, the profitability of a studio came to rest on the success of a single film … Between 1969 and 1980, profits for the most successful motion pictures rose from the hundreds of thousands to the hundreds of millions. Veteran industry leadership [was] replaced by a melange of agents, lawyers, bankers, and business executives who saw filmmaking primarily as an investment strategy, not unlike commodities trading, which combined the risks of high-stakes speculation with a virtually limitless potential for corporate tax-sheltering. The shift from production to finance and distribution had occurred gradually in the wake of the Consent decrees, but it was accelerated to the point of near completion during the 1970s. Formerly, banks and other lending institutions had negotiated revolving credit agreements with the studios, leaving the companies free to allocate the funds themselves, but in 1971 banks began to extend loans on a picture-by-picture basis, with the films themselves as collateral. (Cook 2006: 164–5)

From this moment onwards, distribution and exhibition required not only hugely increased marketing (with merchandise) budgets, but also blanket

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release for all films to recoup the larger investment as quickly as possible. The strategies pioneered, in the previous decades and at the margins, by exploitation cinema met all of that, bar the size of the investment. As the strategies of exploitation cinema came to be adopted by the industry’s centre-ground, popular cinema gradually ceased to exist. There was, by the 1990s, no more exploitation cinema because that is what the mainstream today does best. Michael Denning has argued that the period immediately following the end of Reagan and Thatcher’s administrations (1989 and 1990 respectively) – a period which, in Britain, was characterised by debates on postmodernism and a particular turn towards cultural studies – was marked, in the United States, by a neoconservative ideological attack on the university, and ‘tenured radicals’ within it, which gave way to a fiscal attack. In this context: ‘political correctness’, ‘multiculturalism’, university speech codes, and the canon were hotly debated in newspaper and magazines across the country … the slogan of the canon encompassed two different issues. On the one hand, within the professional disciplines, debates were joined over the place of teaching and scholarship which rejected the usual standards of appropriate subjects of study. Thus, in literature and the arts, one found a revaluation of women artists, black and ethnic artists, and the arts and culture of non-Western societies, as well as of the popular or mass-produced arts. In historical scholarship, this meant a turn towards the various new social histories, studying people and aspects of daily life that had traditionally seemed outside history. On the other hand, the debate over the canon was also a debate over the forms of general education, a debate over whether a liberal arts education need have some core, some common ground, and a debate over what that common ground might be: the leading public controversies were over revisions to the various ‘great books’ courses, which symbolized a common heritage. (Denning 2004: 121, 124)

The first academic anthologies on popular cinema began to appear around this time, in the early to mid-1990s, sustained also by the (by then ubiquitous) production and distribution of VHSs and, eventually, DVDs.14 During this and the following decade, they responded to concerns over the value and legitimacy of a liberal education oriented towards the radical ideals of 1960s and 1970s intellectuals by promoting the study of noncanonic films.15 But the prospect of being co-opted by an industry now fully organised around modalities of distribution and exhibitions that, in the past, had been used exclusively by exploitation cinema, has not been explicitly and critically confronted.

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Popular cinema and the national Given the economic and historic importance of this exploitative and, today, mainstream sector of many film industries, the first question that needs answering is: why have films made between the late 1950s and early 1970s that were built on ingredients proven to sell such as sex and gore been excluded from accounts of most national cinemas until the mid- to late 1990s? Anthologies on popular cinema have tended to assume that this has been caused by the salaciousness of many of the films considered under this rubric. The fact is that in the 1960s representations of sexuality were not the exclusive province of marginal, cheaply produced and quickly circulated films. As Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (2008) noted, ‘sex-as-politics’ was an important aspect of the various new waves and new cinemas that emerged at this time – that is, of movements that are regularly taken to constitute defining moments of national cinemas. But ‘sexploitation’ preceded the new wave of ‘sex-as-politics’. A paradigmatic instance in Britain would be the magazine Tit-Bits, which came to be associated with pirate radio, rock ’n’ roll and youth culture, as well as with increased nudity and salaciousness. The magazine’s circulation peaked in 1955, at 1.15 million (Cameron, Fishlock and Cottrell 1984). Another example is Hammer’s horror cinema, in which the semi-respectable tradition of the gothic novel was used to rehearse the discrepancies between a then new technology-based rationalism and the more ethereal values of individuation, the legitimacy of the pursuit of one’s desires in the face of authority and of putting one’s desires above the requirements of social reproduction. It is my contention that films built around ingredients proven to sell, like Hammer or Italian gothic horror movies, have been excluded from accounts of national cinema until the late 1990s, or at any rate from many national cinemas’ canon, not because of what they showed – be it sexuality, gore or something else – but because of what they have been deemed not to show. In other words, as the well-known trial against Penguin Books for the publication, in 1960, of D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover also proved,16 the issue is not sexual or otherwise morally challenging content as such, but the fact that, with these films, that kind of content was allowed to circulate among a section of the population that, well into the 1960s, was deemed not to be able to ‘protect’ itself from such content’s ‘negative influence’, with ostensibly socially harmful effects. Images challenging the socially permissible were not an issue in, so to speak, non-popular films (in the various new waves and new cinemas) because these films were taken to be addressing a cultured audience. Accordingly, in these films representations of sexuality were

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one among other ingredients of an address that claimed, and was seen, to speak to the nation – an address sensitive to the need to mediate the social conditions necessary for society to sustain itself, and thus for the ideological legitimisation of those (or redefined) conditions. By contrast, unstable genres such as horror films, cheap thrillers and eventually nudies were not, for the most part, regarded as sustaining a national address. Built largely, even if not exclusively, around ingredients proven to sell, such genres rarely paid lip service to social reproduction, let alone to the needs of the nation. This is not to say that what is and is not socially permissible was no concern in these films. It was, but the films’ capacity to generate a profit depended entirely on straddling that boundary and stretching it, sometimes tipping the balance over it, sometimes retreating to more acceptable ground, if only to avoid troubles with the censors. By definition, the only consideration at work in so-called popular films was to make a profit. While by far the largest majority of films circulating at any point in time in any film industry shares that consideration, late 1950s and 1960s popular films could afford to be driven by it more radically than other productions because, occupying a marginal position within the industry, popular films had very little to lose. In the 1960s, that marginal sector of the market revealed a large potential for growth, for higher and faster rates of return, domestically and internationally, than it ever had before World War Two.17 Popular cinema targeted an expanding section of the population, staging horizons previously not available to it. It was not, however, by definition, a progressive cinema. Unstable genres in the 1960s were as transgressive as cult cinema fans would have them be, but purely because transgressing the boundary of what is and is not permissible always sells. Throughout the book I shall refer to the cluster of interests that generated them, as commodities and as artefacts, as radical capital – not because the films in themselves were necessarily radical in the sense of progressive, but because these were productions driven exclusively by short-term profit considerations, and thus radical in the sense of extreme or fundamental in their modus operandi. As is shown by Corman’s The Wasp Woman (1959), among many other such films, so long as returns covered the initial investment and a bit on top, anything went, irrespective of the long-term interests of the parties involved (producer, distributor, exhibitor) and of the film industry as a whole, let alone of civil society. This is not to say that popular films actually failed to say something about the place and time they addressed. How could they – how can any film – not do so? In painting, for example, consider the difference between Jean

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Auguste Dominique Ingres’ Reclining Venus (1822) and Édouard Manet’s Olympia (1863). The first painting situated itself within a classical tradition and presented its subject – a naked female figure – within a mythological framework, a symbol of power and aesthetic perfection. The second painting rejected the mythological veneer, presented its subject – also a naked woman (the painter and famous model Victorine Meurent) – for what she was, and caused a scandal as a result. Nineteenth-century critics read Ingres’ painting as an allegory of, among other things, the French nation (its grandeur, beauty and dominant position in the world). Not so Manet’s. Ingres’ painting made explicit an allegorical relation between the painting and its historical context; Manet’s did (or could) not. (Had Manet chosen to present Olympia, a prostitute, explicitly as an allegory of the nation, his painting would have caused an even bigger scandal.) Today, however, we rightly view both paintings as saying something about nineteenth-century France, whether the painters intended it or not. National film historians’ attitudes towards unstable genres is not unlike nineteenth-century critics’ attitudes towards Manet’s Olympia. Horror films, cheap thrillers, nudies and the like have been excluded from the histories of their respective national cinemas because, unlike the work of, say, Roberto Rossellini (Italy), Emilio Fernandez (Mexico) and Raj Kapoor (India), they have been deemed not to be saying much, if anything, about the national situation in their countries – about the there and then of their circulation in the public sphere. The incapacity of film historians to analyse with some accuracy the functioning of the national address in unstable genres suggests that the problem is twofold. First, there is the issue of what, as film historians, we take to be the object of a national address – to use Roman Jakobson’s terminology, what we take to be the context addressed by the film’s referential function (Jakobson 1987a: 66). What is at issue here is our understanding of post-World War Two history. For what is striking about most histories of national cinema is the discrepancy between the accounts they supply of a cinema’s historical context and history books’ accounts of the socio-dynamics that have shaped the second half of the twentieth century. My summary of the histories proposed by Harvey and Brenner above is intended to set the general background to more precise delineations of popular cinema’s historical context addressed in Chapters 2, 3 and 4, where I endeavour to show how the set of tensions analysed by Brenner manifested themselves in Italy, Mexico and India, producing specific instances of unstable genres, and, simultaneously, diverse historiographic attitudes towards the same, enabling those genres to occupy profoundly different positions within their national cinemas.

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Second, there is the issue of how to read historical dynamics in films beyond the allegorical model. That is to say, the question of how to trace socio-economic pressures not as factors outside the text, reflected by or influencing it, but as the very pressures at work in the film-text – as the interests, power blocs, forces and temporalities that ascribe meaning to, and orchestrate the narrative strategies available to, a film. If any film is symptomatic of the national culture that produced it and which, as a film, it constitutes, what does the analytical framework look like that may enable us to examine how precisely the film does so? A note on methodology The assumption that contemporary, local issues can be seen to be addressed somehow in films rests on the highly problematic tenet that films reflect, stage or at any rate respond to historical reality more or less like for like. As Paul Willemen has argued, ‘there is no need to embark on a critique of reflection theory as the assumed direct mirroring of text and context has already been decisively discredited decades ago by the Russian and Czech formalists’. What does need to be challenged is ‘the notion that representation involves a substitutive relationship in which one thing stands for another’ (Willemen 2010: 255). Filmic signs, like any other sign, have an iconic, a symbolic and an indexical dimension. As classified by C. S. Peirce, an icon is a sign that represents its object by its similarity to it. A symbol corresponds to Ferdinand de Saussure’s arbitrary sign, where Peirce, like de Saussure, speaks of a contract whereby the symbol is collectively understood to represent the object. An index is a sign by virtue of an existential bond between the sign and its object, where the index retains within itself traces of the physical, existential connection between sign and reality.18 It is important to note here that Peirce did not consider these three dimensions of a sign as mutually exclusive; on the contrary, all three modes are co-present within any one sign. Discussions of historical facts being represented, addressed, reflected by or influencing a film’s mode of representation tend to treat the complex cluster of signs that make up a film primarily, if not exclusively, as icons, with the assumption that because a figure on screen looks like, for example, a migrant, it also stands for a migrant (or for a particular filmmaker’s vision of a migrant). The problem is that such a figure could just as well have an ­altogether different narrative function. It could be a symbol of some other referent, the displacement of, say, a lost mother figure, or be the condensation of a cluster of disparate preoccupations with little or no connection to

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ideas of migration. Debates on filmic representations of historical moments set out to read films through the lenses of the film historian’s particular version of that moment, as if films containing images the historian associates with that moment, but not the films that do not, may be able to tell us something about that moment in history, or the filmmaker’s view of it. I am not suggesting that this is not the case. On the contrary, a film showing images of migrants may well say something about migration, but so may other films, even if they do not contain such images. As we will see in Chapter 3, Pecadora (José Díaz Morales, Mexico, 1947) stars Ninón Sevilla, a Cuban dancer very popular in Havana’s cabarets. In 1945 she moved to Mexico and became one of the country’s best-known actresses. She was not the only Cuban to move to Mexico in the mid-1940s, nor was she the only Cuban entertainer to find employment in Mexican cinema, partly because Cuba did not have much of a film industry at the time. Most of Ninón Sevilla’s films see her playing women forced by circumstances to become prostitutes and, eventually, successful dancers. None of them feature migration in any explicit form or shape, nor is there any way of telling from her films that Ninón Sevilla was not Mexican. Even so, her films may well say something about migration, just as her life may. Yet whenever this indexical dimension of a film is contemplated – that is to say, whenever the possibility is considered that a film retains within itself traces of the physical, existential connection between it and the reality it presents – that dimension or capacity is conceptualised exclusively in terms of personal experience, at best of cultural memory, as if Ninón Sevilla’s films said no more about migration than that particular instance of it which was Ninón Sevilla. With the terms of the debate so poorly defined, how are we to decide if Ninón Sevilla’s films tell us something about migration or whether they do not? Frank Capra’s films may also say something about migration. How are we to begin to see what Ninón’s Sevilla’s films say about migration, and how it may differ from what Frank Capra’s films say about it – unless we think of cinema as more than the iconic or symbolic presentation of a reality, the reflection or substitution of a world taken to exist outside the film? Having established which aspects of a national culture may (or may not) condition a film, finding expression as that film (its aesthetics), what kind of analytical tools may enable us to grasp precisely how that historical material does so? In Chapters 2, 3 and 4 I try to demonstrate that the dynamic I have outlined, in a general way, in Chapter 1 can be seen to be at work in films produced in three different regions of the world, where, however, that same dynamic was sustained by specific, local conditions (same process, different material). This led to profoundly diverse aesthetic objects: each w ­ orking

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with the same generic categories (horror, nudity, etc.), orchestrated by the same economic priority (short-term capital accumulation), but resulting in unique (national) clusters of films with very specific modes of address, because the local conditions (the technology available, the cultural historical series at work on the ground, indigenous interest blocs and the relations of force between them) were not the same. To my knowledge, the best tools proposed to date to lend systematicity to the approach I have adopted here  – to examine how such home factors worked themselves into the film-text according to a process (a set of priorities) that was occurring also elsewhere (where, however, it worked with other material), resulting in particular film aesthetics – were proposed by Paul Willemen (2010) in an essay on comparative film studies. Arguing that a truly comparative approach to cinema is the only one likely to produce historically accurate and politically relevant insight into the complex interactions between films and historical change, Willemen observed, however, that we are still far from having identified the analytical tools that may be needed to devise such an approach. C. S. Peirce’s conceptualisation of signs as tri-dimensional is, for Willemen, one such tool, provided we remind ourselves that the symbolic, the iconic and the indexical dimension of a sign are always at work simultaneously, even if to different degrees. A second set of instruments is provided by Louis Hjelmslev (1963), namely his distinctions between ‘substance’ and ‘form’ of both ‘expression’ and ‘content’, as reformulated by Christian Metz (1974: 208–12).19 To simplify somewhat, the linguist Louis Hjelmslev (Roman Jakobson’s collaborator) conceptualised any cultural item as consisting of levels of expression (the raw materials) and of content (the semiotic field). He further differentiated the semiotic process constitutive of any cultural item into matter, substance (the broader field of available choices) and form (the choices made, that is, the actual text). By and large, film analysis today is such that we barely scratch the surface, too often reducing films to what, in Peirce and Hjelmslev’s terminology, would be the iconic and/or the symbolic dimensions of the form of content, even if this level of a text (form of content) can have no structural bearing on its own, that is, if it is separated out from the substance of content (available ideologies, discourses, tropes, generic categories, etc.) and the substance and the form of expression (the available and the actually used technologies, capital, types of labour and so forth). In Chapters 2, 3 and 4, I have tried to adopt elements of the methodological approach proposed by Willemen by writing into my analysis of films the substance, as well as the forms, of both content and expression. Given that each of the films discussed is the product of a global dynamic – capital

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in a radical mode – I have sought to assess how, at a particular place and time, that dynamic played itself out given the local specificity of the substance of expression and of content. This has led me to consider a variety of determinations and factors, from domestic economics (substance of expression), the technologies available (substance of expression) and those actually used (form of expression), each indexing particular industrial–financial configurations, to discourses circulating in the public sphere (substance of content) and parallel media such as comics, pulp fiction or pop music (substance of content and of expression). The latter are at work in the films and shape them simultaneously as available and as actually used cultural capital (indexical dimension of the substance and of the form of expression), as a source of material for stories (symbolic dimension of the substance and of the form of content) and as material used as such in the film – for instance Adriano Celentano’s song ‘Furore’ in Mario Bava’s La ragazza che sapeva troppo / The Evil Eye / The Girl Who Knew Too Much (1962), or the term giallo itself (iconic dimension of the form of content and of expression). Although I have not relied on these exact terms in my analyses, I have adopted Willemen’s forensic approach in principle. Consider, as an example, the functioning of Fiumicino Airport (Rome) in La ragazza che sapeva troppo. The airport was part of the substance available to the film (for instance as one of the possible locations, as well as one of the many possible images of airports); it became part of its form (Bava actually selected this, as opposed to other locations and airports); and it features in the film as the indexical, the symbolic and the iconic dimension both of the film’s content (image of an airport) and of its expression (location). It was not, in the early 1960s, the only airport in Rome, nor the only location symbolising modernity or the only icon of Italian design, but it was the largest airport and very new.20 So the question arises: why did Bava use this type of location and, of the available airports, this one? As a dimension of the film’s substance of expression, Fiumicino indexes large investments, at least as far as the Italian aviation industry at the time was concerned, and this, in turn, contrasts sharply with the indexical dimension of the film’s form of expression, that is, with the low-budget nature of Bava’s film. Such a tension between substance and form of expression is important because it highlights the extent to which a particular idea of modernity is central to the film: Fiumicino Airport as a dimension of La ragazza che sapeva troppo’s substance and form of content, a symbol of high-tech, international modernity, as well as an indication of the filmmaker or the producer’s perceived need to monetise the marketability of Italian design worldwide and thus of the new airport as an instance of it (iconic dimension of the substance and

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of the form of expression). All of which indexes, among other things, the production’s international aspiration, the desire or need to compete with foreign films in the domestic and international markets. Whether this type of forensic method can be sustained across a large body of films is not something that should preoccupy us here. My objective, in the next three chapters, is to demonstrate that this framework can offer a productive way into the knotty task of tracing text–context relations. Harvey and other economic historians have shown that the capitalist world ‘stumbled towards neoliberalisation as the answer through a series of gyrations and chaotic experiments that really only converged as a new orthodoxy with the articulation of what came to be known as the “Washington Consensus” in the 1990s’ (Harvey 2005: 13).21 Much the same could be said about the film industry, the popular cinemas of which, between the late 1950s and early 1980s, staged chaotically, and by default experimentally, a variety of horizons. Social relations were being disrupted and films were made that capitalised on this disruption as much as against it; more often than not, pulling both ways at the same time. If we go by Harvey and Brenner’s accounts of post-World War Two history, and move beyond a simplistically iconic or allegorical reading of film, it becomes possible to see how all films, canonic and popular, mediated the national situation – how they are all necessarily activations of the tension between, on the one hand, individual film industry operators’ drive to generate as much profit as possible at any cost and, on the other hand, their gut feeling that, in the longer term, there may also be advantages in moving within more socially acceptable limits. At present, however, film studies is not equipped to trace how films stage that tension in their text, as a film’s diegesis and aesthetics. There are film historians who analyse films’ aesthetics, and there are others who document a cinema’s industrial base. The first do not talk to the second, and vice versa. Film historians have been shown to be especially unwilling to consider how a film may stage the conditions of its own existence (as it must, necessarily, do) in its orchestration of the strategies available to it to narrate. The reason for this lack of enthusiasm is that film historians are not immune to, nor above or outside, the dynamics that channel the circulation of commodities, including films, at any point in time. The factors that energise the narrative strategies of any film within a national film industry also shape film historians’ accounts of that national cinema, what it comprises and what it does not. The important point here is not whether a film historian can be above or move outside those factors but, more concretely, whether he or she is aware of them or not, and thus of how such factors impinge on her or

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his own historiographic operation. This book started with a question: what moves us to want to research and write about certain kinds of films? My summary of economic historians’ accounts of the dynamics that shaped the years between the Korean War and the mid-1970s is intended to go some way towards a higher degree of critical self-awareness than film historians have, in recent times, tended to manifest. What becomes apparent if we take stock of economic accounts of those two post-World War Two decades is that it is the relation between the state (the agency that grants legitimisation to a range of institutions) and radical capital that determines, at any point in time, in any country, film historiographic attitudes towards unstable genres, branding some clusters of films as canonic and others as popular, and thus marginal to, even outside, national cinema. This is the hypothesis that I set out to demonstrate in the next three chapters. Horror films and nudies have counted as popular in most European cinemas throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Not so in Japan in the 1970s, where soft-core pornographic films constituted the main production line of one of the largest and oldest studios, Nikkatsu – a situation that culminated, in the mid-1970s, with the demise of most Japanese studios, the rise of independents and, eventually, the canonisation of Ai no korîda / In the Realm of the Senses (Nagisa Oshima, 1976) as core Japanese national cinema. The same is true of Mexico, the national film historiographies of which regularly include horror films. In Chapter 3, I show that the visibility of cheaply produced Mexican horror films in the historiographies of Mexican cinema is an effect of the central role played by radical capital within the country’s economy in the 1950s and 1960s, unlike in Italy or, later, in India, where, as we will see in Chapters 2 and 4, different coalitions of forces were at work and where, as a result, equally cheap and similarly generic films circulated, instead, very much at the margins. The omission of Italian giallo and Hindi horror films from the film historiographies of those nations is indicative of film historians’ uncritical imbrication with those political and economic blocs, just as a similar lack of analytical distance led to the unproblematic inclusion of horror and soft-core films in accounts of Mexican and Japanese national cinemas. Finally, to consider the historiographic visibility (or not) of unstable genres in the way I propose here means addressing what remains, in my opinion, the most crucial question for film and, more generally, cultural theory: if a (any) film knows and speaks its time, an analytical framework must be devised that can enable us to read the economic dynamics underpinning that film – the processes which, as an aesthetic object, it must necessarily mediate, through its modes of address, as the ideal material

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conditions of its own existence as a commodity. A framework, in other words, that makes it possible to understand films as artefacts that stage fantasies of self-reproduction. The next three chapters propose such an approach in order to demonstrate that it is possible and highly desirable to bridge the gap between those of us who analyse a film’s aesthetics and those who document its industrial base. Some may well disagree with the links I draw between a film’s aesthetics and socio-economic factors, but, in a way, that is precisely the point: to open a debate about what, precisely, may be such connections, how to identify them, and thus what would constitute the most productive way of seeing them at work in and as films. Failing to address the connections across the economic–aesthetic divide will inevitably leave film historians and theorists no option but to become complicit with the very interests they set out to document and assess – an unwitting complicity that can undermine even the best-intentioned attempts to grasp how films may effect historical change.

2 The exclusion of giallo films from the history of Italian cinema

La ragazza che sapeva troppo / The Evil Eye / The Girl Who Knew Too Much was directed by Mario Bava in 1962. It tells the story of Nora Davis (Letícia Román), a young, blonde American woman who journeys to Rome on holiday. The film’s first image, shown over the titles, is of a TWA aeroplane about to land at Fiumicino Airport. On the soundtrack is Adriano Celentano’s popular song ‘Furore’ (meaning ‘fury’). Immediately after the titles, we cut to inside the jetliner. Nora, one of the passengers, is reading a thriller or giallo,1 entitled The Knife (in English). She is befriended by the man sitting next to her, who offers her a cigarette and then gives her the whole packet. On arrival, the man is arrested by customs officials for smuggling drugs in packets of cigarettes. From here onwards, Nora becomes embroiled in a series of disturbing events. Later that ­afternoon, as she reaches the apartment of her elderly aunt and host, Ethel, she is greeted by a doctor, Marcello Bassi (John Saxon), who informs her that Ethel is very ill. That night, during a violent thunderstorm, Ethel dies suddenly. After trying to phone Marcello at the hospital, Nora decides to go there in person. As she walks down the steps of Trinità dei Monti (the Spanish Steps) in the middle of the stormy night, Nora is attacked and knocked unconscious by a mugger who steals her purse. A few hours later she is woken up by a woman’s scream. Nora looks up to see a woman c­ ollapsing to the ground a few yards from her. To her horror, she notices that the woman has a knife in her back. She also sees a man crouching over the dead woman, removing the knife and carrying away the body. Overcome by this series of events, Nora faints. She wakes up the next morning at the hospital, where her account of the extraordinary events she resolutely claims to have witnessed is explained away by the doctors as  the effect of too vivid an imagination, blaming explicitly her regrettable p ­ assion for giallo books. She returns to Trinità dei Monti with

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Marcello, but no trace of the murder can be found. On the contrary, under the spring  sun the Spanish Steps look as joyful and serene as a picture postcard. Nora will spend the remaining part of the film torn between the insistence of everyone around her that the strange events she claims to have witnessed are the fruits of her imagination and her determination to prove the events to be real. The film is built on this uncertainty. Bava’s eerie photography and camerawork succeed in destabilising easy impressions of commonsense reality while grounding Nora’s point of view. From the beginning Bava avails himself of a variety of generic registers, shifting from gangster and crime films (drug smuggling at the airport and the mugging), to the horror movie (Ethel’s death), romantic drama (the relationship between Nora and Marcello), murder mystery (the dead woman on the steps) and so forth. This generic layering never results in a seamless narrative because it is accompanied by a relay of looks (or narrative positions) that undermine each other: the camera tends to sustain Nora’s look and yet there is evidence that her point of view cannot be fully trusted. Nor, then, should we trust the filmic narrator, who legitimates Nora’s look, unless, of course, we appeal to our trust in the ontological transparency of the camera. It is this trust that Bava’s photography defies successfully, leading us back to where we started and, ultimately, keeping us firmly in our seats until the end, in spite of the film’s formulaic plot. My interest in this film is twofold. In Italy, where it made ITL55 million at the box office,2 the film was not very successful. It was, however, reviewed positively in the domestic press, including in Nuovo Spettatore Cinematografico (1 April 1963), whose critic described it as a: giallo in which formal elements à-la Hitchcock are deployed for the telling of a story that is as fantastic as the stories of Bava’s early films, in spite of La ragazza che sapeva troppo’s realistic setting. We are presented with a Rome that is unprecedented, absurd and yet amusing.3 (quoted in Poppi and Pecorari 1992: 432)

On the foreign market the film did better than at home, although it was reviewed only in a handful of magazines.4 More recently, it has been hailed as the foundational point of the Italian giallo film and critics have claimed that, together with Bava’s gothic horror film La maschera del demonio / Revenge of the Vampires / Black Sunday (1960), La ragazza che sapeva troppo left a deep mark on Italian genre cinema.5 And yet, very little of substance was written on the giallo films (or, for that matter, on Italian gothic horror) until the early 2000s. The main type of writing devoted to the giallo

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genre until then belonged to the category of cult or fan literature, where La ragazza che sapeva troppo and other works by Bava are ­retrospectively ascribed to be as instrumental in the foundation of a genre that is given, ­contradictorily, as simultaneously new and pre-existing. In this literature, the ground out of which these films may have emerged and developed is never outlined, let alone examined in some detail. In the writing where such ground is generally covered, that is to say, in the more academically solid historiographies of Italian national cinema, Bava’s work and the Italian giallo films of the 1960s and early 1970s are simply absent.6 While existing national film historiographies cover other marginal genres, such as the Italian (or Spaghetti) western, the peplum or the ­malizia (­literally ‘­naughtiness’) films, to date none has devoted any space to La ragazza che sapeva troppo or to the genre it is said to have shaped as part of Italy’s national cinema, in spite of the fact that nothing sets the latter films apart from the many similarly advertised in the listings of Italian dailies and ­circulating around the country’s first vision (‘prima visione’) cinemas at the time.7 In short, for all the alleged popularity of the giallo film, Mario Bava’s work is not considered to be part of Italian cinema’s canon. My second point of interest is the film’s mode of address. Bava’s photography and camerawork not only succeed in conveying a sense of eerie estrangement; above all, that eeriness translates as much as an estrangement from the familiar locations as a discomfort with the strategies given, in Italian cinema at the time, to convey a sense of verisimilitude. It is my contention that both the cult status of this and others of Bava’s giallo films, and their absence in the histories of Italian cinema, are to be ascribed precisely to this: La ragazza che sapeva troppo was an attempt to find a new language to present ‘the real’ – an aesthetic the logic and historicity of which film historians have so far proved unable to grasp. In the first part of this chapter I map the socio-economic, cultural and film industrial ground that produced La ragazza che sapeva troppo and its narrative strategies. In the second part, I consider the factors that have led to film historians’ failure to grasp the historicity of Bava’s film. What emerges from the considerations that follow here is a lack of fit between socio-economic accounts of Italian history and film historians’ ideas of post-war Italy. It is this lack of fit that, stemming from film historians’ uncritical position and imbrication within the forces that shaped Italy from the early 1960s, still prevents us today from understanding the film’s mode of narration as necessary, that is, as firmly situated within and addressing the nation.

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The production and circulation of La ragazza che sapeva troppo La ragazza che sapeva troppo and other giallo productions may have been omitted from the historiography of Italian cinema because of their ostensible ‘foreign-ness’. Bava’s film was produced by Galatea – a company set up by Lionello Santi in 1952 (but active only from 1955) in Milan,8 and financed partly by American International Pictures (AIP) – a company formed in 1956 in Los Angeles and dedicated to releasing independently produced, low-budget films, primarily of interest to teenagers, for drive-in cinemas in the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s. AIP retained and exploited the film’s world rights, while in Italy and Britain it was distributed by Warner Brothers (Poppi and Pecorari 1992: 432). Shot in black-and-white cinemascope during the summer of 1962 in less than two weeks at the Titanus Farnesina studios only a year before Titanus stopped its production activities,9 and in well-known tourist locations in Rome, including Trinità dei Monti and the then recently opened Fiumicino Airport, La ragazza che sapeva troppo was released in Rome as a film for people over fourteen years old on Saturday 27 July 1963 at the first vision, city-centre cinemas Paris and Radio City, where it played until Wednesday 31 July, and then again on Saturday 17 August at the first vision cinemas Ritz and Radio City, where it played until Monday 19 August. After re-emerging on Thursday and Friday 22 and 23 August at the Astoria, also a first vision cinema situated in the upper-class area of Parioli, Bava’s giallo disappeared from the city’s screens.10 It took La ragazza che sapeva troppo more than eighteen months to reappear in Rome at the third vision cinema Planetario (on Monday 24 February 1964), where it was shown for only one day. During that time it circulated across the cinemas of Italy’s smaller cities and towns.11 The film’s title (clearly inspired by Hitchcock’s The man who knew too much (1956), which in its dubbed version as L’uomo che sapeva troppo played in Rome only a few months before (in April 1963) Bava’s giallo opened), the choice of locations (which had been made popular by William Wyler’s Roman Holiday (1953)), the casting of American actor John Saxon in the male lead role and AIP’s financial backing have led historians to argue that La ragazza che sapeva troppo was conceived primarily for the international market. And effectively in 1964 it was released in France and in the United States, reaching the British market a year later.12 There is, however, little indication that these countries, rather than Italy, were the film’s intended primary markets. Because in the 1950s most Italians (and certainly the growing urban working and middle class) tended to prefer (dubbed)

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American films to Italian productions, it was common for Italian directors of genre films to adopt American-sounding names – a practice that also facilitated the films’ circulation in the United States and other foreign markets. But, as I discuss later in this chapter, from the early 1960s Italian audiences’ preferences began to shift in favour of domestic cinema. Significantly, unlike Bava’s La frusta e il corpo / The Whip and the Flesh (1963), which was released as ‘directed by John M. Old’ (Fig. 2), Bava’s most used alias, La ragazza che sapeva troppo and later Bava’s gialli were advertised and exhibited as ‘directed by Mario Bava’ (Fig. 1). Further, since the introduction of synchronised sound, in the Italian film industry the practice had been to dub all productions. But unlike most other Italian films, La ragazza che sapeva troppo was made with two soundtracks, one for the Italian market and one for the American, for which a different music score was composed by Les Baxter.13 The Italian version opens with ‘Furore’ (November 1960), the title song of the latest album by Italy’s then most popular representative of native rock, Adriano Celentano, who, in February 1961, had scandalised the San Remo Festival for singing his number with his (swinging) back to the audience, in the process scoring a resounding success among Italy’s youth. These factors seem to indicate that La ragazza che sapeva troppo was simply one in a long series of cheap Italian productions that targeted also the foreign (North American and more generally, international) markets and which, although partly financed with US money, were designed with Italian audiences in mind. On both these grounds La ragazza che sapeva troppo and other giallo films were in good company: there was very little in 1950s Italy that was not financed with US money, in cinema as in other industrial sectors. Financially, between 1945 and 1947 the Italian film industry could barely survive. It is estimated that during this period less than ITL10 million in native capital was invested in Italian films. US money intervened significantly in Italy starting in 1948, the first year of the funding under the Marshall Plan and the first of a four-year plan called the European Recovery Program (ERP). According to Silverman (1984), the influx of this money began to be felt within Italian film production almost immediately. Funnelled through the Banco di Roma overseen by the ruling Christian Democrats through the ERP, US money funded the reopening of Cinecittà, the regularisation of production, the return to the star system, costume films, many Neorealist films,14 and the international style of the early 1960s. By the time La ragazza che sapeva troppo went into production, in Italy as in other markets US interests in cinema and other industries were prevented from repatriating the entirety of their profits. US majors

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1  Advertisement for La ragazza che sapeva troppo, from the Rome daily Il Messaggero of 27 July 1963.

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2  Advertisement for La frusta e il corpo, from the Rome daily Il Messaggero of 28 August 1963. This Mario Bava film is advertised as directed by John M. Old and was shown at the Supercinema.

and distributors operating in Italy were compelled by law to invest 40 per cent of their income from the Italian market either in Italian productions, in co-productions or in US productions shot in Italy. In 1959, two years after the Treaties of Rome and the creation of the European Economic

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3  The Supercinema, where La frusta e il corpo was shown, is situated in Rome’s city centre, at the corner of Via del Viminale and Via Agostino de Pretis. It was originally built in 1925 with a capacity of 2,500 seats. Acquired and restored by the Fondazione Teatro dell’Opera di Roma in 1990, today it hosts the Teatro Nazionale.

Community (EEC), 22 per cent of the Italian films produced that year were co-­productions, including with European countries (Rossi 2001: 437). A common practice among US companies to circumvent these regulations was to open entities that while formally Italian were effectively financed entirely with US capital. Galatea, the company that produced La ragazza che sapeva troppo, was not one of these. The critical reception of La ragazza che sapeva troppo Although La ragazza che sapeva troppo has since been hailed as the foundational text of the Italian giallo, in the 1960s the term giallo was not new to the Italian cinema. In 1934, when Guglielmina Setti reviewed Mario Camerini’s Giallo (1933) in the daily Il Lavoro (20 April 1934) she made explicit reference to ‘crime novels, called, in Italian, gialli because of the yellow [giallo] covers of the first Italian translations of English novels about the conflict between society and the criminal world’ (quoted in Chiti and Lancia 1993: 152). There is no doubt that La ragazza che sapeva

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troppo consisted, among other things, of an attempt to capitalise on the contemporary popularity of giallo paperbacks. And yet, to contemporary audiences Bava’s film was not presented as a giallo. The advertisements that appeared in Il Messaggero promised a ‘brivido alla Hitchckoc [sic]’, a thrill Hitchcock-style. While the absence of all reference to the giallo genre in foreign marketing material is understandable, more relevant here is the fact that the film’s most immediate cultural source was seen as foreign also at home. The Italian film critic Goffredo Fofi, in his outline of Italian fantasy cinema that appeared in 1963 in the French journal Midi-Minuit Fantastique, mentioned that the protagonist, Nora, is a devoted reader of romans policiers (or, in Italian, romanzi polizieschi, that is, detective novels) but discusses the film itself as belonging to a tradition of detective and, more generally, mystery novels (including tales of horror) that, he claimed, was foreign to Italian culture: Italian fantasy cinema has a flourishing history in the domain of mythology, but less so in the world of the fable, and practically none in the horror tale. And this is not only so for cinema: Italian literature has devoted very little time indeed to these subjects … It arrived there only at the end of the nineteenth or at the beginning of twentieth century, with second-rate works, and the influence, at this point, came essentially from France … In these fields, then, Italian cinema could not rely on a native cultural tradition. And at any rate, there was no public ready to receive this type of literature. It has been said that ghosts, monsters and a taste for horror emerge when a society becomes wealthier and evolves through industrialisation. They are cultural manifestations of a general sense of wealth and comfort that in Italy began to spread and acquire a broad base only the last few years. (Fofi 1963: 80)15

A similar claim was advanced by the French film historian Pascal Martinet who, in the earliest monograph on Mario Bava, published more than twenty years after Fofi’s article, traced the film’s generic origins back to the late 1950s and 1960s German crime films, which were based on the popular novels of Edgar Wallace, as well as to Hitchcock (Martinet 1984: 64). Films of various nationality based on Edgar Wallace films were effectively very popular and circulated widely in the Italy of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the cinemas that programmed Bava’s giallo often also showed such films, along with a variety of mystery, detective, horror and other genre films that included comedies, productions starring Eddie Constantine as FBI agent Lemmy Caution, Roger Corman’s films and the horror movies of Mexican director Fernando Méndez (which I discuss in Chapter 3). The question, thus, is not one of generic origin or of influence, but, rather, of

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why mystery, thriller, giallo and horror films emerge at this point in time in Italian cinema in such numbers and in this way. Precise material conditions determine the circulation of films, and generic facets of cultural forms can take root ‘elsewhere’ because they respond to structural conditions that are economically and socially pertinent in that ‘elsewhere’. In short, specific aspects of foreign cultural production are borrowed and restyled because they are deemed capable of conveying important meanings about the particularities of the situation at home. The failure to acknowledge giallo and horror films as a legitimate dimension of Italy’s 1960s culture raises questions about the validity of the frame used by film historians to read the historical conditions and factors that made these films pertinent, even necessary, at the time. More generally, if this frame is not suitable to situate and understand the function of giallo films in 1960s Italy, what guarantee do we have that this frame is of any use to assess the significance of any film whatsoever? Fofi and Martinet’s claim draws on an argument advanced by Antonio Gramsci in the 1920s. Unlike Italian author cinema, the material and  modes  of address of La ragazza che sapeva troppo and of other giallo films  rested extensively on the popularity of a literary genre which, as Gramsci remarked, was foreign to Italian culture. In a series of quaderno notes that dealt with Italian culture and criticism, Gramsci made a ‘“catalogue” of the most important questions to be examined and analysed’. Among them was: the non-existence of a popular literature in a strict sense (serial novels, adventure stories, scientific novels and detective stories) and the persistent ‘popularity’ of this type of novel translated from foreign languages, especially from French. (Gramsci 1985a: 201, trans. William Boelhower) The serial novel is a way of circulating newspapers among the popular classes – remember the example of Il Lavoro of Genoa, under the editorship of Giovanni Ansaldo, which reprinted all the French serial literature, while at the same time trying to give the most refined cultural tone to the other parts of the newspaper – and this means political and financial success. Hence the newspaper looks for that novel, that type of novel, which the people are ‘certain’ to enjoy and which will assure a permanent and ‘continuous’ clientele. (Gramsci 1985b: 207, trans. William Boelhower)

There is an important difference between Gramsci and Fofi’s arguments. For Fofi, in Italy these films, books and, more generally, subjects lack a public. For Gramsci, the public is most definitely there. As his example of Il Lavoro proves, the serialisation of French novels as a strategy to sell the

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paper to a wider market – that is, a market also comprising a ‘popular’ class with less ‘refined’ tastes – was effective because there was then (and there has been since) an Italian public for subjects such as horror and mystery. Importantly, for Gramsci the question hinges not on what he calls the ‘popular classes’ but, rather, on the Italian intellectual class, to which would belong writers capable of producing such works, a ‘refined’ public willing to read them and, finally, critics ready to grant to that type of literary production a place in national culture. Critics and politics Gramsci argued that the non-existence of a popular literature in Italy in the 1920s was a symptom of the fact that the hegemonic class was still steeped in pre-modern social relations and values. The literature that this bloc produced failed to address the preoccupations of social strata who had, by contrast, no choice but to be swept along by the wind of change. It was not a coincidence that it should be from French nineteenth-century literature that Italian serial popular publications borrowed, for nineteenthcentury literature addressed social changes that, in Italy, were affecting the popular classes only at the time of Gramsci’s writing, at the beginning of the twentieth century – changes that Italy’s hegemonic blocs were resisting and unwilling to undertake, and thus also failing to address in the culture they produced. A similar degree of blindness appears to have been at work in the critical and intellectual reception of Italian genre cinema. In the 1920s, at the time of Gramsci’s writing, Italian intellectuals’ disregard for the cultural priorities of ‘the people’ stemmed from the intellectual class’ imbrication with reactionary – aristocratic and religious – forces. But by the 1960s the ground had changed somewhat. This raises the question: what prevented Italian intellectuals from engaging with popular culture, including popular film genres? By the 1930s Germany and France had produced intellectuals whose range of preoccupations included, and often focused primarily on, mass culture. In Italy, fascism’s regressive instrumentalisation of mass culture and its silencing of all critical intellectual positions (Gramsci’s and that of many others) produced a long delay in this area of cultural criticism.16 With the end of World War Two the political positions that became available to Italian intellectuals ranged within the spectrum defined by the two main parties, the Christian Democrats (DC), represented by Alcide De Gasperi, and the Communist Party (PC), headed by Palmiro Togliatti. The first months of 1948 saw the most bitterly fought election campaign ever in the

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history of the republic, not least because it was heavily influenced by international events and pressures: The US administration designated US$176 million of ‘Interim Aid’ during the first months of that year … After that, the Marshall Plan entered into full operation. James Dunn, the American ambassador in Rome, made sure that this massive injection of aid did not go unobserved by the Italian general public. The arrival of every hundredth ship bearing food, medicine, etc., was turned into a special celebration. Every time, the port of arrival was a different one … and every time Dunn’s speech became more overtly political. Whenever a new bridge, or school or hospital was constructed with American help, there was the indefatigable ambassador travelling the length of the peninsula to speak in the name of America, the free World and, by implication, the Christian Democrats. And just in case the message was not clear enough, on 20 March 1948 George Marshall warned that all help to Italy would immediately cease in the event of a Communist victory. (Ginsborg 1990: 115)

The DC, which simultaneously benefited from the Catholic Church’s scaremongering, anti-communist propaganda,17 won a resounding victory (with 48 per cent of the votes) while the PC lost half the votes it had in 1946. De Gasperi went on to be the prime minister of eight successive coalition governments but, for all intent and purposes, the alliance between the DC and the PC came to an end in 1948. For the following three decades cultural debates were framed by the conflict between the ruling party, the DC and the opposition, the PC. As far as Italian intellectuals were concerned, these remained the only available positions for debate within the public sphere, at least until the early 1960s when, following the USSR’s invasion of Hungary in 1956 and the split that the event opened within the PC, a centre-left coalition government was formed that, finally challenging, or seeming to challenge, the DC’s hegemony on political matters and bringing the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) back into power for the first time since 1947, made available in the public sphere a slightly less polarised set of political and cultural perspectives. This is not to say that in the 1950s and early 1960s Italian intellectuals confined themselves to the party line. As the debates on the closure of brothels (started in 1948 by PSI Member of the Senate Lina Merlin), or, as we shall see below, the introduction of new censorship criteria in the early 1960s show, politicians and intellectuals naturally voiced a broad range of positions. Dissent and expulsion from the PC, for instance, were not uncommon, especially after 1956. To date, however, the accepted discourse among film and cultural critics has tended to be that throughout

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the post-war decades Italian public life was divided between the two fronts of the DC and the PC. La ragazza che sapeva troppo and its time In reality, as Paul Ginsborg has shown, from the end of the 1940s the main tension – the force field of contradictory power blocs that effectively orchestrated all areas of Italy’s economic and social life – was not, as most Italian intellectuals and politicians would have it, between the DC and the PC, but, rather, within the DC itself: If we examine Christian Democrat strategy as it developed in the 1950s, we see that it is characterised by permanent tensions and conflicts … At an ideological level, traditional Catholic social theory lay uneasily alongside liberal individualism. The Vatican had consistently warned against the effects of industrial society, and the Christian Democrats … preached the need to safeguard Catholic values in a changing society. Solidarity … charity, associationism, the state’s duty to protect the family, the weak and the poor, were constant themes in their propaganda. However, while the DC paid lip-service to these values and ideas, in practice the majority of the party fully espoused the cause of ‘modernisation’. Here the key themes, strongly shaped by American influences, were the liberty of the individual and of the firm, the unfettered development of technology and consumer capitalism, the free play of the market forces. Thus, laissez-faire ideas of the development of the economy and society clashed with those of Catholic integralism, which emphasised the need for society to correspond to and reflect Catholic values. (Ginsborg 1990: 153–4)

Nothing in La ragazza che sapeva troppo points to a tension between leftand right-wing positions. The film does, however, from the beginning register the tension outlined above by Ginsborg. It is night and Nora realises that her host, Ethel, has died. After failing to reach the doctor by telephone, Nora decides to go to the hospital in person. The scene opens with a fluidly moving shot: from a low-angle view of Trinità dei Monti’s clock tower, the camera pans left and tilts down until the steps leading up to the church are fully visible. Nora appears at the top of the flight of steps to the left of the church. Two cuts, first to a medium shot and then a close-up on her face, show us that she is in distress. As we cut back to the long, low-angle shot of the Spanish steps we see Nora walking down and, on the left-hand bottom corner of the frame, the mugger hiding behind one of the posts that form the steps’ stone banister. The camera is in constant movement, tracing the steps’ architecture and following first Nora’s descent and then the mugger’s

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surreptitious progress running silently towards her, always hidden from Nora’s view by the steps’ architecture. When he catches up with and attacks her (the mugger walking into the next shot from the left, Nora from the right), they struggle, she shouts for help, he pushes her to the ground and grabs her bag. We hear the sound of the church bells. A cut shows us Nora unconscious on the ground from the mugger’s point of view: she is wearing a short, black PVC raincoat made shiny by the rain that barely covers the upper part of her body (Fig. 4). Her naked legs are visible in full (the only brightly white thing in the frame), suggesting that under her coat she may be wearing very little. After a shot showing the mugger running away, we cut to Nora, still unconscious on the ground. This time only the upper part of her body is visible. Her face is turned to the camera, which at this point slowly tilts up towards the church clock tower. The ringing of the bells tells us it is now two o’clock in the morning. The following (medium) shot shows us Nora, now awake and struggling to raise herself from the ground. The church bells are heard again. Nora looks up and, from her point of view, blurred by the fall, we look at the clock tower. But as we do so, a loud scream is heard, off screen. Still from Nora’s blurred perspective we cut to what gradually becomes discernible as a woman advancing towards Nora along the steps, with great difficulty and moaning. After a close-up of Nora’s terrified face (in profile) at what she is looking at, we see the woman falling to the ground, her face forward. Her fall, only a few feet away from Nora, reveals that she has a knife stuck in her back. Now hidden behind the nearest of the steps’ posts, Nora sees a man approaching, removing the knife from the woman’s back and carrying her away. Nora faints. The next shot shows Nora on the ground, the upper part of her body spread across the frame diagonally, her head in the foreground. After dwelling a few seconds on this vision, the camera pans to the left to rest on a puddle of rainwater in which is reflected the clock tower of Trinità dei Monti (Fig. 5). But it starts raining again, and as the rain drops into the puddle, the reflected image of the church disappears. The amalgamation of the seemingly incompatible trajectories pinpointed above by Paul Ginsborg is registered in this sequence in, for instance, the interaction between, on the one hand, the sexually charged image of the unconscious and nearly naked Nora – a generic sales point that, in the diegesis, is ascribed to the mugger – or even in the touristic appeal of the location, and, on the other hand, in the tilts (downwards and upwards) to Trinità dei Monti, a symbol of the ideological power of the Catholic Church as well as the image that opens and closes the sequence, as if to contain its elements. In Italy in the early 1960s, the industrial

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4  Film still from La ragazza che sapeva troppo: Nora lies unconscious and nearly naked under a PVC black overcoat at the feet of Trinità dei Monti.

5  Film still from La ragazza che sapeva troppo: the church of Trinità dei Monti reflected upside down in a puddle of rainwater.

c­ ommercial pressures that made it mandatory for Mario Bava to resort to sales points such as the nearly naked Nora coexisted with religiously codified notions of social behaviour. It was an accommodation, a compromise, that was commented upon by Pier Paolo Pasolini in an article for the

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daily Corriere della Sera of 9 December 1973, entitled ‘Acculturazione e acculturazione’: In the past, the ideology wanted and imposed by the powers that be, was, as we know, religion. And Catholicism was indeed, formally, the only cultural factor to unite Italians. Today religion is competing with a new unifying cultural factor: mass hedonism … There is very little that is religious in the Young Man and Young Woman proposed and imposed by television. They are two Persons whose life acquires value only through Consumer Goods (it goes without saying that they still go to church on Sunday: by car). Italians accepted with great enthusiasm these new models – models that television forces upon them in line with the laws for the Production of wealth (or, rather, for deliverance from poverty). (Pasolini 2008: 22, capitals in the original)

We can identify this tension between, and uneasy coexistence of, commodity culture and religiously sanctioned notions of the socially permissible in the sequence above because of Paul Ginsborg and Pasolini’s historical perspectives, but Pasolini’s analytical vision of Italian cultural life was, at the time, quite unique, hardly shared and far from representative. For the most part, critical positions remained polarised (PC versus DC), resulting in a poor grasp of the ways in which films such as Mario Bava’s spoke the Italy of the 1960s. Sequences such as the one described above, when noticed, were then, and continue to be today, appreciated exclusively for their lyricism, as instances of stylisation – that is to say, appreciated in terms that are conducive to the hollowing out of their specific historical necessity. For sequences such as this were historically necessary: they mediated the uneasy compromise between the drive to accumulate surplus and the requirements of social reproduction precisely and uniquely as that compromise played itself out in the Italy of the 1960s. The question then becomes: what are the socio-economic, cultural and industrial terrains that, inhabited by the film, enable it to know and address its time? It is only through a consideration of the social, the cultural and the film industrial substance available to Bava’s film that we can begin to see how it moved within its historical juncture – in other words, that we can begin to see how social, cultural and industrial pressures orchestrated the substance available to it into the specific forms that constitute La ragazza che sapeva troppo’s national address.18 Society and culture in 1960s Italy The continued supremacy of the Christian Democrats within the government made it so that by the end of De Gasperi’s rule, in 1953, standards

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of living were still very low: in 1951 only 7.4 per cent of Italian households benefited from the combination of electricity, drinking water and an inside lavatory. The situation began to change dramatically in the following years, when, for reasons to do with US capital’s change of direction, Italy’s economy grew, pulled until 1958 by internal demand and, from 1958 to 1963, by exports of industrial goods (fridges, washing machines, televisions, cars, precision tools, typewriters and plastic goods). The geographical location of industrial production expanded beyond Milan and Turin. Large industry  – groups like ENI (Ente Nazionale Idrocuarburi) or big industrial families such as the Agnellis, owners of FIAT (Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino), tyre manufacturer Pirelli (Milan) and steel concern Falck (Como) – remained confined to the north, but cities further south, including Rome, also developed a substantial if more fragmented industrial sector (Pagnotta 2009). By 1961 the number of those employed in industry reached 38 per cent of the working population and those in the service sector increased to 32 per cent. By contrast, the agricultural sector declined to 30 per cent. As an effect of this shift, between 1955 and 1963 more than 9 million Italians moved from rural areas to the cities and factories (Ginsborg 1990: 210–19). Italy’s class structure changed radically. The most notable and seemingly paradoxical change was the sharp decline in the active workforce as a percentage of the working population, caused by rising unemployment in the rural south and by the falling position of women in the new, industrially driven labour market. The majority of the women who were registered as active in agriculture before the rural exodus did not find full employment in the new urban environment. Most remained at home and became officially classed as housewives. Even so, the industrial working class increased steadily, both in absolute terms and as a percentage of the workforce.19 The number of managers also increased markedly. This was a new generation of businessmen, of limited culture and education but determined and prepared to travel all over the world to build up markets for their products. Finally, in line with all other advanced countries, the fastestgrowing sector of the Italian workforce in this and the following decade was the white-­collar sector (Ginsborg 1990: 235–8). Although this is the sector that is likely to have been most directly targeted by the mass culture that emerged in Italy in the years of the economic boom, no class was immune to it, if only as a cluster of aspirational practices. In this context, women played an important role, as guardians of the home perhaps, but especially as consumers and as symbols of new social positions and attitudes. In the twenty years from 1950 to 1970 per capita income in Italy grew more rapidly than in any other European country (from a base of 100 in

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1950 to 234.1 in 1970). Italian families used their new wealth to acquire consumer durables for the first time. Whereas in 1958 only 13 per cent of households owned a fridge, by 1965 the number had risen to 55 per cent. Ownership of washing machines, television sets, motorcycles and cars increased much in the same way (Ginsborg 1990: 239–40). FIAT started the production of its Seicento (‘Six Hundred’) car model in 1954 and presented it at the Geneva trade fair the following year. Cheaply priced and, above all, purchasable in instalments, the Seicento triggered a car-ownership boom across the country: by 1956 more than 1 million were in circulation (Colombo 2004). Eating and dressing habits also changed, as did cultural consumption. Along with the highbrow weeklies L’Espresso and L’Europeo, and the popular dailies Il Giorno and La Notte, the mid-1950s saw the emergence of rotocalchi – popular weeklies such as Oggi, Gente and La Domenica del Corriere – the sales of which rose well above those of similar publications anywhere else in Europe. Pulp literature expanded, adding to the already well-established gialli paperbacks science-fiction publications such as Urania and romances. For its part, the Church retaliated with the relaunch of its publisher Edizioni Paoline and with the transformation of its Famiglia Cristiana into one of the country’s most widely read cultural, political and society weeklies. For in this climate the Church remained the strongest moral force in the land. While Italian men continued to have access to state-run brothels until 1958 as well as to total immunity in matters of adultery, and sexual and domestic violence, Italian women continued to have no access to birth control and to face jail sentences in cases of adultery. The right to dissolve a marriage through a civil divorce (which, however, would not be recognised by the Church) was not granted until 1974. It is against this climate that an image such as the unconscious and nearly naked Nora in a shiny, black PVC raincoat ought to be read. Its film industrial pull, and that of Bava’s tilt to the church clock tower owe their narrative necessity, their historical weight, to this context. Cinema was of course not the only medium to mediate and shape this context. Launched in 1954 as a state monopoly, but not widely available until a few years later, RAI (Radio Audizione Italiane) television was controlled by the DC and heavily influenced by the Church. The code of conduct imposed by Catholic Action candidate and RAI president Filiberto Guala demanded that programmes were not to ‘bring discredit on or undermine the institution of the family’, nor were they to portray ‘attitudes, poses or particulars which might arouse base instincts’ (quoted in Ginsborg 1990: 240). RAI’s broadcasting time comprised religious education programmes, news and current affairs with a heavy anti-communist bias, light music

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and variety shows promoting the public’s participation (Campanile sera, Il musichiere and Un due tre), cultural programmes (Concerto per prosa, Commesso di libreria, Musei d’Italia and In libreria), sport events and quiz shows, including the enormously popular Lascia o raddoppia (literally ‘pass or double the stake’) presented by Mike Buongiorno, through which, as Umberto Eco (1992) first observed, ‘knowledge [was] valued as an instrument for immediate economic enrichment rather than as a means towards gradual social mobility’ (Colombo 2004: 323). As for television advertising, a compromise was reached that was reflective of the tension internal to the DC between, on the one hand, the promotion of values conducive to social reproduction, that is to say, the education of a growing industrial working and lower middle class, and, on the other hand, the promotion of consumer goods among and their sale to the same classes. In 1957 advertisements were thus grouped together into a half-hour programme called Carosello, which was transmitted at peak viewing time before the nine o’clock news. In each spot, of 110 seconds in length, the product could be mentioned only at the beginning and at the end. The rest of the time had to be filled with educative stories and cartoons. By 1960, three years after its introduction, Carosello was RAI’s most watched programme (Ginsborg 1990: 240–1). In spite of the Church’s influence, and along with it, was ‘America’. In the two decades that followed Togliatti’s electoral defeat in 1948 (and, in the same year, the attack on his life), the image of the United States had not yet been tarnished, as it was in the 1970s. Its popular culture was the dominant one among Italian youth; in its name new freedoms, pastimes and ambitions were embraced. Bars equipped with billiard tables and jukeboxes, and hundreds of dance halls, became important meeting points for the new generation. In 1951 the Festival of San Remo was launched as a radio event and, by 1955, as a broadcast on Eurovision. In 1958 the contest was won by singer, songwriter, actor and housewives’ favourite Domenico Modugno. Only three years later the festival became the platform also for a new generation of singers such as Adriano Celentano, who sported longer hair, blue jeans, an attitude and played rock music. Women’s magazines and advertisements began to exalt a new figure of the Italian woman: modern, smartly dressed and with a house full of consumer goods. The women’s monthlies Vogue Italia, Arianna and Grazia were launched in 1950, 1957 and 1962 respectively, followed shortly after by the more progressive and socially aware Amica. But for all of that, the Italy of the economic boom was still a society full of taboos about sexual behaviour. In the early 1960s, some ten years after Alfred Kinsey’s The Sexual Behavior of the Human Female (1953), Italian women’s magazines were only beginning to feature timid discussions

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of premarital sex. They were the first sign of a change in attitudes to sexual mores, which was not to materialise, nor to acquire a legal base, for at least another decade (Ginsborg 1990: 243–4). Italian 1960s visual mass culture Italian intellectuals too embraced aspects of US culture, but while left-wing figures such as the writer, journalist and critic Fernanda Pivano looked up to and translated the works of classic and modernist US writers, they paid little attention to the translation of less refined US imports into an indigenous, post-war popular culture. It was only in the 1960s that figures such as Umberto Eco emerged, and with Eco even today one cannot help but feel slight irritation at the brazen and somewhat dismissive sarcasm with which he then wrote about aspects of that culture, as for instance in his account of quiz show presenter Mike Buongiorno (Eco 1992: 29–34). Irritation because 1950s and 1960s Italian industrial culture mediated the frictions outlined by Paul Ginsborg: on the one hand, religious values, conservative notions of the socially acceptable and other exclusionary mechanisms; on the other hand, the interests of an industrial capital that, in its drive to grow, and if only to appropriate, assimilate and commodify vital areas of social experience, effectively aimed at a maximum of inclusion, in the process absorbing contexts of living that had been, until then, bracketed from representation and excluded from debate within the Italian public sphere. Unlike dance halls, which opened only in the evening and tickets for which were comparatively expensive, cinema was cheap, available to all classes and also accessible during the day. In the 1950s the youth market alone (comprising those aged eighteen to thirty-six) represented nearly 75 per cent of cinema’s frequent viewers (Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia 2004: 621). But Italian post-war visual mass culture also included the gaudy graphics of pulp paperback covers, comics, beauty pageants featuring young Italian women in bikinis and photo-romances. First launched by Mondadori in 1929, in the 1960s giallo paperbacks underwent a significant aesthetic revamp, acquiring the sensationalist and garish look that still distinguishes them today.20 With a weekly periodicity, they featured translations of US and European mystery novels by Agatha Christie, Edgar Wallace, John Dickson Carr and others. Giallo paperbacks also usually featured a short appendix containing articles, short stories and stories from Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Typically, readers were invited to submit their own stories. Italian and, from the 1930s, US comics had been widely read for decades, but the 1950s saw the arrival of the comics paperback, one in a

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range of cultural products at the time to be characterised by striking visuals (a range that included, of course, also film posters). From the early 1960s, traditional adventure comics began to face competition from graphically more titillating comics featuring far less respectable anti-heroes such as the sleek, masked burglar Diabolik (1962) and his alluring partner Eva Kant; the cruel, red-headed Satanik (1964), whose magic potion enabled her to rejuvenate all the better to entice her lovers into her web; and Isabella de Frissac, also known as ‘the devil’s duchess’, the seventeenth-century French heroine of Italy’s first popular erotic comics series (1966). But the most characteristic product of this period was the fotoromanzo (literally ‘photo-romance’). A descendant of the French feuilleton, the first Italian photo-romance appeared in 1946. Although they were then offered to the Italian, essentially female, public as a ‘weekly love romance in photo frames’, early photo-romances such as the enduring Grand Hotel consisted of a combination of drawings (the sets) and photographs (the characters’ faces).21 Importantly, photo-romances borrowed for their stories from successful films – such as Sissi (Ernst Marischka, 1955), starring Romy Schneider, or Elena et les hommes / Paris Does Strange Things (Jean Renoir, 1956), with Ingrid Bergman – whole sequences of which were redrawn, adding captions and pasting the actors’ faces onto the drawings. The 1960s saw the launch of new titles and, above all, the use of photography as the photo-romance’s sole means of presentation. Theatre studios began to open for the specific purpose of shooting photo-romances, while many aspiring young actors began their career, or at some point acted, in photo-romances: Silvana Mangano, Vittorio Gassman, Gina Lollobrigida and many others. Lucia Cardone has argued that, obscurely connected to Catholic notions of sin and often inspired by the (real or fictitious) affairs of film stars, popular women’s magazines and photo-romances in particular helped to open a gap between conservative ideas about women as the productive, virtuous guardians of the domestic sphere and 1950s Italian women’s new horizons (Cardone 2004: 353).22 More convincingly, Cardone shows that from the mid-1950s, photo-romances began to acquire a more cinematic mode of address than in the past decades, paying greater attention to narrative continuity and synthetic space through point-of-view angles, including subjective narration by way of individuated point-of-view frames, flashbacks and oneiric superimposition effects (Cardone 2004: 355). Combined with these strategies, and irrespective of the varying degree of boldness of the stories featured in these publications, the use of photography lent to the situations depicted an added and, in Italy at least, unprecedented degree of audacity.

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Giallo films pushed this strategy further, wrapping up nudity and other sales points into formulaic plots delivered with little or no effort to convince spectators that the lip service to narrative was anything but that. The best among them emphasise the scopophilic dimension of the film-watching experience, as if that alone – the desire to look – provided sufficient reason for going to the cinema. Unlike television, the strict, religiously informed code of which orchestrated the medium’s castigated mode of address and excluded many aspects of late 1950s and 1960s Italian society, giallo (and horror) films monetised the visual registration of areas of social experience that had been until then, and, elsewhere, continued to be, bracketed from public representation. The reasons they could do so and in that way, in spite of increasingly stringent censorship for the cinema, can be found in the crisis that confronted the domestic film industry from the second half of the 1950s. The Italian film industry in the 1960s In 1955, official sources recorded more than 800 million cinema spectators, the highest annual attendance in the history of Italian cinema. On average, in these years each Italian devoted 1.5 per cent of their annual income to entertainment, 77.6 per cent of which (equivalent to just under ITL2,000) was for the cinema (Bizzarri and Solaroli 2004: 607), which each attended 16.7 times a year (against 1.7 times in 2004) (Corsi 2004: 442). The number of new cinemas opening in the country had been growing at a yearly rate of 800 since before the war, reaching a record number of 12,957 in 1967, a figure second only to the US. Although many of these were small, situated primarily in the suburbs and rural towns and, in many cases, did not open on a daily basis (Corsi 2001: 112–17), the number of venues was also very high in large city centres. In the mid-1950s, 7,000 of the country’s 10,000 or so cinemas were equipped with permanently installed projection equipment. In addition, the Church ran 1,860 parish cinemas equipped with 35mm projectors. From the second half of the 1950s the rising number of cinemas began to cause concern within the industry: cinemas were not used to their full potential and exhibitors’ revenues were beginning to drop. Partly because of television, from 1956 the number of spectators also began to drop. Some 250 US, 130 Italian and 100–150 foreign (non-US) films were released every year on the Italian market. Added to the ones already in circulation from the previous years, between 4,500 and 6,500 films circulated every year in the country’s cinemas (Corsi 2004: 443). Until 1962 when, for the first time since the 1920s, (wholly or partly) Italian produc-

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tions generated a higher overall domestic box office than US films, a significant share of the 2 million or so spectators who, on any day of the week, went to the cinema preferred US productions. Exhibitors, on the other hand, and especially second and third vision cinemas, struggled to meet US distributors’ demands on their box office revenues, not to mention block booking, which, again, affected second and third vision cinemas particularly. For this reason, exhibitors preferred to show Italian films. The practice of releasing (wholly or partly) Italian productions by Italian directors under English- or American-sounding aliases is likely to have been introduced to solve the tension between the public’s tendency to prefer US films and exhibitors’ preference for Italian ones. Under pressure to competition from US films (which, in spite of Italian films’ overall box office success of 1962, continued thereafter to be greater in number), from the rising number of venues and from falling attendance, during the second half of the 1950s exhibition began to stratify. By 1960 Rome’s spectators could rely on 43 first vision, 60 second vision and 59 third vision venues; 24 ‘arenas’; and 45 parish cinemas. With the exception of the latter, most of Rome’s cinemas operated a full programme at least six days a week. In some of them, spectators could catch the latest episode of their favourite television quiz show, Lascia o raddoppia, before the screening of the main feature. By the early 1960s, as the spread of television sets added to the difficulties of second and third vision cinemas, the first vision sector underwent a gradual process of vertical concentration, which led to the formation of the first cinema chains. Simultaneously, second and third vision venues decreased in number, some closing down, others upgrading to first vision. First vision cinemas were located in city centres and catered to the taste of very different publics, who made the most of their newly acquired mobility. Moreover, well until the 1970s (and, to a lesser extent, also today) the centre of most Italian cities was inhabited by a variety of social strata, including blue-collar workers. The place of employment of this class was then also centrally located, as in Rome’s popular quarters (quartieri popolari) of Trastevere (Pagnotta 2009) and San Giovanni (Quirico 2004: 619). In large cities such as Rome where, owing to the large number of cinemas, offer exceeded demand, giallo and horror films were primarily shown in first vision venues, even if they never stayed on the bill for more than a week. Outside large conurbations, where demand exceeded offer and where public opinion was likely to be more conservative than in the cities,23 giallo films may have been kept on the bill for longer, but, according to Della Casa (2001), they were reserved for evening programming during working days only, leaving afternoons and weekends free for more family-oriented fare.

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Film production was also changing. From this perspective, the 1950s were marked by Italian cinema’s first crisis since the end of World War Two and, by the end of the decade, by a period of recovery. In 1955 Lux Film, the most efficient and prestigious producer of the immediate postwar, announced its intention to cease film production. The following year Excelsa, Minerva Film (both among the largest producers and distributors of the post-war years), Industrie Cinematografiche Italiane (ICI) and Diana (distribution) were declared bankrupt. In 1958 and 1959 Cines and Ente Nazionale Industrie Cinematografiche (ENIC) followed suit. By 1959, however, production began to show clear signs of recovery, with 169 films that year, rising to well above 200 thereafter and throughout the 1960s; 1959 also saw the success of Italian productions at film festivals and on the international markets. Significantly, in the early 1960s new companies emerged, including small ventures by former directors and independent producers trying their hand at new genres with minimal budgets (Farassino 2004: 408). In these years Dino De Laurentiis launched two companies, Dino De Laurentiis and DDL, while his former business partner set up Carlo Ponti Spa (later Carlo Ponti Cinematografica). Franco Cristaldi’s Vides Spa, which had been producing documentaries since 1946, transferred to Rome in 1954 and launched with national and international co-productions, which resulted in a series of successful quality films, retrospectively considered as among the best of this and the following decades. Publishers, including Angelo Rizzoli, also set up new production ventures, as did some actors (notably Vittorio de Sica) and a significant number of directors who, in this way, began to operate as independent director-producers.24 Regional producers also grew, most notably from or around Naples, such as the familybased Romana Film of Fortunato Misiano, which in the second half of the 1950s released a large number of adventure films and musicals and which, in the 1960s, branched out in sword-and-sandals and giallo productions (Farassino 2004). Finally, among the most notable new entries of the late 1950s and early 1960s was Lionello Santi’s Galatea, which, as I mentioned above, produced La ragazza che sapeva troppo. From the early 1960s Galatea changed direction, abandoning genre films and refocusing instead on producing the work of established Neorealist and Pink Neorealist authors such as Roberto Rossellini and Giuseppe De Santis.25 Galatea’s change of direction was symptomatic of the early 1960s. At one level, between the second half of the 1950s and the early 1960s, the withdrawal from production of large companies such as Lux Film led to a fragmentation of film production and to the emergence of a myriad of smaller, independent producers venturing into new genres. This resulted

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in the emergence of new independent companies, as well as in the proliferation of fly-by-night operators with dubious financial objectives. The employers’ federation Confindustria’s figures revealed that, in 1955, 50 per cent of all Italian productions failed to break even. This, according to Bizzarri and Solaroli, was because by far the majority of producers were not ‘industrialists’ but ‘small entrepreneurs’ for whom film production was but a subsidiary, often very marginal operation: ‘contractors, that is to say, small entrepreneurs for whom the final product does not have to complete its full economic cycle to generate a profit. Their share of the profit is generated in the process of production itself’ (Bizzarri and Solaroli 2004: 613). Often the operation of this type of capital resulted in formulaic films; on other occasions the radical nature of the operation led to cinematically innovative products, if only because, the investment being small to begin with and the producer having little to lose, filmmakers were left free to improvise and experiment. At another level, by the early 1960s the closing down of large established film companies led to the rise of new large producers such as Dino De Laurentiis and Carlo Ponti Spa, which, unlike smaller producers, specialised in quality, that is, author films. Both categories contributed to the economic recovery and international circulation of Italian cinema. While the product of smaller companies tended to circulate abroad under English- or American-sounding (director) aliases and, for the most part, in marginal venues, the product of larger companies was marketed and circulated as ‘new Italian cinema’ in film festivals and elsewhere, including foreign city-centre cinemas. As a result, as Callisto Cosulich (2001) observed, the most unusual aspect of Italian cinema’s speedy recovery in the early 1960s is the extent to which it was sustained by quality, author films – that is to say, with a category of product traditionally associated with a more refined and smaller market. In 1960, the largest Italian box office hits were (in descending order) La dolce vita / The Sweet Life (Federico Fellini), Rocco e i suoi fratelli / Rocco and His Brothers (Luchino Visconti), La ciociara / Two Women (Vittorio De Sica) and Tutti a casa / Everybody Go Home (Luigi Comencini).26 Cosulich argues that this unusual concurrence of critical and commercial success, in Italy and on the international markets, was not a coincidence, but the intended consequence of a concerted effort on the part of large producers to capitalise on the rise of a new class of more affluent consumers and on the concomitant stratification of the market for cinema. In July 1961 Titanus organised a symposium entitled Per un nuovo corso del cinema italiano (meaning ‘a new path for Italian cinema’), which was held in Milan to coincide with a distributors and agents’ conference in the same city. With

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the ostensible objective of discussing the absence of an Italian new wave, producers agreed that what the industry needed was resolutely not a wave capable of undermining its basis, as had occurred in Britain at the expense of Ealing Studios and their comedies, of Rank’s super-productions and of Alexander Korda’s London Films, or in France, Prague and Bratislava. Nor was it a question of making room for a movement similar to the New American Cinema. Rather, in the words of Italian critic Morando Morandini, who addressed the symposium,27 the type of product that would consolidate the recovery of domestic cinema, the ‘ideal film’, was one that would ‘combine harmoniously artistic and commercial factors’, ‘artistic and spectacular’ at the same time (quoted in Cosulich 2001: 483). From that moment onwards, Titanus’ new productions followed this line – a line that was soon adopted in more or less explicit and official ways also by other large producers. Their products would be circulated by Italy’s largest distributors: Lux Film, Angelo Rizzoli’s Cineritz, Cino del Duca and Euro International Films, which precisely in these years expanded their marketing departments and patterned them on the US model, began to target the increasingly popular specialised press (film magazines, highbrow weeklies and so forth), organised a variety of social promotional events (from cocktail parties to debates in cineclubs), put more money into the advertising material (including posters) and improved dubbing (De Vincenti 2001: 478). The same companies co-produced and distributed in Italy films by Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Roger Vadim and Jacques Demy – in short, what was deemed to represent the best of the Nouvelle Vague. But the new course of Italian cinema was not to last. In 1964 Titanus stopped production, Lux Films closed down altogether and so did Galatea. The economic recovery of Italian cinema may indeed have been sustained by large-budget films by established authors, their box office at home and on the international market, just as other ‘made in Italy’ goods sustained in these years Italian industry as a whole. But the 171 films released in 1960 were produced by no fewer than 131 companies, thirty-seven of which never made more than one film (Cosulich 2001: 487). The least that one can say about these figures is that they point to the high degree of fragmentation and differentiation of Italian film production: ad hoc operators aside, it is clear that a large share of the films released in this and the following years were produced by small companies for which generic parameters and associated sales points were as necessary for survival as the expectations of a public that was growing accustomed to quality, author products. By the mid-1960s the growth of the Italian film industry was car-

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ried by genre films, products that guaranteed commercial gain through the capillary exploitation of the domestic market and through assured foreign distribution. According to Della Casa (2001) it is this type of film – genre films – that formed the core of Italian cinema by the mid-1960s. In the light of the industrial pressures I have described above, however, it is important to clarify what genre cinema may mean in this context. Genre films were made by small and large producers alike, even if on the basis of very different budgets and production strategies. The exhibition of genre films also varied, depending on the sources of finance and, above all, on which genre. Commedie all’italiana (literally ‘Italian-style comedies’), the genre regarded as most representative of, and unique to the 1960s (Micciché 2010a), were not made with the same production, distribution and exhibition criteria as Italian western, horror or giallo films, even if these latter genres are also associated with the 1960s. Commedie all’italiana were often produced by large, or at any rate, established producers and were directed by well-known authors.28 They were generally distributed by one of the four large Italian distributors and would stay on the bill in city centres for several weeks. By contrast, what Italian film historians refer to as generi di profondità (literally ‘undergrowth genres’ – presumably because they reached the most peripheral parts of a market), which would be more or less equivalent to the US and British notion of exploitation genres, tended to be made by smaller producers on the basis of a minimum guaranteed income, which was normally advanced by the distributor. In this way, distributors could not only claim exclusive rights on the finished product but also have the last word on the choice of subject, cast and direction, and on the mode of production. According to Lorenzo Ventavoli (1995) in these years for every ITL100 of box office revenues, equivalent to ITL80 after taxes, the distributor would get a maximum of ITL32, while the producer would get 70 per cent of that, or ITL22. As a result, if only to make sure to cover costs in advance of production – costs which at any rate were kept at a minimum – the producer also often relied on an advance from foreign sales or from a foreign co-producer.29 For a distributor to recover a minimum guarantee of ITL50 million, a film would have to generate box office revenues of about ITL230 million. For the producer, limited funding meant completing the film as cheaply and as quickly as possible. As a result, this type of film was inevitably caught between two contradictory pulls: to maximise box office revenues at minimum cost. Any film is subject to this tension. The difference between generi di profondità and those associated with larger producers, such as Dino De Laurentiis’ commedie all’italiana, was that in the latter case the tension was absorbed into the single company and held at bay

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by vertical integration. De Laurentiis, for one, controlled production and distribution. For smaller producers this was hardly the case. A cheaply produced film can only go so far, especially if censorship imposes limitations, as it did in Italy in the early 1960s. Unlike the author-directed genre film produced and distributed by large companies, the ‘undergrowth’ genres in which directors such as Mario Bava and Riccardo Freda specialised circulated primarily, though not exclusively, in a capillary network of suburban cinemas in every small town across the country. It was in this market that generi di profondità generated most of their revenues, sometimes up to 90 per cent of the box office. Significantly, unlike in US exploitation cinema, the shelf-life of which was proverbially short, in the case of Italian generi di profondità revenues were calculated over a period of up to five years (Della Casa 2001: 295). The popularity, within the industry, of a filmmaker such as Mario Bava stemmed from his films’ capacity to meet simultaneously the producers’ and distributors’ demands, not simply, not even mainly, through the exploitation of well-tested sales points (which Bava was not alone in using), nor by means of his minimal production schedules and costs (a skill that Bava shared with many others), or even, as in the case of most of Roger Corman’s films, among other US exploitation cinema, through quick blanket release, but through the films’ capacity to last, their shelf-life, and thus through the quality of their photography and mise en scène – factors that, as the cult status of Bava’s films suggests, may well have contributed to the extension of the films’ notoriety to these days. The layered aesthetic fabric of Bava’s films allowed them to resonate with the expectations of a wide and diverse contemporary public in sufficiently close a way so as to make possible their long-term, extensive and in-depth circulation, in spite of the limited small production and advertising budgets, the over-familiar plots and the restrictions imposed by the censors. The Italy of the 1960s was spoken and addressed in the films’ photographic texture. The place of La ragazza che sapeva troppo in Italian national cinema The early 1960s brought a hardening of censorship that was increasingly out of tune with the times. The first film to cause a particularly virulent reaction was La dolce vita / The Sweet Life (1960). The attack against Fellini’s film was especially strong in Catholic circles, but even this failed to thwart the film’s overwhelming success. Aware that recalling the film for a new censorship reassessment would have been an unpopular move, the Christian Democrat Alberto Folchi, head of the then newly created Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment, found he did not have the means to contain the crisis.30 A

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few months later, rather than awarding the Leone d’Oro to Visconti’s Rocco e i suoi fratelli / Rocco and His Brothers, the Venice Film Festival offered the prize to the mediocre Le passage du Rhin / Tomorrow is My Turn (André Cayatte, 1960). By the end of October of the same year, after heavy cuts had been imposed on other, fundamentally innocuous, Italian films, the censors ordered the withdrawal of Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’avventura / The Adventure (1960) one week after its release. This film was released again only after the producer, Titanus, agreed to tone down the representation of what the censors saw as ‘indecent acts’ and ‘insistent and dishevelled demonstrations of lasciviousness’ (Vigni 2001: 518), in spite of Antonioni’s objections. As in the 1950s, at the beginning of the 1960s the censors focused largely on nudity and scenes of sexual nature, no matter how mild, contained or displaced. Images of lingerie, short skirts, slightly unbuttoned shirts, scantily dressed dancers, sighs of desire, voluptuous embraces, kisses, women in labour and so forth had to be removed from the films as well as from the advertising material.31 In 1962, as a coalition between the Socialist Party and the Christian Democrats (DC) enabled Amintore Fanfani to form a new, centre-left government, a bill was put to parliament to review censorship regulations. The bill was opposed both by the extreme right (neo-fascists and monarchists), who considered the proposed reforms too lenient, and by the Communist Party, who wanted the abolition of censorship. Significantly, within the DC positions were divided between a moderately permissive approach and the more rigid status quo – a division that was symptomatic of the two power blocs constitutive of the ruling coalition, industrial capital and the Church. The resulting new law – Law 161 – saw the abolition of censorship for theatrical performances, but not for cinema, and changes in the constituency of censorship committees, which from then on had to include representatives of the film industry. Moreover, Law 161 introduced the obligation to obtain the censors’ endorsement (nulla osta) for all public screenings and failed to arrive at a more transparent definition of buon costume (literally ‘good custom’, better translated as ‘morally and socially acceptable practice’), on which depended the granting of the censors’ authorisation. A measure of the law’s conservative nature was reflected in the fact that it also introduced a new fourteen (years of age) certification and raised the existing sixteen certification to eighteen. Even so, there is little doubt that the introduction of Law 161 coincided with a general relaxing of attitudes towards sex, or at least of its representation in the cinema: witness the rise and spread of sex movies, in Italy as much as elsewhere. Most of these films were granted the censors’ authorisation, if only after cuts, as were films containing elements of the macabre. Significantly, Mario

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Bava’s La maschera del demonio / Revenge of the Vampires / Black Sunday, released in 1960, was granted a certificate sixteen, while many of the films that he and other directors working in similar genres made after 1962 – including I tre volti della paura / Black Sabbath (Mario Bava, 1963), La frusta e il corpo / The Whip and the Flesh (Mario Bava, 1963) and Amanti di oltretomba / Night of the Doomed (Mario Caiano, 1965) – were released with a certificate eighteen. La ragazza che sapeva troppo was issued for general release, in spite of the one scene in which Nora’s naked legs are fully visible as she lies unconscious on the steps of Trinità dei Monti. In an illuminating essay on 1960s Italian cinema, Lino Micciché (2010a) defined what he called the film medio (the average or run-of-the-mill film) as a film representing the highest peaks of commercial cinema and the lowest ends of authorial cinema. While this type of product has historically constituted the core and economic strength of any major film industry, Micciché argues that in Italy this had never been the case because of the absence, in Italian cinema, of a truly industrial class for whom making film was, first and foremost, a matter of profits and losses.32 According to Micciché, one of the central characteristics of 1960s Italian cinema is the emergence and growing importance of this type of film, the film medio, partly at the hands of enterprising producers – Carlo Ponti, Dino De Laurentiis and Goffredo Lombardo (Titanus), but also Franco Cristaldi (Vides), Alfredo Bini (Arco Film), Lionello Santi (Galatea) and Angelo Rizzoli (Cineriz) – and partly thanks to a group of directors who, in these years, dabbled in and experimented with commercial genres. Although Micciché focuses on figures who are now regarded as part of the pantheon of Italian author-directors, such as Pietro Germi, the notion of film medio could just as justifiably be applied to the films of Mario Bava, Riccardo Freda, Camillo Mastrocinque, Vittorio Cottafavi and a few others. None of them were as firmly placed within a Neorealist tradition as was, for instance, Pietro Germi, nor did they emerge in the 1960s as authorial representatives of new Italian cinema, as Ermanno Olmi did. They were, however, seasoned directors whose work was produced by companies such as Galatea and which constituted, at times, the highest peaks of commercial and genre cinema. Not unlike Germi’s Divorzio all’italiana / Divorce Italian Style (1961), La ragazza che sapeva troppo was also a film medio: both monetised the registration of new areas of experience – subjects, attitudes and horizons which had been until then in cinema, and continued elsewhere to be, bracketed from wide access representation and debate. But Bava’s films were not made in the same way as Germi’s and other big producers’ comedies. Different pressures obtained at every stage of the economic cycle of these two types of product: different

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modes of financing and, as a result, other strategies of distribution, marketing and exhibition. These differences left their mark on the production of the films and, inevitably, on their aesthetics. The narrative strategies that made small and large producers’ films the films they are were not the same, although both types of film medio did address the same time and place. This becomes evident even through a cursory examination of films that either preceded or coexisted with Bava’s giallo. In 1946, in a diary entry entitled ‘The Best Condition’, scriptwriter Cesare Zavattini wrote: How must our new films be? Friends and enemies will accuse us of being unrepentant and insensitive to the cries of sorrow that are raised still from many parts of the earth. ‘Think of the dead,’ authoritative [figures] will say. We can’t. If we weep for one dead man, how much do we weep for three dead men? … And for three million men? … As we wait for a sense of proportion, we cinema people are looking for a lowest common denominator, and we can find it in the courage … to resume that examination which began during our blatant misfortunes and was interrupted by the intervention of too many who were ready to take our penitence upon themselves. Persistence in a hypocritical situation can produce only a hypocritical cinema. (1970: 14–15)

The ‘situation’ evoked here by one of the most important figures of Italian Neorealism was as much an economic crisis as a crisis of objectives and modes of filmmaking. In the summer of 1955, less than two years after the first convention on Neorealism (held in Parma in 1953), the Socialist daily Avanti! published a series of interventions by intellectuals and cultural commentators of varying political persuasions that, in the words of film director Salvatore Piscicelli, marked ‘the liquidation’ of Neorealism (1978: 98). As evident from this debate, and as film historian Lino Micciché has argued, the crisis was rooted, partly, in Neorealism’s theoretical basis, which, as an essentially defensive front, soon after the war found itself incapable of developing a new language, a new relationship with the public and a new mode of production that broke with the rules of a market now radically changed. What took shape instead, alongside Neorealism, was another project: the creation of a new, reconstituted domestic film industry and a specific idea of Italian national cinema. The actualisation of this project saw the new industry’s centre-ground appropriating Neorealism’s modes of address and hollowing them out of the pluralism that characterised the best of the movement’s productions, all the better to pursue the politics of containment, censorship, social repression and international commercialisation that the ruling coalition had embarked on since the end

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of the war. What came to be known as Neorealismo Rosa (Pink Neorealism) also came with big stars, as well as access to and use of well-equipped studios and large budgets. It is through this process of de- (or ­re-)­politicisation that the heirs of Neorealism finally emerged as leading players in the domestic market, indeed as the national cinema, their films ready to be exported as yet another ‘made in Italy’ industrial commodity under the label Neorealism (Micciché 1978: 12). It was at this point that established Neorealist filmmakers faced a crisis of address. As writer and film director Lino Del Fra put it in Avanti! on 23 August 1955, ‘what we need is a sharper analysis, greater sensitivity and a broader range of narrative options, in short a more acutely critical awareness, and all this in order to grasp, more authentically, the real’ (Del Fra 1978: 128–9). For Zavattini, the only way to overcome the crisis was ‘to resume that examination which began during our blatant misfortunes’. L’amore in città / Love in the City (1953) was the compendium film with which Zavattini sought to resume that project. Presented as the first instalment of a longer cine-magazine, L’amore in città consists of six episodes directed by established figures within Neorealism: Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Alberto Lattuada, Carlo Lizzani, Francesco Maselli, Dino Risi and Cesare Zavattini. No further instalment of the anticipated cinemagazine was ever made, but it is clear from these first six episodes that while L’amore in città did seek to turn an analytical eye onto contemporary Italy – for instance, in its choice of subjects – its mode of address is characterised by an uncertainty, even a duplicity as to the way forward. Each episode is caught in a tension between, on the one hand, the modi operandi traditionally associated with Neorealism, such as the focus on the lower social strata, location shooting and the use of non-professional actors, and, on the other hand, the industry centre-ground’s demands, including the use of stars and the avoidance of ‘attitudes, poses or particulars which might arouse base instincts’. Lattuada’s episode, entitled ‘Gli italiani si voltano / Italians Turn Their Head’ is symptomatic. In this episode, shot entirely without dialogue, the camera follows beautiful women as they go about their business in the streets of Rome. Inter-cut with the shots of the women, who are in fact relatively well-known Italian stars, are shots of men looking at them. As the men’s looks become more and more insistent, the film goes into a crescendo, culminating in a scene in which a woman is followed by a man onto a bus all the way to her home. We see the woman getting off the bus in a deserted suburb and running inside the front door of a housing estate. In the closing shot the camera dwells on the man from a remote high angle, a distant, solitary figure standing alone against the industrial cityscape

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visible in the distance. The tension between sympathising with the ordinary, lower-middle-class woman as she runs away from her stalker, and indulging in the pleasure of looking at, even harassing, well-endowed beauties, is held at bay through a hesitation: the high-angle shot on the solitary man enables us to feel sorry for him even as we gladly see his prey into the safety of her home. If, with the benefit of hindsight, it is not difficult today to see L’amore in città as Neorealism’s swan song, more interesting here is to identify in its narrative strategies the pressures that soon after began to register in all sectors of the industry. Less than ten years after Zavattini’s cine-magazine a new generation of Italian directors emerged who began to explore a ‘broader range of narrative options’ (Del Fra 1978), new ways of grasping cinematically a radically changed reality. And innovative films were made, but quickly their directors were instrumentalised, turned into bankable authors of a ‘new Italian cinema’, which, as Cosulich (2001) has shown, was largely orchestrated by big producers as a counter-move intended to maintain the industrial status quo. The possibility of a truly new Italian wave was thus hijacked. In this context, films such as L’avventura / The Adventure (Antonioni, 1960) or even Il posto / The Job (Ermanno Olmi, 1961) remained the exception, while the rule confined itself to more of the same, products such as the enjoyable but aesthetically very conservative Audace colpo dei soliti ignoti / Fiasco in Milan (Nanny Loy, 1960). The films of Mario Bava were a response to the same pressures, but from a different position than Il posto or Audace colpo dei soliti ignoti, both of which were produced by Titanus. Like the best of Italy’s films produced in the early 1960s, Bava’s films engage in a search for new strategies to present ‘the real’ Italy of those years. Compare the emphasis on looking in La ragazza che sapeva troppo and in Lattuada’s episode entitled ‘Gli italiani si voltano’. Whereas in the latter looking is ultimately penalised, that is, presented either as a pleasurable but illicit act or as harassment, in Bava’s film, whether the camera sustains Nora’s or another point of view, the act of looking pushes the plot forward. The spectator is made forcibly and explicitly complicit in the act, upon which depends all sense of truth. The unravelling and solution of the mystery, pleasure and morality are all wrapped up into one relentless scrutiny of images that seem to have been conceived so as to convey a strong sense of the unfamiliar, all the better to elicit the spectator’s look. Further, the eerie, high-contrast black-and-white photography that grabs this look is fundamentally different from the naturalistic photographic style that had emerged by the late 1950s and which, in the early 1960s, also thanks to new technology,33 became associated

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with the new cinemas,34 and with documentary and reportage. While in the 1960s naturalistic lighting made its way also into the studio, where it was achieved by highly artificial means (for example, in Salvatore Giuliano (Francesco Rosi, 1962)), and while the Nouvelle Vague explored flat lighting, Mario Bava went the opposite way, not towards naturalism, but against it. In these years the high-contrast photographic style that Bava chose for La ragazza che sapeva troppo and most of his other films was used, elsewhere in the industry, nearly exclusively for subjective lighting (Farassino and De Berti 2001: 379), for instance to convey the disturbed mental state of a character, as in a dream or a flashback sequence.35 In La ragazza che sapeva troppo too high-contrast photography carries a subjective look. This is not, however, a subjectivity that is ascribed and confined to a diegetic figure, a character, but one that pervades the operation of the narrator, that is to say, of an agency traditionally assigned an objective ground. It is the conflation of these two levels, achieved partly through a particular photographic style, that sustains La ragazza che sapeva troppo as a giallo, a film narrating events that are simultaneously enigmatic and real. But levels in Bava’s films intersect also in another sense, as diverse generic registers, which in La ragazza che sapeva troppo overlap with one another without ever blending into a seamless narrative. The prying look, presented in the film also as that of the customs officers as they arrest Nora’s airplane acquaintance for smuggling drugs in packets of US cigarettes, evokes in these scenes the success of a new genre, the Bond-type spy film and its setting in international ‘non-places’ – to use Augé’s phrase (1992) – to which Italy had just added Fiumicino Airport. Bava then went through another generic shift for the following section of the film: Nora’s night with the dying Ethel, which is shot as a horror-thriller. In other words, the first few sections of the film constitute a kind of rehearsal of the genres available to the director at a time when Neorealism was deemed to be at the end of its shelf-life. It is only after these generic options have been rehearsed that Bava’s film settles into the generic frame of the kind of horror-thriller that constituted a major aspect of the giallo. The mix of generic registers that characterises the opening of La ragazza che sapeva troppo was remarked upon by Luc Moullet in his review of the film for Cahiers du Cinéma, but not appreciated: Beyond its limits, [La ragazza che sapeva troppo] is a complex picture which, more so than Il gattopardo [/ The Leopard (Luchino Visconti, 1963)], is proof of the state of confusion presently being experienced by Italian filmmakers: rejecting conformist pronouncements while nevertheless borrowing from them

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under the pretences of a conventional parody that never rises to the level of critique; able to regain a degree of primitive spontaneity only through a process of collage. (Moullet 1964: 74)

Moullet’s review is dismissive but in one respect the critic is right: Bava was not the only filmmaker to experiment in this way. As Farassino and De Berti (2001) observe, in the 1960s the narrative structures of mainstream Italian cinema acquired a flexibility and a freedom that previously could be found only within the more experimental sectors of the industry. Divorzio all’italiana (1961), a comedy for large circulation, is a case in point. In Germi’s film the protagonist’s visual and sonic fantasies do not appear in a chronological order, nor is the relationship between reality and fantasy clearly delineated. Even so, in Divorzio all’italiana the two levels are firmly grafted onto the protagonist, who orchestrates them in a very practical way and finally manages to fuse them at the end into a subjectively more desirable objective reality. This ploy makes Divorzio all’italiana an enjoyable vehicle of progressive social critique, but not an aesthetically challenging film. Things work out very differently in La ragazza che sapeva troppo, where the tension between reality and imagination, between one register or another, is never resolved. Registers and levels intersect, they remain separate, but their limits are constantly shifting. The ground of ‘the real’ remains undefined. Reality is conveyed as a dense and opaque texture of multiple, blurring and contrasting layers. While in Divorzio all’italiana the narrative agency is stable – grounded in a precise relation to a central diegetic figure, the protagonist –­ in La ragazza che sapeva troppo no such figure exists. The narrator progresses as if suspended in a search for the most suitable means not to reduce the various registers and levels to an orderly vision, a closure, but to bring new layers out onto the already overloaded surface of the text. This sense of intense opacity was not unique to Bava’s films. As Micciché has convincingly shown, it was a central dimension of the Antonioni of L’avventura / The Adventure (1960), La notte / The Night (1961), L’eclisse / Eclipse (1962) and Deserto rosso / Red Desert (1964). This is because whereas Antonioni’s earlier work featured a bourgeoisie that was fighting its way towards its economic miracle, by the early 1960s the protagonists of Antonioni’s films belong to a bourgeoisie that was firmly in power. Gone are the petty certainties and egotistic subterfuges that kept this class busy in the earlier decade: Antonioni’s characters from the 1960s onwards are drifting characters. They are lost in a sea of uncertainties and surface only occasionally into objective reality, trying to hang on to objects that are precarious and always temporary (Micciché 2010a: 158). Neither is the intermingling

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of subjective and objective levels of discourse in these years a prerogative of Mario Bava. In Micciché’s authorial roundup of the decade, he claims that La dolce vita marked an important transition in Fellini’s work: from earlier films, in which the director sought to present subjective reality in an objective manner, that is to say, ‘to mould the “real” to his personal philosophy’, to later films, in which Fellini tried instead to render objective reality subjective, giving room to the psychological and to fantasies (Micciché 2010a: 160). It was this set of preoccupations that, Micciché argues, led filmmakers such as Antonioni and Fellini to search for a new cinematic language. But if that was indeed the case, as I am convinced it was, then why not extend the same argument to the work of other directors? Given that they too inhabited the historical juncture out of which emerged Antonioni and Fellini’s preoccupations and experiments, those preoccupations must have made their way also into other filmmakers’ work. The question, in other words, is not whether they did or not – how could they not? – but, rather, how did they do so: which forms, precisely, did similar preoccupations take in the films of other directors, including Mario Bava? La ragazza che sapeva troppo and history Since the beginning of film history, the relation between a film and its context has been addressed most directly in historiographies of national cinema. But historians of Italian cinema have not asked themselves this question: how did La ragazza che sapeva troppo stage the preoccupations that shaped 1960s Italy? This question was not asked when Mario Bava made his films nor has it been asked since, because historians of national cinema have never truly challenged the authorial paradigm that underpins film history (and, before cinema, literature). Nor was this question raised by the critics of Midi-Minuit Fantastique, in fan-based writing or, more recently, in academic publications on Mario Bava’s and other popular cinema. The terms in which the issue of whether Bava, Freda and similar cult directors’ work is worthy of study continues to be posed in terms of whether they are auteurs or not, even if the notion of film author used in this context has long been superseded by, among others, Peter Wollen’s work (1998, originally published in 1969). It is a marketing construction of the author that coerces film historiography into a blindly complicit relationship with the industry, that is to say, with a set of mechanisms and priorities that film historiography promises instead to assess critically. To narrate the history of popular cinemas, and to begin to understand precisely how Bava and other genre directors’ work speaks the concerns which also shaped author cinema,

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calls for more than the addition of a few names to the author pantheon of national cinemas. To reconsider giallo films in the light of the pressures at work in Italy in the 1960s means first and foremost the examination of Bava’s aesthetics within a historiographic framework that, moving beyond simplistic notions of authorship, opens up his films to the actual constituents of the force field that the films can be seen to mediate. There are, to begin with, precise industrial pressures to take into account. The fragmented character of film production at the time and the small-scale nature of companies like Galatea enabled films such as La ragazza che sapeva troppo to be less exposed to the draconian control obtaining in larger, established production companies such as De Laurentiis or Titanus. Bava’s way of working was perfectly suited to this small type of production. An experienced and highly skilled director of photography, Bava had learned his trade from his father, an artisan specialised in the making of religious icons who found employment in the silent film industry. Bava used to take particular pleasure in working under tight conditions, within minimal shooting times and budgets (Cozzi 2001: 95–129). His inventive development of the artisanal tricks he also learned from his father earned him a reputation not only as a filmmaker capable of churning out films at very low cost, but also as one of the most inventive masters of special effects to be found in Italy at the time and a highly valuable director. The small-scale and somewhat impromptu nature of this section of Italian production, and the drive to compete in a stratifying exhibition circuit, opened up the films produced in these conditions to a degree of experimentation, partly by default. These factors enabled the films to register dimensions and elements of contemporary Italian culture that would otherwise have been filtered out or contained not only by censorship, but also by practices such as a tight script, the employment of staff relying on expensive equipment and well-tested techniques, and the use of stars (and, with stars, the limitations imposed by insurance companies). First among the contemporary elements to leave an imprint on La ragazza che sapeva troppo was the US presence, which is recorded quite explicitly in the film’s opening shot as the image of the TWA airplane about to land at Fiumicino Airport, as well as in the nationality of the female protagonist it carries. As the title of another Italian film had it, Arrivano i dollari! / The Dollars are Coming! (Mario Costa, 1957).36 Bava’s film registered their landing, as it were – in the process manifesting in the diegesis simultaneously a central dimension of life in Italy, one of the film’s sources of finance and a then widely aspired to horizon. But La ragazza che sapeva troppo also registered other, more controversial dimensions of its time, layers of expectations and opportunities which, contained by the regressive

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onslaught of the years that followed the Marshall Plan, failed to materialise, even if for contemporary Italy they were just as real. A measure of such openings is evident, for instance, in the image of Nora lying unconscious on the stairs of Trinità dei Monti dressed only in a black PVC overcoat made shiny by the falling rain and barely covering her naked legs. As the camera tilts towards the church’s clock tower, its image is reflected in, then distorted and finally dissolved in the ripples of a puddle of rainwater. The film elicited in this way a prying, enquiring look, a desire for a better present – one that for the Italy of the 1960s as seen by this film was, in the words of Nuovo Spettatore Cinematografico, both ‘unprecedented’ and ‘realistic’, eerie but very close at hand. If any film can be read as a historical document, as an imprint of the time that knows it, then we should also be able to read a film for what it knows about its time, how it speaks its context. In the light of Micciché’s readings of Antonioni’s films, it could be argued that the image described above – a scantily dressed Nora lying at the feet of Trinità dei Monti – offers a fairly accurate rendition of the one single most important tension in early 1960s Italian society: on one side the Church and its seemingly receding power, on the other the look of a spectator open to the opportunities offered by a more modern force, speculative capital, ready to scoop up and monetise individuals’ desires. Caught unconscious between the two is a middle-class woman, Nora, a US national with an Italian name. But in order to be able to begin to unravel the multiple layers of this image, to grasp the functioning of the strategies that led the narrative to arrive at this point in just this way – to treat, in short, Bava’s giallo as an author film in the way that Peter Wollen or, for that matter, Foucault (1988) theorised this term – a more critical relation to the film industry and, with it, a clearer, more objective understanding of post-war history is needed than has been exercised by film historians to date. La ragazza che sapeva troppo and film historiography It is again Lino Micciché who, speaking in Venice in 1978, offered a glimpse of the problem: It is my conviction that not only our political contradictions, but also our cinematic ones are rooted in the two decades of the post-war. This is not so much, or only, to say, as many have done before me, that ‘we are all the sons of Neorealism’, but rather, and less obviously, that ‘post-Neorealism is still with us’. This necessarily forces us finally to confront a period that, having started in

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the 1950s, cinematically speaking is still not over today. It is not a coincidence that of all the European cinemas the Italian cinema is the only one not to have had, in the 1960s, a new wave that shook it at the foundation. Instead we essentially had a series of generational changeovers. (Micciché 1978: 9)

Why hang on to an aesthetic that, by the 1950s, had effectively been exhausted? Why were the same directors and their narrative choices passed on as the paradigms of a theory and a historiography that, in Europe, in the US and eventually elsewhere, would be elevated to an institutionalised professional field only a few years after Micciché’s Venice address? These paradigms continue to be deployed today for the writing of the histories of national cinemas everywhere, resulting in the creation of canons. The problem with such canons is not so much that they are exclusionary – all canons are. The problem, rather, is that the specific juncture within which they are arrived at, and therefore the criteria on the basis of which such canons are defined, are never, themselves, historicised. It is my contention that this happened because film historians were too imbricated in the political and economic contradictions of the time to be able to develop a vantage point from which to assess their operation critically. Today, with the benefit of hindsight, we can do so. In Italy, progressive intellectuals lost the battle in 1948, with Togliatti’s defeat at the general elections. Among economic historians it is now an accepted fact that the forces that emerged after World War Two in Italy (where they determined the results of the elections) and elsewhere (where, as I show in the next chapters, they took different forms) were not a left- and a right-wing faction, as many intellectuals today still believe them to be. They were, rather, what I referred to in Chapter 1 as ‘social reproduction’ and ‘radical’ capital. On the one hand, the interests of capitalists as a class. These class interests, which are represented by the state, also involve promoting measures that, although not immediately conducive to capital accumulation, are aimed at guaranteeing the reproduction of the social conditions for capital’s long-term survival and expansion, including the reproduction of a labour force with some disposable income. On the other hand, radically speculative interests of individual capitalists, that is to say, the drive to compete and generate surplus value irrespective of the longer-term needs to reproduce the ideal conditions for the reproduction of a system in which capital can thrive (Harvey 1999). In the 1960s, in Italy, these two poles formed a relatively stable force-field that came to be represented by nearly fifty years of uninterrupted Christian Democratic rule. And while the actual tension was, Ginsborg has argued, within the Christian Democratic party,

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the terms of public debate congealed around a discourse of struggle between the right, in power, and the left, permanently in opposition. As elsewhere in Western Europe (Anderson 2009; Anderson and Camiller 1994), this was simply too stable and too overreaching a formation for intellectuals to find platforms that could afford them the means to formulate terms of debate other than the ones they were given by it. As Pier Paolo Pasolini was to learn in the mid-1970s, when he wrote against the legalisation of abortion on subtle humanist grounds and, in so doing, went against the political left’s official line, the legroom to advance complex points for public discussion was very cramped indeed, whatever the medium.37 The same problem confronted Cesare Zavattini a few years earlier, in 1956, when he was invited to speak on cinema at an event organised by the women’s association Unione Donne in Italia (Preda 1979). On that occasion, much to the horror of the rest of this militant audience, a working-class woman asked Zavattini why he was not willing to provide the public with the kind of films that she, like most people, actually preferred, namely star-studded romantic melodramas. As evident from Preda’s (1979) account, the polarisation of the audience into hardcore ideologists and unwitting populists allowed Zavattini no room to answer, let alone room for debate. The risk of carefully crafted arguments being misunderstood by one’s allies, wilfully appropriated and distorted by one’s opponents, or quite simply associated with the latter by a misinformed or poorly educated public was very high. Film historians and critics operated within and addressed a public sphere that, for three decades after World War Two, in Italy as elsewhere, was extremely polarised. Caught, like other intellectuals, within a Cold War-informed dichotomy that had been handed over to them by the very forces they were seeking to oppose, film critics fell back on old positions. The aesthetics of Neorealism, or at least a certain image of it, provided such a fallback line, the most readily available alternative within a sphere where populism ruled. In reality, the critics’ recovery of Neorealism and the (US and domestic) populism it was meant to counteract were the two sides of the same Cold War discourse, the underpinning economic interests of which were never properly examined. For the most, perhaps because of a sense of political urgency, intellectuals limited themselves to take up positions within that discourse. Arguably, there are other, more immediate considerations also to be taken into account. La ragazza che sapeva troppo and other giallo films were not the object of a wilful omission on the part of film historians also because giallo films, like any other film, could only be watched in the cinema once, maybe twice. Unfamiliar modes of narration are difficult to unravel on the basis of one or two viewings. Closer textual analysis became

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possible only with the arrival and widespread availability of the VCR. But even from the early 1980s, when VCRs made multiple, detailed viewing easier, giallo and other ‘undergrowth’ genre films continued to be overlooked in their narrative strategies, for their capacity to speak the Italy of the economic boom, because wherever film critics turned their eyes they interpreted post-war history as a struggle between the two sides of the same Cold War discourse: on one side the Church, the United States or both joined together under the aegis of the DC, its censors, its television, its petty and its less petite bourgeoisie; on the other side the USSR and its proletariat and, once that particular fiction could no longer be sustained, China, Hungary, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Chile and so forth. At the most basic filmic levels and through a process of summary reading, Visconti, Fellini, Antonioni and other directors’ work could be seen to touch also on the tropes and oppositions of this overarching vision of history. Not so Mario Bava’s films, none of which has anything explicit to say about any of the terms of that simple dichotomy – because that was not the true nature of the one single main tension that shaped post-war Italy and the world. Bava’s films were thus quite literally overlooked because the actual context of these (and, indeed, of all contemporary) films was not registered by film critics, let alone critically understood. Nor, as a result, were the films. At best, Bava’s work became the object of formalist concerns on the part of maverick critics – writers who rejected the instrumentalisation of art as politics and, with it, the reduction of films to little more than anecdotally staged ideology. These, mainly French, critics did write about Bava’s films, focusing on various dimensions of their narrative strategies in spite of the limitations imposed by few cinema viewings. The result was a formalism that never moved beyond that, partly because of those viewing limitations and partly because these critics too suffered from a misleading perception of the films’ context. Hollowed out of historical matter, these critics’ consideration of Bava’s work never enabled them to question the author-based framework in which they effectively inscribed him. Mario Bava became the master of a popular form of surrealism, modernism or, at any rate, aestheticism, his work an object of cult, its meticulously layered functioning receding further into inscrutability the more the films were praised.38 By the time Micciché addressed his Venice audience, small-scale, independent companies had become fewer and even more short-lived than in the earlier decade. Galatea discontinued its production of peplum, horror and giallo films soon after 1962 to focus instead on the more upmarket and, by then, more profitable Italian author cinema (Farassino 2004: 429). The giallo film continued to be made until the mid-1970s, by which time

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its mode of address had become characteristic of a generic cinema that saw itself in competition with RAI television. As giallo films began to feature police detectives whose capacity to hold the ground of objective truth is always above suspicion, their narrative strategies increasingly reproduced televisual modes of address, even as the mises en scène were spiced up with the sexier sales points (mainly violence and nudity) that were proscribed to television. The result – films by Fernando Di Leo, Lucio Fulci and others – forms today the object of an increasing number of academic publications on popular cinema in which Mario Bava is regularly mentioned, though rarely discussed at length, as these giallo directors’ pioneering predecessor. In reality the only factor that could, perhaps, be considered as a basis for such lineage is the generic or marketing label. But in and of itself the term giallo as used by the industry’s marketers is not a sufficient ground of (film) historical analysis, if only because one of the objectives of historiography is precisely to assess critically those marketing strategies as a dimension of the pressures that may make a film the aesthetically specific and, through that specificity, historically relevant object that it is. Films are made of a variety of strategies, operating at different levels of the text. Each of these levels is unthinkable if not in relation to an ‘outside’, the specific constitutive ingredients and dynamics of which must be pulled into the equation if a film is to be understood in its unique and necessary functioning. That such aesthetic necessity should today still not be taken into account when compiling accounts of Italian national cinema has less to do with Mario Bava himself, whose status is now equivalent to cult film auteur, and more with a lack of understanding, to date, of the context that his films, however obscurely and unwittingly, inevitably addressed. La ragazza che sapeva troppo today Six decades after World War Two, the terms of the debate have barely changed. We continue to write about national cinema as if a neat line has been drawn across it: national auteurs and popular cinema, whatever that may be. The only difference is that now this obscure object has become one of the foci of academic writing. By and large, such writing seeks to construe generic cinema as transgressive, even if what it may or may not transgress, if anything, is far from clear. Whenever academic publications ask why this cinema may be worthy of study, the reason customarily advanced is that this is a forgotten, under-studied cinema, films that have been unjustly excluded from the canon. Whether this is simply a coded way of justifying the proliferation of peer-reviewed publications and, through it, the legitimation

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of a new class of academics more in tune with the populism of our time, is not a matter I wish to discuss here. From a film historical perspective, what concerns me more is that, in practice, such an answer merely postpones the question. It may well be that Mario Bava’s and similar films did trespass onto forbidden ground, at least forbidden at the time they were made. The fact is that we cannot know – at least not until the specific temporalities and forces constituting that ground are better theorised and more clearly defined than they have been so far, also in recent academic studies of popular cinema. In this chapter I have argued that what shaped Italy in the post-war era was not a tension between the Communist Party (PC) and the Christian Democrats (DC), or, more generally, left- and right-wing factions, but an internal tension within the right and, more specifically, within DC, between the interests of social reproduction capital (sustained by the Catholic Church) and radical elements within industrial and financial capital pushing for competition and consumer culture. Further, what took over Italy in the 1960s and early 1970s was not, or not primarily, a wave of liberation, but the formatting and reproduction of a social sphere that, in its search for a more liberal lifestyle, would be made sensitive to consumerism and thus perfectly tuned into the accumulative drive of industrial and financial capitalist forces that were stronger, more fully consolidated and more efficient than they were only a decade earlier. Crucially, this is not to say that Bava’s and similar films did not have a progressive or innovative dimension. As I have tried to show, they did. It is, rather, to say, first, that there were reasons why the ground on which Bava could operate opened up. Second, it is to say that unless we historicise that ground correctly we will never know why the work of Mario Bava and of other directors of popular cinema may indeed be worthy of study. In the next two chapters I endeavour to show that it is the relation between that mode of capital which is radical and speculative (in and outside the film industry) and the infrastructures of the state (of which educational institutions are a part) that determines the place of popular films in the historiography of any national cinema. In the Italy of the 1960s, radical capital was a significant factor. For instance, it was particularly visible in its mode of operation as speculazione edilizia, a period of highly speculative, often illegal and corrupt practices in the construction sector whereby small contractors and large construction companies alike made enormous profits at the expenses of tenants, many of whom died as poorly built housing collapsed. It opened up spaces, real and aspirational, for conspicuous consumption also among sections of the population who, only a few years earlier, still made themselves – on a small

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and artisanal scale – many of the goods they needed. Radical capital in Italy thus had a close relation to the state, within which it was represented as part of an increasingly corrupt DC, but its operation was never quite granted the degree of legitimacy it would later acquire when Silvio Berlusconi came into power. For this reason, films produced explicitly under its aegis – films that not only infringed the accepted codes of decency but, worse, could be seen to capitalise on that – were also not granted legitimacy. Producers and directors who worked within this most speculative, because less centre-ground and thus less secure, end of the market, such as Mario Bava, were allowed to operate undisturbed, so long as they played along with the censors. Bava’s films circulated widely nationally with a sixteen or eighteen certification, as well as internationally. This is not to say that the arbiters of culture liked Italian cinema to be confused with that type of film. When they were released as Italian productions, Bava’s films were thus left to be: watched by a large number of people who probably enjoyed them but would equally probably rather not admit to it. Nor was the opposition, the Communist Party (PC), any more liberal than its ruling counterpart, if only because of the unassailable Catholicism of the labour force from the support of which the PC derived its influence. Film historians were not, as a rule, swept away by the PC’s regressive populism in matters of sex. Their reluctance to grant legitimacy to generi di profondità stemmed, rather, from the simple condemnation of what they saw as genre cinema’s populist appeal to the lowest common denominator. A better understanding of the forces at play in Italy at the time, that is to say, a critical distance to the terms of debate as film historians were given to inherit them from both the ruling coalition and the opposition, would have enabled them not to dismiss some genre cinema as hastily as they did. The result has been the exclusion, from the histories of Italian cinema, of large chunks of the country’s film production. In the next chapter I show that in Mexico, where the relation between the state and radical capital has been very different from in Italy, the place of horror, mystery and similar genres in the histories of Mexican national cinema changes accordingly – the different nature of that state–capital relation affording these genres an entirely different, indeed inclusive, position in the country’s account of what its cinema may or may not be.

3 Mexico: the cinema of Fernando Méndez

On 4 October 1957 the cinema Palacio Chino in Mexico City showed El vampiro / The Vampire, a new A-certificate release directed by Fernando Méndez. It was reviewed two days later in the weekly El Redondel by Alfonso de Icaza, who observed that ‘in Mexico the mystery or, rather, the horror film has many supporters, and it is from among these that this film is acquiring a big following’ (quoted in De La Vega Alfaro 1995b: 198). The film played at the Palacio Chino for four weeks (García Riera 1994: 62). In November of the same year El ataúd del vampiro / The Vampire’s Coffin, a sequel also directed by Méndez, went into production, to be released on 28 August of the following year. El vampiro has since been considered a seminal moment of Mexican post-war horror cinema. As Doyle Greene put it, ‘El vampiro’s commercial and critical success in Mexico … provided the impetus for the increased production of Mexican horror films throughout the next two decades’ (2005: 8). There are problems with Greene’s claim, or, rather, with his suggestion that Méndez’ film played an industrially foundational role. Yet Greene is not an isolated instance: since its release on the foreign markets El vampiro has been regarded there both as a seminal instance of Mexican generic cinema and as a cult film by a marginal filmmaker. I revisit this somewhat contradictory positioning of El vampiro in Mexican cinema at the end of this chapter, when I discuss the film’s reception outside Mexico, where it appears to have circulated primarily in European retrospectives devoted to fantasy films and, in the United States, in drive-ins and exploitation cinema circuits. But to understand how El vampiro circulated globally and came to be written into the history of cinema in just this way – in short, to assess critically the expectations that underpin its international reception – the film and its director must first be situated in their historically specific film industrial and broader cultural context. In what follows I map the career of Fernando Méndez against the growth of the Mexican film

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industry and the changes the country underwent in the two decades after World War Two. As will become apparent, by the time Méndez directed El vampiro he was neither an obscure nor a maverick filmmaker, as many other directors of horror films tend to be assumed to be, but, rather, a central figure of mainstream Mexican cinema. This raises the question: what were the circumstances that led some horror films to be so central a dimension of Mexican cinema in the late 1950s, at a time when, in other countries, films built on similar generic categories tended to be produced within, and were circulated primarily at the margins of, the national and international industry? El vampiro was a response to the crisis that Mexican cinema underwent in those years. Like similarly generic films made and released in other countries, it was the product of speculative capital, of interests radical enough in their money-making drive to transpose onto Mexican locations and themes sales points that had proven effective in relatively marginal and thus more exploitative sectors of US and European cinema. In the 1950s, this strategy was far from unique: products inspired by 1930s European and Hollywood horror films could be found in other industries. Unlike these products, however, in Mexico El vampiro and others of Méndez’ films were granted a good degree of legitimacy and regarded as run-of-the-mill instances of national cinema. I argue that the unusually legitimate position of Méndez’ horror films in the historiography of Mexican cinema and of Méndez himself as one of its prominent figures (if not quite a national auteur) are to be ascribed to the nature of the relation between the Mexican state and radical capital in the 1950s and 1960s. Unlike in Italy, where the tendency of capital to accumulate surplus value – irrespective of the long-term interests of the system – was kept at bay by the Church, in Mexico after World War Two this radical capitalist drive was present as foreign, mainly US capital. Not bound by US government regulation, in Mexico US interests operated in a highly speculative way, in cinema as in other sectors of the economy. Soon after the war the Mexican government showed little interest in keeping speculative practice under control. On the contrary, for all intent and purposes from the early 1950s it acted as a comprador state.1 The alliance, if not the equivalence, of radically speculative forces and the Mexican ruling elite inside and outside the film industry was the ground that produced at one and the same time Méndez’ horror films, a public ready to patronise them as mainstream, even family, cinema and the critics ready to ascribe to both films and public a high degree of cultural legitimacy. In the closing sections of this chapter I examine the narrative strategies of El vampiro in the light of the particularity of this economic and cultural juncture – a cluster

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of pressures and preoccupations that this and others of Méndez’ films can be seen to mediate in their modes of address. This historical specificity, that is to say, the historicity of the positions made available by Méndez’ films totally passed by European and US critics. For them, Méndez’ horror films appear to have been exotic objects, stylised productions to be watched just like exploitation or fantasy cinema. At the root of this misapprehension was the critics’ imbrication into those processes and factors, within US and European cultures, that made Méndez’ films available there. My objective here is to avoid that we make the same mistake. Today Méndez’ films are available to watch on DVD. We are also fortunate enough to write about these films from an institutionally more powerful position than earlier critics ever occupied. For this reason alone it is imperative that we ask ourselves why we may choose to do so. The legitimacy afforded to Méndez’ films in Mexico in the 1950s and after may just tell us a thing or two about who or which power blocs speak in the current rediscovery of certain kinds of popular cinema. Fernando Méndez, the Mexican film industry and the socio-economics of 1950s Mexico Fernando Antonio Méndez García was born on 20 July 1908 in Zamora. His mother, Carmen García Urbizu, was the sister of Mexican film pioneers Pedro and Francisco García Urbizu. His father, Fernando Méndez Bernal, was a small industrial chemist who, in the late 1920s, fought alongside the Cristeros.2 Much of the family’s inherited and acquired wealth was lost during the Mexican revolution. In 1918 the young Fernando and his parents moved to Mexico City, where he gained entry into the Colegio Marista Francés. At the Colegio, he met his life-long friends, including Adolfo López Mateos, who, forty years later, became Mexico’s president. In 1929 Fernando Méndez joined his cousin, the son of Pedro García Urbizu, in Los Angeles and, a year later, also in Los Angeles, another cousin, Alberto Méndez Bernal, on whose films Fernando began working as a writer and in technical capacities. By 1936 Fernando Méndez was back in Mexico working in a domestic cinema that, with the success of Fernando de Fuentes’ Allá en el Rancho Grande / Over at the Big Ranch (1936) across Latin America, began that very year to grow into an industry (De La Vega Alfaro 1995b). The consolidation of Mexican cinema took place during World War Two. The beginning of Manuel Ávila Camacho’s presidential term (1940–6) marked the beginning of a long period – approximately from 1940 to 1968 – commonly referred to as the Mexican miracle. This was a period of ­combined

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political stability and economic development, which in its first phase (1941–5) depended on a pact with the United States. Starting in the 1940s, the Mexican government embarked on a programme of industrialisation by means of an import-substitution policy. In exchange for military cooperation with the United States, inexpensive labour and guaranteed sales of raw materials, Mexico received loans and technological aid to invigorate its economy and reposition itself in the Latin American, the European and even the US markets. When industrialisation started, the incipient Mexican bourgeoisie doubted the role of the state and the desirable degree of government intervention in the productive process. Eventually, the policy that would rule relations between the state and the private sector for several decades was developed: the duty of the state was to create and maintain the economic infrastructure; it would intervene least in the area of direct production for the market and engage only in those activities in which private enterprise was disinterested. Little by little, in spite of the protests of private entrepreneurs, governmental practice and private deficiencies resulted in a mixed economy, with a ratio that averaged one-third of government input and two-thirds of private investment. Some areas, such as banking, oil, electricity, steel, basic petrochemicals and communications, were reserved for the state or Mexican nationals. Foreign investment remained relatively low. With this compromise, between 1940 and 1960 production increased more than threefold, a post-war boom that, over the years, created an entirely new class of Mexican magnates who were accustomed to low taxes and easy profits under the protectionist umbrella of the state. But during the war and in the decade that followed it Mexico underwent much broader structural economic and social changes. In 1940 agriculture represented around 10 per cent of national production; by the mid-1970s the figure had halved to 5 per cent. The proportion of the economically active population engaged in agriculture fell from approximately 70 per cent at the beginning of the twentieth century to 40 per cent in 1980. Even so, in the late 1960s 24 million Mexicans, more than half of the population, still lived and worked in the countryside (Niedergang 1971: 273). Concurrently, the percentage of workers employed in industry rose from roughly 10 per cent in 1900 to 30 per cent in 1980. The ranks of the industrial proletariat and the middle class grew and cities expanded. In 1900 only 9.2 per cent of the Mexican population lived in cities; by 1940 the figure had climbed to 18 per cent, and by 1970 it stood at around 35 per cent (Smith 1991: 330). The census of 1960 suggests that Mexico’s upper class remained very small; its location shifted from the countryside to the city and traditional hacendados (owners of haciendas or large farms) gave way to bankers, industrialists and agribusinessmen.

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The middle class reached 17 per cent of the total p ­ opulation. By far the majority of the working population was constituted by manual labourers (82 per cent) (Smith 1991: 328). There was a considerable growth in formal urban employment. Traditional services, such as sales and domestic service, decreased in importance to be replaced by social, business and administrative services (office workers, teachers, health workers, technicians and so forth). This change marked the relative decline of the old middle classes (small entrepreneurs, independent craft people) of the smaller provincial cities, towns and villages. The classes that increased in importance were those associated with the large cities: professionals, managers and office workers, workers in the construction and the service industries (De Oliveira 1998: 256). Education became an important element of social mobility. Finally, levels of health improved, life expectancy rose and infant mortality dropped. Through this combination of factors, from 1940 the population began to grow at an annual rate of 3 per cent, one of the highest in the world: from 20 million in 1940 to 36 million in 1960. In the 1960s (and, to a large extent, also today) nearly half of the population was under the age of sixteen (Aguilar Camín and Meyer 1993: 175; Smith 1991: 331; Niedergang 1971: 239). The official line is that the Mexican miracle displaced the country’s traditional centre of gravity from the countryside to the cities (Aguilar Camín and Meyer 1993: 162). Economists, however, have argued that on closer scrutiny this is far from an accurate picture of the changes Mexico underwent in the 1940s. Roger D. Hansen (1971) has shown that, to the extent that there was a miracle of modern Mexican economic growth, this is to be found in the performance of Mexican agriculture. From 1935, agricultural production rose at an annual rate of 4.4 per cent. In the decades that followed, the agricultural sector contributed significantly to the country’s economic development: by the 1970s it had lifted Mexico to virtual selfsufficiency in food production, had generated several manufacturing-sector inputs (such as cotton, sugar cane and coffee), and its rapidly rising exports (representing 50 per cent of total merchandise export receipts) had led to foreign exchange earnings that were used to finance the import requirements of industrialisation. Further, the increasing purchasing power of rural Mexico provided an essential growing market for Mexican industrial products (Hansen 1971: 58–9). Irrespective of the type of landholding (large and small private holdings, and ejidos), the agricultural sectors’ contributions to economic growth were achieved through commercial, rather than traditional, farming. The administrations that succeeded Lázaro Cárdenas (December 1934 to November 1940) reversed their predecessor’s policy of land distribution. Land tenure laws were changed to accommodate large

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private commercial producers. Significantly, much of the newly irrigated land was farmed in a partially or totally mechanised manner (Hansen 1971: 60). The appearance of commercial farming was made possible by incentives that were developed from 1935. In the 1950s these would intensify to include massive irrigation projects, the expansion of rural road networks and by further promoting land concentration at the expense of small farmers. As we shall see, it is this dimension of the Mexican miracle that Méndez’ El vampiro registered. World War Two favoured Mexico’s economic development along industrial lines, including the development of a national film industry, but the continued importance of the agricultural sector in the country’s economic and social fabric, and the conflicts that sustained it, also left their mark on the commodities produced by 1930s and 1940s cinema. To begin with, it was a land-based economy that originally secured the cinema’s main financial basis: until the creation of a financial infrastructure for the industry in the late 1940s at the hands of the state, the sale of land was the most common way to finance film production (Noble 2005: 15). It is not a coincidence that the film that heralded the beginning of regular production should have been the comedia ranchera (rural comedy) Allá en el Rancho Grande / Over at the Big Ranch (Fernando de Fuentes, 1936). Its release and success across Latin America led to the proliferation of comedia rancheras for many years after, but these were not the only type of film to register this important dimension of Mexico’s socio-economic life. As I show later in this chapter, interests and discourses connected to land can also be found to orchestrate the narrative strategies of productions made several years after Allá en el Rancho Grande and relying on different generic categories. Again, this is the case also of Fernando Méndez’ films, even if in the late 1950s new factors intervened to bring questions of land ownership back onto the country’s agenda that lent Mexican films of this period other means to address these or similar concerns. One such factor was the state and its relationship to the United States. The Mexican government began to take an interest in the cinema in the 1930s, most notably by subsidising the new Clasa studios (Cinematográfico Latino Americana S.A., 1935), which were equipped with the most up-todate equipment. Hollywood interests, for their part, as a corollary of the US programme to aid Mexican industrial development, granted technological help and raw materials to the film industry and, on several occasions, made direct production investments. All this allowed Mexican cinema to diversify its production and to expand in most Spanish-speaking markets of Latin America. With Hollywood busy producing films for the war cause, with

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practically guaranteed markets and with the solid backing of US producers, the film industry became the fifth largest sector of the Mexican economy. This period thus coincided with the so-called golden age of Mexican cinema – an era that was sustained by the setting in place of the industry’s infrastructure. In 1941, the union Sindicato de Trabajadores de la Industria Cinematográfica de la Republica Mexicana (STIC) was founded, while the following year the Asociación de Productores de Películas joined forces with distributors and exhibitors to form the Cámara Nacional de la Industria Cinematográfica Mexicana, an organisation that secured the interests of the most powerful within the industry. Also in 1942 the state created the Banco Cinematográfico, a loan-granting organisation, the expressed purpose of which was to consolidate the development of the industry primarily by protecting, promoting and remodelling the production sector. Established originally as a private institution, the Banco ‘liberated filmmakers from the, until then, common practice of selling land to finance business’ by financing film production and distribution. It set the pattern of film financing for the foreseeable future, in which state and private business combined to offer funding (Noble 2005: 16). By 1945 some 4,000 people were employed in the industry, all of whom were affiliated to the STIC. That same year, a disagreement within the STIC led to the creation of the Sindicato de Trabajadores de la Producción Cinematográfica (STPC) to represent the industry’s creative workers: directors, writers, musicians, actors and technicians, that is, cinematographers, sound personnel, set designers, make-up artists, editors and so on. The new union was headed by prestigious names such as cinematographer Gabriel Figueroa and stars Jorge Negrete and Cantinflas, but was rejected by the organisation affiliated to the powerful Confederación de Trabajadores de México (CTM). A governmental arbiter thus established the limits: distribution, exhibition and newsreels would remain under the STIC; feature films under the STPC (Pineda and Paranaguá 1995: 35). These institutions had a fundamental impact on production. During the first half of the 1940s production exceeded seventy films per year. The productions representative of the industry’s centre-ground during these years were those directed by Emilio ‘El Indio’ Fernández, Julio Bracho, Alejandro Galindo Amezcua, Roberto Gavaldón Leyva and others. They were marked by the photography of Gabriel Figueroa and Alex Phillips, and by the acting of Pedro Armendáriz, Dolores del Río, Andrea Palma, María Félix and Jorge Negrete, among many others. Fernando Méndez was not at the centre of the industry during this golden age. His directorial debut was La Reina de Mexico: las quatros apariciones de la Virgin de Guadalupe / Mexico’s

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Queen: the Four Apparitions of the Virgin of Guadalupe (1939), after which Méndez probably worked on Alejandro Galindo’s El monje loco / The Mad Monk (1940), a serial based on a popular radio horror and mystery series. From 1939 until 1960, when Méndez stopped directing, he made a film nearly every year; during the 1950s often more. During the war, however, none of his films defined the industry’s generic ground. Like many of the films produced during the presidency of Manuel Ávila Camacho (1940–6), Méndez’ second film, Allá en el Bajío / Over in the Lowlands (1941), paid tribute to the new government’s agrarian counter-reform by presenting the small rancho as a healthier and fairer alternative to Lázaro Cárdenas’ agrarian policies – policies that only a few years earlier had finally seen the implementation of the long-promised dismantling of large haciendas, the redistribution of land and the expansion of ejidos.3 Importantly, Allá en el Bajío starred Raúl de Anda, an actor and producer who had achieved his first box office success with El charro negro / The Black Horseman (Raúl de Anda, 1940) a year earlier. Méndez’ film was, in many ways, a sequel of the latter. Two years later Méndez began shooting Calaveras del terror / Terror Skulls (1943), a serial that combined two genres which in Mexican cinema had, until then, been treated as autonomous: the western and the mystery film. Inspired by a well-tested Hollywood combination (for instance, Mascot’s B movies of the 1930s), Calaveras del terror was advertised as ‘the first super series in Spanish’. Like its US precedents, it featured masked heroes and was circulated primarily in suburban cinemas, in twelve episodes, even as it transposed the US genre’s conventions to Mexican locales, such as haciendas, small villages and ranchos, and to Mexican history, the Porfirian era.4 Calaveras del terror was thus a somewhat paradoxical object: a fully commercial venture that, however, like Méndez’ earlier film, situated itself firmly within the trend that characterised Allá en el Rancho Grande and other 1930s national cinema, añoranza porfiriana (literally ‘porfirian nostalgia’) or the display of nostalgia for the good old days of Porfirio Díaz’ regime (Noble 2005: 31) and for a rural Mexico made of benevolent hacendados. Indeed, the films that Méndez directed during the war and immediately after were far removed from the nationalist, developmentalist aesthetics of contemporary, mainstream cinema, such as the films of Emilio Fernandez and Gabriel Figueroa. Witness also El criollo aka Un caballero de Jalisco / A Brave Man from Jalisco (1945), which Méndez made two years after Calaveras del terror. Marketed as a historical, nationalist drama, El criollo was, in practice, an adventure film along the lines of Douglas Fairbanks’ The Mark of Zorro (Fred Niblo, 1920). With its focus on notions of bravery and its total disregard for official, nationalist revolutionary ideology, it

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combined two seemingly contradictory temporalities and discourses: commercial, industrial exploitation and agrarian, Porfirian ideals. This tension continued to run across the body of Méndez’ work, including his best known horror films of the late 1950s. By that time, however, Mexico’s economic trajectory and the state ideology that legitimated it had changed radically. Immediately after the war, the state took several measures to support, regulate and control cinema’s industrial structures. In 1945, it created Películas Mexicanas S.A. to take charge of distribution in Latin America, Europe and the southern United States. In 1947 the Banco Cinematográfico was nationalised and became the Banco Nacional Cinematográfico (BNC), with the state as majority shareholder (Pineda and Paranaguá 1995: 36). That same year, the mixed-capital distributor Películas Nacionales S.A. was created to handle domestic distribution. In 1949, the Ley de la Industria Cinematográfica (Film Industry Law) was promulgated (and remains active to this day, with amendments made in 1952). Finally, 1949 was also the first year of the Dirección General de Cinematografía, a sub-agency of the Secretaría de Gobernación (Ministry of the Interior) that was assigned the task of censoring, supervising and preserving the national cinema through a Cineteca, a film archive (which, however, would not come into existence until twenty-six years later). In spite of these measures, in the years immediately after the war Mexican cinema suffered major setbacks. There was a decrease in production (seventy-two films in 1946 and fifty-seven in 1947). Partly a consequence of the renaissance of Hollywood – its regained hold on Latin American markets and the withdrawal of US producers’ direct support – in the immediate post-war period the Mexican film industry plunged into a crisis. The crisis set in during Miguel Alemán Valdés’ presidency (December 1946 to November 1952). Three features appear to have characterised Alemán’s regime: corruption, the ruling coalition’s determination to pursue economic growth at any cost, and Mexico’s opening to US investors to levels not seen since the Porfiriato. On this period of Mexican history it is worth quoting Carlos Monsiváis at some length: During the government of Miguel Alemán, corruption has a technical name (‘Developmentalism’) and great public and national significance: from the accumulation of wealth will spring general prosperity. Let everything be subordinated to this general purpose. Alemán does not want to corrupt the whole country, only to make sure that the royal road to greatness is devoid of all revolutionary implications. Society as showcase and pedestal: there is the frenzied desire to exhibit one’s possessions, and both the banks and the cabarets become the twin voices of this one chorus … During the government of Alemán,

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and the years that follow, habits, ideas and passions are driven by the ideal of self-fashioning, the dazzling story of the ego. Nationalism becomes a noble sentiment demanding occasional support while, economically, the country is gradually, but systematically, denationalised. The Land of Tomorrow receives foreign investment, and in exchange co-operative farmers are assassinated in order to generate divisions and conflict, while workers stubbornly remaining within free trade unions are locked out, beaten and imprisoned with the complacency of shared habits, ideas and passions. If, as Whitehead suggests, an idea that is generally held is always a danger for the existing order, the general idea to be destroyed is – surprise, surprise – the class struggle. The idea of National Unity is fabricated instead: ‘I will govern for everyone,’ says Ávila Camacho [December 1940 to November 1946], as the CTM crowns Miguel Alemán the ‘Worker of the Nation’. Despotism is tempered by assassination, fraud and pillage, and given prestige by whatever charitable donation the booty allowed. From the point of view of power, everything must become a question of social and economic success. The fate of the working class and victimised peasantry is the concern only of political commentators (and the families of the deceased). Everything is absorbed by the spectacle of national growth, the show at which dams, motorways, stadiums and universities are unveiled … A Zapotec Indian may or may not want to be President of the Republic, but what surely matters to him – and by now has become a shared breviary – are the splendours of a well-situated residence, a pool and a cool whisky, served pronto. (Monsiváis 1997: 17–19, trans. John Kraniauskas)

Alemán was determined to continue and extend the process of import substitution industrialisation that was started during the war. To achieve this goal he forged an alliance between state and private capital, both national and, unlike during previous administrations, foreign (Smith 1991: 339). As he declared to the Confederación de Trabajadores de México (CTM): private enterprise should have complete freedom and be able to count on support from the state, so long as it acts on behalf of the general interest. Property ownership should preferably be in the hands of Mexican citizens, in accord with lines already established by our legislation; but foreign capital that has come to unite its destiny with that of Mexico will be able to freely enjoy its legitimate profits … The role of the state is to guarantee for workers the right to organise … At the same time, the state should guarantee the rights of businessmen to open centres of productions and to multiply the country’s industries, confident that their investments will be safe from the vagaries of injustice. (quoted in Smith 1991: 339)

To achieve economic growth Alemán’s administration invested heavily in public works. Large-scale dams were built, arable land acreage was increased

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and electric power generated. Roads, highways and an international airport in Mexico City strengthened communication and transportation networks. A new campus for the National University bespoke the government’s commitment to the formation of highly educated cadres of public servants and private entrepreneurs. While opening the doors to foreign, essentially US, capital, Alemán simultaneously introduced protectionist measures to strengthen Mexico’s own business class. Above all, Alemán and his successors favoured the large-scale mechanised, commercialised agricultural producers of the north, most notably by reversing Cárdenas’ redistributive land reform policies and supporting a constitutional amendment that raised the allowable size of small properties. Certificates of ‘inaffectibility’ were granted, which exempted landowners from further expropriation for holdings up to 100 hectares of irrigated land or 200 hectares of seasonal land. For the production of certain specified crops (cotton, bananas, grapes, coffee, sugar cane, henequen and others) the size of ‘inaffectible’ holdings were made even larger (Hansen 1971: 60). Small-scale and traditional farmers of the centre and south were left behind. Alemán’s policies increased productivity in the countryside, but they also deepened fissures (Smith 1991: 339–40). State ideology had it that the priority of creating wealth required first to have an initial concentration as a form of capitalisation prior to the distribution of wealth. By the end of the 1960s the process of concentration was in full vigour, but redistribution was nowhere to be seen.5 Under Alemán, economic nationalism was replaced by greater economic liberalism. The government remained an important catalyst of growth by providing a basic infrastructure and fiscal incentives, but the Mexican state’s share of economic activity fell significantly. The central idea was to use the private sector to industrialise a largely rural economy. Everything was done to encourage domestic and foreign investors. While import tariffs and licences protected manufacturers from competition from imported goods, the rule that foreign investment be restricted to 49 per cent of share capital was ignored and large transnational corporations were allowed to open new subsidiaries in Mexico. Direct foreign investment grew from US$449 million in 1940 to US$566 million in 1950 and US$1 billion in 1960 (Riding 2000: 135–8). In 1962, 82 per cent of all foreign investment in the country was US investment (Niedergang 1971: 276). US investors concentrated on meeting fast-growing demand in several industries (such as cars, rubber tyres, electrical appliances, food processing, chemicals and pharmaceuticals) and, in each, well-established US firms soon came to control the market. Significantly, in these years the American Chamber of Commerce in Mexico grew into the largest such chamber in the world (Riding 2000: 137–8), but

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its Mexican equivalent was no less important a player. Observing that most of the groups that shared the fruits of the Mexican growth were actually not represented in the official party, the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), Hansen (1971) emphasises that two groups of particular importance at the time were the Confederation of National Chambers of Commerce (CONCANACO) and the Confederation of Chambers of Industry of Mexico (CONCAMIN). Both groups had a semi-official status, acted as intermediaries between businesses and government, and had extensive influence within the highest government circles. Hansen explains: the government found it very convenient to consult these national federations and their constituent chambers concerning administrative regulations and new legislation on matters affecting their interests. As a result, interaction between the various business chambers and the government is now institutionalized and continuous. The chambers frequently phrase their demands in the form of proposed legislation; on other occasions they submit amendments to pending legislation at the invitation of government. Their representatives now sit on numerous public sector regulatory and advisory commissions and a host of other governmental bodies. (Hansen 1971: 108)

As Hansen points out, this is a trend that, begun during the years of Plutarco Elías Calles’ ascendancy (December 1924 to November 1928) and interrupted only by the Cárdenas presidency, was again renewed when Alemán became president, in 1946. Almost to a man, Alemán’s ministers resembled the president himself: they were young, articulate and highly educated. Most important, they had close ties to the president, with onefifth of Alemán’s own law school class reaching high positions in national politics (Smith 1991: 341). Alemán’s inner circle was filled with what has been called the revolutionary right, wealthy and influential businessmen whose affluence generally dated from the period 1920–40: ‘By 1964 the relationship between Mexico’s political and business elites had warmed to the point where most of the country’s leading businessmen publicly supported the candidate of the PRI for the presidency, Gustavo Díaz Ordaz, despite the fact that the more conservative opposition party, the [Partido Acción Nacional] PAN, fielded its own candidate’ (Hansen 1971: 109). The blend of blood or friendship ties and alliances with foreign business that characterised Alemánista politics and economics trickled down also into the film industry – as if, as Carlos Monsiváis puts it in the lengthy passage quoted above, ‘both the banks and the cabarets become the twin voices’ of the same chorus (Monsiváis 1997: 18). In these years several new cinemas opened in Mexico City and in 1948 annual attendance passed 130 million.

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Articles in the Ley de la Industria Cinematográfica prohibited the development of monopolies. They also prohibited exhibitors from holding interests in production and distribution, and producers and distributors likewise in exhibition. Yet, precisely in 1949, when the Ley was promulgated, a monopoly headed by US magnate William O. Jenkins, in association with the Mexicans Manuel Espinoza Yglesias, Manuel Alarcón and Maximino Ávila Camacho, brother of the ex-president, managed to gain control of 80 per cent of the national exhibition sector. During this new critical phase, Mexican cinema’s solution for survival consisted in lowering production costs by reducing the average filming time from a minimum of five weeks to three (García Riera 1998: 151) and producing low-budget films based on urban themes. The unexpected box office success of Ismael Rodríguez’ Nosotros, los pobres / We, the Poor (1947) and Ustedes, los ricos / You, the Rich (1948), starring Pedro Infante, and of similar films by Alejandro Galindo, redirected Mexican cinema towards a primarily commercial practice dedicated to satisfying the demands of the growing urban working and middle classes. Mediated by melodramatic or comedic formulas, urban poverty became good business and urban films energised production. Between 1948 and 1952 production reached an average of 102 feature films per year, but budgets dropped, as illustrated by the case of Emilio Fernández, the great nationalist filmmaker of the golden age who, after La Perla / The Pearl (1945), Enamorada / Woman in Love (1946), Río Escondido / Hidden River (1947) and Maclovia / Maclovia (1948) – almost all starring the film diva María Félix – made a series of films on comparatively low budgets.6 Faced with a growing crisis, during Miguel Alemán’s presidency the Mexican film industry began to re-establish itself by way of low-budget generic films, otherwise known as churros, after the ring-shaped, deep-fried cakes sold on street corners: ‘not nourishing, rapidly made, soon forgotten, identical to one another and cheap’ (Rubenstein 2000: 665). According to García Riera, there is no doubt that the proliferation of churros during the second half of the 1940s was dictated, above all, by William Jenkins’ exhibition monopoly, with the support of the Banco Nacional Cinematográfico and its domestic and international distributors Películas Nacionales (1947) and Películas Mexicanas (1945) (García Riera 1998: 152). The most typical genre of the Alemán period was the cabaretera and arrabal (literally poor suburbia or slum) film, brothel-cabaret melodramas with antecedents in films of the 1930s, such as La mujer del puerto / Woman of the Port (Arcady Boytler, 1934). In the 1940s most cabaretera and arrabal productions followed the same template: circumstances push a young, provincial girl, or a girl of humble origins, to work in a cabaret in the city, becoming at one

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and the same time a reluctant prostitute and a famous singer, or, more frequently, a famous rumba dancer. One of the actresses most closely associated with the arrabal genre was the Cuban-born dancer Ninón Sevilla, to whom I return, briefly, later in this chapter. Other successful genres of the late 1940s were also derived from the urban film model: family melodramas and comedies starring Tin-Tan, Cantinflas and Resortes.7 In these years, the directors’ section of the unions imposed such closedshop policies that it had become practically impossible for new directors with the potential to inject innovation to break into the industry (Noble 2005: 17). If not quite at its centre, Méndez nevertheless managed to do just that, significantly with a serial, Calaveras del terror, and two churros, El criollo and Tres hombres malos / Three Bad Men (1948), a western that was produced, scripted and interpreted by Raúl de Anda. With inflation pushing up production costs and a monopoly ruling over exhibition, Tres hombres malos was a response to the crisis, an attempt to target the Spanish market in the United States with a Mexican version of Peter B. Kyne’s popular novel Three Godfathers, which had also inspired Marked Men (John Ford, 1919), Hell’s Heroes (William Wyler, 1929) and Three Godfathers (John Ford, 1948, with Mexican star Pedro Armendáriz). The following year Méndez succeeded in breaking into the industry’s centre-ground, this time with a comedy, Matrimonio y mortaja / Marriage and Shroud (1949), a box office hit produced by Raúl de Anda that capitalised on the kind of show that had became popular in the capital’s theatres, where exhibitors, keen to attract middle-class audiences, had taken to staging comedies of manners in lieu of the more traditional but coarser carpas (vaudeville). The success of Méndez’ comedy was not a coincidence. The ground was beginning to shift and Méndez was well positioned to benefit from it. According to García Riera, the 1949 Ley de la Industria Cinematográfica constituted an attempt to regulate William Jenkins’ monopoly, not to destroy it (García Riera 1998: 152). Originally developed by Manuel Ávila Camacho’s administration, by the end of Miguel Alemán’s presidency, in 1952, Jenkins’ monopoly had succeeded in subjugating the Mexican production sector to its own interests: several of the more powerful producers, such as Gregorio Walerstein and Raúl de Anda, combined with Jenkins to provide him with films. Film financing, production and direction became increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few. Soon, the sons of established directors joined the industry as producers and directors.8 The industry’s consolidation reached its apex in 1954, when 118 features were made. At the time, this was the highest level of production achieved by any Spanish-language industry. Yet only 22 of the 118 films produced would

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be distributed within the year (Pineda and Paranaguá 1995: 40). By then the industry had begun to revolve almost exclusively around a number of family-based companies (De La Vega Alfaro 1995a: 91), exhibition was a monopoly and production under-capitalised. To make matters worse, during the war years the industry had witnessed an influx of workers, including film stars, who now continued to demand high salaries (García Riera 1998: 151). Finally, the 1950s saw the arrival of television. By 1955 even humble households began to be able to afford their own set (García Riera 1998: 184). Two years earlier, in an attempt to counteract television’s competition and promote quality cinema, Eduardo Garduño, then head of the Banco Nacional Cinematográfico, devised the Plan Garduño, which was intended to ‘wrest power away from the distributors, whose ongoing monopoly produced the effect of enlatamiento (literally “canning”), whereby the screening of national films got held up in the exhibition schedules’, and to ‘limit the importation of foreign films to some 150 per year’ (Noble 2005: 17). It also allowed producers to become majority shareholders of distributors Películas Nacionales, Películas Mexicanas and Cinematografía Mexicana (Cimex) (García Riera 1998: 185), and raised considerably the Banco National Cinematografíco’s ceiling for finance to production. But the Plan Garduño was plagued by problems, ineffective and, in important respects, detrimental. Not only was the suggested 50 per cent domestic film quota never enforced (Pineda and Paranaguá 1995: 39); the distributors’ shares were actually bought up by producers linked to Jenkins’ exhibition monopoly, such as Gregorio Walerstein (García Riera 1998: 185). The decade that followed Méndez’ Matrimonio y mortaja was thus a period that film historians regard as one of Mexican cinema’s worst moments, and it is this crisis that became the stage of Méndez’ most successful years. Indeed, the importance of Méndez’ work, and especially of his horror films, for the argument I advance here lies in the fact that his most active years as a film director coincided not so much with what film historians have called ‘the prolonged structural crisis of Mexican cinema’ (De La Vega Alfaro 1995a: 91), but above all with an economic and social climate marked by the lasting priorities of Alemán’s administration. For it was this set of priorities – endemic corruption and nepotism, the indiscriminate opening of the economy to US capital and the ruthless pursuit of economic growth, irrespective of the welfare of Mexican society at large – that landed Mexican cinema in that prolonged structural crisis and made Méndez and his films desirable products. From 1950, the Mexican film industry focused on the domestic market and on Latin American countries that lacked a filmmaking infrastructure. In this context, producers began to

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rely more and more on directors capable of making low-cost films within short production schedules. Méndez’ antecedents, including the box office success of Matrimonio y mortaja, made him one of the most sought-after directors. From 1950 he began to direct and write scripts regularly. While throughout the 1940s he had made six films and one serial, in the 1950s he directed thirty-two feature films, several shorts for television and wrote the script for another six productions. By far the majority met the industry’s centre-ground’s generic demands. Between 1950 and 1953 Méndez directed seven films for Raúl de Anda’s Cinematográfica Intercontinental: Barrio bajo / Skid Row (1950), a spin-off of Ismael Rodríguez’ Nosotros, los pobres set in the world of the arrabal that recounts, in a comedic, melodramatic manner, the misfortunes of three social outcasts (played by Carmen Gonzáles and the two comedians Adalberto Matínez Resortes and Enrique King El Reintegro); Los apuros de mi ahijada / My Goddaughter’s Difficulties (1950), a middle-class comedy drama dwelling on the conflict between country and city values; Fierecilla / The Shrew (1950), an adventure film based on Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew and a vehicle to launch the career of actress Rosita Arenas; La hija del ministro / The Minister’s Daughter (1951), a comedy inspired by Frank Capra’s work starring, again, Rosita Arenas; El suavecito / Suave (1950), to which I return below; the comedia ranchera El lunar de la familia / The Family’s Flaw (1952); and Genio y figura / True Genius (1952), a melodrama on the vicissitudes of moving from the country to the city. In these years he also directed four films for Gregorio Walerstein’s Filmex: La mujer desnuda / The Naked Woman (1951), which marked Méndez’ debut in the cabaret film; Sí…mi vida / Yes, My Love (1952), an attempt at exploiting the commercial potential, in Mexico, of a middle-class youth culture made of college life, swing, rock and American football; the urban comedy Había una vez un marido / Once Upon a Time a Husband (1952); and the noir melodrama As Negro / Black Ace (1953). Finally, in April 1952, Méndez launched his own production company with the comedia ranchera Los hijos de María Morales / María Morales’ Sons (1952), inspired by Ismael Rodríguez’ Los tres García / The Three García (1947), for which Méndez had written the script. There is little information as to Méndez’ renumeration for any of these films. De La Vega Alfaro reports that the director was paid MXN50,000 for his work on both Sí…mi vida and Había una vez un marido. Nor is there evidence of Méndez ever having been paid a percentage of a film’s revenues until 1954. Even so, Méndez’ breakthrough, Matrimonio y mortaja, was his third collaboration with Raúl de Anda, an actor, director and producer who had emerged as one of the industry’s most powerful

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figures: Méndez  directed eleven of his forty films. Indeed, between 1949 and 1958, Méndez worked with Mexico’s most important production houses, including Raúl de Anda and Gabriel Alarcón’s Cinematografíca Internacional (seven films), Gregorio Walerstein’s Filmex (six), Valentín Gazcón’s Cinematográfica Jalisco (five), Abel Salazar’s Cinematográfica ABSA (five), Producciones Raúl de Anda (four), Películas Rodríguez Hermanos (four) and Alfredo Ripstein’s Alameda Films (three). Most of the films Méndez directed up to the end of Miguel Alemán’s presidency were social reproduction dramas of one sort or another: melodramas, adventure films, westerns, comedies and one cabaret film. Only four of Méndez’ films were box office hits, but nearly all those he directed between 1949 and 1958 were first released in Mexico City’s best cinemas, including in the first run venues Palacio Chino, Orfeón and Real (to attend which, in the 1940s, a formal dress code was still necessary) (Medina 2010). Last but not least, all of the films Méndez directed until 1956 (and most of the ones he directed throughout his long career) were given an A certification, with the exception of El suavecito.9 The problems that this film encountered with the censors and public opinion alike, and its consequent failure at the box office, offer a point of entry into the cultural dynamics that enabled Méndez to sustain his position as a central figure of the industry’s mainstream by way of films such as El vampiro, that is to say, with productions the generic categories of which film historians have instead tended to associate with more marginal sectors of the industry than Méndez ever occupied – exploitation, fantasy or cult cinema. El suavecito In Mexico film censorship is the task of the Dirección General de Cinematografía, a sub-agency of the Ministry of the Interior that was set up in 1949. Films can be awarded five types of certification: AA is normally for animation; A for films for children and the general public; B for those aged twelve and above, consisting of films with low degrees of partly covered nudity; C for those aged eighteen and over, comprising films with non-explicit sex, strong content and language, and violence; and D for pornographic films (Estrada 2011). El suavecito was made for Raúl de Anda’s Cinematográfica Intercontinental and went into production on 30 October 1950 at Azteca studios. It tells the story of small-time crook Roberto (el suavecito, literally ‘the suave one’ played by Víctor Parra), a young man from one of Mexico City’s poorest barrios and a popular member of Mexico City’s underworld. Roberto, whose activities include prostitution (as a c­ inturita or

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pimp) and gambling, is engaged to his neighbour, the equally poor and beautiful but respectable Lupita (Aurora Segura). Tired of Roberto’s behaviour, Lupita leaves him for Carlos, a man who makes an honest living as a taxi driver. One day, Roberto invites Carlos to a party where a woman is accidentally killed by one of Roberto’s gangster hosts. Found drunk and unconscious at the site of the murder, Carlos has no recollection of what happened and is arrested. Roberto is called to the police station, along with his gangster friends, and, jealous of Lupita’s new fiancé and too afraid of his gangster colleagues to reveal the killer’s real identity, allows Carlos to be charged with the woman’s murder. Roberto decides to leave town but, not long on the coach, he changes his mind. He returns to the police station, reveals the truth and saves the innocent Carlos from prosecution. Later that night he is ambushed by the gangsters in an abandoned depot and, brutally beaten, dies in Lupita’s arms. On 12 January 1951, several Mexico City newspapers announced that El suavecito had been having problems with the censors and that Jesús Castillo López, the president of the Dirección General de Cinematografía, had decided in favour of an outright ban. A few weeks later, after the film was privately shown to a new panel also comprising film industry figures and journalists, the censors announced that the film would be released on condition that ‘denigrating’ scenes be removed (De La Vega Alfaro 1995b: 73). El suavecito was finally released with a C certification on 3 August 1951 at the Palacio Chino, where it played for one week only. It is one of Fernando Méndez’ most interesting melodramas. Manuel Gómez Urquiza’s black-and-white cinematography is remarkable, Víctor Parra’s performance excellent and the script unusually devoid of the platitudes that often make dramas about the poor and unemployed unwatchable. Roberto’s behaviour is certainly not commendable, but, as far as immorality and illegality are concerned, Víctor Parra’s character pales in comparison to most contemporary underworld figures of any national cinema. The reactions of the Mexican censors and public opinion against El suavecito is all the more puzzling for the film’s total absence of nudity, let alone explicit sexual content. After all, Aventurera / The Adventuress (Alberto Gout, 1950), starring the Cuban dancer Ninón Sevilla, had been released only a year earlier. Like other films of this genre, Aventurera, as Carlos Monsiváis put it, centred on: the sinner, the prostitute, the demi-mondaine, the devourer; a new morality was presented through the aegis of ‘the woman who has lost her scruples and her virginal fragrance.’ The representation of the prostitute staged the potential of desire and affirmed the degraded institution that protects the family … The

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film-prostitute … was brutally attractive, vain, given to sacrifice, enamoured of revenge and, at party-time, able to perform all the variants of copulation. In a way, each choreographed shake of Ninón Sevilla’s rumbera hips could be analysed through … metonym: pars pro toto, the part for the whole … Each of Ninón Sevilla’s movements stands in for all the couplings prohibited by the censors. In Aventurera (1949), Sensualidad / [Sensuality] ([Alberto Gout]1950), Aventura en Río / [Escapade in Rio] ([Alberto Gout]1952), Revancha / Revenge ([Alberto Gout]1948) and Víctimas del pecado / Victims of Sin [Emilio Fernandez](1950), Ninón was the vamp who could not be represented in the 20s and the apotheosis of the mistress, the lover who does not confer respectability but gives prestige: ‘I would not introduce her to my mother, but I want all my friends to know.’ (Monsiváis 1995: 121, trans. Ana M. López)

Aspects of Roberto in El suavecito display a degree of ambiguity not unlike the roles played by Ninón Sevilla. Víctor Parra/Roberto’s rumba dancing, his kindness to children and, ultimately, to his mother, his love for Lupita and, above all, his final repentance were written into the character to affirm the morality of a spectator sensitive to Roberto’s intense desire for upward mobility irrespective of adverse conditions. As Víctor Parra later explained (quoted in De La Vega Alfaro 1995b: 73), in the end, the modifications requested by the censors amounted to no more than removing some of the beautifully lit, noir-ish shots of the closing sequence so as to tone down the violence of the gang’s attack on Roberto.10 Yet widespread public opinion objections to the lifting of the original ban focused not so much on the violence as on Víctor Parra’s character, that is to say, on the actor’s sympathetic rendition of a figure whom public opinion deemed morally reprehensible, perhaps, as Carlos Monsiváis has suggested, precisely because of the adverse conditions facing him.11 In other words, it was the small-time crook’s ambition to move up in the world that disturbed sections of public opinion, just as it lent the film and its protagonist appeal for an altogether different section of Mexican society. Parra, then a very popular actor, had played a similar though secondary role in an earlier arrabal production, Ángeles del arrabal / Angels of the Slums (Raúl de Anda, 1949). This time around he went to great lengths to prepare for the new, leading role, adopting a mode of moving and talking that were intended to and did lend Roberto a high degree of non-condescending verisimilitude. To this, Parra added his extraordinary dancing skills and panache, for which he was famous. It was this combination of negative character with positive traits that also lent Roberto the right amount of forward-thinking depth that would enable later critics to praise the film – a psychological roundedness of character that encouraged empathy and understanding, rather than condemnation.

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But contemporary public opinion would not have it. The conservative press attacked the film for showing actions that harmed society and for depicting characters that denigrated the country’s image abroad: As if they were made one after the other, like a series, in recent times several films have been released that deal with the topic of the pimp, who lives off or abuses women. Among other things, one of the inconveniences of these pictures is that if and when they are released abroad they create, in the country where they are shown, a negative image of the Mexican man. There is no doubt that there are among us many shameful individuals. However, if there is one thing by which the Mexican man distinguishes himself, this is his manly honour, which manifest itself not only through gallantry and bravery, but also in his masculine [macho] dignity – a quality that, sometimes misunderstood, is in open opposition to the role of the procurer or fancy man propagated by our cinema. (El Redondel, 2 August 1951, quoted in De La Vega Alfaro 1995b: 155)

For their part, slightly more progressive critics accused the censors of double standards, for demanding the ban of and cuts to El suavecito while allowing the screening of equally violent and ostensibly immoral foreign (read US) films. After all, they too gave a negative image of their society: It seemed that this picture was never to be released under any circumstance, not even on the foreign market, because, according to a member of the censorship board, it denigrates our country, and this in spite of the fact that a large number of foreign films critical of society and denigrating their country are being allowed on the Mexican market. (El Cine Gráfico, 22 April 1951, quoted in De La Vega Alfaro 1995b: 74)

What the critic of El Cine Gráfico did not seem to realise was that such foreign films were approved by the censors because the society they gave a negative image of was a foreign society. In the eyes of public opinion, the problem with El suavecito was a (nationalist) concern over the image of the Mexican nation and society, abroad and at home. The cultural policies of Mexico’s comprador state The reactions to El suavecito outlined above and the nationalism they point to are revealing because they are indicative of the extent to which during Alemán’s and subsequent presidencies the Mexican cultural industry was allowed to break into ‘immorally’ unchartered territory and, in so doing, legitimate the comprador trajectory and ideology of the state in those years.

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The case of El suavecito was not an isolated instance. The censors, the press and public opinion’s reaction to the film echoed a wave of public campaigns against mass culture that have been documented by Anne Rubenstein (1998) in her book on historietas (Mexican comic books). Rubenstein’s account helps to understand the censors’ original ban of Méndez’ melodrama, their retraction and public opinion’s ultimate rejection of both the censors’ decision and the film. It also helps to understand the commercial and critical success of Méndez’ horror films, and, in particular, the position of El vampiro and of its sequel as mainstream cinema, because the centrality of these horror films within the national cinema was sustained by the same industrial interests that, seven years before El vampiro went into production, had finally allowed the release of El suavecito with very minor cuts, in spite of public opinion’s negative reaction against the immorality of its protagonist. The first campaign against comic books took place from 1942 to 1944 and was the work of a few Mexico City organisations, which complained that historietas were not only immoral, they were also an obstacle to upward mobility. Soon, these organisations were joined by ‘left-wing educators and intellectuals’: Rather than simply joining in public clamor against the perceived social effects of locally produced historietas, [left-wing educators and intellectuals] formulated the first complaints against global mass media. Strenuous objections to the popularity of Walt Disney’s animated cartoons and newspaper comic strips were expressed in a debate over the possible creation of Disney films especially designed to aid in the 1944 literacy campaign. Some of the arguments seem to have been taken straight from the anti-comic book campaign, such as a suggestion that Disney animators would represent girls from ‘our humble classes’ as if they were ‘senoritas americanas,’ thus destroying ‘the natural courtesy of our Indians.’ The central issue, however, was neither female sexuality nor the fear of modernity, but a kind of cultural protectionism: Mexicans ‘are masters of our own culture … the education of Mexicans must be the exclusive work of Mexicans!’ (Rubenstein 1998: 91)

Rubenstein observes that in general, however, conservatives believed transnational media to be safer than Mexican historietas. US cartoons were seen as ‘decidedly more wholesome in nature and … much better suited to the younger reader’ (Fernando Peñalosa, The Mexican Book Industry, quoted in Rubenstein 1998: 92). In 1944, the public outcry against Mexican comic books led president Ávila Camacho to announce the formation of a new office, the Comisión Calificadora, charged with censoring comic books and

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illustrated periodicals. Yet, judging by its minuscule budget, the commission did not occupy a very distinguished position in the federal bureaucracy. Commissioners never received the paltry MXN7,200 yearly salary due to them until 1953, nor did any of them ever attain a high political rank. Above all, the commission could not enforce its ruling. It could announce draconian punishments, but it needed the courts and the federal and local police to impose the penalties. The commission did not usually receive such support (Rubenstein 1998: 112–13). As Rubenstein observes, the position that censors took in their meeting frequently failed to represent the interests of the governmental sector that had placed them on the commission. Significantly: the same publishers produced comic books and Mexico City newspapers, and these newspapers were important government supporters; sometimes, too, newspapers acted as mouthpieces for individual politicians, none of whom were at all likely to risk offending publishers by shutting down their profitable businesses. Publishers could use their personal connections to high-level government officials to oppose the censorship campaign. (Rubenstein 1998: 93)

And, in most cases, publishers also used such connections in order to elude penalties and fines. In 1947, during the Alemán administration, the commission ceased to function at all – just three years after it had been set up. It was revived somewhat during a second wave of moral panic during the presidency of Adolfo Ruiz Cortines (December 1952 to November 1958), whose ‘much-reported emphasis on government responsiveness and ­cleanliness … was taken by conservative groups as an opportunity to press old grievances and make new alliances with the state’ (Rubenstein 1998: 96). By the early 1950s, the number of magazines and comic books published in Mexico was booming. New genres of periodicals appeared, ranging from photonovels to girlie calendars and magazines, such as Eva and CanCan. According to Rubenstein, important factors distinguished the second wave of moral panic from the first: to begin with, participants in the first campaign aimed, variously, at the replacement of immoral comics by moral ones, strict government censorship, or the complete elimination of historietas. By 1952, however, a mechanism for censorship already existed, so that people agitating against periodicals had a specific goal ready-made for them: they wanted the commission to do its job better. The second distinction was in the scope of the campaigns. The first wave of complaints against periodicals focused on comic books, particularly on their youngest readers. The second wave of concern encompassed comic books, but also covered true-crime tabloids, scandal sheets, and men’s magazines. (Rubenstein 1998: 96)

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In spite of the renewed energy that characterised this second wave of moral panic and its broader scope, the Comisión Calificadora failed again to make any progress towards the goals of the campaigners. It did not even manage to make pornography unavailable. Rubenstein points out that the commission did, however, perform three crucial roles, even if none of them fitted the commission’s job description: first, it helped articulate and preserve the discourse of cultural nationalism, emphasising lo mexicano and resistance to international cultural forces. Even during periods when the rest of the Mexican state was more likely to use the transnational rhetoric of progress and modernity, the commission acted as a nationalist (and to a certain extent, anticapitalist) voice. Second, by raising barriers to translated U.S. magazines that were slightly higher than those faced by local publications, the commission helped prevent cultural imperialism … Third, the classifying commission provided a mechanism by which conservative protest could be channelled and co-opted by the state. (Rubenstein 1998: 127)

I have outlined in some detail the political and economic pressures that set the limits of the commission’s operation. As I hope is evident from my account, the three roles highlighted by Rubenstein were precisely the reasons why the Comisión Calificadora never managed to emerge as more than an agency for the containment of positions concerned with the moral fabric of the country. In their resistance to the press’ ruthlessly commercial and, as they saw it, socially irresponsible, capitalist operation, the campaigners and the commission – whose voices the commission was meant to represent but which, ultimately, it successfully contained – run contrary to the economic and political priorities that characterised the presidency of Miguel Alemán and those who followed it. The censors’ failure to ban El suavecito in spite of strong public support for an outright ban reveals the extent to which Alemán’s and subsequent administrations paid no more than lip-service to concerns that did not directly feed into the promotion of economic growth. And this irrespective of and above considerations for the socio-cultural reproduction of ethical mores and moral conduct. The director of the truecrime weekly Prensa Roja (Red Press), José Rubio Castilla, and his lawyer, Rafael Curiel, knew what they were doing when, addressing the Comisión Calificadora in 1957, they urged the commissioners ‘to consider [Rubio Castilla’s] economic project … We have to use the magazine as a commercial medium in order to be able to sell it. If the government would subsidize us … we could write philosophy, good philosophy.’ Commissioner Nájera did reply that ‘the mercantile spirit that guides the editor is … completely

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immoral’, but this did not stop the commission from letting Rubio go with no more than a warning (Rubenstein 1998: 144). The director and producer of El suavecito also faced the censors and, on the whole, their outcome was very similar. In some respects, this should not have come as a surprise, for it could be argued that El Suavecito encapsulated a central tenet of Alemanista ideology: economic advancement at any cost. The place of generic films in 1950s Mexican cinema Fernando Méndez and Raúl De Anda could not entice the public to show up at the cinema in large quantities to watch El suavecito. However shortlived, the squabble with the censors made the film neither fish nor foul: most families would not want to pay to see a banned or C certification film, nor would punters interested in adult films pay attention to a social melodrama, a film with no nudity or sex. And while Alemán’s and subsequent administrations had no real time for the preoccupations of moralist campaigners, lip-service to their demand was paid. During the years of Adolfo Ruiz Cortines’ presidency, Ernesto P. Uruchurtu, a central figure of Alemán’s government and, under Ruiz Cortines, mayor of Mexico City, imposed a climate of moralist austerity on the city that put an end to the prominence of the arrabal and cabaret films (García Riera 1998: 187). Comedies featuring the middle class became the main genre, along with family melodramas and lucha libre (wrestling) films. Lucha libre had been (and continues to be) an extremely popular sport in Mexico, and not exclusively among the lower classes. The first televised wrestling matches were broadcast in November 1950. The programmes proved so successful with audiences that by 1953 wrestling broadcasts took place four times per week (Levi 2009). The cinema’s first attempt to compete with them was Chano Urueta’s La bestia magnífica / The Magnificent Beast (1952), which was soon followed by many similar productions in this and the following years. As early as 1953, lucha libre films began to incorporate elements of horror in their narrative, as in El monstruo resucitado / The Revived Monster (Chano Urueta, 1953). Although this would not become a consistent pattern until the early 1960s, the horror ingredient was an added sales point, a means for the films better to compete against television broadcasts as well as against each other. Within a few years lucha libre was taken off the air, significantly by Mexico City’s mayor Ernesto P. Uruchurtu (Levi 2001). At which point even more films were made that starred popular wrestlers, most notably Rodolfo Guzman Huerta, best known as the legendary Santo, El Enmascarado de Plata (Silver Mask).

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Another genre associated with the 1950s was the western or charro film, set in the countryside and featuring solitary, avenging, masked heroes. The emergence of these two genres, the lucha libre and charro films, was a symptom of the protraction and, in many respects, the escalation of the industry’s crisis. In 1951, Mexico City had a total of fifty-eight sound stages distributed among six studios. In June 1957 Clasa shut down, followed in September of the same year by another studio, Tepeyac, and, in 1958, by Azteca. The only two studios left for regular feature production (that is to say, production by the STPC) were Churubusco, which in 1959 was brought under state ownership, and San Ángel Inn, which had been set up by Jorge Stahl in 1949 (García Riera 1998: 210). With the Cuban revolution, Mexican cinema lost one of its main natural markets. But the closures of studios were due primarily to the intervention of interests connected with the Jenkins monopoly. Gregorio Walerstein and the actor Víctor Parra were put in charge of enlarging an old studio, Cuauhtémoc. Renamed Estudios América S.A., it was staffed with workers from STIC, the union that, in 1945, had sought but failed to assert their right to participate in feature film production in the legal battle against STPC, the union that had been formed to safeguard the interests of the creative, more professionalised and, as a result, more financially demanding sector of the film industry’s labour market (Pérez Turrent 1995: 140­–1). In 1959, during the first year of Adolfo López Mateos’ presidency (December 1958 to November 1964), STIC was officially allowed to produce short films and serials (García Riera 1998: 211). Estudios America soon began to circumvent the 1945 restrictions by producing feature-length films and releasing them in multiple episodes. The first series shot with STIC workers was El jinete sin cabeza / The Headless Rider, a western with horror elements shot on location and directed by Chano Urueta in 1956, consisting of nine thirty-minute episodes originally intended for television but released in September and December of the following year as three ninety-minute programmes, each made up of three episodes, entitled, respectively, El jinete sin cabeza / The Headless Rider, La cabeza de Pancho Villa / The Head of Pacho Villa and La marca de Satanás / The Mark of Satan. Western serials and charro films were cheap to produce because they could be and often were shot on location. According to Gregorio Walerstein (quoted in García Riera 1998: 212) they also made good business in the United States among the Latin American public there. Estudios Americas soon followed with more of the same, and with Los tigres del ring / Tigers of the Ring, another serial directed by the same Chano Urueta, originally intended for television but soon released in second-run cinemas as three programmes with different titles. This time the serial was

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a thriller featuring luchadores (wrestlers), a subject that afforded similar economies as the western because films could be shot on the back of actual wrestling bouts. Estudios Americas’ operation resulted in generic films produced in rudimentary conditions and with fewer technical personnel than required by the STPC. It also led to the proliferation of similarly cheap products industry-wide – not serials made ostensibly for television, but feature films directed and produced by prominent industry figures (or their sons) and organised around proven sales points, such as horror and mystery. It is against this background that Fernando Méndez returned to the western, charro and adventure film, genres he had first explored during the early stage of his career. Between 1954 and 1955 Méndez directed seven pictures, six of which were based on the themes and ingredients of the western: a lowcost trilogy for Cinematografíca Jalisco, comprising Los aventureros / The Adventurers (1954), a mixture between a comedy, a western and a rural melodrama, ¡Vaya tipos! / Some people! (1954) and Tres bribones / Three Rogues (1954);12 the equally economical Los tres Villalobos / The Three Villalobos (1954), based on a popular Cuban radionovela; and La venganza de los Villalobos / The Revenge of the Villalobos (1954), both for Películas Rodríguez Hermanos, for which Méndez received 15 per cent of the net profits.13 There followed Fugitivos / Fugitives (1955), another western melodrama with bull fighting, which was reminiscent – for the sexualised performance of Evangelina Elizondo – of both The Outlaw (Howard Hughes, 1940) and Riso amaro/ Bitter Rice (Giuseppe de Santis, 1948); Hay ángeles con espuelas / There Are Angels with Spurs (1955), a comedia ranchera; and Rapto al sol / Capture in the Sun (1956), which was originally to be directed by Raúl de Anda’s nephew, Gilberto Gazcón, and, to elude STPC’s regulations, shot in Nicaragua. When shooting began, however, the technicians – members of STPC – refused to work, at which point the producer sent for Méndez, who took charge of the film’s direction. By the mid-1950s Fernando Méndez’ position in the film industry had enabled him to move to Pedregal de San Ángel, then one of Mexico City’s wealthy residential areas. In 1956 he directed the musical comedy La locura del rock’n roll / Rock & Roll Madness (1956), a Mexican response to the success of Hollywood youth musicals such as Rock Around the Clock (Fred F. Sears, 1956), and also directed Ladrón de cadáveres / The Body Snatcher (1956), which was based on Méndez’ own script. Originally entitled Trasfucerebro or Los cadáveres piensan / Corpses Think, Méndez’ story mixed elements from the gangster, horror and science-fiction genres. It was later changed significantly by other contributors, including Argentinean writer Alejandro Verbitsky,

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finally resulting in a film that was clearly designed to continue capitalising on the popularity of lucha libre films such as La bestia magnífica / The Magnificent Beast (Chano Urueta, 1952), El Enmascarado de Plata / Silver Mask (René Cardona, 1952), El luchador fenómeno / Extraordinary Wrestler (Fernando Cortés, 1952) and Huracán Ramírez / Hurricane Ramírez (Joselito Rodríguez, 1952) by combining wrestling with the sales points already present in Méndez’ original script: mystery and horror.14 These added bonuses were not lost on Rafael Solana, the critic of Excélsior: This film will be of little interest to some sectors of the public and of great interest to another sector … It is a movie about a sport that seemed to have been forgotten, wrestling, which, in the past, has been the focus of some quality productions, including La bestia magnífica. This time wrestling is not the sole and central element of the film, but part of a hair-raising detective and horror story. In the closing sequences, and especially in the scene when panic breaks out in the arena, which is outstanding, Fernando Méndez, whom we do not hesitate to consider the best of our second league directors, manages to satisfy the public’s emotive response. After an interesting development, the picture culminates with a very exciting and lively ending. (quoted in De La Vega Alfaro 1995b: 188)

Ladrón de cadáveres was followed by one of the director’s few arrabal films, La esquina de mi barrio / The Corner of My Neighbourhood (1957) and, in the same year, by two altogether different horror films, El vampiro and its sequel, El ataúd del vampiro, the films for which Méndez is best known abroad. Perhaps paradoxically, El vampiro and El ataúd del vampiro also marked the beginning of the end of Méndez’ career as a director. After El ataúd del vampiro he directed Señoritas (1958), an urban drama notable mainly for featuring what the film’s publicity material described as ‘Mexican cinema’s most sensual stars’ (Christiane Martel, Ana Berta Lepe and Sonia Furió) (De La Vega Alfaro 1995b: 115) and for using footage shot during the earthquake that hit Mexico City on 29 July 1957; El cofre del pirata / The Pirate’s Chest (1958), a minor vehicle for Tin-Tan whose career was, by then, declining; and one more fantasy-horror film, Misterios de ultratumba / Mysteries from beyond the Grave / The Black Pit of Dr. M (1958), apparently based on a chapter of French Benedictine monk Augustin Calmet’s (1672–1757) The Phantom World: the History and the Philosophy of Spirits, Apparitions, etc. (1751),15 and part of a trilogy for Alfredo Ripstein’s Alameda Films. The trilogy also comprised Los diablos del terror / Terror Devils (1958), a western pitting a lone ranger figure against evil masked wrestlers, and El grito de la muerte / The Living Coffin (1958), another, more interesting western with

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some fantasy and horror elements. The following year Méndez directed another trilogy, of westerns, for Cinematrográfica ABSA: Los hermanos Diablo / The Diablo Brothers (1959), El renegado blanco / The White Renegade (1959) and Venganza apache / Apache Vengeance (1958). Finally, in 1960 he directed his last film, Mujeres engañadas / Women Deceived, which was originally conceived as an arrabal film but turned out to be a more conventional melodrama. Ladrón de cadáveres was Méndez’ first incursion into horror cinema as a director. Unlike other lucha libre films, it was shot entirely at the Churubusco studios with a crew associated to the STPC and beautifully photographed by Víctor Herrera. Both Herrera and art director Gunther Gerszo would work on Méndez’ better known horror films a year later. The circulation of these films and, to a lesser extent, of Ladrón de cadáveres in European fantasy cinema retrospectives and US exploitation circuits from the 1960s has tended to produce a vision of their director as a figure operating at the margins of the industry. But Méndez was nothing of the sort. When compared to other, contemporary lucha libre films, Ladrón de cadáveres alone is sufficient evidence of his central position within the industry’s centre-ground, not to mention the rest of Méndez’ mature work. Throughout his long career all Méndez ever made were films that sought to fulfil and, from 1949, succeeded in fulfilling, the generic (and censorship) priorities of mainstream Mexican cinema, from comedias rancheras to urban melodramas, charro and lucha libre films. By directing Ladrón de cadáveres as one of the most central figures of Mexican cinema at the time, Méndez simply followed an existing pattern and, simultaneously, consolidated it as yet another generic cluster of the industry’s centre-ground. In other words, it is not, as Doyle Greene put it, that ‘El vampiro’s commercial and critical success … provided the impetus for the increased production of Mexican horror films throughout the next two decades’ (Greene 2005: 8) – horror films were made and circulated in abundance before Méndez dabbled in the genre. Rather, it is that through his industrially central position, Méndez’ use of horror elements (as in Ladrón de cadáveres) contributed to transforming this ingredient into a sales point also viable for and constitutive of mainstream cinema. El vampiro effectively consolidated the mainstreaming of an ingredient and genre that in post-war Mexican cinema had, until then, been associated with the margins.16 Nor is it a question of inscribing Fernando Méndez into the pantheon of Mexican cinema as an auteur (as opposed to a maverick or cult filmmaker in the manner of, say, a Roger Corman) and, in the process, to redefine the Mexican cinematic canon so as to include horror films. In most parts of Europe, the United States and in South Asia horror

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films and their directors were indeed removed from the respective national film industries’ centre-ground. Not so Méndez or his horror films, which are regarded by Mexican historians as an important dimension of national cinema. It is my contention that the uniquely central position, in 1950s Mexican cinema, of a generic menu elsewhere associated with the more marginal and, as a result, more radically exploitative sectors of the industry, was symptomatic of the economic trajectory pursued by the country since President Alemán. It was the fundamentally unproblematic nature of the alliance between the PRI under Alemán and after, and radical, speculative capital, both Mexican and US, that created the conditions for Méndez’ horror films to circulate, and be written about, equally unproblematically as Mexican mainstream cinema. Significantly, by the time Méndez’ former school mate, Adolfo López Mateos, was elected president, the director was shooting his last films. He then retired because of ill health, though he continued to work in the cinema as a scriptwriter. Barely a year into Lopez Mateos’ presidency, the state acquired the cinemas controlled by exhibitors Operatora de Teatros and Cadena Oro, the two main arms of William Jenkins’ monopoly. García Riera reports that, apparently, the monopoly did not resist the acquisitions nor its de facto dismantling, because cinema was no longer as profitable a business as in the past (García Riera 1998: 211). A more likely interpretation of these events is that William Jenkins was no longer necessary. The Mexican state, by now irreversibly shaped by the lasting legacy of Miguel Alemán’s comprador policies, could step in, take over William Jenkins’ interests and continue, on its own, the US businessman’s operation. Fernando Méndez’ horror films in/as Mexican history El vampiro was shot at Clasa in May 1957, one month before the closure of the studios, and released in October 1957 at the cinema Palacio Chino (Mexico City), where it played for four weeks. As a product of the film’s industrial and economic pressures that were constitutive of Alemán’s regime and his successor, Adolfo Ruiz Cortines, whose policies were essentially the same, El vampiro inevitably registered that configuration in its modes of address. From the start, the film presents itself as a clearly defined generic product. Unlike other films previously directed by Méndez, in El vampiro horror was not simply an ingredient, a sales point added to other, more dominant generic categories, as, for instance, in the lucha libre production Ladrón de cadáveres. In El vampiro a particular kind of horror with international commercial appeal provides the main generic template. Significantly,

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unlike most of Méndez’ earlier films, El vampiro was not produced by Raúl de Anda. The selection of horror as the film’s main generic template was rooted in the awareness that El vampiro had to circulate in an industry shaped by the monopolistic practices of William Jenkins without the direct support of as powerful a network as the one linking Raúl de Anda to the US magnate. As producer Abel Salazar explained in the television series Los que hicieron nuestro cine (Alejandro Pelayo, 1984): The 1930s was a period of crisis for North-American cinema … As I considered the reasons behind the lack of success of, or at least the problems affecting Metro, RKO and Fox, which were the most important companies, I realised that there was this one company, Universal, which was quite small in comparison to the other ones and which was doing well. I investigated the matter and I realised that Universal’s revenues were due to their horror films and to those starring Diana [sic] Durbin. This is what sustained Universal. It follows that what we had to do was to make a horror picture, and this is how I conceived El vampiro. Basically I took Dracula … and placed it in a Mexican hacienda. (quoted in De La Vega Alfaro 1995b: 109)

If Universal’s Dracula (1931) was indeed a source of inspiration, as Abel Salazar claims, then according to García Riera (1994: 64) it is likely to have been George Melford’s Drácula, Universal’s Spanish version with Carlos Villararías as the vampire and Lupita Tovar as his sexually alluring victim, rather than the more sober English version, directed by Tod Browning. With the exception of the set and of the iconic images showing the vampire rising from his coffin (hands appearing first, through the coffin’s slowly opening lid), similarities between Melford’s Drácula and Méndez’ El vampiro are hard to find, as they are between El vampiro and Browning’s Dracula. More importantly here, neither did Méndez rely on Ariadne Welter’s cleavage as Melford had done nearly thirty years earlier with Lupita Tovar’s, nor were either of Universal’s Dracula productions set in a Mexican environment.17 El vampiro was aimed at the national mainstream market. As Abel Salazar himself suggests, he was not the first producer to resort to the tropes of horror, or, for that matter, to US and European horror, in order to sustain the circulation of a production in a competitive film market. His choice of horror and, more specifically, of a particular brand of it, Dracula as a generic trope, is indicative of the extent to which immediate film industrial pressures played on the producer and director, but it says little about the nature of those pressures. The problem with explaining away the use of generic categories in certain films as derivative of other films is that such explanations imply a sense of direct determination that is ahistori-

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cal. Of course, individuals copy and, at times, quite simply recycle whole sequences of other films, but the question is which aspects of these films were borrowed and, above all, why? What did Dracula mean in Mexico in the late 1950s? One way of identifying how El vampiro registered the historical dynamics that were constitutive of its time is to examine the way in which, in this film, generic tropes that had been part of cinema since the 1920s were translated into a historically specific Mexican setting. El vampiro was a commercial venture aimed at the general public, the commercial and critical success of which led Salazar to produce a sequel, El ataúd del vampiro. Unlike the original, the sequel is set, for the most part, in an urban environment. Yet even El ataúd del vampiro devotes the long opening sequence to the transportation of the vampire’s coffin from its original, rural location, to urban modernity. El vampiro’s first image, in the titles sequence, is a high-angle shot of a hacienda’s courtyard at night. There is little indication at this point as to which year or century it may be. The hacienda looks dark, old and gloomy. Standing with his back to the camera is a man wearing a black cape. With the titles still running, the next shot shows the same figure in the same position, this time at eye level. The third shot is an extreme close-up of the man’s eyes, followed by what he sees: an open window. Cut to that interior: a woman, whom we later learn to be aunt Eloisa (Carmen Montejo), paces about her bedroom. She looks worried and looks towards the open window. The following cuts – back to an extreme close-up of the man’s eyes, outside, to inside the room as Eloisa moves towards her bed, and back again to the man’s eyes – indicate that it is still the man who is watching. This staging temporarily allocates narration to (and forces us to identify with) him. We are then given a closer, outside view of the window, which introduces a dramatic (and much praised) reverse shot. As if from the window, through a non-allocated point of view, we look into the courtyard: the man lifts his arms, his cape opens and, as we cut to his back again, the man has turned into a bat, which is now flying into the bedroom. In the next shot the camera is inside the bedroom: Eloisa looks at the window and starts screaming. In the next reverse shot the whole frame is covered by the black cape of the vampire (back to his human shape) as he appears to the left from behind the camera, as if through the window. He approaches the bed (Fig. 6), bites Eloisa on the neck and eventually exits the frame to the left, revealing his victim unconscious on the bed. The camera tracks in to a closer view of Eloisa’s bitten, bejewelled neck and the last titles appear: ‘Una Producción de Abel Salazar / Dirigida por Fernando Méndez’. The titles sequence over, a cut takes us to what seems (but turns out not

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6  Film still from El vampiro.

to be) a very different world: contemporary 1950s Mexico. A sign board tells us that we are at the train station of Sierra Negra, a small Mexican town. A train is approaching across a somewhat barren landscape. It stops at the station and a large, oblong box is unloaded. A panning close-up on its lid tells us that it comes from Bakonia, Hungary, that it contains soil and that it is addressed to Senõr Duval. From the same train alights Marta Gonzales (Ariadna Welter), a young, modern woman. She has come to visit her aunt María Teresa (Alicia Montoya), who lives at the family’s hacienda, Los Sicomóros, along with her sister Eloisa (Carmen Montejo) and her brother Emilio (José Luis Jiménez) (also aunt and uncle to Marta). Already at the station and waiting for some transport to go to Los Sicomóros is Enrique (Abel Salazar), a young, urban man. When a horse-driven cart arrives to pick up the box, Enrique convinces the lugubrious driver to give Marta and him a lift. Sitting on the box of Hungarian soil that has now been loaded on to the cart, Marta and Enrique leave the station, only to be left in the middle of a foggy wood half an hour away from the hacienda. As they walk and talk, followed, unbeknown to them, by Eloisa, we learn that Marta works in an office and that Enrique is a doctor. Marta is eager to return to the hacienda where she grew up with her uncle and her two aunts because María Teresa, who has been like a mother to her, is ill. They

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reach the hacienda only to be told that María Teresa has already died and is now buried in the hacienda’s crypt. Eloisa explains that it is a blessing in disguise because María Teresa had been sliding into insanity, claiming that a vampire was after her. Marta, who remembers Los Sicomóros as the beautiful place of her happy childhood, is further distraught by the hacienda’s state of advanced decay. No workers are available to maintain its upkeep. In fact, people are abandoning the area, partly put off by superstitions. That same night Marta learns from Eloisa that their neighbour, Señor Duval (Germán Robles), wants to buy Los Sicomóros. Eloisa is in favour of selling, but Emilio is not. It is the family’s hacienda and his sister is buried there. Now that María Teresa is dead and her share of the estate has passed on to her niece, Marta must cast the deciding vote on the sale of Los Sicomóros. But not long into the film we discover that María Teresa’s fears were justified. Duval is a vampire and Eloisa his (vampirised) accomplice. In order to ensure that Marta votes in favour of the sale, Duval and Eloisa plan to turn Marta into a vampire. From an old book lying on the family shelves Enrique learns that exactly 100 years earlier the inhabitants of Sierra Negra killed and buried in the hacienda’s crypt a foreign vampire, count Karol de Lavud. Duval, who is count Karol’s brother, has a master plan: to revive his brother by putting him to lie in the box of Hungarian soil and, once in possession of Los Sicomóros, to restore the House of Lavud. In the end, Duval’s plans are foiled by María Teresa, who, in reality, had been induced into a state of apparent death by a potion administered by Eloisa. Just before her burial the servants Maria and Anselmo found a note attached to her body that asked them to remove her from the tomb after the burial. She had been hiding in the crypt all the time, occasionally appearing at night to lay crucifixes on Marta’s bed, for her protection. In the end, María Teresa eliminates Duval by putting a stake through his chest while he is asleep, while Enrique saves Marta, whom Duval had brought to the crypt to be vampirised. The film closes with Marta and Enrique back at the train station. They are about to leave Sierra Negra and have fallen in love. That the hacienda played a crucial role in Méndez’ film in its relation to 1950s Mexican society was not lost on Mexican commentators: The Porfirian hacienda, which, as Carlos Monsiváis put it, ‘was strictly speaking a vampiric institution’, works surprisingly well … It is the logical space for the protagonist, who is associated with an agrarian context with feudal resonances, to appear convincing. According to this reading, the image of the Mexican Dracula becomes the perfect metaphor of the Porfirian hacendado (landowner), ‘owner of lives and of large land expanses,’ a figure who, without

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doubt, has survived in certain forms of contemporary caciquismo.[18] This … enables Méndez’ film to speak to a historical and cultural reality that has not lost its relevance today. (De La Vega Alfaro 1995b: 110)

De La Vega Alfaro and Carlos Monsiváis are correct in pointing to the hacienda as one of the elements that links El vampiro to contemporary Mexico, but this is only the starting point. More questions can be asked of the film’s mise en scène. Duval, like other film vampires, is several hundred years old but can nevertheless operate in modern Mexico. Given that, at least at the beginning, he is the only figure to be allocated a subjective point of view, are we correct in associating him with a feudal, lineage-based order that does not recognise individuated subjectivity? Why is he ascribed a subjective look that, anachronistically, does not appear to recognise the boundary between private and public space? Why is this subjectivity pitted against a figure, Marta, who appears to be fully modern? Finally, why is Duval a foreigner? Can a foreigner be taken to be the representative of a domestic feudal system? It would be preposterous to expect a film to advance a seamlessly coherent set of discourses; no film does. In order to unravel the tensions and contradictions that make El vampiro the film it is, in the first part of this chapter I have tried to outline the time that knew El vampiro. The question I want to bring to bear on the film’s mise en scène now is: how did El vampiro know its time? Which aspects of the film’s narrative strategies give us indications as to the positions it invites its viewers to adopt within the limits imposed by the ‘historical and cultural reality’ (De La Vega Alfaro 1995b: 110) that shaped it as a film? We can begin by questioning the assumption that Marta is a representative of a fully modern order. The story is bracketed by a cinematic symbol of modernity – the arrival of a train. Yet that train carries both Marta and the box of soil, synecdoche of a land-based economy. Further, the train gone, Marta is left with no other mode of transport than a horse-driven cart, on the back of which she sits, again, with the soil. From the beginning, then, Marta is less a figure of modernity than a shifting set of options. Through her, concerns are staged that resonate with the social and economic effects of the Mexican government’s policies and ideology under Alemán and his successor: the continued importance of the agricultural sector within the Mexican economy, its industrialisation and transformation into mechanised agribusiness, the emphasis on productivity and growth at any cost, and the influx of foreign investment. In this context, and through the character of Marta, El vampiro presents us with specific choices: on her arrival at Los Sicomóros, Marta is confronted with the reality of a system in decay, a hacienda that can

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no longer sustain itself. Her aunt, María Teresa, whom she referred to earlier as viejita (old), is now dead, while her uncle has aged further. Only Eloisa, the vampirised aunt, looks conspicuously young – a fact that takes Marta and Enrique by surprise and which is commented upon. Marta is thus offered the opportunity of enabling her family and their status to be carried over into modernity, though in a new form: by turning the hacienda into a financial venture through its sale, and, in the process, sealing the family’s partnership with the foreign buyer. The sale of Los Sicomóros to Duval would change the family’s source of income from land to finance capital. El vampiro positions us clearly against both this option and its proponent, whose temporality is, anyway, ambiguous. As would most vampires, Duval looks younger than uncle Emilio and aunt María Teresa but he is also very old. Could it be that Duval is the figure we are made to identify with at the beginning of the film (the titles sequence) because it is foreign investment (in the person of William Jenkins) that had been a determining factor in Mendéz’ successful career as a director? I am not in any way suggesting here that the connection between arrangement of points of view and film industrial pressures was the effect of a fully conscious move on the part of Méndez. But the orchestration of narrative strategies was Méndez’ decision. All that needs to be noted here is that allocating a subjective point of view to the vampire during the titles sequence of a film was as good (and common) a way as any of telling the spectators that what they were about to watch was a horror film. Such emphasis on this central sales point marks El vampiro as a product designed to circulate in an exhibition sector that, as Méndez and his producer knew only too well, was monopolised by the US magnate. The subjective point of view allocated to Duval, the foreign investor, in the titles sequence thus signals not only a moment of identification for the spectator. It also acts out in the mise en scène the film’s industrial position, from which the film (and its makers, however unwittingly) speak. The film’s author – understood not as the person of the director but, as in the work of Michel Foucault (1988), as the narrative instance structuring the order of discourse or text – becomes temporarily visible in the diegesis and, with it, the (industrial) relations of (cultural) production that sustain its operation. This notwithstanding, Duval is given to us as a figure to be opposed. Among other things, he feeds on the blood of campesinos and their children. But the alternative to Duval, that is to say, the revival of the old agrarian system, is presented as no more desirable. Throughout El vampiro, the lack of nostalgia for the old order is partly signalled by means of Rosalío Solano’s photography and Gunther Gerszo’s art direction, which produced images full of contrasts and shadows. Thus rendered, the fog, darkness and decay

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that surround Los Sicomóros and the adjacent woods reveal the extent to which here, in contrast to many a melodrama rancheros, the Porfirian hacienda is shown to belong to a world beyond redemption. This is a modernist, not a nostalgic look on feudal Mexico. Accordingly, whatever traditional or religious ritual there is in El vampiro it is always shown as if watched from a distance. From the funeral of María Teresa, in the film’s fourth sequence, onwards, scenes staging aspects of feudal Mexican society are shot either by way of non-allocated high-angle shots, through frames within the frame, such as architectural structures or trees around the margins of the frame, or simply blocked by objects in the foreground. These factors indicate that Duval cannot be read as a version of the Porfirian hacendado, as De La Vega Alfaro reads him. That configuration is more clearly delineated in El vampiro by the ineffective and old uncle Emilio and the ghostly, emaciated María Teresa, for theirs is the hacienda that is unproductive. Further, María Teresa’s apparent death (and that of Marta later in the film) is a trope not commonly found in other Dracula productions, perhaps because notions of life after death, living dead and such like are already embedded in the figure of Dracula himself. In El vampiro, where it appears to have been an original addition of Méndez’ scriptwriter, Ramón Obón, apparent death has the effect of rendering María Teresa and Marta somewhat vampiric in their own right. María Teresa even survives into the sequel, El ataúd del vampiro, along with Duval (and, of course, the younger generation, Marta and Enrique). If Duval and his accomplice, the rejuvenated aunt Eloisa, resonate with any dimension of 1950s Mexican society, then this is not so much the Porfirian hacendado, as its reconfiguration under Alamánista policies of economic growth, mechanised agribusiness and foreign (US) investment. As a product of a Mexican film industry also moulded by those policies, El vampiro could not but make this and its antagonists available in the mise en scène as a set of ambivalent positions. Significantly, the cluster of preoccupations at work in El vampiro can be found also in other Fernando Méndez films. El grito de la muerte / The Living Coffin (1958) is also set in a hacienda that is owned by two sisters, Doña María (Hortensia Santoveña) and Clotilde (Carolina Barret). Clotilde has died a year before the story begins and is referred to as la insepulta (literally the ‘un-buried’) because her corpse has disappeared. She is believed by locals, by the hacienda’s servants and by her sister to haunt the swamps surrounding the family’s property and to be responsible for a series of deaths in the area, which she supposedly perpetrates in revenge for her sons’ death. Despite the fact that the locals give Clotilde the alternative name of la llorona, after the Mexican legend of the weeping or crying woman, El grito de

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la muerte has little or no relation with the legend.19 Mention of la llorona is made in the film simply as a way of emphasising the anachronism of the locals’ superstitious behaviour. The spectator is expected to know better and to regard old Doña María’s fear of her dead sister’s revenge beyond the grave as unreasonable. Dona María’s obsession is such that she neglects the dayto-day running of the hacienda, which, as a result, is on the verge of bankruptcy. Further, a knife is stuck into the hacienda’s clock that hangs on the living-room wall. By stopping its hands so that they always mark the time of Clotilde’s death, Doña María and the servants believe the knife to have the power of stopping Clotilde from reappearing. But María Elena (María Duval), Clotilte and Doña María’s niece, is annoyed by this superstitious behaviour. When, in a gesture of defiance, she removes the knife from the clock, Clotilde begins to roam around the hacienda. Soon Doña María dies. Not long after her burial her corpse also disappears from the hacienda’s crypt. In the end, thanks to the sobering intervention of Gastón (Gastón Santos), a lone ranger figure, and his travelling companion, Coyote Loco (Pedro de Aguillón), it all turns out to be a scam conceived by Felipe (Carlos Ancira) and Don Emiliano (Guillermo Àlvarez Bianchi), the hacienda’s managers, in order to prevent the sale of the estate to another party after the sisters’ death. By stealing their corpses and roaming around the property masked as the two dead sisters, Felipe and Don Emiliano were planning to gain control of the hacienda themselves and exploit the gold deposits that had been discovered on its land around the swamp. El grito de la muerte is habitually discussed as a film combining two genres, the western and the horror, and, if the poster (Fig. 7) is anything to go by, it was certainly marketed that way. Scripted by Ramón Obón, who was also responsible for the script of several other Méndez films, the film was a vehicle for Gastón Santos, a young actor associated with Alfredo Ripstein’s Alameda Film, who had emerged a year earlier by playing western-type roles. In spite of Víctor Herrera’s colour cinematography (the same cinematographer of Ladrón de cadáveres), El grito de la muerte looks very much like a western, the apparitions of the dead sisters being far from a spectacular affair. Yet similar tropes emerge as in El vampiro: the unprofitable hacienda, the returning dead and, importantly, subterfuges to transform a land- and lineage-based economy unit (the hacienda) into a financial, speculative venture (the gold mines). Importantly, as De La Vega Alfaro rightly observes, the rural Mexico of El grito de la muerte is no longer the feudal world of the melodrama ranchero à la Allá en el Rancho Grande. Here rurality takes on all the connotations of the US western, with saloons, cowboy suits and hats, not singing hacendados with sombreros, as in Allá en el Rancho Grande. The s­etting of

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7 Poster for El grito de la muerte.

El grito de la muerte is yet another indication that, with Méndez, the iconography of horror drawn upon is not the one associated with nationalist notions of mexicanidad, be it in the form of Aztec mummies or of lloronas. Concerned less with land as the symbol of a lineage-based feudal economy than with land as a means of financial speculation, El vampiro and El grito de la muerte are infused with the awareness of a modernity that is marked North American. This may well explain why the story of Dracula was used for the first film, in spite of the fact that Mexican culture is not short of terrorinducing myths, as if, conscious of the fact that Abel Salazar’s production company had to compete with a US monopoly at home, he set out to make a film that could be circulated on both sides of the border: Mexican enough for the domestic market but not too Mexican for export, perhaps, but above all for the domestic educated classes whose preferences were for foreign films. The circulation and reception of Fernando Méndez’ films abroad Fernando Méndez’ films have circulated outside Mexico. El vampiro was listed in Cahiers du Cinéma in December 1959 as having been released

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8 Advertisement for Misterios de ultratumba, from the Rome daily Il Messaggero of 30 July 1960.

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in Paris between 28 October and 17 December of that year. It was also reviewed in the French periodicals Cinéma (January 1960) and in Son et Image (Saison cinématographique, December 1960). Misterios de ultratumba was released in Rome in early 1960 in a first vision city-centre cinema (Fig. 8) where, like other, similarly generic Italian and foreign pictures, it played for less than a week. Indeed, if contemporary reviewers and, later, film historians are anything to go by, the international circulation of Méndez’ horror (and other) films was primarily confined to film festivals’ retrospectives on fantasy cinema in Europe or, in the United States, to exploitation cinema circuits and to venues and television channels catering to the Latino community: Diametrically opposed to the luxurious decadence of the Italian horror films are the Mexican movies of Fernando Méndez, Alfonso Corona Blake, Chano Urueta and José Cibrian (to mention but a few), destined for popular consumption all over Latin America and only occasionally seen in the United States in Spanish-speaking houses and (dubbed) on television. It is not surprising that these films were first noticed in European circles: they appeal to the polarities of the movie public, either to very plebeian audiences which relish their frenzied pace and top-heavy ramifications or to connoisseurs who delight in their disarming naivêté and their fairly frequent, and largely unconscious, felicities. In such quality they carry a great deal of conviction and are happily devoid of the self-contemptuous tone that often screeches in the work of more proficient competitors. (Clarens 1968: 194; 1997: 158–9) Mexico produces a large number of fantasy films … Fernando Mendez [sic] is the only director whose name is known on this side of the Atlantic: author of El ataud del vampiro [sic] … and of El grito de la muerte, which were never released in France, unlike his El vampiro and El ladron de cadaveres [sic], which were circulated on the commercial circuit … While the Mexican school clearly deserves to be known by cinephiles, we instead ignore practically every fantasy film made in the rest of Latin America. Even so, occasionally, in the context of a festival or through the reports of special correspondents, it is possible to discover material that proves the existence of such a cinema. (Prédal 1970: 59–60) Fernando Mendez [sic] is the only Mexican director to have been spared by the general spite of the specialist press. And yet we only know two of his films, and nothing allows us to claim that his work is better than that of a Miguel Morayta or of a Frederick [sic] Curiel, of whose work, again, we only have a list of titles; what these may be about and what they are like we ignore entirely. (Sabatier 1973: 267) For the interested cinephile the problem, and it is not a small one, is to know where to see these films: in France one can count the number of distributed

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films on the fingers of one hand. So we are left with Mexico, where the local cinémathèque has preserved a fair share of the country’s cinema, or otherwise the more easily accessible United States. For instance, at one’s own risk, in New York one can see recent Mexican films in Brooklyn or in Puerto Rican areas. For older films one has to rely on Channel 9, which, very rarely and at around two o’clock in the morning, [shows Mexican films] in versions that have been horribly dubbed by a Florida-based company, or otherwise on Spanishlanguage channels (Channels 41 or 47). (Bourgoin 1978: 17)

In Europe, El vampiro was screened again at the thirteenth edition of the San Sebastian International Film Festival, in June 1965, and reviewed in that context by the French magazine Midi-Minuit Fantastique 13 (November 1965). It has since been included in several European retrospectives on fantasy cinema, including the fourteenth edition of the International Festival of Fantasy Cinema of Sitges in October 1991 and the thirty-sixth and fortieth editions of the San Sebastian International Film Festival in September 1988 and 1992 respectively. As for the United States, El vampiro reached that market in the mid-1960s via Florida producer K. Gordon Murray, who purchased the distribution rights for twenty-eight Mexican films, as Jerry Warren had also done with other Mexican horror films (Ray 1991: 11–13). As Stéphane Bourgoin and others have documented, K. Gordon Murray cut the films, dubbed them into English and, often under a different director’s credit, sub-leased them to American International Television as a package en­ti­tled Thrillers from an­oth­er World! Sources – the reliability of which I was not able to verify – state that the television channel broadcast them from the late 1960s through to the 1970s (www.atlasdvds.com/thr.html, accessed 21 July 2012). As altered by the Florida producer, El vampiro and its sequel also played in some US theatres along with La momia azteca contra el robot humano / The Robot vs the Aztec Mummy (Rafael Portillo, 1958) as part of a ‘giant scream show’, which had people dressed as monsters running through the venue’s aisles (Weldon 1983: 747), as well as a double feature show with Muñecos infernales / Curse of the Doll Peo­ple (Benito Alazraki, 1960) in drive-in cinemas across the south­-east of the United States. The first US magazine to review them appears to have been Film Fan Monthly: Mexican producers specialise in adventure and action films, comedies and, primarily, horror films. Some of these films are shown in the United States, but only occasionally, and this is due, probably, to the lack of known names or at any rate names capable of attracting crowds … It’s a pity because some of these films are quite good. (Daryl Davy, Film Fan Monthly, January 1968, quoted in De La Vega Alfaro 1995b: 200)

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Over the years, the circulation of Méndez’ horror films outside Mexico nearly exclusively through European film festival and US exploitation cinema networks led to the production of a discrete body of work that, while sometimes acknowledging Méndez’ significance within Mexican genre cinema, simultaneously presented him primarily as a director of fantasy and/or exploitation films and thus, by implication, as a marginal figure within the industry. As I hope my outline of the director’s work makes clear, this was not Méndez’ position within Mexican cinema: throughout the 1950s he was far from a negligible figure in the industry and made mainstream cinema. The industrial, economic and political circumstances that contributed to Méndez occupying so central a position in the domestic film industry while making horror films were evidently not the same as the ones that led to the production and circulation of exploitation and fantasy film in the United States and Europe. The main problem of contemporary reviews of El vampiro and other Méndez films in the foreign press, and the influence they continue to have on more recent accounts of these and other, similarly generic cinema, is the suppression of those circumstances from the evaluation of the films. The generalities of their commercial format – their sales points – are acknowledged, but the reasons why those points may have sold – why the format worked in Mexico at a particular time – are not explored. The historical substance that grounds the necessity of the films’ functioning as commodities and as cultural artefacts is simply not taken into account, thus leaving the critics free to reduce the films to nothing more than copies of more familiar products. So, for instance, Cahiers du Cinéma’s anonymous two-line review of El vampiro, published when it was first released in France: By plagiarising the strategies of the classics within the genre, it is possible to arrive at a far less boring product than this type of cinema usually delivers. (Cahiers du Cinéma, 102, December 1959: 62)

Similarly, from the United States, the authors of The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film claimed that: While Americans were concerned with atomic bombs and space invaders, Mexico got busy copying our ’30 and ’40 horror movies. German Robles is Count Lavud, an impressive-looking vampire with very long fangs and a nice crypt. (Weldon 1983: 745)

Likewise, Carlos Clarens in his survey of the genre: In style the horror movies of Mexico have assimilated the Hollywood tradition of the thirties and forties, of which they appear a logical extension, and a touch

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of Freund and Stumar can be seen in many traces in the camera work of Víctor Herrera and Raúl Lavista. (Clarens 1968: 194; 1997: 159)

A few years later, in an altogether different kind of (French) publication, film historian René Predal observed that: [El ladrón de cadáveres] is part of the Santos series, of which it constitutes one of the best episodes. Mendez [sic] has managed to make the most of the fact that the film takes place in the world of wrestling and succeeds in making very enjoyable the presentation of bouts, which is usually so long and so boring in films of this genre. Here, by contrast, violence, brutality and blood burst out from the beginning to produce the atmosphere of a horror film. For its part, the ‘monster’ is a curious mélange between a vampire … a Frankenstein figure … and a werewolf … The film also includes some rather weak scenes (notably the romantic scenes), but the make-up is impressive; combined with excellent special effects, it all makes El ladron de cadaveres [sic] a work of quality, on a par with English productions. (Prédal 1970: 59)

As these reviews show, critics looked for similarities between Méndez’ and US or British horror films, rather than focusing on how in the former generic tropes also found in US and British films were bent to suit Mexican priorities. Rarely, for instance, did European and US critics mention that El vampiro is set in a Mexican hacienda or that, in relation to that Mexican environment, Count Lavud is an outsider.20 To Mexican critics the relations between El vampiro and its context were an essential consideration. Not so to foreign critics. Some of them were cinephiles enough to acknowledge that lack of contextual information was an obstacle to their evaluation of the films, but by far the majority appear not to have perceived such deficiency as a problem, falling back instead on familiar territory, reviewing El vampiro as a derivative film, which somehow was infused with a ‘delirious imagination’ (Cinema 60, January 1960, quoted in De La Vega Alfaro 1995b: 198) and an ‘endearingly unaffected simplicity’,21 and, finally, labelling Méndez’ film either as an example of ‘the only true fantasy cinema’ (Jean Rollin, MidiMinuit Fantastique, October 1966, quoted in De La Vega Alfaro 1995b: 200) or as ‘Mexploitation’ (Greene 2005: 8).22 The channels through which European and US film critics watched Méndez’ horror films thus ended up informing the films’ reception abroad. In the United States, for which Mexico was little more than a neo-colony of migrant labour, El vampiro was thus targeted by distributors, and reviewed accordingly, as a film intended for working-class and lower-middle-class teenagers, including those of Latino origins. In France, where positions vis-à-vis Mexico and, more

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generally, Latin America veered towards the political left, the same Méndez film was instead proposed to the cultured and progressive middle class who patronised film festivals and who proceeded to discuss this and others of Méndez’ films as exotic versions of surrealist cinema. Over the years this produced publications such as Doyle Greene’s Mexploitation Cinema, which for all its merits nevertheless discusses El vampiro as on a par with, or even instrumental in the production of, other Mexican horror films that, in reality, occupied a different position within the Mexican film industry. There is no guarantee that we can avoid projecting onto these films tensions and pressures that are specific to our national constellation, as earlier critics did. But, with the benefits of historical hindsight and of multiple viewing (afforded by new technology), we are much better placed than earlier critics and historians to allow Méndez’ horror films to speak to us for what they said in Mexico in the late 1950s. To associate these films with the more marginal sectors of other national cinemas is a mistake because in the 1950s the Mexican film industry was not the only area of the country’s economy to have been opened up to speculative practices. In 1950s Mexico, radical capital, both foreign and domestic, was allowed to rule in cinema and, as Rubenstein’s analysis indicates, also in other sectors of the media, because its priorities were the driving force of President Alemán’s economic policies, from finance and industry to agriculture. Under this regime, which barely changed after Alemán’s term came to an end, the Mexican state acted as a comprador state: it encouraged industrial and financial interests, Mexican and foreign, to run wild, irrespective of long-term infrastructural and social considerations. Within cinema, this did not only give carte blanche to monopolies and smaller speculators – it simultaneously had the effect of moving to the industry’s centre-ground products that, for their greater speculative or exploitative nature, in other film industries have tended to be relegated to the margins. Under conditions where short-term financial speculation was the over-arching priority of domestic and foreign operators, irrespective of the industry’s long-term interests as a national institution, horror cinema became a mainstream genre. As I hope to have shown in my analysis of El vampiro, the film does stage all this – the conditions of its own existence – in its modes of address. Anything along the lines of the historicising reading I have proposed here was not something that contemporary foreign critics and historians have contemplated. And we can rest with that. But that a good degree of historicising should not form, today, part of the standard approach to a film, in spite of the abundance of information now available that enables us to open up El vampiro’s or any other film’s aesthetics to the socio-economic fabric

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that made them what they are, is much more worrying. Worrying because it renders all the more likely the possibility that the same (or a new wave of the same) force as the one that granted national cultural legitimacy to El vampiro – that is, highly speculative capital and its holding in many areas of life – may actually be what motivates our rediscovery of popular films today. To be clear, I am not suggesting here that this or other generically driven pictures should be relegated to oblivion once again because they may be the products of a populist, money-making enterprise. We are, after all, dealing with an industry. I am saying, rather, that the one single reason why a certain kind of cinema may be worth rediscovering is to find out precisely why we may want to do so. In the next chapter I examine the factors that, to this day, have enabled historians of Hindi cinema unproblematically to obliterate from the history of Indian cinema the only horror films the country ever produced, even if we would be hard put to find a single Indian cinemagoer not to have heard of these films’ makers: the Ramsay brothers. This raises the questions: how popular is what we now call popular cinema? Which interests speak through our changing cinephilia?

4 The Hindi horror films of the Ramsay brothers

In Shaitani ilaaka / Satan’s Circle (Kiran Ramsay, 1990) we are presented with the murder of a man at the hands of a shape-shifting female. The barely dressed woman walks into a room where a man is lying on a bed. The camera, initially positioned behind and at a short distance from the woman, slowly tracks in to take up her point of view. She hypnotises him, has sex with him and finally kills him. We witness these actions as if through the woman’s eyes. This sequence is typical of Hindi horror cinema, which perhaps explains why in India, until very recently, horror films seemed like a glitch in the system: none appears to have been made throughout the history of Indian cinemas except between the late 1970s and the early 1990s, when the genre saw a moment of glory with the Hindi productions of the Ramsay brothers. From the mid-1990s a series of films began to be made that mixed, to varying degrees, elements of the horror, thriller and melodrama film.1 Unlike the Ramsay brothers’ productions, this recent wave comprises exclusively large-budget productions, or at any rate, much larger than the Ramsay brothers’. Accordingly, they also feature far less nudity and sex than the earlier and cheaper Hindi horror films. Whether these more recent productions signal the mainstreaming of the Hindi horror film is too early to say. This chapter focuses on the Ramsay brothers’ horror films, because in spite of their uncontested status across India these films do not feature in any of the histories of Indian cinema. Apart from half a column in the Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (Rajadhyaksha and Willemen 1999), it is as if for film historians the Ramsay brothers and their films never existed. In this chapter I examine some of the Ramsay brothers’ films, their position in the Hindi film industry and the industry’s relation to the wider economy. What becomes apparent from this outline is that Hindi cinema produced horror films during the 1980s and in that decade mainly because in India the one single factor that was necessary for the production of films exploit-

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ing the generic sales points constitutive of the genre – radical ­capital – was, until then, contained by the Indian government’s economic policies. From the late 1970s containment was relaxed and radical capital was allowed to make its entry into the Indian economy by a ruling coalition, the colouring of which was fundamentalist and Hindu. The religious overtones rubbed off on the film industry’s produce, including on its chosen generic menus. These forces set limits to the film industry’s operation. They did not, however, necessarily define how individual operators moved within those limits, nor how films orchestrated the narrative strategies available to them, because these strategies, like those of any other cultural practice, always remain accessible for mobilisation by a wide range of forces, whether they are dominant or not. It is crucial to take this into account when we consider the invisibility of Hindi horror films in the historiography of Indian cinemas to date. This is because such an omission signals, at best, the incapacity of film historians to grasp the functioning of filmic forms other than their use as endorsed by dominant power blocs; at worst, film historians’ uncritical imbrication in those blocs and, ultimately, their (however unwitting) complicity with them. This is not a stance we can afford to maintain while at the same time claiming to be historians. The Ramsay brothers’ horror films in the Hindi film industry The Ramsay family consists of father F. U. Ramsay (1917–89), a radio engineer, manufacturer and producer,2 and his seven sons. Six of the seven sons – Kumar, Shyam, Keshu, Tulsi, Gangu and Kiran – are actively associated with film and, from the early 1990s, with television (Rajadhyaksha and Willemen 1999: 191).3 Most of the Ramsay films were directed by the Tulsi and Shyam team, with Kiran, the youngest, in charge of sound. The twenty or so horror films they made between 1978 and 1990 never occupied the centre-ground of cinema in India. Even so, the success of these films during the 1980s led other filmmakers, such as Mohan Bhakri and Vinod Talwar,4 to experiment with the genre. Notwithstanding these other names, whose production has never been consistent, the Ramsay brothers’ films constitute a unique instance of horror cinema in India: nothing like them had been made before and nothing as legendary has been made after the Ramsay brothers. Of course there have been elements of horror in a range of other Indian films. The difference between these and the Ramsay brothers’ productions is that the latter were built entirely on the horror ingredient,5 and sold explicitly as horror films.6 Accordingly, the tropes of the Ramsay brothers’ films are far from unique. Living corpses, graveyards, crosses,

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vampires and stakes, haunted Islamicate mansions, tridents (god Shiva’s symbol), shape-shifting females, angry many-handed goddesses and animated objects, all of which form the basic props of these films, were inspired by Christian ritual, borrowed unashamedly from the British Hammer films, while simultaneously drawing from Hindu myths and reproducing much of the iconography of Indian mythological and devotional cinema. Most of the films are set in the countryside. Whatever story there is, it focuses, as a rule, on the infringement of this world by aspects of an outside. The disrupting factors are presented as pertaining to the modern world and often take the form of ruthless financial speculation. Female sexuality, either as a primary concern or as a symptom of the disruption of old values brought about by aspects of modernisation, is also a regular feature. Religious iconography and rituals play an important role in these films, especially Christian and Hindu iconography. On the one hand, the prominence of Christian iconography is connected to the way in which Christianity reached India during the early stages (and by way) of colonialism. On the other hand, it is also associated with notions of modernisation, at least to the extent that, from the mid-twentieth century, Christianity has been perceived in India as having opened up spaces where more egalitarian discourses could circulate than had been the case with other, more indigenous religions. For now, it is enough to say that in the Ramsay brothers’ films religious iconography, Christian or otherwise, functions like a sales point, a customary ingredient expected of the genre, rather than as a function of the order of discourse or as a point of authority. I return to this point below. Religious and secular notions of the supernatural are not the Ramsay brothers’ only sales points. Good music scores and, above all, (partly covered) nudity and very mild sexual scenes also sold these films. As we shall see later in this chapter, this was as much the case in the 1980s as it is in more recent productions, and it is this ingredient that is entirely absent in later, large-budget horror productions such as those of Ram Gopal Varma. Indeed, scenes containing some nudity and mild sexual acts are a good indication of the position of the Ramsay brothers’ horror films within the 1980s Indian film market. Within Hindi and, more generally, Indian cinema, the Ramsay brothers’ horror films tend to be regarded as an anomaly. In reality they are more representative of Hindi cinema than general wisdom would have them to be, at least from a film industrial point of view. To begin with, by far the majority of Indian film production was in the past and, to a large extent, is still today small-scale. Historically, much of it has also been ­family-based, at least in Hindi cinema. And so is the Ramsay brothers’ mode of production, which partly explains their ‘slippery corporate identity’ (Nair

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2012: 128).7 The whole family is involved in the necessarily regular production of low-budget films that tend to be shot over as long a period as fifty to fifty-five weeks.8 This is a shooting schedule that the Ramsay brothers can afford because, unlike large-budget Hindi productions, they rely on generic ingredients rather than on the marketability of overbooked film stars, ‘often drawing their talent from an alternative circuit of television and beauty pageants’ (Nair 2012: 130). Second, although each of the Ramsay brothers’ horror productions has been released as a film for adults only (A rating), their circulation has never been a phenomenon restricted to Mumbai and other large urban centres, as it is sometimes assumed to be. In the 1980s and, with variations, also today, these horror films circulated within an exhibition network that was marginal to the industry but which covered the national territory. According to Nair, reports in the Mumbai-based trade journal Film Information suggest that ‘the Ramsays had discovered principal markets in an hinterland of B-, C-, and D-centres’ (Nair 2012: 127), where B-centres are of a maximum of 300,000 inhabitants, C-centres 50,000 inhabitants and so on: A film would be released on a dozen prints in Bombay’s less favoured ‘neighborhood’ theatres. By the second week, that number would drop to ten; by the third week, only a print or two would remain in circulation in Bombay. By this time, the film would have begun its journey into the interiors, playing on one screen in Pune in its fourth week, and on one screen on Wai [Maharashtra] in its seventh week. It never ran anywhere for more than a few weeks, but shortterm contracts with distributors on ‘re-issue’ rights meant that films could be re-released over and over again for the next few years. (Nair 2012: 127)

Sometimes distributors would re-release the films with different titles, and market them through redesigned posters, but whether this was the case or not, the Ramsay brothers’ horror productions had a long shelf life. As Tulsi Ramsay confirmed in an interview in 2009: ‘Even 30 years later, we’re still collecting receipts from Do gaz zameen ke neeche’ (Nair 2012: 126). The Ramsay brothers’ films circulated, first, via the industry’s customary distribution channels, the Ramsays having a distributor for each of India’s six distribution areas. The films were advertised in the national press, including in English language dailies, and on the radio. In Bombay and other urban centres they were shown in category B and C cinemas when they were first released (though not reshown as part of second vision programmes). In the countryside, the Ramsay brothers’ horror films were exhibited in small town and village cinemas, and it is from these rural areas that the brothers drew the largest share of their box office revenues.

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The reasons for this have to do with the nature of Indian film exhibition. Historically India has had one of the world’s lowest number of cinema seats per person. Competition to access venues in urban centres is very high. With large audiences available, urban cinemas are easily filled, a film can stay on the bill profitably for several weeks at a time and exhibitors can and do demand a high share of the box office. Outside large urban centres and in the countryside, where audiences are smaller, the situation is very different. With smaller audiences to fill a cinema, the films there circulate faster, which in turn raises the demand for films. More of them are needed to fill the bill of any single venue and competition is thus not as fierce as in the large cities. Exhibitors’ demands on the box office are also lower. In small towns a Ramsay brothers’ film could play for a few weeks, with the proviso that, as an adults-only show, it is very unlikely to have played at each of a cinema’s five daily screenings. Even so, the sheer number of suburban and rural cinemas across the country made it so that this ramified, provincial network generated a much larger share of revenues and profits for the Ramsays than did big urban centres. Moreover, the golden age of the Ramsay brothers coincided with the introduction of the VCR in 1982 and, in the following years, its increasing availability. A second channel of distribution for their films was thus the VHS cassette. In the 1980s not many Indian households could afford their own VCR, but by the mid-1980s the country was dotted with video parlours.9 By the end of that decade a VHS supplier could count on an average demand of 6,000 cassettes per month from video parlours in the area (Hindustan Times, 8 October 1995). It is likely to have been in the provincial, the non-urban and in the video-parlour markets that nudity worked best as a sales point – not least because, in a country where no cinema is openly devoted to pornography, films with a sexual content are not as easy to come by as in urban centres, where access to black markets is easier.10 Lastly, with the launch of private television broadcasters in 1991, the Ramsay brothers gained access to a third, national circulation channel. Keen to attract advertising revenues by targeting specific groups, Zee TV – the first Hindi satellite channel, launched in 1992 – commissioned the Ramsay brothers with a horror series. The Zee Horror Show was intended as a means to attract teenage viewers and was thus devoid of the adults-only content found in the Ramsay brothers’ films. Yet the Zee Horror Show went well beyond its target: between 1991 and 1993 it became Zee TV’s most popular programme, drawing as much as 30.4 per cent of the national audience (Sriram and Mohan 1994). It was not the same type of product as the films but it gave the Ramsay brothers enormous publicity and, to

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their ­productions, unchallenged nationwide prominence. Today, satellite broadcasting and video CDs constitute the Ramsay brothers’ main exhibition outlets and source of revenue. The socio-economics of India from the late 1970s to the early 1990s The Ramsay brothers’ horror films’ mode of circulation alone would provide sufficient ground to regard these films as an instance of India’s national cinema. Yet there is also no denying that the Ramsays’ films do stand out as a distinctive manifestation of that cinema. Why did the Ramsay brothers’ phenomenon occur in those years and in those years only? And why did it manifest itself in just that way? In Chapters 2 and 3 I have argued that the one important factor in the making and the circulation of popular genres such as horror and giallo films is what I have called radical capital. I have argued that the position of such genres within any single national cinema varies depending on the leeway that mode of capital is allowed in any one country at any point in time. In other words, the prominence or not of horror and similarly exploitative genres depends on the relation between radical capital and the state, the entity regulating the territory and the institutions within which capital and films circulate. In Italy, during De Gasperi’s administration and after, speculative capital was allowed a margin of operation that was limited by the influence of the Church on (and within) the ruling coalition. In Mexico such restrictions did not apply. On the contrary, in the 1950s and after, the Mexican state acted as a comprador state, facilitating the operation and at times itself operating as speculative capital. In India radical capital’s margin of manoeuvre has historically been determined by the Indian National Congress (INC, more commonly known as the Congress) Party’s protectionist economic policies. Until the mid-1990s, the Indian state sought to keep highly speculative investment under firm control, if not to penalise it. The result has been that over the years investors determined to operate irrespective of capital’s long-term interests have tended to go their own way. Parallel circuits of money flow, by which this mode of capital could operate, emerged and grew. Cinema has been one such network, not a small one either and not only in the 1980s that concerns us here. My argument is that the horror film emerged in India during that decade because it mediated what was felt, perhaps obscurely or subconsciously, to be at issue in the new alignments that shaped India’s turbulent 1980s. But the tensions that marked that decade and, more importantly as far as cinema is concerned, the ways in which these tensions manifested themselves in the public sphere, can

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only be understood if traced back to the longer-term pressures of which they were a culmination. In the run up to World War Two, when still under British colonial rule, India built up textile and steel industries that were able for a while to compete internationally. Soon after independence and partition Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru determined to industrialise, but not to build on the industries India had established in the previous decades. His party, the ruling Congress Party, rejected the path of growth through exploitation of comparative advantage (exports of industrial goods). Pessimism about the terms of trade, as well as about the prospect of finding Western markets for its products, led India into a strategy of import substitution instead. The country was to build up its own machine-goods industries, restrict imports of non-essential goods and regulate its larger private firms in order to avoid the formation of monopolies. Throughout Nehru’s government, this recipe of import substitution dominated social-political strategy (Desai 2002: 237–8). Two forces were at play in this context: an industrial big bourgeoisie that relied on the state and its policy of contained capitalist expansion in chosen sectors; and a politically influential, localised and predominantly landed small bourgeoisie. The Congress’ legitimacy in democratic India depended on the latter. Capitalism in India resulted from the uneasy cohabitation of these two blocs, with the small bourgeoisie as the dominant faction (Desai 1975). While Nehru was committed to industrialisation and social modernisation, the imbrication of this class in pre-capitalist structures led Nehru’s Congress to face the paradox of being formally wedded to a programme of industrial development and social progress without having the power to implement the most radical elements of this path (Kaviraj 1997: 58–9). During India’s first ten years as an independent nation, the fundamental contradictions of this uneasy compromise were held at bay by the urgency of, and the sense of euphoria generated by, the nation-building project. But the late 1950s brought a massive foreign exchange crisis. From the mid-1960s the country experienced an industrial downturn. Bombay became the only area to see industrial growth. In both 1965–6 and 1966–7 there were famines, which impelled the government to import large quantities of wheat from the United States. Inflation accelerated and the balance of payments soared into deficit. Under international pressure in 1966 the Indian rupee was devalued (Desai 1975: 11). Arguing that the (any) state-building project is critically mediated by the nature of state–capitalist relations, Vivek Chibber (2004) has demonstrated that in India the policy of import substitution led to a weak developmental state. The import substitution model ‘made it possible, and even rational,

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for Indian capitalists to resist the effort to build a state that could impose discipline on private firms’ (Chibber 2004: 10). In the 1950s and after, vertical links that would have connected firms to state agencies and state agencies to the Planning Commission were virtually absent, and horizontal flows of information between state agencies were tenuous. The result was that the implementation of industrial policies was left to a bureaucracy that devised its own ad hoc rules of thumb. This created imbalances in the system. Not having an interest in being disciplined, firms fought off attempts to build a state suited to the task. Once the state policy apparatus was in place, the biggest firms were also able to bend its policies to their own needs (Chibber 2004: 199–207). The 1957 foreign exchange crisis marked the point at which some of the critical shortcomings of the Indian development model became known to state managers as well as to the public. One of the problems highlighted by the crisis was that if the pace of development was to be maintained, exports would have to be increased. Efforts to provide special assistance to firms moving in this direction began immediately, but instead of a centralised and carefully coordinated system for administering the schemes, the method that was actually adopted was similar to the other aspects of industrial policy – they were handed over to the bureaucracy, which, lacking effective means of coordination, established myriad schemes that were overlapping, discontinuous, administratively cumbersome and, in practice, reduced the legitimacy of the measures: ‘The dynamic result of the planning process was to delegitimise the idea of disciplinary planning, while at the same time weakening its main agent’, the Planning Commission (Chibber 2004: 210). By the mid-1960s, murmurs for an overhauling of the planning apparatus led the government to introduce reforms that were aimed at reducing state intervention. The 1970s was a decade in which developing countries raised their industrial growth rates. While many switched from an import substitution policy to an export-oriented policy, India under Indira Gandhi continued instead the protectionist policies of the earlier decades, leading to industrial stagnation (Desai 2005: 153). It was only in the 1980s, when Rajiv Gandhi took over from his mother, that there was a distinct shift of policy towards more liberalisation, and especially substantial liberalisation of imports. This insured that terms of trade improved for agriculture. Public investment as a share of GDP also increased, particularly in rural India. While rural development schemes were far from entirely successful in reaching target groups, they nevertheless led to greater spread of economic growth in the country (Ghosh 2005: 1033). There was a significant acceleration in the growth rate and much greater willingness to import,

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not only goods but also capital. Thanks to the higher growth rate and the increased demand for agricultural labour, poverty began to reduce, also in the countryside (Desai 2005: 193). But this acceleration came, again, without restructuring, and the estimated share of the black or parallel economy in the country’s economic life also soared. Secularism in the politics of 1980s India Greater disposable income outside urban centres is very likely to have been a factor in the importance of rural areas in the circulation of the Ramsay brothers’ films, as were the possibilities for small speculative capital opened up by liberalisation. Moreover, in 1966, two years after Nehru’s death, his daughter, Indira Gandhi, became prime minister, but the Indian National Congress Party was hit by major defections. At the national elections in 1969 it found that popular support had been eroded to the point of losing half of its majority states. The 1970s were thus marked by what Madhava Prasad (1998b) has called a moment of disaggregation, which was as political as it was economic. While Indira Gandhi sought to mobilise popular support among the lower middle and working classes with her particular brand of populism, that very same populism had the effect of alienating the layers upon which the Congress had so far relied for its legitimacy. The main beneficiaries of the social and economic policies since 1947, that is to say the middle class, the rich peasants and the small and large capitalists, felt increasingly threatened (Chandra 2003: 24). Rich peasants reacted to repeated official pronouncements about the implementation of existing land reform laws, as well as to the passing and implementation of fresh landceiling legislation. In 1969, when Indira Gandhi nationalised the country’s fourteen largest banks, the capitalist class went on an investment strike. For their part, the middle class felt hit by a new and highly unpopular scheme of compulsory deposits amounting to a freeze in wages and salaries (Chandra 2003: 27–9). Combined with the de-legitimisation of the state’s economic programmes first and with liberalisation later, political disaggregation allowed radically speculative capital and other forces a playing field they had never afforded in earlier decades. Greater disposable income in rural areas and unprecedented leeway to radical capital are likely to have been necessary determinations in the emergence of the Ramsay brothers’ operation. They are not, however, sufficient to explain the generic choices that characterise their cinema. The one crucial factor in this respect is the shifts that occurred in the 1980s in the country’s politics of secularisation. In 1975 Indira Gandhi, accused of

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corrupt practices during her 1971 election campaign, was debarred from politics for six years. This event and the formation of a multi-party Janata Front, culminating in a major rally calling on the army and police to disobey illegal orders, led Indira Gandhi to declare the state of emergency. Two years later, for the first time since independence, the Congress, still led by Indira Gandhi, was defeated in the general election. The Janata Party, a coalition of disparate opposition parties, took power. Over barely a decade, this series of events culminated in the ascendancy of Hinduism as a major ideological force and its institutionalisation in the political sphere. Broadly speaking, to this day three notions of secularisation have emerged. There is the concept of secularisation understood as decline of religious institutions, beliefs, practices and consciousness. Second, there is secularism understood as the process of disengagement from, or compartmentalisation of, religion from political life. The third notion of secularisation is connected to the growing importance of rational thought and activity – a dynamic that implies newer claimants to intellectual and moral authority other than religiously sanctioned systems (Vanaik 1997: 66). But Achin Vanaik has rightly observed that in India a fourth notion of secularisation obtains: there ‘secularism was perceived as the unifying principle mediating between and collating different religious communities in order to forge a common struggle for national liberation’ (Vanaik 1997: 67). As the legitimating ground of the ruling coalition collapsed and the Congress, as the political core of the nation, splintered, the ruling coalition’s commitment to secularism also began to crumble. The Hindu extreme-right Shiv Sena had lurked in the margins of the political sphere since the late 1960s (Lele 1995). After having offered its support to the Janata combine in 1977, it switched to the Congress in 1980, when Indira Gandhi returned to power. Attacks against dalits,11 tribal groups and Muslims sparked off by the Shiv Sena in the 1970s spread across the rest of the country between 1980 and 1984. That year, following the Indian army’s attack on the Golden Temple in Amritsar and the assassination of Indira Gandhi, more than 3,000 people, mostly sikhs, were killed during riots in Delhi. In the meantime, the Shiv Sena exploited middle- and lower-middle-class fear of unemployment in order to promote feelings and activities against south Indians. Even so, by the time it established its political alliance as a dominant partner within the Janata Party (BJP) signs of loss of its popularity in the Bombay region had become visible. Having to share its influence with a number of other competing forces but with continued support from a core constituency in offices, factories and middle-class neighbourhoods, and with its history of anti-Muslim, anti-dalit, anti-communist and anti-south-Indian rhetoric and practices, the

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Shiv Sena ‘saw itself as well poised to capitalize on the spreading popularity of Hindutva’ (Lele 1995: 1520). By 1991 the first ever BJP ministry took over, in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh. Increasingly building on the Hindu supremacist underpinning of the public sphere – the same sphere that, in 1947, had led to the partition of India and Pakistan – and by then openly mobilising extremely reactionary religious (Hindu) rituals and forms of social interaction, in 1996, three years after communal riots in Bombay led to the death of thousands of civilians, the BJP emerged as India’s largest single party. Religious iconography in Hindi cinema This was the terrain within which the horror films of the Ramsay brothers functioned. The nature of the forces constitutive of this terrain, and the prominence of religious discourses in this context, made it so that religious iconography came to be mobilised also as a vital element of the Ramsay brothers’ productions. Both forces and discourses, however, say very little about the ways in which the films moved within the limits imposed by that configuration. Hindu myths have been central to Indian cinema since its inception. They were certainly the main source for Dadasaheb Phalke’s feature films.12 A profile in Modern Review, for instance, claimed that: [Mr. Phalke] believes that in our Puranas there is an inexhaustible mine for the film-producer and it is his experience that films which depict stories from the Puranas are more popular with the cinema-goers than his other films of scenes of Indian life. The Puranic stories are familiar to all, the incidents need little explanation and the films that incorporate these stories grip the audience as no other films will do. (Modern Review, September 1917: 287, emphasis added)

By the 1920s, mythological films formed the bulk of Indian silent production, along with stunt and historical films.13 Unlike American cinema and, if in a different way, more like Italian historicals of the 1910s and 1920s, the films of Phalke and of his contemporaries – figures like Baburao Painter, Kanjibhai Rathod and Suchet Singh, all of whom drew on mythology for their subjects – suggest that Hindu mythology was then perceived not in tension with notions of Indian modernisation, but as a factor instrumental to its realisation. For one thing, mythological themes were deemed to be good business. It is evident from the article in Modern Review that they also played an important part in the nation-building project, as a means to address an audience imagined as the Indian nation. As Rajadhyaksha (1987) has argued, for Phalke Hindu mythology was not necessarily a pre-modern

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narrative form; on the contrary, the films mobilised it for a project – nation building – that encompassed a broad range of horizons, some of them far more progressive and socially modernising than the historiography that India had inherited from the Raj.14 From 1947, the Congress’s stated objective was to build a modern and secular nation – indeed, more modern and more secular than imperial Britain. As a result, rationalist expectations of cause and effect were soon brought to bear on stories that, originally belonging to the category of revealed narratives, were earlier seen to require ‘little explanation’. For instance, less than twenty years after the release of Phalke’s best-known film, Raja Harishchandra / King Harishchandra (1917), the critic Jatindra Nath Mitra reviewed the latest releases within the genre of the Semi-Pouranic by claiming that ‘in some of them, history has been sacrificed to weave out a tissue of miraculous events. In almost all of them, no attempt seems to have been made to pay any heed to human psychology’ (in Bandyopadhyay 1993: 31).15 Two decades later, the independent government commissioned a report on the state of the Indian film industry. Under a section entitled ‘Factors Affecting Industry’, the RFEC (Report of the Film Enquiry Committee) (1951) complained that: the treatment of historical or mythological subjects [d]isplays a lack of perspective and familiarity with history and susceptibilities. There is a freedom in dealing with these themes which ill-accords either with facts or with decorum. History becomes subservient to the theme and religious lore to phantasy or lampooning. Mythology [i]s often so mixed up with the grotesque as to be almost indistinguishable from the ludicrous. [W]e would therefore suggest that when drawing upon ancient sources, producers should look upon them not merely as collections of fairy tales but endeavour to interpret on the screen the wisdom that lies enshrined in them. (RFEC 1951: 176)

Since well before independence and partition Hinduism had been part of the ideological frame of reference of large sections of the coalition that was to take over from the British. However, in 1947 the construction of the Indian nation as modern and secular depended on the clear demarcation of two spheres: history and myth. The modernity of the Indian subject was a measure of her or his capacity to distinguish between the two and to position herself or himself on the side of history.16 Hence the RFEC’s demand that ‘ancient sources’ be interpreted in cinema for their capacity to impart that quintessential tenet of rationalism that was ‘wisdom’. By then, in the Hindi cinema that defined the industry’s generic centre-ground, notions of the supernatural were customarily dealt with in a rationalist and secular manner. Kamal Amrohi’s beautiful debut Mahal / The Mansion (1949) is a

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case in point. Sometimes misleadingly referred to as a ghost story, this Hindi classic is a psychodrama that tells the story of Shankar (Ashok Kumar) as he moves into an abandoned mansion to find that a portrait of the former owner bears a resemblance to his own. Shankar also sees the ghost of the former owner’s mistress, Kamini (Madhubala), who tells him that he either must die if they are to be united or that he must marry her reincarnation, Asha, the gardener’s daughter. In the end, however, it all turns out to be a trick staged by Asha, who admits to having masqueraded as the ghost. Along the same lines but released in the year of Nehru’s death, when Indira Gandhi, then Minister of Information and Broadcasting, began to present herself as her father’s successor, Woh kaun thi? / Who Was She? (Raj Khosla, 1964) centres on Anand (Manoj Kumar), a young doctor obsessed by a woman (Sadhana) who appears to him with different names and in different guises. The story evokes as much the supernatural as notions of madness, to opt, in the end, for a rationalist unravelling of the mystery: Anand’s friend, Dr Ramesh (Prem Chopra), had concocted a plot to drive Anand insane and get hold of his inheritance. By the time Woh kaun thi? was released the Hindi cinema’s dominance over the Indian market had begun to crumble. Following the devaluation of the rupee in 1966, the cost of film production increased greatly, leading to a drop in the number of films made. Two years later, however, the figures for all of India’s production showed a significant recovery, and by then Madras had begun to show its potency as a film production centre.17 Ten years later, Tamil and Telugu films, produced respectively in Madras and, eventually, in Hyderabad, finally caught up with Hindi productions. Coinciding with the emergence of south Indian separatist movements pitting themselves against central government, the rise of so-called regional cinemas in the 1970s also marked the collapse of the Congress’s legitimating ground as the ruling coalition by bringing back Hindu mythology onto the Indian cinemas’ generic centre-ground. The bulk of Tamil and Telugu cinema of this period and after resolutely rejected empiricist notions of history, preferring Hindu mythology as a mode of historical narration, just as silent Indian cinema had done during British rule. By contrast, mainstream Hindi cinema continued to hold on to the secularising ground that had characterised, in name at least, Indian nationalism, staging the explicit return of communalism rather as a set of practices pertaining to the administration of the public and the private spheres, as, for instance, in N. Chandra’s rape revenge films Pratighaat / The Revenge (1987) and Teezab / Acid (1988), and, differently, in Manmohan Desai’s nationalist action melodrama Mard  / Man (1985).

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The syncretism of the Ramsay brothers’ films From the perspective of the political tensions outlined above, the difficulty presented by the Ramsay brothers’ productions is that while staging also Hindu iconography these films do not appear to fall into either the mythological (and devotional) or the historical categories. At the time of writing, the very few articles that have appeared on the work of the Ramsay brothers have tended to discuss their horror films as a manifestation (if not an explicit reproduction) of the ideology of Hindutva. But unlike in mythological and devotionals, in the Ramsay brothers’ films religion does not provide the order of discourse. While by the late 1970s Indian films clearly veered towards one side or the other of the secular and religious fronts, the Ramsay brothers’ productions straddled the divide. Events, in the Ramsays’ films, are not revealed; they are strange. On the one hand, decades of secularisation appear to pre-empt a religious resolution; on the other, the political-ideological ground sustaining secularism having collapsed at the core, rational explanations are also presented as blocked. Rationalist notions of cause and effect are not quite barred from these films; rather they feature as a desirable yet no longer achievable option, like a utopia projected back into the past. At the same time, the films do avail themselves of religious (mainly Hindu and Christian) iconography, for they addressed a national market and a cultural terrain, the ideological and industrial fabric of which had been sustained also by this substance, if only in a tacit, non-institutional way. In this context, from a commercial speculative perspective, ‘religious lore’ sells. Unlike Phalke’s use of myths, therefore, the Ramsay brothers’ films mobilise religious discourses precisely because they are deemed to require explanation. Selling all the better for steadfastly refusing to provide closure in either (rationalist secular or religious) directions while registering the pressures of both vectors, the Ramsay’s horror films capitalised, to use Tzvetan Todorov’s terminology (1973), on hesitation. Industrially, as highly speculative ventures, and generically, in their use of religious iconography, the Ramsay brothers’ films never took up religion in a religious way. Religious iconography, rather, is exploited for commercial ends, which is why a great deal of effort must be and is put into the mise en scène to make it ‘look convincing’.18 Hence, also, the syncretism that characterises the films’ use of several religions at once. Syncretism was as much a dimension of classic Ramsay brothers’ horror films of the 1980s as it is of more recent work, such as Ghutan / Suffocation (Shyam Ramsay, 2007). Ghutan tells the story of Catherine (Heena Taslim), a young, attractive woman from Goa. She is sexually active, proud of her

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sexuality and married to Ravi (Aryan Vaheed), a lazy womaniser who cheats on her, refuses to have sex with her and drives her to drink. One day they have a fight, Ravi pushes Catherine to the floor and she lies there, seemingly dead. In order to get rid of her body Ravi proceeds to bury Catherine in an old cemetery. When he starts digging, however, she wakes up, but Ravi decides to bury her anyway, alive (Fig. 9). For the remaining part of the film Catherine, now dead but determined to take her killer back to her grave with her, haunts her husband and his entourage. A scene exemplary of the syncretism of the Ramsay brothers’ films sees Catherine emerging from her grave. Her body carrying the scars of the fight that led to her apparent death, she decides to ask for help from the village (Catholic) priest. It is only while talking to him that Catherine (and the spectator with her) realises that she is, in fact, dead. The terms used in their conversation to define her status include both the English word ‘soul’ and the Hindi word aatma (meaning ‘spirit’ or ‘self’ in Hinduism, Jainism and Buddhism). When, upon realising that she is now just that, Catherine tells the priest that she ‘want[s her] body back’, the priest explains that if her ‘aatma re-enters’ her dead body, she will become ‘an evil, a living dead’. But a living dead, a zombie, is by definition a soul-less being, a dead body without a will or a self. If the term aatma were to be used in the generically correct sense here, Catherine would not be a zombie, or a living dead, but a bhoot (the Hindi word for ghost), with one difference: that, having reclaimed or, as the priest puts it, ‘re-entered’ her body, Catherine becomes, somewhat paradoxically, a ghost or spirit with a body. This is to say that this scene, exemplary of the Ramsay brothers’ repertoire, comprises a concoction of discourses, some (film) industrial (Night of the Living Dead, George Romero, 1968), some religious and from different religions (Catholicism, or at any rate from Christianity, and Hinduism). In addition, Ghutan also features a police inspector with a Muslim name, Shankar Khan, who keeps invoking Allah and who, somewhat contradictorily, is the only figure in the film to speak the discourse of secular rationality,19 as well as a professor by the name of Siddharth Nath who stages Victorian-style spiritualist sessions in which he acts as a medium to communicate with the afterlife, all the while being surrounded by Jewish paraphernalia (such as a menorah) and speaking of shakti (the Sanskrit, Hindi and Hindu term for ‘sacred force’, often in a female form). This idiosyncratic blend indicates that, unlike in mythological and devotional Indian cinema, in the Hindi horror films of the Ramsay brothers goddesses, demons, crucifixes and curses are not the objective or end of narration, but rather the means to achieve sensational narrative effects, pretexts to stage moments of fear, suspense and surprise. Hence the prominence,

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9 Advertising brochure for Ghutan. (Courtesy of Shyam Ramsay).

in the Ramsays’ films, of vague, syncretic figurations of magic that often borrow from several traditions of both religious and secular iconographies simultaneously, but also the distance at which religious notions are actually kept. Shaitani ilaaka, a more classic example of the Ramsay brothers’ horror production than the later Ghutan, is a case in point. The film tells the story of Anju (Sri Pradha), a young woman possessed by a shape-shifting female who needs human (preferably young and female) sacrifices in order to r­esurrect

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her master, the demon Shaitan (literally Satan). Unlike other victims Anju is spared, only for the female fiend to use her body as her reincarnation. Symptoms of possession begin to manifest themselves when Anju falls in love with Deepak (Deepak Parashar), a modern young man, leading to sporadic moments of strange behaviour and fits, mainly in the privacy of her room. Her family calls a doctor to see what can be done, but he becomes in turn a victim of the shape-shifting, evil worshipping female’s magic power: she takes control of the doctor’s hands and has him strangle himself. Not, however, before he admits defeat and recommends that a mystic guru be called in from Nepal. He, alone, can heal the young woman. This realisation, carried through to the end of the film, is staged as a major source of distress, not only on the part of Deepak and of Anju’s family, whose modern outlook it clearly upsets, but also of the audience, who are invited to witness the primitive and violent procedures leading to the young woman’s exorcism with horror and disbelief by way of frontal, static frames presenting the action from a cautious distance. It is worth comparing this scene with, for instance, The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973), in which an altogether different aesthetic menu, including subjective points of view, is used to evince precisely the opposite, namely reconciliation with, and faith and belief in, Christian, indeed, inquisitionist rituals. For the true tension that shapes the Ramsay brothers’ horror films, their aesthetics, is not between religion and secularisation, as in The Exorcist, but rather between, on the one hand, the use of ‘religious lore’ as ‘phantasy or lampooning’ and, on the other hand, respect for any religion, as enshrined in the Indian constitution. In other words, the friction here is between financial growth at any cost and the requirements of social reproduction, which in India, as elsewhere, fall within the responsibilities of the state. Throughout their filmmaking, the Ramsays have given priority to the first consideration: financial growth. It is this radically speculative dimension of the Ramsay brothers’ films that has made them vulnerable also to simplistic accusation of religious fundamentalism. For these films do rely on the iconography of religious ideologies, as religious representatives also do. Unlike the latter, however, the Ramsay brothers do so for commercial, shortterm reasons, more often than not producing highly unorthodox, fantastic figurations that contrast deeply with the religious ideologies from which they borrow the iconography. Being concerned with the legitimation of a system conducive to their own reproduction, religious forces would be the first to have these films banned, if only for what they would be very likely to regard as misuse of religious imagery. It is not a coincidence that one of the grounds on which the censors have objected to the Ramsay brothers’ films has been for their representation of black magic.20

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The breakdown of the 1950s nationalist aesthetics of modernisation The frontal frame used in Shaitaini ilaaka to feature Hindu ritual while keeping it at some distance offers a point of entry into the Ramsay brothers’ aesthetics as a registration of the broader cultural fabric that made these films necessary. Historically, the relation between the Indian film industry and the Indian state has been characterised by a specific set of tensions. Madhava Prasad has rightly observed that although in the run-up to independence a section of the film industry expected the government of India to recognise the potential of cinema, both as a medium and as an industry, Nehru’s Congress did not do for the film industry what it was committed to doing for other sectors. Nehru himself had remarked that the cinema was not a priority for the new nation, causing considerable anxiety in industry circles (Prasad 1998b: 32–3). Significantly, he introduced a ban on the construction of new cinemas, which lasted until the late 1960s. In the 1940s and 1950s director Mehboob Khan came forward as a representative of the film industry’s demands for state support, but, as it clearly transpires from the evidence of the Indian Cinematograph Committee of 1927–8, Mehboob’s demands were far from new. Government support – both financial and nominal in nature – had been seen, and sought as crucial to the development and growth of the Indian cinema since the late 1920s. Over the years, prominent industry figures tried to convince the British and the Indian governments that such aid would grant filmmakers access to corporate finance and bank loans, freeing producers from exorbitant rates of interest from loan sharks and, in the longer term, perhaps promoting if not greater integration within the industry, at least more balanced relations between exhibitors, producers and distributors. But nothing was done until 1969, when the Film Finance Corporation (FFC) was set up. The idea of the FFC was originally suggested in the 1951 Report of the Film Enquiry Committee, two years after the government appointed S. K. Patil to examine all aspects of the film industry. The report, however, was ignored until 1960, when the FFC was set up under the Ministry of Finance to give lowinterest loans to selected projects, mainly within the independent sector, and to assist the industry ‘by providing, affording or procuring finance or other facilities for the production of films of good standard’ (Rajadhyaksha and Willemen 1999: 162). Transferred four years later to the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, the FFC subsequently confined itself to supplementing the budgets of mainstream or internationally known filmmakers until 1969, when Indira Gandhi and her Information and Broadcasting ministers Nandini Satpathy and I. K. Gujral announced new guidelines.

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The FFC’s funding would from then on be devoted to the production of cinema that was realist, narrative-centred, developmental and, culturally, distinctively Indian.21 In 1976, under the influence of Indira Gandhi, the FFC came under the obligation ‘to develop the film in India into an effective instrument for the promotion of national culture, education and healthy entertainment’ (Committee on Public Undertaking Report, 1976, quoted in Rajadhyaksha and Willemen 1999: 162, 166). The contentious nature of the relationship between the Indian state and the cinema as an industry has made it so that, while demanding state support in line with other industrial sectors, throughout the 1950s and after the industry has tended to reject, bend and, to some extent, evade the forms of regulation and disciplining that the state sought to impose upon it. Complaints against duty on imports of equipment and spare parts as well as on raw stock had been advanced repeatedly by producers since 1948, as they had been before to the colonial administration. Although these were never successfully bypassed, calls to the government for reductions of the entertainment tax were made, by exhibitors and by the other sectors of the industry, from when the tax was first introduced in 1922. Over the years, as government steadfastly refused to lift the tax, ways were found of (partly) evading it. In 1969, when the state attempted to introduce a margin of support in the form of the FFC, powerful sections of the industry thus did all they could to contain what they interpreted as a threat of state intervention, on film content perhaps, but above all on the industry’s financial and commercial operation. As I have argued elsewhere (Vitali 2008), the threat was real enough, but, again, promptly and typically counteracted. The FFC failed to break through the powerful exhibition networks and their locally entrenched financial circuits that de facto controlled the industry, because since the 1950s the cinema, along with other sectors of the economy, had developed ways of operating that, functioning in parallel to more tightly controlled networks, were effectively oblivious of official policy, even though not unaffected by it. The late 1960s and 1970s were thus marked by the definitive collapse of the aesthetics that had dominated what has come to be known as the golden age of Hindi cinema. I have argued elsewhere (Vitali 2001) that Guru Dutt’s Pyaasa / Thirst (1957) was as much a classic Hindi melodrama as, within its category, a limit text – by which I meant that the narrative strategies of this film can be seen to break down under the strain of sustaining the contradictions that the first wave of disillusionment about the nationalist project of social modernisation had, by 1957, brought to the surface. After Pyaasa, Hindi cinema split into the broadly defined

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c­ ategories of popular, parallel and avant-garde cinema. As Madhava Prasad has convincingly shown (1998b), this moment of disaggregation called for new aesthetics, industrial practices and cultural policies – a call that was met, on the one hand, by the FFC, its initial support to independent cinema and the New Indian Cinema films of Kumar Shahani, Mani Kaul, Mrinal Sen and others, and, on the other hand, by the film industry’s opposition to the FFC’s mandate, its parallel appropriation of New Indian Cinema’s aesthetics and their nominal incorporation into the industrial practices that had historically dictated the production of popular genres. The films starring Amitabh Bachchan were the most symptomatic manifestation of these years and the economic pressures that characterised them. The dynamics set off by this series of events eventually led to the emergence of a radically commercial cinema, propelled by the opening of the Indian economy to private, foreign and, above all, parallel or black investment (Vitali 2005, 2008). This was a cinema that sustained the creation of an audience capable to meet the demands of corporate interests, and therefore appreciative of their advertising aesthetics, by pumping larger (white and black) investments into genres that until the late 1960s had been relegated to the margins of the industry. Some genre cinema, such as action, was thus transformed into films consumable also by the larger family melodrama market. Accordingly, as action films came to occupy the Hindi film industry’s centre-ground, the liberties with accepted notions of morality that action films had taken when still at the margins of the industry were curtailed. The Hindi mainstream action hero of the 1970s operated outside the law, but his moral allegiances remained those of the 1950s family melodrama. Compared with the female characters of earlier and cheaper action films, such as those played by Helen, the female figures populating the world of the Bachchan anti-hero were very demure affairs. The aesthetics of the Ramsay brothers’ horror films Hindi horror cinema emerged in the early 1970s, at the same time as Bachchan’s anti-hero, and consolidated at the end of that decade at the hands of the Ramsay brothers. Unlike Bachchan’s action films, the Ramsays’ films were not deemed to be suitable for the large family market. Horror films remained small-budget productions. This is not to say that the Ramsays’ films failed to register and monetise the tensions of these years. It is, rather, to say that film historians have so far failed to grasp how these films did so; that they have not properly considered the historicity of the Ramsay brothers’ aesthetics.

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Imploding frontality There is, for starters, the Ramsays’ use of frontality, a recurring mode in their mises en scène. Ashish Rajadhyaksha (1987) has extended his argument about the uses of mythology in early Indian cinema to Phalke films’ modes of address, and, more particularly, to the filmmaker’s use of frontality – as, for instance, in Raja Harishchandra / King Harishchandra (Dadasahed Phalke, 1917). Frontality refers here to a kind of direct address to the viewer by way of a frame arranged in a 180-degree space, as opposed to a 360-degree space. In cinema, it conveys a static point of view and, to that extent, can operate as an obstacle to the subjective and mobile narration effected by strategies based on perspectival vision. In contrast to the latter, a frontal address fixes the viewer within a more strictly ordered spatial hierarchy, treating the film frame as a flat surface and allocating spaces to the characters and other diegetic elements on the basis of their status or position within a preestablished order. Whereas in a perspectival system the rendition of reality depends on the observer’s (the camera’s) position and point of view as he or she (it) moves within a 360-degree space, the frontal frame presents the viewer with a reality within which relations are given. The order of reality is determined not by the position of a character in its dynamic interrelation with other elements in the diegesis, nor by the narrator’s orchestration of those relations or points of view, but by an all-encompassing, monocular subject that functions as analogous to God’s eye view. Rajadhyaksha showed that Phalke recovered the frontal address from, among other sources, the Parsee and Marathi theatres – practices that Phalke mobilised as part of a nationalist aesthetics oriented towards the revaluation of what he believed to be Indian tradition. Rajadhyaksha’s point was subsequently picked up by historian Ravi Vasudevan, who demonstrated that the Hindi melodrama of the 1950s relied, on the one hand, on the perspectival narrative strategies that are also at work in European and US cinemas – such as the reverse angle and spatial continuity from one shot to the next – and, on the other hand, on frontal (or iconic, after Geeta Kapur, 1993) modes of address that appear to interfere with perspectival narration. For instance, in Andaz / A Matter of Style (Mehboob Khan, 1949) an image of Hindi star Nargis interrupts, and is lifted out from, the spatial relations established until that point in the scene, as if to be presented to the viewer for special contemplation (Vasudevan 1993). While Kapur and Rajadhyaksha demonstrated that frontality has been an important feature of cinema in India since its inception, Vasudevan’s work showed that frontality acquired a particularly prominent function in

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Hindi cinema also after independence where, Vasudevan contended, it was a symptom of Hindi melodramas and, more generally, Indian society’s continued reliance on pre-modern points of authority and social conventions. Elsewhere I have argued (Vitali 2001, 2006a) that this was not necessarily the case. Hindi mythological. devotional and horror films do show frequent use of frontal modes of address, and so do a host of other genres and films, in Hindi and other, non-Indian cinema, including many progressive works, because as a cinematic form, frontality remains open to be mobilised by a variety of forces, some resisting modernisation and others advancing it. A case in point is Shaheed / Martyr (Ramesh Saigal, 1948), a Hindi nationalist melodrama made by Filmistan,22 and screened especially for the Congress Party’s All India Committee in April 1948 before its commercial release in Bombay in August of that year, in time for the first anniversary of Indian independence (Desai 2004: 33). My argument, developed by way of an analysis of Shaheed and other, contemporary Hindi films’ mise en scène, was that precisely for its engagement with discourses of Indian nationalism – that is, because of India’s encounter with a contradictory and, on the whole, deeply regressive force, British colonialism, which addressed Indian people by way of narrative strategies such as visual perspective and psychological realism – Shaheed and, like it, post-1947 Hindi cinema, resorted to a frontal mode of address as a degree zero. Deviations from the frontal address are, to use Roman Jakobson’s distinction, the marked terms. In other words, in Hindi cinema the frontal frame – characterised by the absence of a specific point of entry into what is given by the camera to be seen as the real – ­provides an abstract space marked as no more than the nationalist positing of ‘the real India’. Frontality is a prominent feature of the Ramsay brothers’ films, and not simply because these are part of Hindi cinema, nor because of these films’ exploitation of religious iconography. Rather, unlike other Hindi films, all of the Ramsay productions take off from this narrative ground, only to stage the implosion of that very frontality that Hindi cinema had foregrounded as the space-address of the nation. Frontality implodes, for instance, in Hotel (Tulsi and Shyam Ramsay, 1981). Hotel centres on an unscrupulous group of businessmen who decide to build a hotel on the site of an old Christian graveyard (Fig. 10). They trick the priest in charge of the site into selling them the land, claiming it will be used as a playground for children. When he discovers the entrepreneurs’ real intentions, the priest dies of a heart attack. Contractors move in, stack the gravestones in an old shed and dump the bodies in a communal pit, marked only by a pile of rocks. During a party organised by the businessmen to celebrate the hotel’s opening, smoke

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begins to filter through the stones. Soon, silent, shrouded corpses can be seen stalking through the hotel. The businessmen attempt to flee, only to each meet a gruesome death. A sequence indicative of the extent to which the use of frontality in this film registered, however obscurely, the sense of a collapse of the national core shows the entrepreneurs in the hotel lobby. The narrative function of this scene is to induce into the spectator a sense of imminent danger, a tangible and undeniable proof that things are not as they should, or are expected to be. The uncanny breaks through into daily life and an explanation is in order. Instead, hesitation as to the nature of the strange happenings takes over the film-text at several levels. A conversation begins between all present, each character expressing varying degrees of concern over the possibility of repercussions following their trickery. The entire conversation is confined within a space of 180 degrees. This frontal point of view initially produces a kind of tableau: three of the entrepreneurs are clearly visible in the background, slightly off centre to the right. To the left, in the foreground and in near profile, is the government official who cleared the red tape for the purchase of the land, while in the background, also to the left, stands the fourth businessman. In the background we can also see doors with glass panes and several paintings on the walls. It is evening or night-time. The room is dark, the only light, coming from the doors, producing a bluish effect all around. The centre of the frame is taken up by a brown tea table and chairs on a yellow rug. Soon an argument ensues between two of the entrepreneurs. As the conversation becomes somewhat heated, the camera moves into the space of action, breaking up the tableau with fast zooming movements and extreme frontal close-ups on the face of the characters. But the quarrel is soon interrupted by peculiar events: the furniture in the room begins to shake violently, the howling sound of the wind makes itself heard and, through the thick smoke filling the hotel’s Islamicate veranda, the shadows of corpses can be seen advancing towards the party. Up to this point, shot and counter-shot between the astounded faces of the characters and what they see is effected through extreme frontal close-ups and frontal views of either shaking furniture or advancing corpses. However, as the speculators, terrified at the sight of the advancing corpses, run towards the doors of the hotel lobby, this frontal mode of address gives way to a fluidly mobile camera that follows the characters at an appreciable distance as they rush to the doors, looking for a way out. Space here expands and closes, acquiring a flexibility that is dependent on the actors’ movement across the room and that was entirely absent in the first half of the sequence. Yet, precisely at the moment when the film appears to have finally achieved a degree of seamless spatial fluidity, the furniture in the room starts to shift

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by itself, blocking every door and window as soon as the characters run towards them. Once all the doors and windows are blocked, drawers and furniture doors begin to open and shut violently as if possessed by an outer force. The protagonists, now moving around a flexing space, shout in a frenzy of panic. Frontality in this sequence opens up, but that opening is narrativised as a source of horror, as is its re-establishment. This sequence not only marks the beginning of the series of deaths but its modes of address also echo the way in which the businessmen’s deaths are staged. One entrepreneur dies as he walks into the hotel’s cellar and the door shuts behind him. At this point the camera, placed at 90 degrees at the top of the stairs leading to the cellar, shows his companions, frontally and below eye level, their back to

10 Hotel: VCD cover showing the unscrupulous speculators and, in the background, the advancing shrouded corpses. (Courtesy of Shyam Ramsay).

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the camera, banging at the door and shouting. When the door opens, the man is leaning against it, dead, his body falling against his companions, towards us and the camera. Another death takes place as one of the men trips down the grand flight of stairs that connects the hotel’s lobby to the first floor. As he walks down the stairs the camera is positioned on the line of action, that is to say, straight in front of him, at the bottom of the stairs and behind a long pike (one of the pseudo-Islamicate relics decorating the lobby). We see, frontally, the man as he falls towards us and dies impaled on the pike, placed at a zero degree to the camera. In yet another deadly instance, frontality takes a more symbolic form. Frightened by the events, the government official runs out of the hotel and seeks refuge through what used to be an underground passage, only to find that it is now blocked by the new hotel’s foundations. No sooner does he realise this than the wall of rocks forming the foundations begins to collapse, slowly, one rock after the other. As he turns around to avoid being crushed, and retraces his steps, two rocks appear at the other end of the passage, as if put in motion by an unknown force. The government official is stuck into a contracting space frontally marked by the flat wall of the hotel’s foundations and the rocks under which were discarded the corpses that were originally buried in the old cemetery. Like much other horror cinema elsewhere, Hotel was a cheaply produced film. In most cinemas, and especially in marginal productions of exploitation genres such as the horror film, unaccredited labour (extras, non-qualified help and so on) is very inexpensive. Financial considerations must have played a part when Shyam and Tulsi Ramsay opted to have staff off screen pushing the furniture along or behind the set’s walls, pulling the drawers and doors open and shut or other, similarly conspicuously cheap, special effects. But financial considerations alone are not enough to explain why, among the many inexpensive solutions available to the filmmakers, the Ramsay brothers opted for these particular ones. Hotel and their other films registered and monetised the collapse of the ideological and political ground upon which the Congress, as the core of modern, secular India, and its legitimacy rested. At a diegetic level, this dimension of 1980s India manifested itself as a necessity to trigger an impasse between rationalist ideas of cause and effect and religious notions of deus ex machina. The films capitalised on the resulting sense of hesitation by resisting closure either way. At another level, that is, at the level of mise en scène, this drive to capitalise on what was perceived as contemporary preoccupations produced also a collapse of the inherited narrative strategies and their limits, breaking open the frontal frame, the favoured mode of national address. The Ramsay brothers’

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films are of course not the first instance in Hindi cinema in which frontality appears as too limiting a narrative strategy. Indian film historians have shown that frontality has long been one of the many strategies available to and used in Indian films. The films of Guru Dutt, Ritwik Ghatak and many others, before and after the New Indian Cinema movement, took off precisely from the limitations imposed by the narrative menu Indian cinemas were given to inherit, of which frontality was but one modality. My point here is another: given that frontality is at work in Indian films and that, over the years, under diverse circumstances, the functioning of this (along with other modes of address of Indian cinema) changed, what were the pressures that made frontality implode in the Ramsays’ films? It is my contention that whereas in Guru Dutt, Ritvik Ghatak and New Indian Cinema’s films frontality broke down in the critical search for a new aesthetics, in the horror films of the Ramsay brothers the implosion of frontality is no more and no less than an indexical registration of the collapse of the apparatus that had, until then, sustained the ideological legitimacy of the Indian state. Such collapse is registered in the fabric of the text because the films monetised what were at the time obscurely but widely perceived preoccupations. The Ramsays’ horror films thus exploited a generalised sense of ideological crisis, and they did so irrespective of the long-term interests of the political and industrial apparati that sustained them as artefacts and as commodities. Over the years, the troubled relation between the Indian state and the film industry has been signposted by a series of government reports on cinema which, as Lawrence Liang (2008) has documented, show a pronounced tendency to refer to film and its effects as evil. With the BJP’s rise to power, this tendency took an altogether less benign form. Between the early and the mid-1990s, controversies were sparked by, among other films, Khalnayak (Subhash Ghai, 1993), Raja babu (David Dhawan, 1994), Bandit queen (Shekhar Kapur, 1994), Alluda majaaka (E. V. V. Satyanarayana, 1995) and Bombay (Mani Rathnam, 1995). If the scandal caused by Raja babu led to the announcement of amendments in the Censor Code, Bandit queen was virtually banned. As for Bombay, it was released only after Shiv Sena’s chief Bal Thackeray cleared the film (Rajadhyaksha and Willemen 1999: 29). Three years later, having been shown capable to effect this new turn of the screw, the government was able ideologically to sustain a U-turn in its policies on cinema: the BJP declared the film industry a legitimate industry. From now on it would qualify also for institutional finance. In the light of these later developments it is important to consider two more dimensions of the Ramsays’ horror aesthetics: their use of sexuality and the staging of individuation.

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The interaction between horror and the representation of sexuality The horror cinema of the Ramsay brothers registered the regressive discourses that were increasingly shaping the Indian political sphere in the 1980s. They drew from its polarisation along communal lines in their use of religious iconography. As is evident from Shaitani ilaaka, they also registered the resistance to modernisation that characterised the coalition of forces then emerging as the dominant political faction in their evocation of notions of magic and the religious, even if earlier films such as Andaz, Mahal and Woh kaun thi had resorted to the far more secular categories of rational cause and effect. From this the Ramsay brothers derived their choice of generic ingredients: horror or, rather, a type of horror premised on notions not of gore or of European gothic, but on Hindu and Christian religious imagery, elements of which break through in the Ramsay brothers’ films at particular moments and for specific effect. As Shyam Ramsay put it, in India a film such as Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975), where the monster is rarely seen, would not do well, because in Hindi horror cinema the monster must be shown and seen.23 At one level, this is because the sight of the monster, or at least of some horror, as opposed to the sensation or the feeling of horror, is perceived to offer punters better value for money. And significant efforts are made by the Ramsay brothers to display sensational make-up, locations and special effects. At another level, monsters and other horrific effects are mobilised in their films at particular moments, most notably in scenes disclosing degrees of nudity and sexual behaviour or at any rate breaking accepted notions of modesty and other social conventions. One of many such moments can be found in Veerana / Vengeance of the Vampire (Shyam and Tulsi Ramsay, 1988). In this film a beautiful, blood-sucking chudail (witch) called Nakita stalks the outskirts of a village. Every night she intercepts men and lures them to an abandoned mansion, where sex provides the occasion for the kill. Sameer, the son of the local thakur (village chief or headman), decides to put an end to the witch’s actions and, one night, accompanies her to her mansion. The two strip, slip into a bubble bath and engage in some risqué banter. Not long into the scene, however, as the couple start kissing, the beautiful Nakita transforms into the ugly, animallike witch. The timing, in this as in similar instances from other Ramsays’ films, suggests that another way of reading Shyam Ramsay’s statement would be to say that it is not so much a matter of the monster appearing to the spectator, as of the spectator finding herself or himself in the field of vision of the monster at a particularly salient moment – as if (perhaps like in some other horror cinema) in the Ramsay brothers’ films the monster

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functions as the flipside of the pleasure of breaking a rule, as the punishment, thrill or pay-off for infringing socially sanctioned codes of modesty. In other words, sexual imagery is, of course, a customary element of such salient moments, in the Ramsays’ as in other films. The difference is that in the Ramsays’ films it is not sexuality that is the object of punishment; what triggers the appearance of the monster, and what the latter’s appearance targets is, rather, the act of looking at sexual images, rather than sexuality itself. The censors subjected Veerana to two extensive revisions and nearly fifty cuts (Nair 2012: 134). As Nair observes, these ranged ‘from the banal … to the bizarre’. Judging from the descriptions provided by Nair, I would argue that quite a few of the censors’ cuts and orders were also ­unsurprising – for instance the injunction to ‘reduce drastically’ the ‘brutal shots of people throwing and beating’ the chudail (who, having been overpowered by Sameer, eventually ends up lynched by the village mob), or to ‘delete the visuals of the strong man being kicked in the crotch, wherever it occurs’ (Nair 2012: 134). Admittedly, ‘one can never know for sure what it was about Veerana that set the disciplinary scissors snipping’ (Nair 2012: 134), just as one can never know exactly what might have led to most instances of image censorship anywhere. Even so, what is remarkable about the list of cuts and injunctions partly listed by Nair is the censors’ focus on the act of looking itself, a fixation that would explain their request to delete from Veerana the ‘shot of Nakita removing her clothes and camera pans on Sameer looking’ or ‘visuals of Raghu [peeping] through a hole when Jasmine is in the bathroom’ (Nair 2012: 134–5). In this film, as in other Ramsay brothers’ horror productions, the monster appears in salacious moments, and its appearance activates what Paul Willemen (1994) has called the cinema’s fourth look.24 It is a look that constitutes the spectator as subject and, what is more here, as a subject whose subjectivity is grounded in her or his scopophilia. The censors’ language and cuts lay open the operation of Veerana’s monstrous fourth look. They act out its penalising or shaming dimension, perhaps hoping, in this way, to contain its individuating thrust. Horror and the individuated look The Ramsays’ films did not reflect the ideologies of the regressive movements dominant at the time. Although they moved within the limits set by Hindu fundamentalism and what it opposed, these horror films can be seen to try to carve out from within those narrow margins a space for subjectivation and desire, a space to say ‘I’ in cinema, at a moment when the rights of an individual irrespective of caste, class, gender and religious

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persuasion came under attack on a daily basis, and as that cinema was increasingly subjected to restrictions aimed at banning from the public sphere political positions and representations of behaviour not conducive to social reproduction along communal and caste lines. This is the case in the Ramsay brothers’ exploitation of nudity and mild sexuality, that is to say, in their use of sales points that were proven to sell because they trespass on socially unaccepted ground; but also, and more generally, in the films’ mode of address, for the films’ aesthetics are premised on the staging of a subjective look and on the difficulties that such a staging entails when such gaze carries notions of desire. Consider Haveli / Mansion (Keshu Ramsay, 1985), which is essentially a serial-killer horror film. Haveli opens with a frontal view of a large room. The image, shown as a coloured negative print, is blurred, partly blocked by black sparks and presented as a distant memory, perhaps the product of imagination. A small group of people is visible, but the nature of their actions is revealed only through the soundtrack: the words of a woman who is being gang raped. We then cut to the present: through a mobile camera we see a mansion at night. The camera is in the mansion’s gardens and conveys the point of view of someone approaching the building. On the soundtrack we hear someone breathing. From here on, the film centres on a group of men who die seemingly mysterious deaths. The killer, a masked figure, is never actually seen, not even when the killings are carried out. It is only at the very end that the masked figure is revealed to be the policeman, the brother of the woman of the opening, blurred shot. The subjective camera approaching the mansion at night carries his point of view as he sets out on his first act of revenge. This subjective point of enunciation is not sustained throughout the film, not least because of the need to show the policeman in action as a representative of the law from a neutral and often frontal point of view and, in so doing, not to reveal that he is, in fact, the masked serial killer. Extreme subjective narration, however, recurs whenever a killing is about to happen. One such moment takes place in a hotel suite where one of the men receives a threatening phone call. It is the middle of the night but he immediately starts packing his suitcase. The camera follows him as he moves from the living room to the bedroom of his suite through an open door. As he takes his suitcase out of a cupboard, puts it on the bed and leans over it to throw his things in it, we cut to the opposite side of the bed. The camera is now showing his face, half hidden by the suitcase’s open lid. The room’s white walls are barely visible in the background. Suddenly he hears a noise, lifts his head and turns around. With an odd cut the camera repositions itself slightly and switches to a frontal mode. At

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the same time, through a lighting effect, lozenge-shaped shadows appear in the background, projecting the image of a grid against the opposite wall, flattening the image and producing a threatening sense of enclosure. Frightened, the man runs towards a door, and then another, but opens neither. It is not clear whether this is because they are blocked or because he is too scared to see what may be on the other side. But he soon pulls himself together and slowly manages to open one door just enough to peep through it. At which point a cut takes us to the other side of the door: the frame is entirely black except for the middle section, where we see a slice of the man’s face, looking out at, but not seeing, us. We cut back inside the room, where the man resumes his packing. A few seconds later the door opens wide. Frightened again, the man manages to regain composure the moment he realises that no one is there. But his sigh of relief is barely over when in comes something: a sudden, despatialising cut shows in extreme close-up a monstrous mask, its mouth strangely open into a deformed, terrifying laugh. Although we never see the full figure behind the mask, this is the first of the rare glimpses we get of the unknown killer we have been forced to identify with from the very opening of the film, for his must have been the imagined or real memory of the woman’s rape, as was the look at the mansion at night through the mobile camera. Glimpses of the killer are rarer and more fragmented than in other Ramsay brothers’ movies because whenever the protagonist of Haveli is in action the camera reproduces his look through extreme subjective, zero-degree points of view. But, as the mask clearly signals, he too is a monster. Whereas most other Ramsay brothers’ horror films show us the monster, putting the spectator in the monster’s field of vision, in Haveli the spectator both sees and is the monster, at least to the extent that he or she has no choice but to identify with it, looking at events from the monster’s side of things. This strategy, which is quite unusual in horror cinema for the simple fact that it can easily undermine suspense, is pushed to a new level in Ghutan, a film that rests entirely on the spectator’s sympathetic identification with a proudly sexually active, and thus monstrous, woman. Ghutan is an important film in this respect because, made and released in 2007, it was better positioned to foreground notions of sexuality in a manner that earlier Ramsay films could not afford to do. It is not that earlier Ramsay films were less forward or direct in their presentation of nudity and sexual acts. On the contrary, between the 1980s and the 2000s very little appears to have changed in that respect: whatever sexuality the films can afford, it was presented as explicitly in the 1980s as it was two decades later. Shower or bath scenes are as mandatory and as necessary a pretext to stage degrees

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of nudity now as they were in the 1980s. The difference is that while in Ghutan Catherine’s demands for sex are granted legitimacy, if only because she is Ravi’s wife, in earlier Ramsay brothers’ productions sex tended to be penalised somehow, often, as I have argued above, with a vision of horror. Significantly, in Ghutan the recollection of the events that lead to Catherine’s death is presented primarily from her point of view, also through a flashback that, appropriately, opens with a large photograph of Catherine looking straight at the camera. We imagine Catherine’s look addressing us: we are in her field of vision, and she remains, throughout the film, our main conduit into her story. One way to describe the interrelation of frontality and subjective narration in Haveli and in Hotel would be to say that in Haveli the viewer is made to take up the position of the staff who, in Hotel, were hiding behind the furniture and pushing the drawers open and shut. From the point of view of a 180-degree space, in Haveli we often occupy the off-screen space, from where we look onto what is given by the camera, frontally, to be p ­ erhaps reality but a reality that is blurred, loaded with sexuality and still to be understood, even vindicated – as in Haveli’s opening shot. We thus break into this frontal space, forcefully, in the process assuming the position of the killer. In these moments, as the camera carries the monster’s gaze, so does the spectator. In this way, our desire to look, which, in cinema, is equivalent to the desire to know, is given full play, even as it is marked as a sadistic, evil desire. And whereas Haveli offers mitigating circumstances, to the extent at least that the killer is, after all, a policeman vindicating his sister, her abuse and death, the scene from Shaitani ilaaka I briefly described at the beginning of this chapter leaves little room for mitigation. Sex, scopophilia and epistemophilia are all wrapped into one evil, female figure. In Hotel disruptions of the frontal frame are registered as the traumatic collapse of a sense of closure, even if the alternative, extreme closure, is also presented as traumatic. By contrast, in Haveli and Shaitani ilaaka frontality is collapsed by the irruption of a subjective look. That look is marked as evil or monstrous, but, as Ghutan also shows, this does not prevent the viewer from identifying with it. On the contrary, that is precisely what the films emphatically invite us to do, all the better to sell in as large and as ramified as possible a market. For beyond the generic tropes and sales points associated with the horror genre, the Ramsay brothers’ films banked on the desire for cinema itself, even if, or maybe precisely because, such desire had been inscribed in government reports as evil – cinema as sheer pleasure, rather than as healthy entertainment or as a means to advertise other consumer goods.

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The Ramsay brothers’ horror cinema’s exclusion from national cinema The broad, indiscriminate and radically commercial address of the Ramsay brothers’ films is one of the characteristics that renders these films symptomatic instances of India’s national cinema. As cheaply produced films, the Ramsays’, like Mario Bava’s, were made and released with the explicit purpose of as much added value to the initial investment as could be hoped, given the size of the investment and the prevailing market conditions. Because this was a market controlled by a fragmented but very powerful exhibition sector that demanded large shares of the box office, the Ramsay brothers never occupied the film industry’s centre-ground. They targeted instead a more marginal but vast market by exhibiting their films in peripheral cinemas across the country, in video parlours and eventually via satellite television. Writing in the late 1980s, Partha Chatterjee noted that consumerism in India is ‘a phenomenon restricted only to something like the top 10 or 15 per cent of the total population. The rest are outside the pale of the “all-India” market, and can never be incorporated into it unless the full historical process of a bourgeois-democratic revolution can be completed’ (Chatterjee 1997: 153). Back then, the more consolidated section of Indian capital might not have even wanted to include in its effective market this vast mass of people with little income to spend on industrial commodities, for even with only 15 per cent of the population, this restricted ‘all-India’ market was already larger in demographic size than the home markets of most European capitalist countries (Chatterjee 1997: 153). By contrast, as a marginal and thus radically speculative enterprise, the Ramsay brothers with their horror films sought to do precisely that. Lacking legitimation, be it from the Indian state or from the film industry’s centre-ground, the Ramsay brothers’ films targeted also this end of the market, and they did so by voraciously absorbing contexts of living that, elsewhere, were being bracketed from representation. Such out-of-bounds contexts were the Ramsay brothers’ unique selling points, dimensions of everyday life that, not represented by larger productions, made the Ramsay brothers’ horror films popular in the Gramscian (national-popular) (1985b) and Brechtian (popular-realist) (1964) sense of the term.25 The corollary of this is that, in their indiscriminating, inclusive grasp, the horror films of the Ramsay brothers registered diagnostically, as it were, a moment of Indian history, making visible a layered fabric characterised also by social horizons of experience that – like individuated subjectivity, the activation of desire irrespective of socially accepted behaviour, or the right to stage those all too real fantasies in cinema as a practice free from instrumentalisation – were left

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behind as rubble by the forward movement of the regressive forces which, by the late 1980s, prevailed. In an article in The Hindu of 15 July 2011, Ziya Us Salam observed, with reason, that ‘a handful may pretend not to have heard the name. But most know that the Ramsays specialise in certain kinds of spooky films’ (Us Salam 2011). Even so, the ongoing popularity of the Ramsay brothers’ horror films among South Asians is not reflected in current film historiography. No history of Indian cinema mentions these films. The reasons for this have to do with the ways in which film historians have tended to conceptualise the relation between the state, the film industry and the nation, in India as much as elsewhere. Early conceptualisations of the nation that were aimed at writing the history of cinema sprang, significantly, from the two countries that, in the first half of the twentieth century, competed most fiercely to globalise their industrial empires: the United States, with Lewis Jacobs’ The Rise of the American Film (1939), and the Third Reich, with Oskar Kalbus’ Vom Werden Deutscher Filmkunst (1935). Immediately after World War Two, these were followed by a series of national film histories that took stock of the proliferation of film industries over half a century in a variety of Western countries, as well as by that milestone of film historiography that is Siegfried Kracauer’s From Caligari to Hitler (1947). Kracauer’s account successfully fused the industrial and the national (as opposed to the nationalist) dimensions of cinema, but it was Lewis Jacobs’ more nationalist survey that was embraced as a template for the writing of national film histories in much of the world. Divided into six parts – entitled ‘Fade In’, ‘Foundations’, ‘Development’, ‘Transition’, ‘Intensification’ and ‘Maturity’ – Jacobs’ book relied on a linear notion of history that understood the nation as the natural, not to say organic, result of an evolutionary trajectory. This Jacobs adopted as the framework appropriate to chronicle both the cultural and the industrial dimensions of cinema. The outcome was a back-handed celebration of Hollywood films that elevated a handful of (male) filmmakers as exemplary artists for the world to emulate. Since the publication of The Rise of the American Film, the writing of film histories in terms of some intuited national ethos that determines both the industrial arrangements and the films produced has become the norm. Only a handful of film histories to date have questioned Jacobs’ template. This has caused enormous problems to the documentation and the study of film industries that do not operate in the same way as that rather unique instance of it that is Hollywood cinema. And India is a case in point. One of the most influential models of nationalism available to the Congress in the run-up to independence was the United States. India was

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not unique in this respect. Whether as a constitutional model or as an economic power, by the 1930s the United States were emulated and aspired to by many national formations. Jacobs’ The Rise of the American Film was not only one of the first biographies of a national cinema, but also an apotheosis of all other cinemas’ most powerful competitor. It is not surprising that most historiographies of national cinemas came to be narrated on the template of Jacobs’ book, including India’s. Jacobs’ framework laid out the history of Hollywood beginning from the founders, the coming of sound, the emergence and growth of production studios and, within them, the great auteurs, carefully selected so as to give the United States a cultural lineage worthy of its future as the largest exporter of cultural goods. Within this developmentalist frame, the set of conventions dominant in nineteenthand early twentieth-century European and US literature and the fine arts, namely, the conventions of Realism, were adopted as the preferred criteria for ‘good’ or ‘mature’ cinema. Barnouw and Krishnaswamy’s Indian Film (1980), a book that has marked, and continues to mark, the study of Indian cinemas since its first publication in 1963, closely followed the path laid out by Lewis Jacobs: the beginnings of cinema in India with the Lumière brothers’ screening in Bombay in 1896; the founder, Dadasaheb Phalke, significantly a committed nationalist born into an upper-caste family; the coming of sound, which helped to consolidate a domestic film industry producing and exhibiting films in Indian languages; the rise of a studio system around New Theatres in Calcutta (producing Bengali films), the Prabhat Film Company in Pune (making films in Marathi, Hindi and some in Tamil) and Bombay Talkies in Bombay; finally, around 1947, the emergence of an indigenous form of realism and concomitant auteurs out of New Theatres. There are many problems with this account of the cinema in India, and I have discussed them at length elsewhere (Vitali 2006b). Here it is worth noting, first, that in reality and in spite of the historians’ reverence for the kind of realist films made by New Theatres in Calcutta and its Bengali auteurs,26 by 1935 New Theatres’ realism had become a minor trend within an industry thriving on, among other genres, mythological, devotional and stunt (action) films. Bombay Talkies, one of the biggest producers of the pre-war period and the only one to be a fully fledged corporate venture, was responsible for many of these non-realist films, as well as for the work of some of the most influential auteurs of Hindi cinema, such as Bimal Roy and Nitin Bose. More often than not, the style of these auteurs derived precisely from a tangible discomfort with the rules of realist narration in cinema. Yet, to this day, the narrative strategies of Indian cinemas continue to be discussed through the lenses of realisms of various persuasions. The

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lack of consideration paid to Indian horror films, including the Ramsay brothers’, stems partly from this. Indian horror films do not simply fail to display what, since the inception of Indian cinema, was assumed to be part of Indian native culture, namely a religious outlook. They also fail to lend credence to the kind of realism that emerged, in independent India, as a nationalist counter to religion, its iconography and modes of address. Second, the adoption of Jacobs’ model to narrate the history of Indian cinemas made it so that research priorities have tended to stress film production at the expense of all other sectors of the film industry, because, at least until the 1970s, Hollywood was a production-oriented enterprise. Indian distribution and, above all, exhibition, on the other hand, remain largely unexplored areas, even if there are good indications that, if properly researched, they alone would offer a far more accurate picture of the functioning of Indian cinemas than existing accounts have been able to do so far. This is certainly the case for the films of the Ramsay brothers, the particular mode of production of which would be unsustainable and unexplainable were it not for the specificities of the Indian exhibition sector. In 1953 Eric Johnston, then president of the Motion Picture Association of America, explained to a Senate Committee that ‘pictures give an idea of America which it is difficult to portray in any other way, and the reason, the main reason … is because our pictures are not obvious propaganda’. Johnston proceeded to remind Senator J. William Fulbright, that ‘we [Hollywood] are a commercial enterprise’ (Guback 1986: 252). Johnston’s declarations notwithstanding, the US film industry has always profited from enormous state support, especially as it set out to penetrate foreign markets after World War One. This has never been the case in India, where, since its beginning, the film industry has functioned as a parallel, non-integrated network for the circulation of a type of capital that, for its radically speculative mode of operation, the Indian state has historically sought, unsuccessfully, to regulate, curb and, until the 1990s, penalise. Thus, the exclusion of the Ramsay brothers’ films from the historiographies of Indian cinema does not result from their lack of relation with the historical fabric of the nation. Rather, it is a direct effect of the fact that while the Ramsays’ horror films are an instance of a mode of capital that, although quintessentially national, for its speculative tendency has never been officially enfranchised by the Indian state, film historians have so far failed to take distance from this governmental position. Within the historiography of Indian cinemas and, more generally, culture, the debate has tended to be articulated along the lines of a binary opposition between realism – the preferred cultural regime supported by the state, and modernism – an aesthetics of resistance

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to state i­deology. As Nair (2012) shows, Indian cinema magazines merely reproduced this dichotomy.27 Partly derived from European notions of high and low culture, such a perspective has done little to help unravel the functioning of cinema in India, where, moreover, modernism has never been as unambiguously an oppositional stance as it was in Europe, at least until the 1960s (Huyssen 1986).28 In the 1980s important steps were taken to overcome the binary impasse between realism and modernism, most notably through the mobilisation of notions of Third Cinema as an analytical framework as well as a way of making and circulating films.29 But the focus on cinema as politics that characterised Third Cinema practice had the unintended effect of further marginalising, in the historiography that developed from it, films that, like the Ramsays’, are unashamedly commercial in their address. Like Mario Bava’s films, though in a very different way, the Ramsay brothers’ were excluded from film historiography because they seemed to have little to say, directly, about the state of the nation, or at least the nation as narrativised by the dominant interest blocs: divided across a simple dichotomy of secular and religious, traditional and modernising forces. The horror films of the Ramsay brothers registered a reality that was more complex and nuanced than that, and they did so through the orchestration of a menu of narrative strategies that film historians, unable to grasp its functioning on the basis of familiar aesthetic categories, also failed to grasp in its relation to the time and the place it addressed.

Conclusion

If canonical texts [are] always symptomatic of the culture in which they [are] produced and communicated, then the culture itself must be resonant with the text in ways more complicated than historians have necessarily assumed. (Withington 2013: 16)

In the mid-1990s anthologies began to appear that discussed as ‘popular cinema’ films similar to the ones examined in this book. But the reinscribing of horror, giallo and other unstable genres into the histories of national cinemas, rather than in anthologies specifically devoted to what has been left out from those histories – that is to say, the understanding of these films in relation to the historical moment they address – requires that we draw a distinction between two uses of the term ‘popular’. On the one hand, the industry’s use, for the marketers of which ‘the people’ are nothing more than a function in a commercial transaction, their value measured in monetary terms. On the other, the use by critical theorists, for whom, as for Antonio Gramsci and Bertolt Brecht, ‘popular’ – the domain of ‘the people’ – refers to a horizon, an all-inclusive public sphere, the value of which is dependent on the enfranchisement of individuals’ needs and desires, irrespective of monetary considerations. It is one of the contentions of this book that these two meanings of the term ‘popular’ can be reconciled, all the better to understand how a commodity such as a film mediates thoughts, attitudes and feelings that may or may not be conducive to the reproduction of the system that generated that commodity in the first place. They are reconcilable because a film inevitably stages the socio-­economic conditions of its own production – the relations that make it the commodity it is and that sustain it as a function in a process of capital accumulation – but it does so in very complex, or as Marx put it, hidden ways. To begin with, different circumstances inevitably produce very different films.

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These films also stage profoundly different horizons – fantasies about the ideal conditions for their existence as commodities, their functioning as surplus generating processes. Within a capitalist system such as the one we inhabit, the overall logic of accumulation that produces and sustains films is, in its basic mechanisms, the same all over the world. Even so, very different material is available to films in different parts of the world and at different times to function according to that logic. As a result, films stage a multiplicity of, more often than not, conflicting trajectories, also within a single film. It follows that the study of any one cinema or genre must necessarily produce a profoundly contradictory object – a terrain rife with tensions within which some interests emerge as dominant at some moments, other interests at other moments.1 Any film registers these pressures: the socio-economic processes that produce it ‘are resonant with’ the film-text, for it is the pressures constitutive of these processes that orchestrate the functioning, in the film-text, of the material available to the film, producing its specific and unique aesthetics, its narrative strategies and modes of address. The historicity of films has never really been disputed, and the consensus is indeed that a film relates closely to the economic, social and cultural circumstances that presided over its making. What is far from clear are the mechanisms by which history writes itself into a film, how ‘the dynamics animating historical change “present” in representations’ (Willemen 2010: 252). In psychoanalysis the term fantasy refers to an ‘imaginary scene in which the subject is a protagonist, representing the fulfilment of a[n unconscious] wish in a manner that is distorted to a greater or lesser extent by defensive processes’ (Laplanche and Pontalis 1973: 314). This notion of fantasy as the distorted expression of an unconscious wish can provide an opening towards understanding how films stage the ideal conditions for their existence as commodities. For, as Walter Benjamin wrote: the economic conditions under which society exists are expressed in the superstructure – precisely as, with the sleeper, an overfull stomach finds not its reflection but its expression in the contents of the dreams which, from a causal point of view, it may be said to ‘condition’. (Benjamin 1999b: 392, K2,5)

The first step to begin to unravel the ‘complicated’ or distorted ways in which the socio-economic processes that make up a historical conjuncture may not simply be ‘resonant with’, but are, rather, expressed or present in and as a film-text, is to differentiate and hold in a dynamic tension – or, as

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Althusser (1971: 135) put it, in a state of ‘relative autonomy’ and ‘reciprocal action’ – the domains that may be said to ‘condition’ films. In Chapters 2, 3 and 4 I focused on three such areas or domains: (a) the cinema as an industry – its economic, industrial and financial functioning; (b) the nation, understood as the socio-cultural, historically specific formation that a film industry addresses; and (c) the state – in the broadest sense of the institutions and apparati that define the limits within which a film industry and its public move (which is of course not to say that the state defines how industry and public move within those limits). Writing about the emergence of Nazism from the cinema of the Weimar Republic, Siegfried Kracauer was careful to differentiate between these three domains. Less so Lewis Jacobs, whose legitimation of the rise of Hollywood as an expression of US capital’s world expansion fused the industrial, the national and the political dimensions of film culture into one single, linear track. Similarly, discussions of popular films too often collapse the marketing use of the term popular with the Brechtian and Gramscian understanding of it, in the process naturalising the priorities of a small and powerful industrial financial bloc as the ostensibly democratically (popularly) determined priorities of a whole society. Indeed, over the years, the uncritical adoption of Jacobs’ account of Hollywood cinema as a template to narrate the history of any national cinema has made it difficult for film historians to carve out a space from within which films can be seen to vent priorities, preoccupations and tensions that, while also at work in the fabric of the nation, are not the same as the priorities of power blocs dominant within it at any point in time. It has also made it difficult to conceptualise the relation between the state and the film industry in terms other than propaganda, censorship, education and a few other regulatory institutions. Terms such as transgressive are too simplistic to carve out the necessarily intricate modalities of such a space. The most that such terms can do is to imply that the boundaries between the industry, the state and the audience are fixed – which they are not – and that the terms applying within each field are absolute, rather than the results of unstable compromises. Again, in reality the widespread assumption is that the relations between these fields or domains are indeed rife with tensions, but what may be at the root of those tensions and their differently specific nature in individual countries, and at different times in the history of a cinema, is rarely brought to bear in any detail in discussions of the aesthetics of individual films. Even if it is precisely the factors at the root of those tensions that preside over the functioning of the material available to a film-as-commodity, for it to be orchestrated into a film-as-text, resulting in the unique artefact that such film is.

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In an essay that discusses the importance of Giovanni Arrigi’s The Long Twentieth Century (1994) for the analysis of cultural production, Fredric Jameson observed that: Marxist literary criticism … has less often tried to analyse its objects in terms of capital and value, in terms of the system of capitalism itself, than it has in terms of class, and most often of one class in particular, namely the bourgeoisie … This means that Marxian cultural theory has almost exclusively turned on the question of realism, insofar as that is associated with a bourgeois class culture, and for the most part (with some famous and signal exception) its analyses of modernism have taken a negative and critical form: how and why does the latter deviate from the realistic path? (Jameson 1998: 145)

In Chapters 2 and 4 I have argued that the exclusion of unstable genres from the historiographies of (among many others) Italian and Indian national cinemas stems precisely from that: not simply from the habit of analysing a (any) film’s narrative strategies through the lenses of aesthetic parameters inherited from nineteenth-century Realism (and thus of reducing these other aesthetics to deviations from the assumed norm), but, above all, from film and cultural theory’s focus on the social dimensions of industrialised culture, rather than on its value and functioning within (and as) a money economy. With this book, more explicitly so than in my earlier work on Hindi action cinema (Vitali 2008), I have sought to point in a direction that may enable us to begin to redress the balance. One of the arguments of Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century (though not the central one) is that it was the alliance of merchant capital with the state, rather than merchant capital as such, or its rise out of a feudal system, that led to the modern era. Merchant capital was at work throughout the Middle Ages and before; it is only with the medieval state’s gradual legitimation of merchant capital’s priorities that bourgeois culture and capitalism acquired growing ascendancy. Here I have adopted a parallel line of argument in relation to the visibility or not of unstable film genres within national cinemas’ canons. Most film historians would agree that behind cheap horror, giallo, thriller, wrestling and soft-core pornographic films is indeed a particular kind of capital – or rather, capital in a particular mode: oriented towards short-term profits and ready to go to any length to increase in size. Given that that kind of mode or orientation is at work in any industry, the question is: what lends legitimation to its produce? The answer is two-fold. At one level, legitimation is granted by the state, the agency ultimately responsible for a country’s economic trajectory and thus of the industries within it. At another level, legitimation is given by

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film historians in their alignment, or not, and thus their critical positioning within, that state–industry relation. In Chapters 2, 3 and 4 I have gone some way to explore this question by looking at the relation between, on the one hand, the Italian, Mexican and Indian states and, on the other, a particular mode of capital at work in those nations and their film industries: radical capital and its operation as giallo and horror films. The modalities that characterise that relation in each case – 1960s Italy, 1950s Mexico and 1980s India – were different (and they were definitely not the same as the  ones regulating the relation between Hollywood and the US state until the 1960s). I have argued that it has been film historians’ lack of alertness to the changing nature of that state–radical capital relation, and their uncritical position within it, that has so far led them to reproduce, in their accounts of a national cinema, the priorities of the blocs conducting that relation: where the state had an instrumental relation with radical capital, as in late 1950s and 1960s Mexico, film historians have proceeded to write into their accounts the horror films of Fernando Méndez, among other unstable genre films. Where the state kept radical capital at bay, as in Italy in the 1960s and in India until the 1990s, so did film historians treat films produced by capital in that radical mode. One reason for such an uncritical stance on the part of film historians is that, for the most part, we have tended to content ourselves with a country’s more or less official account of its history. The opening sections of books on national cinemas customarily devote a few mandatory pages on the historical context, yet very little is normally done with that material in the parts devoted to the analysis of films – little, that is, beyond assuming that contemporary issues can occasionally be seen to be reflected and/or somehow addressed in some of the films. Such an assumption rests on two tenets. The first is that the context is a synchronous entity constituted by given facts of a (mainly) political nature. Economic factors beyond those most immediately relating to cinema are largely ignored, as is the possibility that aspects of a film may relate not to the contemporary configuration, but to dynamics that operate on a much longer time scale. This is to say that very little thought tends to be given to how a film’s context may be conceptualised so that such context can be drawn productively into the analysis of a film. Which dimensions of a culture should be taken into account, in what relation to each other, and which temporalities? A productive text–context approach requires a far more dynamic conceptualisation of historical context – one that accounts for a more fluid interaction between films and other areas of a culture, as well as for the subsumption of multiple temporalities into the present of the film. The framework I have adopted

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here seeks to bring this multiplicity of coexisting and interconnecting areas and temporalities into the equation by examining the changing relation, in particular countries, between the state, the film industry and the aesthetic of the films the latter produces. Instead of assuming a context–text synchronous relation, in Chapters 2, 3 and 4 I have thus sought to identify as thick a web of connections as space here allowed between industrial and financial interests within a country’s film industry and economy, social conditions and cultural considerations, and the state’s position vis-à-vis these processes, as evident through, for instance, state policies. In Chapter 1 I argued that this approach demanded a clearer understanding of the economic dynamics that shaped post-World War Two world history than film theorists and historians have tended to show so far – that is, an understanding in tune with current historical and economic analysis of that period. Following Robert Brenner, Giovanni Arrighi and David Harvey’s widely accepted accounts, I have maintained that the overarching tension in those post-war years and after was not, as most government agencies would have had us believe, between left- and right-wing forces, however conceived, but, more pertinently as far as cinema is concerned, between two modes of capital – better still, a tension or contradiction within capitalism itself, which, with World War Two, emerged triumphant. On the one hand, the drive of individual capitalists to maximise profits and constantly revolutionise their operation, irrespective of the long-term need to sustain and reproduce the conditions that enable them to generate profits – I have referred to this modality as radical capital. On the other hand, the interests of capitalists as a class, and thus the need to mitigate capitalism’s most (self-) destructive tendencies, by, among other things, contributing to and being accountable for the functioning of a country’s infrastructure and the sustenance of the labour force necessary for capitalism’s long-term survival – I have called this social reproduction capital. I showed that commercial genres such as horror cinema could be made better sense of if understood as products of radical capital – in the sense that the latter’s pressures and priorities could be seen to be at work, for better and for worse, in horror and giallo films’ orchestration of the aesthetic menu available to them. Finally, I have maintained that film historians have failed not so much to identify this radical pressure as a crucial component of unstable genres, but to see it as a fundamental dimension of post-World War Two history even if, between the 1950s and the 1970s, it was not, in most countries, a dominant trend. Most nations during those years gave little or no legitimation to radical capital. The cinema the latter produced may have represented a large share of a national cinema’s output, and yet the model of history and of

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c­ ulture with which film historians have tended to operate did not allow them to accommodate what appeared to them to be marginal, because so was, in those years, radical capital within the global economy and the economic programmes of most states. This shows that the historiographic and analytical frameworks deployed in most histories of national cinema are simply not good enough to account for the produce and priorities of forces other than the ones dominant at the point of writing. The imbrication of film historians’ into, and thus their lack of critical distance from, hegemonic blocs has so far determined the position (the exclusion or inclusion) of popular cinema in the histories of most national cinemas. These films, precisely for their articulation of an important dimension of post-World War Two capitalism that bypassed film historians, could not be seen to speak the nation as the state and its ideological apparati saw it – unless, that is, radical capital was given state legitimation as a crucial dimension of a country’s economy. The first was the case of Italy and of India; the second the case of Mexico, where, in contrast to Italy and India, the centrality of radical capital also in the ideology of the PRI and in its comprador economic policies led to the inclusion of Fernando Mèndez’ horror films into the national film canon. A similar historiographic pattern can be found in accounts of Japanese and Spanish cinemas. From 1973, the Japanese state abandoned a fiscally conservative framework and turned instead to the unique public worksbased system of the doken kokka (construction state). As Gavan McCormak has documented, the doken kokka centres not on manufacture: but on an ‘Iron Triangle’ of politicians and bureaucrats, financial institutions and construction industry. Its mode of operation is opaque, unaccountable … and … it enables the country’s powerful bureaucrats to channel the population’s life savings into a wide range of debt-encrusted public bodies – those in charge of highways, bridge-building, dams and development initiatives, for instance – in which many of the same bureaucrats look forward to enjoying lucrative, post-retirement sinecures. For local politicians, the doken kokka means promising new public-works projects – viable or not – in their constituency, in return for funds and votes … There have been short-term benefits for many, not least in terms of soaking up unemployment during the long 1990s recession. Gradually, however, public-works infrastructure has been replaced by ‘extrastructure’ – developments undertaken for their own sake, while the collusive alliance at the system’s core has corrupted both politics and society. (McCormak 2002: 11)

Significantly, Japan’s switch from industrial manufacture to an alliance between government bureaucracy, financial institutions and the c­ onstruction

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industry – the ideal combination for high-risk, speculative capital to thrive – in the early 1970s coincided with the switch from the pink film, produced mainly by independent companies, to their mainstream version, the roman porunu, from 1971 the main production line and source of income of one of Japan’s largest and longest-standing studios, Nikkatsu (Sharp 2008). In the 1980s Nikkatsu intensified its involvement into an economy presided over by legitimated radical capital with heavy investments in property and golf resorts – a move that, in the harsher climate of the 1990s, led Nikkatsu into bankruptcy.2 Relative to the total invisibility of soft-core pornographic films in the historiography of any other national cinema, pink movies and above all roman porunu feature prominently in histories of Japanese cinema. I would argue that such prominence is an indirect but demonstrable effect of the Japanese state’s relation to radical capital from the 1970s through to the end of the millennium – a relation that is evidenced also by the nature of the doken kokka and its centrality in the country’s economy. In Spain, the relation between the state and radical capital in the 1970s was much more in line with the situation in place in other European countries in the post-war years, and to that extent, very different from both 1970s Japan and 1950s and 1960s Mexico. In Spain a programme of liberalisation was undertaken from the 1960s that saw state interventionism and economic protectionism decrease sharply to the benefit of increased economic flexibility and, above all, of foreign capital investment (López Hernándéz and Rodriguez López 2010). A massive investment boom was built up which, as Ricard Soler (1969), among others, has observed, depended on one political condition: the dominance, in the government and its bureaucratic apparati, of the Opus Dei. The continued centrality of this religious institution and of its technocracy in the economic and cultural policies of 1970s Spain may well explain both the hold of certain tropes in Spanish horror films of the period – first and foremost Paul Naschy’s werewolves, which are barely disguised religious versions of the (secular) Jekyll and Hyde story – and the conspicuous omission of this genre from the historiographies of Spanish national cinema. Germany, Turkey and Nigeria – to mention but a few countries with a large but often invisible production of unstable genres films – would constitute equally interesting cases.3 Space and resources are, however, too limited here to offer an anthological panorama of all the national formations that have produced popular films. I have called them unstable genres because most countries with a film industry have, at some point or other, dabbled in such genres, even if very few such films feature in these countries’ accounts of their national cinema. I leave the task of retracing those configurations to

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film historians who are more familiar with those cinemas than I am. Here I want to conclude with a few reflections on the methodology I have used. The problem of applying the forensic mode of analysis originally proposed by Paul Willemen, as I have partly tried to do here, lies less in the complexity of the procedure and more in the fact that often the information needed is either no longer accessible, or it is so only at very great cost – from data about the type of technology available at the time a film was made and its cost, to details about location, labour cost, distribution rights, financing, land prices and so forth. At one level, film historiography’s disregard for this kind of data is indicative of the extent to which film studies is still indebted to pre-1960s literary studies, including the latter’s scarce interest in the material dimensions of texts. At another level, it is crucial to emphasise here that the objective of the mode of analysis I have adopted in Chapters 2, 3 and 4 is not to gather large amounts of, sometimes perhaps irrelevant, information about individual films. Rather, its merit is that it forces us to account for the multiple levels of a film, as well as the historical context that made the film possible, thus enabling us to open up a film’s text to forces and domains that although habitually conceptualised as being outside the text, are, in reality, directly or indirectly, moulding it as an aesthetic object. This matters because a film’s relation to its context is not a one-way affair: films effect historical change just as much as the forces of history shape films. In the 1970s Pier Paolo Pasolini and Régis Debray pointed to a cluster of forces that economic historians have since identified more precisely: the one single factor that made Mario Bava’s and other popular cinema possible, even necessary, was radical capital – the interests of individual and, at that time and place, small entrepreneurs prepared to infringe a few rules so as to break into, and retain their position within, the market for cinema. Forty years after the release of La ragazza che sapeva troppo / The Evil Eye / The Girl Who Knew Too Much (Mario Bava, 1962) (and, if Debray (1979) is correct, even earlier than that) the position of the ruling coalition in European countries and in the United States in relation to that radical modality of capital has changed beyond recognition. By the 1980s, financial speculation had become the rule, rather than the exception. The US and European governments became less reluctant to sell off public services that had taken centuries to organise and safeguard as necessary infrastructure for the long-term survival of capital and its most coveted object, labour (Harvey 2005). From the late 1970s a new alliance was forged between the governments of (post-)industrialised countries and radical capital. It is the culmination of this phase – the contested triumph of neoliberalism in the 1990s – that makes it so that these films speak to us, with renewed urgency, today.

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Not necessarily because, when they were made, they endorsed or ‘reflected’ the priorities of that modality of capital. Most did not, certainly not in any direct way in their diegesis. More interestingly, we relate to these films today because that is the formation which, then in its embryonic form (as radical capital), propelled these popular films into existence. The films inhabited a film-industrial juncture in which highly speculative capital was a fundamental dimension, even if not necessarily a dominant dimension, of the broader economy. As the products of that juncture, the films registered some of its constituents, and, with them, preoccupations about something that, forty years later, was to become a fully fledged neoliberal constellation within which speculative capital has become the rule. Once again, their visibility in film studies curricula today requires not a judgement but a historical explanation, a better grasp of their relevance and modes of functioning. Because the value of unstable genres films lies in this: their inclusion (or not) into the canon of film studies urges us to ask ourselves why they may matter (or not) today, as much as why they might have (or not) mattered then, when they were first made. To paraphrase Walter Benjamin (1999b: K2, 3), our renewed interest in these films requires us to do justice not only to their concrete historical situation, but, above all, to the concrete historical situation of the interest we now take in these films. For the study of films cannot be reduced to the chronicling of films and cinema. It emerged as a radical, intellectual endeavour to figure out how, precisely, industrial cultural artefacts condition our everyday lives, and, with that aesthetic understanding, to arrive at a clearer sense of where we may want to be heading.

Notes

Introduction  1 These letters are from Paul Willemen’s personal archive. I would like to thank Roma Gibson for allowing me to quote them here.  2 Examples include Dimitris Eleftheriotis’ Popular Cinemas of Europe: Studies of Texts, Contexts and Frameworks (2001); Ernest Mathijs and Xavier Mendik’s Alternative Europe: Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema since 1945 (2004); Stephanie Dennison and Lisa Shaw’s Popular Cinema in Brazil, 1930–2001 (2004); Victoria Ruétalo and Dolores Tierney’s Latsploitation, Exploitation Cinemas, and Latin America (2009); and Patricia Allmer, Emily Brick and David Huxley’s European Nightmares: Horror Cinema in Europe since 1945 (2012), to mention but a few.

Chapter 1  1 Dyer and Vincendeau (1992) is one of the very few volumes to do so.  2 See Halliday (1986: 1–23).  3 In Japan farmers were reduced from about 53 per cent of the population in 1947 to 9 per cent in 1985. In Latin America, where, at the end of World War Two in most countries (with the exception of Venezuela) peasants formed half or the absolute majority of the occupied population, by the 1970s peasants had become a minority everywhere except in Haiti and in the mini-states of the central American land-strip. The situation was similar in countries of western Islam. Only three regions of the globe remained essentially dominated by villages and fields: sub-Saharan Africa, South and continental South-East Asia, and China (Hobsbawm 1995: 290–1).  4 The dynamics that characterised the first wave of the industrialisation of culture are mapped by Ohmann (1996).  5 The International Movie Database credits Roger Corman with fifty-five films directed and some 385 produced between 1954 and 2008. It may be hard to

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believe that anyone may have preferred The Wasp Woman (Roger Corman, 1959) to The Intruder (Roger Corman, 1962). Yet The Intruder is the only film with which Corman ever made a loss (Corman 2005).  6 For a similar argument in relation to pornographic prints and the invention of pornography as a distinct category, see Hunt (1993).  7 The term ‘embedded liberalism’ was first used by the US political scientist John Ruggie, who built on earlier work by economic historian Karl Polanyi. Polanyi introduced the concept of markets becoming ‘disembedded’ from society during the nineteenth century and went on to propose that the ‘reembedding’ of markets would be a central task for the architects of the post-war world order.  8 Within this general model, there were of course great variations in the policies adopted by individual countries. For a detailed account of the situation in European countries and in Turkey, see Anderson (2009).  9 One of the strategies that Hollywood adopted to compete with television was to sell (reruns, syndication and foreign sales) and eventually produce (series, commercial and news) for, television. See Wasko (2003). 10 See also the documentary Cleopatra: the Film that Changed Hollywood (Kevin Burns and Brent Zacky, 2001, USA). 11 ‘Over-production’ (or ‘over-capacity’) is defined as a situation whereby there is insufficient demand to allow firms producing at a higher cost to maintain their former rates of profit (Brenner 1998: 25). 12 This is Hitchcock on the subject: ‘I remember the terrible panning we got when Psycho opened. It was a critical disaster. One critic called it “a blot on a honorable career” and a couple of years later he reviewed [Roman] Polanski’s Repulsion [1965] by saying it was “a psychological thriller in the classic style of Hitchcock’s Psycho”’ (quoted in Spoto 1983: 420). As for Peeping Tom, in his autobiography Michael Powell wrote: ‘When the show [the film’s opening at the Plaza Cinema, near Piccadilly in London] was over, we [Powell and scriptwriter Leo Marks] waited in the lobby for our friends. But we had no friends. They passed us with averted gaze. It was obvious they just wanted to get off the hook, go home and forget about it – and us … The two executives of AngloAmalgamated Films? Wouldn’t you have thought that they would have spent a little money, and taken space in the newspaper, and said, “This is what the critics say about our wonderful film. Now you, the public, come and see for yourselves, and see what a wonderful film it is, and what lousy critics we have.” But did they? Not on your nelly! They yanked the film out of the Plaza, they cancelled the British distribution, and they sold the negative as soon as they could to an obscure black-marketeer of films who tried to forget it, and forgotten it was, along with its director, for twenty years’ (Powell 1993: 402). The outraged response to Peeping Tom virtually ended Michael Powell’s career as a major director in Britain. See also Christie (1978) and Moy-Thomas (1982). 13 During most of the post-war period, manufacturers had barely relied on debt to finance production: between 1950 and 1965, interest payments had constituted

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a mere 1 per cent of profits. As a percentage of profits net interest jumped to 11 per cent between 1965 and 1973, as profitability fell sharply. Between 1973 and 1979, with profits down and the cost of credit reduced, that figure increased by another one-third to 15 per cent (Brenner 1998: 160). 14 Video release was also an outlet for the most out-of-bounds material, as well as for underground films, video art and art cinema. 15 In Britain, the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, the group associated with the New Left Review, the early Screen, etc. 16 The case of the Crown v. Penguin Books opened on 21 October 1960 at the Old Bailey in London. Only a year before the trial, Labour Member of Parliament Roy Jenkins had secured the passage of a new Obscene Publications Act, leaving a crucial loophole – the question of literary merit – through which works might escape prohibition. In May 1960 Penguin Books announced its plans to publish 200,000 paperback copies and sell them at just the equivalent of £3 today. The book, which according to the prosecution had a ‘tendency to deprave and corrupt’, had been published in a limited English-language edition in Florence in 1928 and in Paris the following year. An expurgated version was published in England in 1932. In 1959, the full text was first published in New York, and, one year later, in London. As evident from the case advanced by prosecuting council Mervyn Griffith-Jones (‘Is it a book that you would even wish your wife or your servants to read?’), the problem was less the book’s publication as such – rather, what troubled public opinion was the book’s indiscriminate availability (through cheap and wide circulation) across class divides. On 2 November 1960, after just three hours’ deliberation, the jury acquitted Penguin Books of all charges. Almost immediately, the book became a bestseller. Within fifteen minutes Foyles bookshop in London sold 300 copies and took orders for 3,000 more, Hatchards sold out in forty minutes and Selfridges sold 250 copies in half an hour. Yet, as Dominic Sandbrook reminds us, there was another side to the story. Public opinion in 1960 was still very conservative, and ‘the Home Office was flooded with letters of protest. In Edinburgh, copies were burned on the streets; in South Wales, women librarians asked permission not to handle it; from Surrey, one anguished woman wrote to the home secretary, explaining that her teenage daughter was at boarding school and she was terrified that day girls there may introduce this filthy book’ (Sandbrook 2010). 17 As we will see in Chapters 2 and 4, the collapse of cinema audiences caused by television in some countries in the late 1950s and 1960s facilitated the circulation of marginal genres, as old cinemas located in urban centres began, in order to survive, to screen also this type of film, often at non-peak times. 18 See Peter Wollen (1998: 83–4). 19 In addition to Metz, see the entry on Hjelmslev in Ducrot and Todorov (1972). 20 Fiumicino Airport was officially opened on 15 January 1961, with two runways, replacing the smaller Ciampino Airport in Rome. During the 1960s the national airline company Alitalia invested heavily in the new airport, building hangars,

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maintenance centres and eventually a third runway. Despite being officially opened in 1961, Fiumicino Airport had actually been in use since 20 August 1960 in order to help relieve air traffic that was congesting Ciampino Airport during the 1960 Olympics. 21 See also Rahtz (2014). For an account of the shaping of that consensus within leading academic institutions and their links with government and supranational financial institutions, see Desai (2002).

Chapter 2  1 In Italian, a thriller or crime novel is referred to as a giallo because of the yellow (in Italian giallo) cover of the popular Mondadori paperback series, to which I return later in this chapter.  2 Or US$88,000 at the 1963 exchange rate (US$1 = ITL625). As a term of comparison, Bava’s La maschera del demonio, released three years earlier, made ITL139 million (US$222,400 (source: Internet Movie Database).  3 In Italy, La ragazza che sapeva troppo was also reviewed in Fiera del Cinema (7 July 1962).  4 In ‘Saison ’64’, Cahiers du Cinéma, 154 (April 1964) and Midi-Minuit Fantastique, 7 (September 1963) in France, in Cinema en 7 Dias, 132 (19 October 1963) in Spain, and in The Monthly Film Bulletin (April 1965) in the UK.  5 La maschera del demonio was originally reviewed in a rather dismissive way in Il Nuovo Spettatore Cinematografico (16 October 1960): ‘This story of demons and vampires eventually reduced to ashes by an orthodox crucifix was inspired by a short story by Gogol [Viy], to which princes and princesses have been added so as to make it look more dignified’ (quoted in Cosulich 2001: 492). Thirty-five years later, Martin Scorsese would claim that Bava’s ‘italo-gothic vision was particularly evident in his capacity to create an atmosphere: tombs, thick fogs, heroines wandering down dark corridors and an extraordinary use of sounds and objects. In films like La maschera del demonio … Bava’s delirious, expressive visual style elevates the horror genres to its highest levels (originally in Della Casa and D’Agnolo Vallan 1995, quoted in Cosulich 2001: 492).  6 Some monographs and anthologies published in the early 2000s do mention Mario Bava, but none devote any space to a study of key films such as La ragazza che sapeva troppo and La maschera del demonio. Among these are Eleftheriotis (2001), Mathijs and Mendik (2004), Spicer (2007) and Allmer, Brick and Huxley (2012). A rare exception is Carol Jenks’ contribution to Dyer and Vincendeau (1992), although her essay focuses on Barbara Steele, rather than Mario Bava. These are books about European popular cinema. My point is that Mario Bava’s work does not feature in publications devoted to Italian cinema.  7 The only two exceptions are the thirteen-volume encyclopaedic Storia del cinema italiano, published by Marsilio editors (2001–10), and Peter Bondanella’s A History of Italian Cinema (2009), which Bondanella published twenty-five years

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after three editions of his Italian Cinema: from Neorealism to the Present (1984) had appeared, on the realisation that, ‘the only popular genres or “B” films … discussed in the previous editions [being] film comedies and the spaghetti westerns, with a cursory treatment of Italian horror films … [a] fourth edition of this work would no longer do: a new history of Italian cinema would have to be rethought, re-organized, and completely rewritten’ (Bondanella 2009: x). The terms ‘first’, ‘second’ and ‘third vision’ cinemas are literal translations of the Italian ‘prima’, seconda’ and ‘terza visione’, which are the terms used (from the 1930s) by distributors, exhibitors, critics and film historians to differentiate the  different classes or types of cinemas in the stratified Italian market. First vision (or first-run) cinemas were generally very elegant venues located in the city centre that charged higher ticket prices and screened good quality prints of new releases. The film was then usually moved to second vision cinemas. Whether these were located in the suburbs or in the city centre depended on a variety of factors, such as whether the building was new or old, the socio-economic composition of the area, and so forth. Second vision cinemas used poorer quality prints, were less glamorous venues and charged lower prices. Third vision cinemas were devoted, as a rule, to re-runs of popular and less popular productions. They tended to be old venues and use very poor quality prints. Tickets were, accordingly, cheaper. In third vision cinemas films would stay on the bill for only a few days, rarely a whole week.  8 Galatea was one of the most interesting new companies to open at this time, when, as I discuss later, Italian film production became more fragmented than it had been in the previous decades. A partisan during the war and related to the powerful Invernizzi family (head of the industrial food giant Galbani), Lionello Santi was a practised creator of international film production and financial packages in the context of which he played a variety of roles: lawyer, consultant, producer and eventually director. With the backing of Lux Film, in 1957 he produced the box office sensation Le fatiche di Ercole / Hercules (Pietro Francisci, 1958), a swords-and-sandals (peplum) film starring American bodybuilder Steve Reeves, the enormous international success of which, according to Mario Bava, ‘rescued Italian cinema’ (quoted in Chiti and Poppi 1991: 150). Le fatiche di Ercole generated revenues exceeding ITL887 million (US$1,419,200 at the 1958 rate of exchange) (Chiti and Poppi 1991: 150) and consolidated Galatea’s trajectory in the following years. With solid international financial backing, Santi went on to produce the peplums Ercole e la regina di Lidia / Hercules Unchained (Pietro Francisci, 1959), La battaglia di Maratona / Giant of Marathon (Jacques Tourneur, 1959), La regina delle Amazzoni / Colossus and the Amazons (Vittorio Sala, 1960) and Revak, lo schiavo di Cartagine / The Barbarians (Rudolph Maté, 1960). Galatea also produced the two horror films La maschera del demonio / Revenge of the Vampires / Black Sunday (Mario Bava, 1960) and Caltiki, il mostro immortale / Caltiki, the Immortal Monster (Riccardo Freda, 1959). Judging these genres to have too short a lease of life, from 1960

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Santi changed direction, refocusing production on established Neorealist (and Pink Neorealist) authors such as Roberto Rossellini and Giuseppe De Santis (Farassino 2004: 429).  9 The first Italian film to be released in cinemascope was the documentary Continente perduto / Lost Continent (Leonardo Bonzi, Enrico Gras and Giorgio Moser, 1955) (Farassino and De Berti 2001). 10 It is important to note here that in Italy, during the first three weeks of August, everything closes for the national summer holiday of Ferragosto. As Italians move en masse to the beach, most cinemas close. Accordingly, the cinema’s annual season officially ends on 31 July. 11 Unless otherwise indicated, information about the circulation of Mario Bava’s films is based on research carried out by the author on the film listings of Il Messaggero, Rome’s main daily newspaper. 12 Source: International Movie Database for the United States and Britain; Cahiers du Cinéma, 154 (April 1964: 73–4) for France. 13 The music score for the Italian version was composed by Roberto Nicolosi. AIP had Les Baxter rescore the film, most likely because Baxter had been responsible for the score of the (in the United States) successful La maschera del demonio. There are more differences between the Italian and US versions. In the US version, retitled The Evil Eye, all reference to drugs was removed and short sequences added, including one in which the nearly naked Nora Davis is watched by the portrait of a man bearing a striking resemblance to the director. The ending of the two versions also differs. In the Italian version Nora is left suspecting that the events may have been the fruit of her imagination, while in the US version clearer indications are given that the murders had indeed been real (Acerbo and Pisoni 2007: 122). The version referred to here is the Italian version. 14 Among these films was Riso amaro / Bitter Rice (Giuseppe de Santis, 1948), an account of the working conditions of itinerant female agricultural labourers in the Po valley, which won an Oscar nomination in 1951 and turned Silvana Mangano into a star (Silverman 1984: 40–3). 15 It is worth noting here that Tzvetan Todorov did not publish his Introduction à la littérature fantastique until 1970. Todorov’s seminal book was translated and published in English in 1973 as The Fantastic: a Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. 16 Futurism played a significant, creative role within mass culture, in Italy as well as across Europe. Futurism involvement with and use of newspapers, popular magazines, bestsellers, professional sports, film, fashion, advertising and so forth was noted by contemporaries such as Giuseppe Prezzolini (1923) and Antonio Gramsci (1985c [1921]) and, more recently, has been explored by scholars such as Claudia Salaris (1994) and Walter Adamson (1997). In general, however, Futurism did not articulate a consistent critique of mass culture, such as the one produced by the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research, funded in 1923.

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17 The Catholic Church’s blatant and explicit support for the DC is rendered admirably in Divorzio all’ italiana / Divorce Italian Style (Pietro Germi, 1961) in a sequence which, right at the beginning of the film, introduces, through the protagonist’s voice-over, the main spheres of Italian society: on the one hand aristocrats and the upper bourgeoisie, all men, who socialise at ‘the club’, where discussions always end up being about women; on the other, ‘the proletariat’, also exclusively male, who meet at the working men’s centre for dancing (though without women) and other ‘modern’ activities. We then cut to the only place in town that holds everything and everybody together, women included: the church during Sunday mass. The priest is giving his sermon from the pulpit: ‘And so, my faithful fellow citizens, I exhort you to vote for a party that is popular, democratic, and which therefore respects your Christian faith. In other words, for a party that is Christian and Democratic.’ At which point, the choir starts singing. 18 This is no explicit national address. La ragazza che sapeva troppo’s mode of address, its aesthetics, was necessary in Italy in 1962 in the sense that it took its shape irrespective of Bava’s intent. I return to this point in the book’s conclusion. 19 Although the growth of the Italian industrial working class compared favourably with France and Britain’s, by 1971 little more than one-fifth of it was employed in firms with more than 100 employees. As I discuss below, the small-scale nature of Italian industry at the time is a characteristic found across all sectors, including in the film industry. 20 For the history of giallo paperbacks see Dunnett (2010). 21 Grand Hotel was launched by Domenico Del Duca, owner of Italian publisher Universo and publisher of adventure comic for girls L’Intrepido. Del Duca originally proposed the idea of a comic aimed at adults to the Italian Communist Party, which, however, rejected it. Consisting of twelve pages, the first issue used drawings and was sold at ITL12 (nearly half the price of a daily newspaper); 100 million copies of it sold very quickly, and legend has it that it had to be reprinted four times in order to meet demand. Its average circulation in the late 1950s was 1 million copies (Bravo 2003). For an insight into the world of the fotoromanzo and its public, see Michelangelo Antonioni’s short documentary L’amorosa menzogna / Lies of Love (1949). 22 An interesting treatment of this dynamic can be found in Federico Fellini’s Lo sceicco bianco / The White Sheik (1953), the story of a young bride who, brought to Rome by her husband to meet his relatives and visit the Pope, takes advantage of her husband’s siesta to sneak away and go to the offices of a photo-romance publisher, where she hopes to meet ‘the white sheik’, the hero of her favourite series. 23 Demand exceeded offer because, owing to the smaller public, a cinema’s programme changed more frequently, requiring a larger number of films to fill the bill.

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24 Including Carmine Gallone (Produzioni Gallone); Gianni Vernuccio, Antonio Leonviola and Sergio Corbucci (Ebe Cinematografica); Edoardo De Filippo (Gea Cinematografica); Raffaello Matarazzo (San Ferdinando Film); Marino Girolamo (Produzioni Artistiche Riunite); Luigi Comencini (MG Cinematografica); and Roberto Rossellini (Aniene Film). 25 I return to Pink Neorealism below. See also Liehm (1984), Brunetta (1982a) and Micciché (1978) and (2010b). 26 Their domestic box office were, respectively, ITL2,221 million (US$3.5 million at the 1960s rate of exchange), ITL1,672 million (US$2.6 million) and ITL1,564 million (US$2.5 million) (Cosulich 2001: 478). In 1962 La dolce vita won one Oscar and was nominated for three (best direction, best writing and best art direction). Two years earlier it had won the Palme d’Or at Cannes. Also in 1960, Rocco e i suoi fratelli won the FIPRESCI and the Special Prize in Venice. As for La ciociara, between 1960 and 1962 its female lead, Sophia Loren, won an Oscar, a Bafta, a Blue Ribbon, a Golden Globe and the Cannes prize for best actress, while the film itself was nominated for the Palme d’Or (1961). 27 The three speakers addressing the symposium were Titanus’ president Goffredo Lombardo, Italian film critic Morando Morandini and film director Roberto Rossellini. 28 For instance, Capriccio all’italiana / Caprice Italian Style (Mauro Bolognini, Mario Monicelli, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Steno, Pino Zac and Franco Rossi, 1968) and Il commissario / The Police Commissioner (Luigi Comencini, 1962), both produced by Dino De Laurentiis Cinematografica; Boccaccio ’70 (Vittorio De Sica, Federico Fellini, Mario Monicelli and Luchino Visconti, 1962), produced by Rizzoli’s Cineriz; or the work of Dino Risi, the author most closely associated with the genre, including his Una vita difficile / A Difficult Life (1961), produced by Dino De Laurentiis Cinematografica, and Il sorpasso / The Easy Life (1962), produced by Cecchi Gori Films. 29 This is corroborated by Mario Bava, who, in an interview with Luigi Cozzi that was originally published in Italian monthly Horror in 1971, said: ‘I am not in a position to choose which projects to accept and which not to accept. I accept everything, so long as they pay straight away’ (Cozzi 2001: 103). 30 All matters concerning the cinema were put under the Ministry of Tourism and Entertainment in 1959. Minister Folchi was then also deputy president of the Council of Ministers and president of the Centro Cattolico Cinematografico, a body the main purpose of which was ‘to provide Christians with a pastoral evaluation of each film on release’ in Italian cinemas (http://chartitalia.blogspot. com/2006/01/il-centro-cattolico-cinematografico.html, accessed 3 June 2011; see also Treveri Gennari 2009). A measure of the controversy caused by, as well as of the popular success of, La dolce vita can be seen, again, in Divorzio all’italiana. In spite of the Church’s boycott, when Fellini’s film is shown in the Sicilian town of Agromonte (the set of Divorzio all’italiana), the town’s entire

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population and that of the surrounding countryside goes to see it, bringing with them chairs from home and nearby bars because the cinema is too small to accommodate them all. 31 Other objects of censorship were social critique, negative impressions of public institutions and, often, critical examinations of Italy’s recent past, particularly aspects of the anti-fascist Resistance. 32 This view is supported by Bizzarri and Solaroli’s analysis (2004), which was originally published in the mid-1950s. 33 In 1959 Kodak Eastman Colour launched a new type of 50 ASA stock that was twice as sensitive as the one then available. Three years later Ilford HPS released on the market a 400 ASA black-and-white stock, which made possible filming in lighting conditions until then unthinkable (Farassino and De Berti 2001: 372). 34 An exemplary case is Il posto, most scenes of which are shot with ‘real’ lighting, from the sun to diegetic elements such as lampshades and lampposts. Nor was any attempt made in this film to tone down the contrast between lit and shaded areas (Farassino and De Berti 2001: 377). 35 A good example of this is 8½ (Federico Fellini, 1963). 36 Arrivano i dollari! is a comedy starring Alberto Sordi, an Italian film star who came to be associated with representations of the Italian ordinary middle-class or lower-middle-class man. In the film Sordi plays one of the five Pasti brothers, each of whom has a negative trait: Michelino is a notoriously jealous husband; Alfonso (Sordi) is penniless and calls himself a count, having married an old countess, now suspiciously dead; Giuseppe is a miser; Cesaretto is lazy; and Piero, the youngest, a womaniser. One day the brothers receive a telegram announcing the arrival of an aunt from South Africa, the widow of a poor uncle who had emigrated there many years before. Expecting an old, helpless woman, the five brothers are surprised to discover, on the day of her arrival, that the South African aunt is young, beautiful and very rich. They also learn that they stand to receive part of their late uncle’s inheritance, on condition that they overcome their flaws. When the brothers are told how much they stand to inherit they shrug their shoulders, seeing little point in trying to improve their personalities for so small an amount, until, that is, they realise that that figure written into the notary’s papers refers not to Italian liras, but to US dollars. 37 Pier Paolo Pasolini’s article ‘Sono contro l’aborto’, in Corriere della Sera of 19 January 1975, reprinted as ‘Il coito, l’aborto, la falsa tolleranza del potere, il conformismo dei progressisti’, in Pasolini (2008: 98–104). At the time, Pasolini argued that the legalisation of abortion was too easy an option, one open only to the upper layers of a middle class who could afford to indulge in this as in other forms of consumerism. Controversially, Pasolini proposed that before Italy could consider such an option, its population, and above all the middle class, should first lobby for the introduction of sexual education in schools as well as for free access to contraception, against both the Church’s ban of sexual education and contraception, and the ruling coalition’s policies. Pasolini’s article in

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Corriere della Sera triggered vehement and, on the whole, homophobic reactions and replies by, among other intellectuals on the left, the writer and journalist Alberto Moravia. 38 Similar considerations apply to the Italian (or Spaghetti) western, the visibility of which in film historiography has been greater than that of other unstable genres, from as early as the mid-1970s. There are reasons for that. As Francesco Mininni (1995) has observed, Sergio Leone and Sergio Corbucci’s westerns were conceived under the aegis of Neorealism. The violence, the accuracy of the locations and sets, and the (cynic, individualistic) characterisation are in sharp contrast with the romanticism of the US western. They are, in Mininni and Brunetta’s view, symptomatic of the fact that Leone and Corbucci, unlike Mario Bava or Riccardo Freda, still worked within a tradition of Italian realism. This is likely to be one of the reasons why film historians have been less reluctant to regard the Italian western as part of Italian national cinema than has been the case with Bava’s films, and thus to include the Spaghetti western but not the giallo in accounts of that cinema (see Bondanella 1984). But other factors are just as determining in this respect. First, unlike Bava’s giallo and horror films, which generated small profits and experimented with non-realist modes of address, the Spaghetti western yielded, from the start, excellent box office revenues and larger profits. They were produced in massive quantities – 800 in ten years (Brunetta 1982b: 403), and became internationally dominant, to the point of leaving their mark on a new generation of US westerns. Critics thus did include them in their vision of Italian cinema, but also often dismissed them as derivative, generic cinema. Second, as Christopher Frayling noted (1981), by the time the Italian western came about (and its success), the system of production (and the type of capital underpinning it) that had generated other, earlier unstable genres had been around for ten years. This made Italian westerns perfectly suitable to break into the mainstream. It also made them visible to film historians from the mid-1970s, as it did with the horror films of Dario Argento, albeit, at the beginning, within an authorist framework. (Interestingly, at the time Argento was compared to Alfred Hitchcock (Brunetta 1982b: 415)). Evidence of this industrial link is Argento’s role as scriptwriter (with Leone and Bernardo Bertolucci) of Leone’s C’era una volta il West / Once Upon a Time in the West (1968). According to Brunetta (1982b: 402), it is Leone who prepared the ground for both Argento and Bertolucci’s careers. Third, there is Clint Eastwood, whose subsequent success raised retrospectively the visibility of Leone’s westerns. Finally, an important factor in the acceptability of the Italian western as part and parcel of Italian national cinema is its lack of sexual imagery. Spaghetti westerns were suitable to circulate as mainstream cinema and did so, targeting also the family and youth market. Not so Mario Bava’s films, which were for years regarded as a far more marginal, niche and historiographically inconsequential phenomenon.

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Chapter 3  1 The term ‘comprador’ was originally a Portuguese word used to refer to a member of the Chinese merchant class who aided European traders in China in the late eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Hired by contract, the comprador was responsible for a Chinese workforce of currency exchange specialists, interpreters, coolies and guardsmen. By extension, the term came to be applied to a class of middlemen who emerged under European colonialism, when traders and colonial officers in Africa, South Asia, Asia and Latin America relied on local operatives as middlemen to operate on the ground. Many compradors became extremely wealthy and established businesses of their own, but their fortunes were totally dependent on the colonial system, a dependency that turned compradors into native guardians and enforcers of colonial interests. Today the term tends to be used as an adjective qualifying the priorities of an indigenous class (as in ‘comprador bourgeoisie’) or of a ruling coalition (‘comprador State’) that implements economic and political measures that are favourable to foreign (neo-imperial or neo-colonial) powers, against the country’s interests. For comprador policies in Mexico, see Berberoglu (2003) and Petras and Veltmeyer (2010).  2 The Cristero War (1926–9), also known as La Cristiada, was a mass popular uprising and attempted counter-revolution against the anti-Catholicism of the newly formed Mexican revolutionary government.  3 An ejido is an area of communal land used for agriculture on which community members individually possess and farm a specific parcel.  4 After José de la Cruz Porfirio Díaz Mori (1830–1915) who served seven terms as president of Mexico: from 1877 to 1880 and from 1884 to 1911, when he was overthrown. A veteran of the Reform War and the French intervention in Mexico, Porfirio Díaz rose to the rank of general, leading republican troops against the puppet emperor Maximilian. Seizing power in a coup in 1876, Díaz and his allies ruled the country for the next thirty-five years, a period known as the Porfiriato. Considered by historians to have been a dictator, Díaz is a highly controversial figure in Mexican history. The Porfirian era was marked by significant internal stability (known as the paz porfiriana), modernisation and economic growth. However, Díaz’s regime was characterised by high levels of repression and political stagnation. Díaz fell from power during the Mexican revolution, after he had imprisoned his electoral rival and declared himself the winner of an eighth term in office. After his downfall, Díaz fled to France, where he died in exile four years later.  5 This is the case for all three sectors of the economy. According to the 1962 industrial census, 1.5 per cent of the 136,000 registered concerns controlled 77.2 per cent of capital and 75.2 per cent of production. The agricultural census of 1960 reveals that 1 per cent of the non-ejido properties controlled 74.3 per cent of private landholding. The same year 0.6 per cent of commercial concerns

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controlled 47 per cent of capital and 50 per cent of income from sales (Aguilar Camín and Meyer 1993: 117).  6 Salón México (1948), El rapto / The Snatching (1953), Pueblerina / Townswoman (1948), La malquerida / Woman Unloved (1949), Víctimas del pecado / Victims of Sin (1950), Acapulco (1951), El mar y tú / The Sea and You (1951) and La red / The Net (1953).  7 Germán Genaro Cipriano Gomez Valdés Castillo (1915–73), better known as Tin-Tan, was a Mexican actor, singer and comedian. His performances often played on the image and the language or slang of the pachuco, a Mexican character combining the figures of the spiv and the macho or suave playboy. Fortino Mario Alfonso Moreno Reyes (1911–93) was a Mexican comic film actor, producer and screenwriter known professionally as Cantinflas. He often portrayed impoverished campesinos or peasants of pelado (urban bum) origin. His character came to be associated with the national identity of Mexico (see Pilcher 2001). Adalberto Martínez Chávez (1916–2003), better known as Resortes, was a Mexican actor, comedian and dancer. He began his career in the circus and made his cinema debut in 1946. He acted in more than fifty films and in several television series.  8 Including René Cardona, Raúl de Anda, Miguel Zacarías, Valentín Gazcón and Gregorio Walerstein’s.  9 The other exceptions, released after 1956, were La esquina de mi barrio / The Corner of My Neighbourhood (1957, B certification), Señoritas (1958, B certification), Misterios de ultratumba / Mysteries from beyond the Grave aka The Black Pit of Dr. M (1958, B certification) and Mujeres engañadas / Women Deceived (1960, B certification). 10 Apparently, the final sequence of El suavecito was inspired by Robert Wise’s The Set-Up (1949), the removed shots including images of the gangsters’ shadows on the building’s walls as they beat Roberto to death. 11 ‘El suavecito’s problem is dandyism: aspiration and style in an environment where elegance, in its traditional sense, is out of place. The character played by Víctor Parra is done and undone by his aspiration to elegance. This idea that it is possible to be elegant in the midst of totally adverse circumstances is what the film is really about’ (Carlos Monsiváis, Los que hicieron nuestro cine, quoted in De La Vega Alfaro 1995b: 76). 12 The costs of each film in the trilogy was in the area of MXN396,000, that is to say, well below the average cost of a feature film made that year, which, as worked out by Federico Huer in his La industria cinematográfica (1964), was MXN750,200 (quoted in De La Vega Alfaro 1995b: 92). 13 Both films were distributed in the United States, the Philippines, Baja California and several other Latin American and West Indian countries, where they did so well, especially in Cuba, as to have been likely to have prompted the making of the Mexican–Cuban co-productions La justicia de los Villalobos / The Villalobos’ Justice (1960) and Aquí están los Villalobos aka El regreso de los

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Villalobos / The Return of the Villalobos (1960), both directed by the lead actor Enrique Zambrano (De La Vega Alfaro 1995b: 95–7). 14 Fernando Méndez was paid MXN12,000 for the script and MXN30,000 for the direction (De La Vega Alfaro 1995b: 103). According to De La Vega Alfaro, as originally conceived by the director Ladrón de cadáveres told the story of Fernando, a man who, having fallen in love with the young Consuelo, decides to stop working for the gang of drug traffickers headed by Ramón. Ramón kills Fernando and courts Consuelo. A French scientist recovers Fernando’s corpse and injects his brain into the body of an orang-utan who, jealous of Ramón, fights with the gang leader over Consuelo. They both end up in hospital, where the French scientist performs an operation which, with the consent of Consuelo, transfers Fernando’s brain into Ramón’s body. As released at the Mariscala cinema in Mexico City in September 1956, where it played for three weeks, Ladrón de cadáveres centred instead on a police detective and his best friend, a wrestler called Guillermo Santana, aka El Vampiro (played by real-life wrestler Wolf Ruvinskis), who team up to stop a scientist from killing wrestlers and reviving them by replacing their brains with those of monkeys so as to make them invincible in the ring. But El Vampiro is killed and his corpse stolen. Now with a gorilla’s brain and hair growing all over his body, he returns to the ring, brutally kills his opponent, terrifies the crowd and finally kidnaps his former girlfriend Lucía. In the end El Vampiro is shot by the police as he carries the fainted Lucía on the terraced roof of her house. In a scene vaguely reminiscent of King Kong, he dies falling from the top of the building. 15 More precisely, on Volume 2, Chapter 38, entitled ‘Instances of persons who have promised to give each other news of themselves from the other world’. 16 As a narrative ingredient, horror was far from a novelty in the 1950s. Before World War Two, and since the early 1930s, horror films recurred, the most memorable example being La llorona / The Crying Woman (Ramón Peón, 1934). For more information on this and similar 1930s films, see López (2009). Peón’s film was followed by several other films with the same title or subject in the 1940s and in the following decades, each with varying degrees of macabre, all centred on the turmoil of the crying woman, and, perhaps with the exception of René Cardona’s La llorona / The Crying Woman (1960) and Rafael Baledón’s La maldición de la llorona / The Curse of the Crying Woman (1963), all very much marketed as melodramas. 17 Both Dracula films were shot at Universal’s studios and on the same set: the English version during the day and the Spanish version at night. Terence Fisher’s Dracula, for Hammer Film Productions, was first released in the United States in May 1958, in Britain in June of the same year and in Mexico in January 1959, that is, well after Méndez’ film. 18 In Latin American and Spanish politics caciquismo (literally ‘bossism’) refers to the rule and power of local chiefs or bosses (caciques). As a class, these leaders have often played a key role in their countries’ political structure.

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19 The legend of la llorona goes back to the time of Hernán Cortés and links her with La Malinche (c.1496 or c.1505–c.1529), also known as Malintzin, Malinalli or Doña Marina, a Nahua princess from the Mexican Gulf Coast who played an important role in the Spanish conquest of Mexico by acting as interpreter, advisor, intermediary and lover of Hernán Cortés. According to the legend, after having borne a child to Cortés, La Malinche was replaced by a high-born Spanish wife. Her pride and jealousy drove her to acts of vengeance. In some versions of the story, the first of such acts on the part of la llorona was the killing of her children. She has since wandered through the woods and swamps of Mexico as a ghostly woman and can be heard at night crying for her missing children. The historical figure of La Malinche was one of twenty slaves given to Cortés by the natives of Tabasco in 1519. Later she became his mistress and gave birth to his first son, Martín, who is considered the first mestizo (people of mixed European and indigenous Latin American ancestry). Her figure has been intermixed with Aztec legends (such as, precisely, la llorona). Her reputation has changed over the years according to social and political perspectives, especially after the Mexican Revolution (c.1910–20), when she was portrayed in dramas, novels, paintings and in films. In Mexico today La Malinche remains a potent icon. She is understood in various and often conflicting aspects, as the embodiment of treachery, the quintessential victim or simply as symbolic mother of the Mexican people. The term malinchista refers to a disloyal Mexican. For more information on la llorona, on La Malinche and on the connections between these two figures, see Almere Read and González (2000: 202–7) and Todorov (1982). 20 ‘the vampire at hand, here Count Lavud’ (Caen 1965: 28). 21 ‘Vampires are evidently telepathic … and Lavud’s true identity will not surprise anyone, but it will relish some of us for its naïve simplicity: when seen reflected in a mirror, Lavud’s name will give you the key to the mystery’ (Caen 1965: 28). 22 It is worth noting that in the more critically informed Latsploitation, Exploitation Cinema, and Latin America (Ruétalo and Tierney 2009), Fernando Méndez’ horror films are not discussed as exploitation cinema. For an informed discussion of the circulation and reception of these films as exploitation cinema in Spain, see Lázaro-Reboll (2009).

Chapter 4  1 These include Raat (Ram Gopal Varma, 1992), Kaun (Ram Gopal Varma, 1999), Raaz / Secret (Vikram Bhatt, 2002), Hawa (Guddu Dhanoa, 2003), Bhoot / The Ghost (Ram Gopal Varma, 2003), Sssshhh (Pavan Kaul, 2003) and a few others in the second half of the 2000s.  2 Before Indian independence and partition the family owned a big fourteen door showroom in Karachi, the Ramsinghania Radio and Electric Company. They moved to Bombay in 1947 to a little showroom on Lamington Road (Nair 2012: 124).

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 3 For a complete filmography of the Ramsay brothers see Rajadhyaksha and Willemen (1999: 191–2) and Tombs (1997: 86–93). For more information on the Ramsay brothers, see Nair (2010, 2012).  4 See, for instance, Khooni mahal / Deadly Manor (Mohan Bhakri, 1987), Kabrastan / The Graveyard (Mohan Bhakri, 1988), Khooni murdaa / Deadly Corpse (Mohan Bhakri, 1989), Roohani taaqat / Spiritual Power (Mohan Bhakri, 1991), Insaan bana shaitan / Man into Monster (Mohan Bhakri, 1992), Raat ke andhere mein / In the Dark of the Night (Vinod Talwar, 1987), Wohi bhayaanak raat / That Same Horrifying Night (Vinod Talwar, 1989) and Hatyarin / The SheVampire (Vinod Talwar, 1991).  5 As Tulsi Ramsay recounted in an interview with Kartik Nair: ‘“We had watched [Ek nanhi munhi ladki thi / There Was a Little Girl (F. U. Ramsay, 1970), a thriller] with the audience.”’ While the few viewers who came remained mainly comatose, they could be seen coming to life during the film’s night-time heist sequence … The sudden explosion on to the screen of [Prithviraj] Kapoor’s latex-clad, hideous figure shocked audiences, who gasped and screamed in terror. The Ramsay boys observed the response and returned to tell their father: “Public cheekhti hai” [“the public screamed”]. They remember approaching the patriarch … with the idea of making an all-out genre film: “Why don’t we make a full-fledged horror movie?”’ (Nair 2012: 125).  6 The Ramsay brothers’ first horror film, Do gaz zameen ke neeche / Beneath Two Yards of Earth (Tulsi Ramsay, 1972) was advertised with, among other strategies, a thirty-minute preview close to midnight on All India Radio service Vividh Bharati ‘featuring voice artist Sheel Kumar speaking over excerpts from the film’s soundtrack [who] would say: “Watch Do gaz zameen ke neeche, the new Ramsay brothers film, tonight … Close your doors, close your windows …”. Then there would be sounds of the heroine screaming, of the hero saying to her “You are imagining things!” … Then a song’ (Tulsi Ramsay, quoted in Nair 2012: 126).  7 As Kartik Nair observes, ‘while the Ramsay Brothers presently retain an office on Lamington Road with the banner Ramsay Films, films were sometimes produced by Ramsay Films Combine … sometimes by Ramsay International … at other times by the Ramsay Cine Corporation … or recently the Ramsay House of Horrors’ (Nair 2012: 128).  8 Unless otherwise stated, information on the exhibition, distribution and production of the Ramsay brothers’ films and on the Zee Horror Show is based on the author’s research, on interviews with Shyam Ramsay (Mumbai, May 2011) and on conversations with Mumbai-based writer, poet and journalist Jerry Pinto.  9 Originally video parlours were either coffee bars or makeshift venues equipped with a VCR and a TV screen or, less often, VCR and projector. They were and continue to be located in both rural and urban areas, and have played a highly problematic role within the industry. Although capacity can vary greatly (reaching an estimated maximum of 150 seats), the status of video parlours is precarious at best, illegal at worst. Today they are allowed to operate after paying

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a nominal entertainment tax of INR2,000 per week, but historically they have tended to function without any licence and, more often than not, to screen pirated material (on VHS, VCD and DVD). 10 For information on the hidden circulation of pornography in South Asia, and especially in non-urban areas, see Hoek (2010). 11 Dalit and scheduled caste are terms used to refer to people regarded as untouchables or outcaste in relation to the caste system enforced in South Asia by Hinduism and other religions. While discrimination based on caste has been prohibited and untouchability abolished under the Constitution of India (1949), discrimination and prejudice against dalits (Indian and across South Asia) remain. 12 The son of a Sanskrit scholar and trained in architecture and landscape painting, Dadasaheb (Dhundiraj Govind) Phalke (1870–1944) worked as a photographer, as a stage make-up man, as an assistant to a German illusionist and as a magician. He opened an art printing and engraving workshop in 1908 and soon became interested in the cinema. In 1912 he started Phalke Films on Dadar Main Road in Bombay. Phalke was a committed nationalist who saw his cinema as a contribution to the struggle for self-rule and who continues, to this day, to be regarded as the founder of cinema in India. He made feature films that centred exclusively on themes borrowed from Hindu mythology. 13 For mythological and devotional films in Indian cinema, see Das (1980), Rajadhyaksha (1986, 1987), Kapur (1987, 1993), Dasgupta (1989), Hughes (1996a, 1996b), Lutgendorf (2003), Dwyer (2006) and Valanciunas (2008). 14 For further elaborations of this line of argument see also Chatterjee (1986), Mukherjee (1984) and Vitali (2001). 15 By contrast, in his review of the films released under the generic label of Mohamedan, the critic maintained that while ‘the main virtue of these pictures is their gorgeous dresses and nice settings, their main defect is incoherence; outwardly they appear historical, though inwardly they are nothing but myths’ (in Bandyopadhyay 1993: 31). 16 For an elaboration of this argument, see Prasad (1998a). 17 Of the 351 Indian films made in 1968, only 89 were produced in Bombay. Madras, by contrast, produced 227, 14 of which were in Hindi (Screen, 10 January 1969: 1, 11). 18 Shyam Ramsay in conversation with the author (Mumbai, May 2011). 19 Not believing in the magic disappearance of Catherine’s corpse from the grave, Shankar Khan wants saboot, meaning ‘proof’ or ‘evidence’ in Hindi. 20 Shyam Ramsay, in conversation with the author (Mumbai, May 2011). 21 The criteria for film funding, as stated in the Committee on Public Undertakings Report (1976) were: ‘1. Human interest in the story; 2. Indianness in theme and approach; 3. Characters with whom the audience can identify; 4. Dramatic content; 5. Background and capability of the applicant’ (Rajadhyaksha and Willemen 1999: 166).

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22 Filmistan was a Bombay-based studio established in 1943 by a breakaway group from Bombay Talkies. It elaborated the conventions of earlier studios into the first consistent generic codifications of a post-independence all-India film market (Rajadhyaksha and Willemen 1999: 95). Shaheed tells the story of Ram (Dilip Kumar), the son of a colonial officer and a fervent nationalist, who leaves home to join a group dedicated to armed struggle (qualified as ‘terrorist’) in spite of his father’s disapproval. 23 Interview with the author (Mumbai, May 2011). 24 Laura Mulvey (1975) distinguished three different looks: first, the camera’s look as it records the profilmic event; second, the audience’s look at the image; and third, the look the characters exchange within the diegesis. Paul Willemen (1994: 107) argued that ‘in the filmic process there are not just three looks, but four: the look at the viewer must be added. Jacques Lacan [(1977: 84)] described this fourth look as being “not a seen gaze, but a gaze imagined by me in the field of the Other.” It is this look which “surprises [me] in the function of voyeur, disturbs [me] and reduces [me] to a feeling of shame.” It is this look which, in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, constitutes me in relation to the Other. In the filmic process, this look can be represented as the look which constitutes the viewer as visible subject. A tangible signifier of the look (not to be confused with the look itself, which is imagined) could be found in the reflection of the projection beam’s light from the screen back onto the faces of the viewers.’ 25 On Gramsci see also Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (1977). 26 Among the most prominent New Theatres film authors are Debaki Bose, Pramathesh Chandra Barua, Nitin Bose and Bimal Roy. 27 The only review of the Ramsay brothers’ horror films that appears to take some distance from these binary terms was written by Roscoe Mendoza (1985), who claimed that these films, not the modernist fare of New Indian Cinema or the industry centre-ground’s large commercial productions, spoke to the ‘Indian psyche’ (Nair 2012: 137). 28 For modernism in India, see Kapur (2000). 29 See Rajadhyaksha (1989) and Kapur (1989).

Conclusion  1 For my use of ‘dominant’ here, see Jakobson (1987b).  2 See ‘International company news: Japanese film group seeks protection’, Financial Times, 2 July 1993. Available at http://data.synthesis.ie/site_media/ trec/FT/FT933-16576.txt (accessed 27 November 2012), and Matsuzaka, Takeshi (1993).  3 For the popular cinema of Germany, see Tim Bergfelder’s work, in particular his International Adventures (2005). For Spanish horror cinema, and especially the films of Paul Naschy, see Willis (2012).

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Filmography

8½ (Federico Fellini, 1963, Italy) Acapulco (Emilio Fernández, 1951, Mexico) Ai no korîda / In the Realm of the Senses (Nagisa Oshima, 1976, Japan) Allá en el Bajío / Over in the Lowlands (Fernando Méndez, 1941, Mexico) Allá en el Rancho Grande / Over at the Big Ranch (Fernando de Fuentes, 1936, Mexico) Alluda majaaka (E. V. V. Satyanarayana, 1995, India, Telugu) Amanti di oltretomba / Night of the Doomed (Mario Caiano, 1965, Italy) L’amore in città / Love in the City (Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini, Alberto Lattuada, Carlo Lizzani, Francesco Maselli, Dino Risi, Cesare Zavattini, 1953, Italy) L’amorosa menzogna / Lies of Love (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1949, Italy) Andaz / A Matter of Style (Mehboob Khan, 1949, India, Hindi) Ángeles del arrabal / Angels of the Slums (Raúl de Anda, 1949, Mexico) Los apuros de mi ahijada / My Goddaughter’s Difficulties (Fernando Méndez, 1950, Mexico) Aquí están los Villalobos / El regreso de los Villalobos / The Return of the Villalobos (Enrique Zambrano, 1960, Mexico/Cuba) Arrivano i dollari! / The Dollars are Coming! (Mario Costa, 1957, Italy) As Negro / Black Ace (Fernando Méndez, 1953, Mexico) El ataúd del vampiro / The Vampire’s Coffin (Fernando Méndez, 1958, Mexico) Audace colpo dei soliti ignoti / Fiasco in Milan (Nanny Loy, 1960, Italy) Aventura en Río / Escapade in Río (Alberto Gout, 1952, Mexico) Aventurera / The Adventuress (Alberto Gout, 1950, Mexico) Los aventureros / The Adventurers (Fernando Méndez, 1954, Mexico) L’avventura / The Adventure (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960, Italy) Bandit queen (Shekhar Kapur, 1994, India, Hindi)

202

FILMOGRAPHY

Barrio bajo / Skid Row (Fernando Méndez, 1950, Mexico) La battaglia di Maratona / Giant of Marathon (Jacques Tourneur, 1959, Italy) La bestia magnífica / The Magnificent Beast (Chano Urueta, 1952, Mexico) Bhoot / The Ghost (Ram Gopal Varma, 2003, India, Hindi) Bombay (Mani Rathnam, 1995, India, Hindi) La cabeza de Pancho Villa / The Head of Pacho Villa (Chano Urueta, 1956, Mexico) Calaveras del terror/ Terror Skulls (Fernando Méndez, 1943, Mexico) Caltiki, il mostro immortale / Caltiki, the Immortal Monster (Riccardo Freda, 1959, Italy) Capriccio all’italiana / Caprice Italian Style (Mauro Bolognini, Mario Monicelli, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Steno, Pino Zac and Franco Rossi, 1968, Italy) C’era una volta il West / Once Upon a Time in the West (Sergio Leone, 1968, Italy) El charro negro / The Black Horseman (Raúl de Anda, 1940, Mexico) La ciociara / Two Women (Vittorio De Sica, 1960, Italy) Cleopatra (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1963, USA) Cleopatra: the Film that Changed Hollywood (Kevin Burns and Brent Zacky, 2001, USA) El cofre del pirata / The Pirate’s Chest (Fernando Méndez, 1958, Mexico) Il commissario / The Police Commissioner (Luigi Comencini, 1962, Italy) El criollo / Un caballero de Jalisco / A Brave Man from Jalisco (Fernando Méndez, 1945, Mexico) Deserto rosso / Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1964, Italy) Los diablos del terror / Terror Devils (Fernando Méndez, 1958, Mexico) Divorzio all’italiana / Divorce Italian Style (Pietro Germi, 1961, Italy) Do gaz zameen ke neeche / Beneath Two Yards of Earth (Tulsi Ramsay, 1972, India, Hindi) La dolce vita / The Sweet Life (Federico Fellini, 1960, Italy) Drácula (George Melford, 1931, USA) Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931, USA) L’eclisse / Eclipse (Michelangelo Antonioni, 1962, Italy) Ek nanhi munhi ladki thi / There Was a Little Girl (F. U. Ramsay, 1970, India, Hindi) Elena et les hommes / Paris Does Strange Things (Jean Renoir, 1956, France) Enamorada / Woman in Love (Emilio Fernández, 1946, Mexico) Enmascarado de Plata / Silver Mask (René Cardona, 1952, Mexico) Ercole e la regina di Lidia / Hercules Unchained (Pietro Francisci, 1959, Italy)

FILMOGRAPHY

203

La esquina de mi barrio / The Corner of My Neighbourhood (Fernando Méndez, 1957, Mexico) The Exorcist (William Friedkin, 1973, USA) Le fatiche di Ercole / Hercules (Pietro Francisci, 1958, Italy) Fierecilla / The Shrew (Fernando Méndez, 1950, Mexico) La frusta e il corpo / The Whip and the Flesh (Mario Bava, 1963, Italy) Fugitivos / Fugitives (Fernando Méndez, 1955, Mexico) Il gattopardo / The Leopard (Luchino Visconti, 1963, Italy/France) Genio y figura / True Genius (Fernando Méndez, 1952, Mexico) Ghutan / Suffocation (Shyam Ramsay, 2007, India, Hindi) Giallo (Mario Camerini, 1933, Italy) Gladiator (Ridley Scott, 2000, UK/USA) El grito de la muerte / The Living Coffin (Fernando Méndez, 1958, Mexico) Había una vez un marido / Once Upon a Time a Husband (Fernando Méndez, 1952, Mexico) Hatyarin / The She-Vampire (Vinod Talwar, 1991, India, Hindi) Haveli / Mansion (Keshu Ramsay, 1985, India, Hindi) Hawa (Guddu Dhanoa, 2003, India, Hindi) Hay ángeles con espuelas / There Are Angels with Spurs (Fernando Méndez, 1955, Mexico) Hell’s Heroes (William Wyler, 1929, USA) Los hermanos Diablo / The Diablo Brothers (Fernando Méndez, 1959, Mexico) La hija del ministro / The Minister’s Daughter (Fernando Méndez, 1951, Mexico) Los hijos de María Morales / María Morales’ Sons (Fernando Méndez, 1952, Mexico) Hill Street Blues (Steven Bochco and Michael Kozoll, 1981–7, USA) Hotel (Tulsi and Shyam Ramsay, 1981, India, Hindi) Huracán Ramírez / Hurricane Ramírez (Joselito Rodríguez, 1952, Mexico) Insaan bana shaitan / Man into Monster (Mohan Bhakri, 1992, India, Hindi) Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975, USA) El jinete sin cabeza / The Headless Rider (Chano Urueta, 1956, Mexico) La justicia de los Villalobos / The Villalobos’ Justice (Enrique Zambrano, 1960, Mexico/Cuba) Kabrastan / The Graveyard (Mohan Bhakri, 1988, India, Hindi) Kaun (Ram Gopal Varma, 1999, India, Hindi) Khalnayak (Subhash Ghai, 1993, India, Hindi) Khooni mahal / Deadly Manor (Mohan Bhakri, 1987, India, Hindi)

204

FILMOGRAPHY

Khooni murdaa / Deadly Corpse (Mohan Bhakri, 1989, India, Hindi) Ladrón de cadáveres / The Body Snatcher (Fernando Méndez, 1956, Mexico) La llorona / The Crying Woman (Ramón Peón, 1934, Mexico) La llorona / The Crying Woman (René Cardona, 1960, Mexico) La locura del rock’n roll / Rock & Roll Madness (Fernando Méndez, 1956, Mexico) El luchador fenómeno / Extraordinary Wrestler (Fernando Cortés, 1952, Mexico) El lunar de la familia / The Family’s Flaw (Fernando Méndez, 1952, Mexico) Maclovia / Maclovia (Emilio Fernández, 1948, Mexico) Mahal / The Mansion (Kamal Amrohi, 1949, India, Hindi) La maldición de la llorona / The Curse of the Crying Woman (Rafael Baledón, 1963, Mexico) La malquerida / Woman Unloved (Emilio Fernández, 1949, Mexico) The man who knew too much (Alfred Hitchcock, 1956, USA) El mar y tú / The Sea and You (Emilio Fernández, 1951, Mexico) La marca de Satanás / The Mark of Satan (Chano Urueta, 1956, Mexico) Mard / Man (Manmohan Desai, 1985, India, Hindi) The Mark of Zorro (Fred Niblo, 1920, USA) Marked Men (John Ford, 1919, USA) La maschera del demonio / Revenge of the Vampires / Black Sunday (Mario Bava, 1960, Italy) Matrimonio y mortaja / Marriage and Shroud (Fernando Méndez, 1949, Mexico) Misterios de ultratumba / Mysteries from beyond the Grave / The Black Pit of Dr. M (Fernando Méndez, 1958, Mexico) La momia azteca contra el robot humano / The Robot vs the Aztec Mummy (Rafael Portillo, 1958, Mexico) El monje loco / The Mad Monk (Alejandro Galindo, 1940, Mexico) El monstruo resucitado / The Revived Monster (Chano Urueta, 1953, Mexico) La mujer del puerto / Woman of the Port (Arcady Boytler, 1934, Mexico) La mujer desnuda / The Naked Woman (Fernando Méndez, 1951, Mexico) Mujeres engañadas / Women Deceived (Fernando Méndez, 1960, Mexico) Muñecos infernales / Curse of the Doll People (Benito Alazraki, 1960, Mexico) Nosotros, los pobres / We, the Poor (Ismael Rodríguez, 1947, Mexico) La notte / The Night (Michelangelo Antonio, 1961, Italy) The Outlaw (Howard Hughes, 1940, USA) Le passage du Rhin / Tomorrow is My Turn (André Cayatte, 1960, France) Pecadora / Sinner (José Díaz Morales, 1947, Mexico) Peeping Tom (Michel Powell, 1960, UK)

FILMOGRAPHY

205

La perla / The Pearl (Emilio Fernández, 1945, Mexico) Il posto / The Job (Ermanno Olmi, 1961, Italy) Pratighaat / The Revenge (N. Chandra, 1987, India, Hindi) Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock, 1960, USA) Pueblerina / Townswoman (Emilio Fernández, 1948, Mexico) Pyaasa / Thirst (Guru Dutt, 1957, India, Hindi) Raat / The Night (Ram Gopal Varma, 1992, India, Hindi) Raat ke andhere mein / In the Dark of the Night (Vinod Talwar, 1987, India, Hindi) Raaz / Secret (Vikram Bhatt, 2002, India, Hindi) La ragazza che sapeva troppo / The Evil Eye / The Girl Who Knew Too Much (Mario Bava, 1962, Italy) Raja babu (David Dhawan, 1994, India, Hindi) Raja Harishchandra / King Harishchandra (Dadasahed Phalke, 1917, India, silent) El rapto / The Snatching (Emilio Fernández, 1953, Mexico) Rapto al sol / Capture in the Sun (Fernando Méndez, 1956, Mexico) La red / The Net (Emilio Fernández, 1953, Mexico) La regina delle Amazzoni / Colossus and the Amazons (Vittorio Sala, 1960, Italy) La reina de Mexico: las quatros apariciones de la Virgin de Guadalupe / Mexico’s Queen: the Four Apparitions of the Virgin of Guadalupe (Fernando Méndez, 1939, Mexico) El renegado blanco / The White Renegade (Fernando Méndez, 1959, Mexico) Repulsion (Roman Polanski, 1965, UK) Revak, lo schiavo di Cartagine / The Barbarians (Rudolph Maté, 1960, Italy) Revancha / Revenge (Alberto Gout, 1948, Mexico) Río Escondido / Hidden River (Emilio Fernández, 1947, Mexico) Riso amaro / Bitter Rice (Giuseppe De Santis, 1948, Italy) Rocco e i suoi fratelli / Rocco and His Brothers (Luchino Visconti, 1960, Italy) Rock Around the Clock (Fred F. Sears, 1956, USA) Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953, USA) Roohani taaqat / Spiritual Power (Mohan Bhakri, 1991, India, Hindi) Salón México (Emilio Fernández, 1948, Mexico) Salvatore Giuliano (Francesco Rosi, 1962, Italy) Lo sceicco bianco / The White Sheik (Federico Fellini, 1953, Italy) Señoritas / Señoritas (Fernando Méndez, 1958, Mexico) Sensualidad / Sensuality (Alberto Gout, 1950, Mexico) The Set-Up (Robert Wise, 1949, USA) Shaheed / Martyr (Ramesh Saigal, 1948, India, Hindi)

206

FILMOGRAPHY

Shaitani ilaaka / Satan’s Circle (Kiran Ramsay, 1990, India, Hindi) Short Cuts (Robert Altman, 1993, USA) Sí…mi vida / Yes, My Love (Fernando Méndez, 1952, Mexico) Sissi (Ernst Marischka, 1955, Austria) Il sorpasso / The Easy Life (Dino Risi, 1962, Italy) Sssshhh (Pavan Kaul, 2003, India, Hindi) El suavecito / Suave (Fernando Méndez, 1950, Mexico) Teezab / Acid (N. Chandra, 1988, India, Hindi) Three Godfathers (John Ford, 1948, USA) Los tigres del ring / Tigers of the Ring (Chano Urueta, 1957, Mexico) I tre volti della paura / Black Sabbath (Mario Bava, 1963, Italy) Tres bribones / Three Rogues (Fernando Méndez, 1954, Mexico) Los tres García / The Three Garcia (Ismael Rodríguez, 1947, Mexico) Tres hombres malos / Three Bad Men (Fernando Méndez, 1948, Mexico) Los tres Villalobos / The Three Villalobos (Fernando Méndez, 1954, Mexico) Tutti a casa / Everybody Go Home (Luigi Comencini, 1960, Italy) Ustedes, los ricos / You, the Rich (Ismael Rodríguez, 1948, Mexico) El vampiro / The Vampire (Fernando Méndez, 1957, Mexico) ¡Vaya tipos! / Some People! (Fernando Méndez, 1954, Mexico) Veerana / Vengeance of the Vampire (Shyam and Tulsi Ramsay, 1988, India, Hindi) Venganza apache / Apache Vengeance (Fernando Méndez, 1958, Mexico) La venganza de los Villalobos / The Revenge of the Villalobos (Fernando Méndez, 1954, Mexico) Víctimas del pecado / Victims of Sin (Emilio Fernández, 1950, Mexico) Una vita difficile / A Difficult Life (Dino Risi, 1961, Italy) The Wasp Woman (Roger Corman, 1959, USA) The Wicked Lady (Lesley Arliss, 1945, UK) Woh kaun thi? / Who Was She? (Raj Khosla, 1964, India, Hindi) Wohi bhayaanak raat / That Same Horrifying Night (Vinod Talwar, 1989, India, Hindi)

Index

Notes: ‘n’ after a page reference indicates the number of a note on that page. Illustrations: page numbers in italic refer to illustrations. Titles of films are indexed only under the original language. 8½ (film) 66n.35 Abel, Richard 14 Acapulco (film) 89n.6 Adamson, Walter 43n.16 aesthetics 8, 27–8, 31–2, 71, 72, 120–1, 159, 161 giallo (films) 74, 163 India 140, 141, 142, 147, 156 Ramsay brothers’ horror films 139, 141, 150, 157 Ai no korîda (film) 31 Alarcón, Gabriel 93 Alazraki, Benito 117 Alemán Valdés, Miguel 85–8, 91, 105, 112, 120 Alfaro, Eduardo De La Vega 110, 112, 113 All India Radio 123n.6 Allá en el Rancho Grande (film) 79, 82, 84 Alluda majaaka (film) 147 Althusser, Louis 160 Amanti di oltretomba (film) 62 Amore in città (film) 64–5 Amorosa menzogna, L’ (documentary) 53n.21 Amrohi, Kamal 133 Andaz (film) 142

Ángeles del arrabal (film) 95 Anglo-Amalgamated Films 18n.12 Antonioni, Michelangelo 53n.21, 61, 64, 67, 68, 70, 73 Approaches to Popular Film (book) 3 Apuros de mi ahijada, Los (film) 92 Argento, Dario 73n.38 Armes, Roy 2–3, 8 arrabal (films) 89–90, 92, 95, 100, 103, 104 Arrighi, Giovanni 19, 20, 161, 163 Arrivano i dollari! (film) 69 As negro (film) 92 Asociación de Productores de Películas 83 Ataúd del vampiro, El (film) 77, 103, 107, 116 Audace colpo dei soliti ignoti (film) 65 audiences 2, 13, 14, 160 Indian films 126, 132, 141, 153 Italian films 36–7, 42–3, 52, 54–5, 68–9, 73 Mexican films 78, 88–9, 90, 100, 117, 119–20 Avanti! (daily) 63, 64 Aventura en Río (film) 95 Aventurera (film) 94–5 Aventureros, Los (film) 102

208 Ávila Camacho, Manuel 79, 84, 90, 97 L’Avventura (film) 61, 65, 67 Bachchan, Amitabh 141 Baledón, Rafael 104n.16 Banco Cinematográfico, Mexico 83, 85 Banco Nacional Cinematográfico, Mexico 85, 89, 91 Bandit queen (film) 147 Barnouw, Erik 155 Barrio bajo (film) 92 Barthes, Roland 7 Battaglia di Maratona, La (film) 36n.8 Bava, Mario 36n.8, 60, 65–70, 73 historicity 64–70 historiography 4–5, 35, 41, 68–9, 73–4, 73n.38, 75 narrative strategies 73 see also under individual film titles Benjamin, Walter 159, 167 Bestia magnifica, La (film) 100, 103 Bhakri, Mohan 123, 123n.4 Bhatt, Vikram 122n.1 Bhoot (film) 122n.1 Bizzarri, Libero 57 Boccaccio ‘70 (film) 59n.28 Bold! Daring! Shocking! True! (book) 3 Bolognini, Mauro 59n.28 Bombay (film) 147 Bombay Talkies (studio) 155 Boytler, Arcady 89 Brecht, Bertolt 158, 160 Brenner, Robert 15, 17, 20, 30, 163 British Cinema History (book) 3 British Popular Cinema (book) 3 Browning, Tod 106 Brunetta, Gian Piero 73n.38 C’era una volta il West (film) 73n.38 Cabalero de Jalisco, Un (film) see Criollo, El (film) cabaretera (cabaret films) 89–90, 100 Cabeza de Pancho Villa, La (film episode) 101 Cadáveres piensan, Los (film) see Ladrón de cadáveres (film)

INDEX

Cahiers du Cinéma (magazine) 66, 114, 118 Caiano, Mario 62 Calaveras del terror (series) 84, 90 Caltiki, il mostro immortale (film) 36n.8 Camacho, Manuel Ávila 79, 84, 90, 97 Camerini, Mario 40 Cameron, Ian 1–2 Cantinflas 83, 90, 90n.7 capital, radical 20–1, 24, 71, 163–7 India 123, 127, 130, 162, 164 Italy 75–6, 162, 164 Mexico 78, 120, 162, 164 capital, social reproduction 20, 24, 48, 71, 138, 163 capital, speculative 75, 165, 167 India 127, 130, 156 Italy 70, 75, 127 Mexico 78, 105, 121, 127 capital, surplus accumulation 6, 19, 20–1, 48, 71, 158–9 capital–state relations see state–capital relations Capriccio all’italiana (film) 59n.28 Cardona, René 93, 104n.16 Cardone, Lucia 53 Castilla, José Rubio 99–100 Castillo López, Jesús 94 Catholic Church 44n.17, 45, 46, 48, 50, 54, 60, 70 censorship 6, 24 India 138, 147, 149–50 Italy 44, 54, 60–2, 63, 73, 76 Mexico 85, 93–100 see also morality; sexuality in films Chandra, N. 134 charro (films) see westerns, Mexican Charro negro, El (film) 84 Chatterjee, Partha 153 Chibber, Vivek 128 Christian Democrats (DC), Italy 43–5, 44n.17, 61, 71, 75 churros (films) 89, 90 Cine Gráfico, El (magazine) 96 Cinéma (magazine) 116 cinema, British 1–3, 5, 13

INDEX

cinema, commercial 59, 62, 77, 84, 85, 89, 138, 141 cinema, national exclusion from 7, 23, 25, 31, 35 historiography 5–7, 10, 30, 74–5, 158, 160–5 India 6, 127, 153–4, 161 Italy 5, 6, 35, 63, 68–9, 74, 161 Japan 5, 31, 164–5 Mexico 5, 6–7, 31, 85   horror 31, 78, 97, 105, 120 Spain 5, 165 cinema, popular 1, 13, 20, 22–5, 158 historiography 2–10, 22–3, 30, 74–5, 121, 164, 167 see also unstable genres cinemas India 125–6, 134, 139, 153 Italy 35, 36, 39, 40, 54–5, 60, 116 Mexico 84, 88, 93, 101, 105 Ciociara, La (film) 57 Clarens, Carlos 118–19 Clasa (studio) 82, 101, 105 Cofre del pirata, El (film) 103 comedia ranchera (films) 82, 92, 102 comedies, Italian-style 59, 59n.28 Comencini, Luigi 57, 59n.28 comics 29, 52–3, 53n.21, 97–8 Comisión Calificadora, Mexico 97–100 commedie all’italiana 59, 59n.28 Commissario, Il (film) 59n.28 Communist Party (PC), Italy 43–5, 53n.21, 75, 76 Congress Party, India 130, 131, 133, 134, 143, 146 consumer society 12, 48, 50–1, 75, 153 contexts, socio-economic 5–6, 10–22, 158–67 Cook, David 10 Corbucci, Sergio 73n.38 Corriere della Sera (newspaper) 48 Cortés, Fernando 103 Cortines, Adolfo Ruiz 98, 100, 105 Costa, Mario 69 Cosulich, Callisto 57, 65 crime novels, Italian see giallo (books)

209 Criollo, El (film) 84–5, 90 Critical History of British Cinema, A (book) 2–3 critics 7, 18n.12 Italian films 34, 40–1, 58, 66–7, 72–3, 73n.38 Mexican films 96, 116–19; see also Méndez, Fernando see also film historiography culture, mass 11–12, 43, 43n.16, 48–54, 97 Curran, James 3 de Anda, Raúl 84, 90, 92–3, 100, 106 De Berti, Ugo 67 de Fuentes, Fernando 79 de Gasperi, Alcide 43, 44, 48, 127 de Icaza, Alfonso 77 De La Vega Alfaro, Eduardo 110, 112, 113 De Laurentiis, Dino 56, 60, 62, 69 de Santis, Giuseppe 36n.8, 56 de Saussure, Ferdinand 26 de Sica, Vittorio 56, 57, 59n.28 Debray, Régis 15, 166 Del Duca, Domenico 53n.21 Del Fra, Lino 64 Della Casa, Stefano 55, 59 Denning, Michael 22 Desai, Manmohan 134 Deserto rosso (film) 67 Dhanoa, Guddu 122n.1 Dhawan, David 147 Diablos del terror, Los (film) 103 Díaz Morales, José 27 Dino De Laurentiis Cinematografica 56, 57, 59–60, 59n.28 Dirección General de Cinematografía (Mexico) 85, 93, 94 Divorzio all’italiana (film) 44n.17, 62, 67 Do gaz zameen ke neeche (film) 123n.6 Dolce vita, La (film) 5, 57, 60, 68 Drácula (film) 106 Dracula (film) 106 Duménil, Gérard 19 Durgnat, Raymond 2, 8

210 Dutt, Guru 140, 147 DVDs 22, 79 Dyer, Richard 3 L’eclisse (film) 67 Enamorada (film) 89 Encyclopaedia of Indian Cinema (book) 122 Enmascarado de Plata, El (film) 103 Ercole e la regina di Lidia (film) 36n.8 Esquina de mi barrio, La (film) 93n.9, 103 Europe 11–22 Excélsior (daily) 103 exploitation cinema 3, 6–7, 10, 15, 22–3, 118, 119 see also generi di profondità Fantastic, The (book) 41n.15 fantasy films 41, 77, 116, 117, 118, 119 Farassino, Alberto 67 fatiche di Ercole, Le (film) 36n.8 Fellini, Federico 53n.22, 59n.28, 64, 66n.35, 68, 73 see Dolce vita, La (film) 5, 57, 60, 68 Fernandez, Emilio 25, 84, 89, 89n.6 Fierecilla (film) 92 Film Fan Monthly (magazine) 117 film festivals 56, 61, 116, 117, 118 Film Finance Corporation (FFC), India 139–41 film historiography 1–10, 19–20, 23, 25–6, 27–32, 74–5, 158–67 India 31, 122–3, 154, 155–7; see also Ramsay brothers’ horror films Italy 31, 35–6, 68–9, 70–1, 72–6, 73n.38; see also Bava, Mario; giallo (films) Mexico 31, 78, 162; see also Méndez, Fernando popular films see cinema, popular; unstable genres United States 154–5 film industry 17–18, 24, 30, 160 film industry, India 122–3, 126, 140–1, 153

INDEX

Hindu mythology 132–4 production 125, 134, 139–40, 156 state policies 123, 127, 139–40, 147, 156, 162 see also Hindi horror films; Ramsay brothers’ horror films film industry, Italy 37–40, 54–60, 62–5, 162 box office revenues 34, 38n.8, 55, 58, 59–60, 73n.38 circulation 54, 57, 58, 60 finance, United States 37–40 lighting 66, 66n.34 production 36n.8, 37–40, 56–7, 58, 59, 60, 73n.38 see also Bava, Mario film industry, Mexico 77–9, 82–5, 88–93, 106, 120 charro (films) see westerns, Mexican distribution 85, 89, 91, 117 exhibition, monopolies 89, 90–1, 101, 105, 111 financing 78, 83, 91 genre films 78, 89, 100–5, 118 market, America 77, 82, 90, 101, 114, 117 production 83, 85, 89, 90, 101 state policies 82–3, 85, 120, 162 unions 83, 90, 101 see also Méndez, Fernando film industry, United States see United States Film Information (journal) 125 film medio 62–3 film studies see film historiography films, fantasy see fantasy films films, India 123, 141–3, 155 narrative strategies 123, 142, 155 sexuality see sexuality in films see also Hindi horror films; Ramsay brothers’ horror films films, Italy experimentation 67, 68, 69 film medio 62–3 foreign influences on 41, 69

INDEX

foreign vs. Italian 36–7, 54–5 narrative strategies 65, 67 sexuality see sexuality in films see also Bava, Mario; giallo (films) films, Mexico 96, 100, 114–18 lucha libre 100–2, 103–4 sexuality see sexuality in films westerns see westerns, Mexican see also Méndez, Fernando films, popular see cinema, popular; unstable genres Fisher, Terence 1–3 Fiumincino Airport, Rome 29, 69 Fofi, Goffredo 41, 42 fotoromanzo (magazines) 52, 53, 53n.21, 53n.22 Foucault, Michel 7–8, 70 Francisci, Pietro 36n.8 Freda, Riccardo 36n.8, 60, 62, 68 From Caligari to Hitler (book) 154 frontality 142–3, 147; see also Ramsay brothers’ horror films Frusta e il corpo, La (film) 37, 39, 40, 62 Fugitivos (film) 102 Futurism 43n.16 Galatea (company) 36, 36n.8, 40, 56, 58, 62, 69, 73 Galindo, Alejandro 84, 89 Gandhi, Indira 130–1, 139–40 García Riera, Emilio 90, 106 Garduño Plan 91 generi di profondità 59–60, 73, 76 see also exploitation cinema Genio y figura (film) 92 Germi, Pietro 44n.17, 62, 67 Gerszo, Gunther 104, 111 Ghai, Subhash 147 Ghatak, Ritwik 147 Ghutan (film) 135–6, 137, 151–2 giallo (books) 33, 40–1, 50, 52 Giallo (film) 40 giallo (films) 6, 8, 29, 37, 55, 163 critics see critics, Italian films historiography 31, 34–5, 36, 40–3, 69, 72–4, 73n.38, 158

211 narrative strategies 74 see also Bava, Mario Ginsborg, Paul 45, 46, 48, 52, 71 Gómez Urquiza, Manuel 94 Gout, Alberto 94–5 Gramsci, Antonio 42–3, 43n.16, 158, 160 Grand Hotel (photo-romance) 53, 53n.21 Greene, Doyle 77, 104 Grito de la muerte, El (film) 103–4, 112–14, 114, 116 Guala, Filiberto 50 Guzman Huerta, Rodolfo 100 Había una vez un marido (film) 92 haciendas 84, 107–13, 119 Hall, Stuart 12–13 Hammer and Beyond (book) 3 Hammer Films 2, 3, 5, 13, 23 Hansen, Roger 88 Harvey, David 15, 17, 18, 20, 30, 163 Hatyarin (film) 123n.4 Haveli (film) 150, 152 Hawa (film) 122n.1 Hay ángeles con espuelas (film) 102 Heritage of Horror, A (book) 2 Hermanos Diablo, Los (film) 104 Herrera, Víctor 104, 113, 119 Hija del ministro, La (film) 92 Hijos de María Morales, Los (film) 92 Hindi horror films 31, 122–3, 124, 156 see also Ramsay brothers’ horror films Hindu, The (daily) 154 Hindutva (ideology) 132, 135 historietas (comics) 97–8 Hitchcock, Alfred 18, 18n.12, 36, 41, 73n.38 Hjelmslev, Louis 28 Hobsbawm, Eric 11 Hollows, Joanne 3 Hollywood 1, 10, 17, 155, 160 see also United States, film industry

212 horror films 8, 13, 165 historiography 2–3, 5, 6, 23, 25, 158 India see Hindi horror films; Ramsay brothers’ horror films Italy 36n.8, 41–2, 73, 73n.38, 162 Mexico 31, 77–8, 104n.16; see also Méndez, Fernando Spain 165 Hotel (film) 143–6, 145, 152 Huerta, Rodolfo Guzman 100 Huracán Ramírez (film) 103 Hutching, Peter 3 icons, filmic 26–7, 28, 29–30 India economic policies 123, 127–30 Hindu vs. secular ideology 131–5, 138, 146, 149 state ideology 131, 133, 146 Indian Film (book) 155 Indian National Congress Party see Congress Party, India Industrie Cinematografiche Italiane (ICI) 56 Insaan bana shaitan (film) 123n.4 Inside Popular Film (book series) 3 intellectual classes 43–4, 52, 71, 72, 97 L’intrepido (comic) 53n.21 Introduction à la litterature fantastique (book) 41n.15 Italiani si voltano, Gli (film episode) 64–5 Italy 35, 44–5, 75–76 culture, mass 43, 43n.16, 48–54 literature, popular 41–3 Jacobs, Lewis 154–5, 160 Jakobson, Roman 25, 28, 143 Jameson, Fredric 161 Janata Party (BJP), India 130–2, 147 Jancovich, Marc 3 Japan 5, 31, 164–5 Jenkins, William O. 89, 90–1, 101, 105, 106 Jinete sin cabeza, El (film episode) 101 Johnston, Claire 1–2, 8, 13 Johnston, Eric 156

INDEX

Kabrastan (film) 123n.4 Kalbus, Oskar 154 Kapur, Geeta 142 Kapur, Shekhar 147 Kaul, Pavan 122n.1 Kaun (film) 122n.1 Keynesianism 15, 17–18, 21 Khalnayak (film) 147 Khan, Mehboob 139 Khooni mahal (film) 123n.4 Khooni murdaa (film) 123n.4 Khosla, Raj 134 Kracauer, Siegfried 154, 160 Krishnaswamy, S. 155 Ladrón de cadáveres (film) 102–3, 104, 116, 119 Lattuada, Alberto 64 Lavoro, Il (newspaper) 40, 42 Leone, Sergio 73n.38 Lévy, Dominique 19 Liang, Lawrence 147 liberalism, embedded 15–16, 18 literature, pulp 29, 50, 52–3 Llorona, La (film) 104n.16 Locura del rock’n roll, La (film) 102 Long Twentieth Century, The (book) 161 looking (act of), in films 34, 64–6, 70, 148–9, 150, 152 López, Ana M. 104n.16 López, Jesús Castillo 94 Loy, Nanny 65 lucha libre (films) 100–2, 103–4 Luchador fenómeno (film) 103 Lunar de la familia, El (film) 92 McCormack, Gavan 164 McKeon, Michael 9 Maclovia (film) 89 magazines 50, 51, 98, 99 Mahal (film) 133–4 Maldición de la llorona, La (film) 104n.16 malizia (films) 35 Malquerida, La (film) 89n.6 Man who knew too much, The (film) 36

INDEX

Mar y tú, El (film) 89n.6 Marca de Satanás, La (film episode) 101 Mard (film) 134 Marshall Plan 11, 37, 44, 70 Martinet, Pascal 41 Maschera del demonio, La (film) 5, 34, 36n.8, 61–2 mass culture see culture, mass Maté, Rudolph 36n.8 Matrimonio y mortaja (film) 90, 92 Melford, George 106 Méndez, Fernando career 77–8, 79, 83–5, 91–3, 102–5, 118 critics 79, 96, 103, 116, 118–20 films 84–5, 90, 97, 102–4; see also under individual film titles foreign circulation 114–20 foreign influence 84, 113–14, 118–19 historicity 79 historiography 78, 79, 120–1, 162 Messaggero, Il (newspaper) 38, 39, 41, 115 methodology 26–31, 166–7 Metz, Christian 28 Mexico agriculture and land ownership 81–2, 84–5, 87, 109–11, 112, 113 comprador state 78, 96, 105, 120, 127, 164 cultural nationalism 96–7, 99 economic growth 79–82, 85–8, 91, 99–100, 120 Mexploitation Cinema (book) 120 Micciché, Lino 62, 63, 67–8, 70–1, 73 Midi-Minuit Fantastique (magazine) 3, 41, 68, 117 Mininni, Francesco 73n.38 Mirror for England, A (book) 2 Misterios de ultratumba (film) 93n.9, 103, 115, 116 Mitra, Jatindra Nath 133 Modern Review (magazine) 132 Momia azteca contra el robot humano, La (film) 117 Monicelli, Mario 59n.28 Monje loco, El (serial) 84

213 Monsiváis, Carlos 85, 88, 94–5, 109–10 Monstruo resucitado, El (film) 100 Morales, José Díaz 27 morality 12–14, 23, 50, 51–3, 94, 96–100, 141 see also censorship; nudity in films; sexuality in films Moullet, Luc 66–7 Movie (journal) 1, 2 Mujer del puerto, La (film) 89 Mujer desnuda, La (film) 92 Mujeres engañadas (film) 93n.9, 104 Muñecos infernales (film) 117 Murray, K. Gordon 117 Nair, Kartik 125, 149 Nath Mitra, Jatindra 133 Nehru, Jawaharlal 128, 139 Neorealism 36n.8, 37, 56, 62, 63–5, 70, 72, 73n.38 Pink 36n.8, 56, 64 New Indian Cinema 141, 147 New Theatres (studio) 155 new wave cinema 58, 66 newspapers, Mexico 98 Nikkatsu (studio) 31, 165 Nosotros, los pobres (film) 89, 92 Notte, La (film) 67 Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey 23 nudity in films 54, 61, 94 see also censorship; morality; sexuality in films nudity in paintings 24–5 Nuovo Spettatore Cinematografico (annual) 34, 70 Old, John M. (alias) 37, 39 Olmi, Ermanno 62, 65 Operatora de Teatros (company) 105 Orfeón (cinema) 93 Oshima, Nagisa 31 Parra, Víctor 93, 94, 95, 101 Pasolini, Pier Paolo 47–8, 59n.28, 72, 166 Patil, S.K. 139

214 Pecadora (film) 27 Peeping Tom (film) 18, 18n.12 Peirce, C.S. 26, 28 Pelayo, Alejandro 106 Películas Mexicanas S.A. (company) 85, 89, 91 Películas Nacionales S.A. (company) 85, 89, 91 Péon, Ramón 104n.16 peplum films 35, 36n.8, 56, 73 Per un nuovo corso del cinema italiano (1961, Milan) (symposium) 57–8 Perla, La (film) 89 Phalke, Dadasaheb 132, 133, 142, 155 photo-romances see fotoromanzo (magazines) Pirie, David 2, 8 Piscicelli, Salvatore 63 Plan Garduño 91 pop music 29, 33, 37, 51 Popular European Cinema (book) 3 porn films 5, 31, 165 Porter, Vincent 3 Portillo, Rafael 117 Posto, Il (film) 65, 66n.34 Powell, Michael 18, 18n.12 Prasad, Madhava 130 Pratighaat (film) 134 Predal, René 119 Prensa Roja (weekly) 99 Psycho (film) 18, 18n.12 Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film (book) 118 Pueblerina (film) 89n.6 pulp fiction 29, 50, 52–3 Puranas (Hindu texts) 132, 133 Pyaasa (film) 140 Que hicieron nuestro cine, Los (TV series) 106 Raat (film) 122n.1 Raat ke andhere mein (film) 123n.4 Raaz (film) 122n.1 radical capital see capital, radical Radio Audizione Italiane (TV) 50–1, 74 radio, India 123n.6, 125

INDEX

Ragazza che sapeva troppo, La (film) 29, 33–42, 38, 45–8, 47, 62, 65–7 camerawork and photography 34, 35, 45–6, 47, 65–6, 70 historicity 35, 48, 69–70 historiography 35–6, 68–9, 70 see also Bava, Mario RAI (TV) 50–1, 74 Raja Babu (film) 147 Raja Harishchandra (film) 133, 142 Rajadhyaksha, Ashish 132, 142 Ramsay brothers 122, 124–5, 126; see also under individual names Ramsay brothers’ horror films 122–7, 123n.6 camerawork and photography 150–1 circulation 125–6, 153 frontality 143–6, 147, 152 see also frontality historicity 141, 153 historiography 122–3, 153–4, 156–7 looking (act of) 148–9, 150–2 low-budget films 125, 146, 153 production 124–5, 156 religious iconography and rituals 123–4, 132, 135–8, 148 sexuality see sexuality in films special effects 144–6, 148 Ramsay, Keshu 123, 150 Ramsay, Kiran 122, 123 Ramsay, Shyam 123, 135, 146, 148 Ramsay, Tulsi 123, 123n.6, 125, 146, 148 Rapto al sol (film) 102 Rapto, El (film) 89n.6 Rathnam, Mani 147 realism 2–3, 73n.38, 155, 161 Red, La (film) 89n.6 Redondel, El (weekly) 77 Regina delle Amazzoni, La (film) 36n.8 Reina de Mexico, La (film) 83–4 Renegado blanco, El (film) 104 Report of the Film Enquiry Committee (1951, India) 133, 139 Resortes 90, 90n.7 Revak, lo schiavo di Cartagine (film) 36n.8

215

INDEX

Revancha (film) 95 reviews see critics Riera, Garcia Emilio 90, 106 Rio escondido (film) 89 Rise of the American Film, The (book) 154, 155 Risi, Dino 59n.28, 64 Rizzoli, Angelo 56, 58, 59n.28, 62 Rocco e i suoi fratelli (film) 57, 61 Rodríguez, Ismael 89, 92 Rodríguez, Joselito 103 Roohani taaqat (film) 123n.4 Rossellini, Roberto 25, 36n.8, 56 Rossi, Franco 59n.28 rotocalchi (popular weeklies) 50 Rubenstein, Anne 97–9, 120 Rubio Castilla, José 99–100 Ruiz Cortines, Adolfo 98, 100, 105 rural comedies, Mexico see comedia ranchera (films) Ryall, Tom 3 Saigal, Ramesh 143 Sala, Vittorio 36n.8 Salam, Ziya Us 154 Salaris, Claudia 43n.16 Salazar, Abel 93, 106, 107, 114 Salón México (film) 89n.6 Santi, Lionello 36, 36n.8, 56, 62 Satyanarayana, E.V.V. 147 Sceicco bianco, Lo (film) 53n.22 Schaefer, Eric 3 Señoritas (film) 93n.9, 103 Sensualidad (film) 95 Setti, Guglielmina 40 Sevilla, Ninón 27, 90, 94–5 sexuality in films 23–4 India 126 Italy 46–7, 61, 64–5, 73n.38 Mexico 94, 126 Ramsay brothers’ horror films 122, 124, 135–6, 148–50, 151–2 see also censorship; morality; nudity in films Shaheed (film) 143 Shaitani ilaaka (film) 122, 137–8, 148

Shiv Sena (political party), India 131–2, 147 Sí... mi vida (film) 92 signs, filmic 26–9 Silverman, Michael 37 Sindicato da Trabajadores de la Industria Cinematográfica de la Republica Mexicana 83, 101 Sindicato da Trabajadores de la Produccíon Cinematográfica 83, 101, 102, 104 social reproduction capital see capital, social reproduction socio-economic contexts see contexts, socio-economic Solana, Rafael 103 Solaroli, Libero 57 Soler, Ricard 165 Son et Image (magazine) 116 Sorpasso, Il (film) 59n.28 spaghetti westerns 35, 73n.38 Spain 5, 165 Sssshhh (film) 122n.1 state–capital relations 6, 14–15, 31, 86, 127, 128 Steno 59n.28 STIC (union) 83, 101 STPC (union) 83, 101, 102, 104 studios 21, 56, 58, 92–3, 101–2, 104, 155; see also under individual names Suavecito, El (film) 92, 93–7, 99–100 Supercinema (Rome) 39, 40 Talwar, Vinod 123, 123n.4 Teezab (film) 134 television 17, 116 India 123, 126–7, 153 Italy 48, 50–1, 54, 55, 74 Mexico 91, 92, 100, 101, 106 United States 117 Third Cinema (movement) 157 Three Godfathers (book) 90 Thrillers from another World (TV package) 117 Tigres del ring, Los (serial) 101 Tin-Tan 90, 90n.7, 103

216 Tit-Bits (magazine) 23 Titanus Farnesina (studio) 36, 57–8, 61, 62, 65, 69 Todorov, Tzvetan 41n.15, 135 Tourneur, Jacques 36n.8 Trasfucerebro (film) see Ladrón de cadáveres (film) Tre volti della paura, I (film) 62 Tres bribones (film) 102 Tres García, Los (film) 92 Tres hombres malos (film) 90 Tres Villalobos, Los (film) 102 Tutti a casa (film) 57 undergrowth genres see generi di profondità Unione Donne in Italia (women’s organization) 72 United States 10–22 aid (see Marshall Plan) film historiography 154–5 film industry 17, 21–2, 156; see also Hollywood investment, foreign 37, 44, 49, 80, 85, 87, 105   film industries 17, 37–40, 78, 82–3 popular culture, foreign 51, 69, 84, 97 viewing Mexican films 116, 117, 119 Universo (publisher) 53n.21 unstable genres 4, 6, 24, 25, 31, 73n.38, 161–5, 167; see also cinema, popular Urquiza, Manuel Gómez 94 Urueta, Chano 100, 101, 103, 116 Us Salam, Ziya 154 Ustedes, los ricos (film) 89 Valdés, Miguel Alemán see Alemán Valdés, Miguel Vampiro, El (film) 77–8, 105–12, 108 camerawork and photography 107, 111–12

INDEX

critics 77, 109–10, 118, 120 foreign circulation 77, 114–18, 119–20 historiography 120–1 mainstream 93, 97, 104, 106, 120 narrative strategies 110–11 Vanaik, Achin 131 Varma, Ram Gopal 122n.1, 124 Vasudevan, Ravi 142–3 ¡Vaya tipos! (film) 102 VCRs 73, 126 Veerana (film) 148–9 Vega Alfaro, Eduardo De La 110, 112, 113 Venganza apache (film) 104 Venganza de los Villalobos, La (film) 102 Ventavoli, Lorenzo 59 VHSs 22, 126 Victimas del pecado (film) 89n.6, 95 videos 126, 127, 145, 153 Vincendeau, Ginette 3 Visconti, Luchino 57, 59n.28, 61, 73 Vita difficile, Una (film) 59n.28 Vom Werden Deutscher Filmkunst (book) 154 Walerstein, Gregorio 90, 91, 92, 93, 101 Warren, Jerry 117 westerns, Italian 35, 73n.38 westerns, Mexican 84, 90, 101–2, 103–4, 113 Wilcox, Herbert 14 Willemen, Paul 1–2, 8, 13, 26, 28, 29, 166 Woh kaun thi? (film) 134 Wohi bhayaanak raat (film) 123n.4 Wollen, Peter 4, 68, 70 Zac, Pino 59n.28 Zavattini, Cesare 63, 64, 72 Zee horror show (TV programme) 126 Ziya Us Salam 154