LECTURE 6
FILM THEORY
3) Italian Vernacular Cinema
What is an Italian giallo film? Mikel J. Koven’s latest book La Dolce Morte: Vernacular Cinema and the Italian Giallo Film attempts to illuminate this under-appreciated cultural phenomenon and is in fact the first English-language academic study to do so.
Literally meaning “yellow”, the term giallo here references the cover design of pulp fiction novels first produced by Italian publishing house Mondadori in the late 1920s. Initially, these were mostly translations of crime/mystery stories by writers like Agatha Christie and Edgar Wallace, but it wasn’t long before home-grown literary gialli began to appear.
The book sets up a particular framework for the discussion of gialli which focuses on their status as “vernacular cinema”, explaining that “approaching the giallo as one would other kinds of Italian cinema…is not productive, as this genre was never intended for the art house, but for the grind house.”
Bold colours, strong bold san serif typefaces, often with distorted effects or quite display typefaces. The type of cinema is a crossover between crime and fiction novels to cult films.
No comments:
Post a Comment