Tag Archives: 1970s cinema

A Krimi-Giallo Hybrid: What Have You Done to Solange?

Solange 2
What Have You Done to Solange?

Format: Dual Format (DVD + Blu-ray

Release date: 14 December 2015

Distributor: Arrow Video

Director: Massimo Dallamano

Writers: Bruno Di Geronimo, Massimo Dallamano

Original title: Cosa avete fatto a Solange?

Cast: Fabio Testi, Cristina Galbó, Karin Baal, Joachim Fuchsberger

Italy, Germany 1972

107 mins

Massimo Dallamano’s Catholic girls’ school psycho-sexual thriller combines elements of German and Italian genre cinemas.

A German-Italian co-production, Massimo Dallamano’s What Have You Done to Solange? is one of several films intended to bridge the gap between the West German Edgar Wallace krimi and the Italian gialli. The relationship between the two subgenres dates back to the late 1960s, when gialli like Antonio Margheriti’s Naked You Die! (1968) were released in Germany in black and white (despite being shot in colour) to resemble the classic Wallace krimi in appearance. At the same time Rialto Film, the primary producer of the Wallace films, were trying to find ways of revitalizing their formula, in response to declining popularity. Their first attempt, Double Face (1968), was certainly equipped for lasting cult appeal, being directed by Italian horror legend Riccardo Freda and co-written by the future ‘godfather of gore’ Lucio Fulci. It also starred Klaus Kinski in a rare leading role, as well as a number of Euro-horror veterans, including Gunther Stoll, Margaret Lee and Annabella Incontrera. Unfortunately, Freda’s star had waned by that point, and despite the efforts of the cast, Double Face is bland and uninvolving.

The film’s commercial failure doused Rialto’s interest in further ventures, and the matter might have rested there, were it not for Dario Argento’s The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. One of the big European box office hits of 1970, Argento’s debut feature sparked off a wave of similar thrillers, bringing the giallo firmly into the mainstream. In Germany The Bird with the Crystal Plumage was distributed by Artur Brauner’s Central Cinema Company (a.k.a. CCC Films), Rialto’s main competitor in the field of the Wallace krimi. Brauner added a spurious credit to German prints of the film, claiming it was based upon a story by Bryan Edgar Wallace, the son of the famous author whose own works had been adapted by CCC Films. The Bird with the Crystal Plumage was then marketed to German audiences as an authentic krimi.

Having noticed the film’s impressive box office takings, Rialto decided to attempt another krimi-giallo crossover. Although most of the technical aspects of What Have You Done to Solange? were left to the discretion of the Italian crew, Rialto made a number of changes to bring the film closer to their previous Wallace krimi, including setting the film in London. The main detective would be played by Joachim Fuchsberger, Rialto’s most popular leading man, while the German wife would be played by Karin Baal, the star of two earlier Wallace films, including The Dead Eyes of London (1961), arguably the finest example of the form. A single line of dialogue was added to justify the appropriation of the title of a genuine Edgar Wallace story for the film’s German title (The Clue of the Green Pin), despite the two stories having absolutely nothing in common.

Enrico Rosseni (played by Fabio Testi, best known for his role in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis) teaches Italian and gymnastics at a prestigious Catholic school in London. Even though his severe German wife Herta (Karin Baal) teaches at the school as well, Enrico is having an affair with one of his students, Elizabeth Seccles (Christina Galbó, The Living Dead at the Manchester Morgue). During one of their meetings, Elizabeth sees a young girl and the flash of a knife, but Enrico angrily dismisses her claim. The following day a girl’s body is discovered in the same location, with the victim another student of the school. Even though Elizabeth is a key witness, Enrico discourages her from contacting the police because of his marriage. When another student is murdered, Enrico realizes that Elizabeth is not just a witness, but a key figure in the events unfolding and a potential victim too.

Despite its hybrid origins, What Have You Done to Solange? is very much a classic example of the 1970s giallo. As usual, the police are present but take a backseat role to the hero’s amateur investigations. Although Enrico himself is not a witness to the crimes like his counterpart in Dario Argento’s thrillers, his girlfriend Elizabeth is, and she experiences the same confusion and progressive revelations as the heroes of The Bird with the Crystal Plumage and Deep Red (1976). The killer is visible only as a pair of black-gloved hands, although we hear his voice. His motivations are a little more complex. Instead of being a witness to, or a victim of, a traumatic event, he’s taking revenge on behalf of that victim. The incident itself is one of the most unpleasant of its kind and certainly effective, but would perhaps be more appropriate for a Roman Catholic country; the United Kingdom’s laws on the subject make such events largely unnecessary (a similar point applies to Elizabeth’s age; in Italy she would have been over the age of consent). The brutal and sexualised nature of the killings (and their motivation) is sharply at odds with the standards of the Wallace krimi, which rarely featured graphic violence and generally couched any sexual content in a light-hearted tone.

By technical standards, What Have You Done to Solange? is exceptional, especially the cinematography. Although best known as a producer of notorious splatter movies (including the excellent Beyond the Darkness) and hardcore pornography, Aristide Massacessi (a.k.a. Joe D’Amato) is a skilled cinematographer whose framing and shot composition are consistently solid. Director Dallamano is a capable cinematographer himself, having worked on A Fistful of Dollars (1964) and For A Few Dollars More (1965) before moving into direction. Together Dallamano and Massacessi create a stylish, visually interesting film, with a number of memorable and eye-catching moments. Legendary composer Ennio Morricone provided the scores to more than a dozen gialli in the early 1970s, including Argento’s early thrillers. His work on What Have You Done to Solange? relies on many of the same motifs and themes that characterise his other giallo scores: angular, discordant bass figures; wordless child-like singing; high-pitched, screeching strings. Despite this, it’s a strong enough score, and certain passages correspond well to the images they accompany.

Although Dallamano is happy to kill off the girls in a brutal fashion and use them to provide the film’s plentiful nudity, there is something sad about his portrayal of these young women. They are essentially adrift in the world. Their parents are generally absent from the film and when they do appear, they present a rose-tinted, idealised view of their children that shows no awareness of their growing physical and mental maturity. Their Catholic upbringing provides them with plenty of rules and admonitions against sin but offers them no help with their predicament whatsoever. The other adults in their lives are equally hopeless. Their teachers (aside from the priests) include a lecherous hypocrite who ascribes to them every kind of sexual vice but spies on them in the showers. Even Enrico, the one teacher who takes their side in disputes with the school, is having an affair with a girl not yet halfway through her teenage years, and is not above pressurizing his lover to give in to his sexual demands. With no guidance except their own instincts, the girls drift into the clutches of perverts, sleazy photographers and backstreet abortionists.

The execution and genre mechanics make What Have You Done to Solange? an excellent example of its kind, but it possesses an emotional resonance that lifts it above the majority of its contemporaries. It is not a flawless film; Inspector Barth’s assertion that showing the teachers graphic crime scene photos is a ‘necessary formality’ is ridiculous and grotesque, while Enrico’s sudden change of heart is poorly handled and does the character no favours (indeed, none of the film’s characters are anything other than one-dimensional). Despite its shortcomings, What Have You Done to Solange? is a first-rate giallo that deserves this new restoration.

Watch the trailer:

Jim Harper

Walerian Borowczyk: The Motion Demon

review_The_Theatre_of_Mr_&_Mrs_Kabal
The Theatre of Mr and Mrs Kabal

Walerian Borowczyk Retrospective

Cinema of Desire
Venue: BFI Soutbank, London
Dates: 1-27 May 2014

The Listening Eye
Venue: ICA, London
Dates: 20 May-27 June 2014

For more information visit the BFI and ICA websites

While Walerian Borowczyk (1923 – 2006) had been a keen amateur filmmaker since his youth, his professional debut was a handful of short films made with another poster artist, Jan Lenica (1928 – 2001). These films took what was interesting about the Polish posters of the 1950s (the economy of means, a ‘hand-made’ quality) and translated it into cinema. In 1958, Borowczyk co-wrote a documentary film on posters (Sztuka ulicy), which connected both mediums in that they express thoughts and feelings through images and text. Unlike posters, however, films are about movement. Borowczyk was not just a filmmaker, but also a painter and sculptor. During his later years, he returned to graphics (using a technique he referred to as pulverographie, or ‘dustography’, which involved colour photocopying) and produced a series of bizarre wooden sound sculptures (34 of Borowczyk’s ‘dustographs’ illustrate his 1992 collection of short stories, L’anatomie du diable (The Anatomy of the Devil) available as part of Arrow Video’s upcoming special edition box set release Camera Obscura: The Walerian Borowczyk Collection. Three of Borowczyk’s sound sculptures are featured in the ICA exhibition ‘Walerian Borowczyk: The Listening Eye’ (The Fox Reading Room, ICA, 20 May-6 July 2014).

Borowczyk was fascinated with early cinema – the motion studies of Etienne-Jules Marey (which feature in Dom), the praxinoscope of Charles-Émile Reynaud (upon which Borowczyk’s 1979 short Jouet joyeux is based), the special effects of Georges Méliès, the physical comedy of Keaton as well as the montage experiments of Eisenstein. Borowczyk did not have a singular style so much as a way of thinking about the world. Some of Borowczyk’s short films are made up from photographs (e.g. Szko?a, Les astronautes), others involve the manipulation of objects (e.g. Renaissance, Le phonographe) or a combination of the two (e.g. Rosalie). In that, he is close Russian Formalist critic Viktor Shklovskii’s conception of a poetic cinema in which objects could be used to express abstract concepts. Shklovskii described Battleship Potemkin as an ‘uprising of dishes’ on account of the plates smashed during a monologue in which a crew member expresses discontent. Borowczyk took this idea to an extreme – objects are not only on a par with actors (e.g. Rosalie, Une collection particulière) but in some cases displace them completely (Renaissance, Le Phonographe).

While Borowczyk considered painting and filmmaking as two separate genres, he nevertheless fulfilled Fernand Léger’s dream of an artist being able to express themselves through paintbrush and film camera (during the 1950s, Borowczyk had travelled to France to make an amateur film about Léger at work in his studio, and would later make a remarkable documentary featuring Ljuba Popovi&#263 paintingL’amour monstre de tous les temps). Like both Norman McLaren and Len Lye before him, Borowczyk sometimes painted directly onto celluloid (e.g. Sztandar M?odych) or animation cells (e.g. Théâtre de Monsieur & Madame Kabal (The Theatre of Mr and Mrs Kabal) and Scherzo infernal). Alternatively, he used the rostrum camera to make elaborate tracks around paintings (e.g. Les jeux des anges). As with many Polish poster artists of his generation (e.g. Lenica, Roman Cie&#347lewicz, etc.), collage was profoundly important to him. Through cinema, the constituent elements could move (e.g. L’encyclopédie de grand-maman).

In 1968, Borowczyk made his live-action feature debut, Goto, l’île d’amour (Goto, Island of Love). Thematically, it is a love story about the lengths a man goes to possess a woman. Stylistically, it was the culmination of Borowczyk’s formal experiments concerning the use of objects as a means of telling stories (e.g. Rosalie), framing (e.g. Les jeux des anges, Gavotte) and combining black and white with colour (e.g. Renaissance, Diptyque). Divorced from both time and place, Goto works as an adult fairy tale, which attracted the attention of Angela Carter. Goto also paved the way for a generation of graphic artists who wanted to work in film (e.g. the Brothers Quay, Craigie Horsfield, Andrzej Klimowski and John Goto – who liked the film so much he changed his name).

After four years and a couple of shorts, Borowczyk’s next feature film was Blanche, a personal project in which he invested his own money. It is loosely based on Mazepa, a drama by the Polish Romantic poet Julius S?owacki. Set in medieval France, Blanche recreates an entire world through set design and props. In addition to painting the sets, Borowczyk fabricated many of the objects that feature in the film. Ostensibly a period drama, Blanche has a number of surreal touches, like a crucifix that transforms into a crossbow. He was a great fabricator, who loved distressing wood to make it appear antique (e.g. Une collection particulière). At the heart of Blanche is Borowczyk’s wife, Ligia, a woman with a remarkable screen presence whose angelic demeanour conceals a demonic sexual impulse. If Ligia was Dietrich, then like von Sternberg, Borowczyk was a master at creating atmosphere. Blanche bombed at the French box office, although it played for over a year at the Paris Pullman Cinema in London.

With La b&#234te (The Beast), Borowczyk tricked his audience into thinking they were watching a refined costume drama, before confronting them with a Monty Python version of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ involving gallons of fake sperm. Often described as an erotic film, La b&#234te is more of a Rabelaisian comedy. If anything it was a parody of pornography. Both La b&#234te and Contes immoraux (Immoral Tales) were box office smashes in France. In terms of the way Domenico Scarlatti’s harpsichord music is used as a counterpoint, the role played by objects and animals (satin slippers and slimy snails) as well as its dreamlike quality, La b&#234te is pure Borowczyk. The sexual aspect was nothing new (it had always been there, lurking under the surface) but now it was visible. The premiere of Contes immoraux and La b&#234te coincided with the election of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and the abolition of film censorship.

Borowczyk’s intention was never to solely titillate. Instead, he was interested in sexuality as a theme, just as violence was a theme in Sam Peckinpah’s Westerns. Borowczyk was interested in how people and society had, historically, dealt with sexuality. As a Catholic, he was particularly concerned with the role of the Church, both in Poland (e.g. Dzieje grzechu) and Italy (e.g. the ‘Lucrezia Borgia’ episode of Contes immoraux). Borowczyk believed in the importance of sex in Renaissance art, particularly the significance of Raphael’s mistress (the ‘Margherita’ episode of Les héroïnes du mal). Many of Borowczyk’s films deal with the repression of sexuality, and its manifestation in the form of taboos (Contes immoraux) and dreams (La b&#234te). Borowczyk himself was preoccupied by the idea of sin, and thought of his films not as erotic, but ethical. Critics preoccupied with flesh are blinkered to the more transcendental aspects of Borowczyk’s films (both Renaissance and Goto, l’île d’amour are concerned with resurrection). If the displays of self-sacrifice in Blanche have overtly religious overtones, then it is worth remembering that Borowczyk wished to follow up the film with one about the Passion of Christ…

Between 1983 and 1987, Borowczyk attempted to mount a project about the life of Nefertiti, an adaptation of Dumas’s La reine Margot, a film about Chopin and George Sand, an English-language period drama based on a script by Cherry Potter (The Ancestral Mansion), as well as a return to feature-length animation (an expansion of his 1984 short Scherzo infernal, much like Théâtre de Monsieur & Madame Kabal elaborated on Le concert). However, all of these projects collapsed. Then Alain Siritzky, the producer of the Emmanuelle series, turned to Borowczyk as a means of bringing some artistic prestige to his franchise. In this respect, Borowczyk sold out no more than Sam Mendes did when he signed on to direct Skyfall. The teaser for Emmanuelle 5, in which a dildo is fashioned, origami style, out of a napkin, is typical Borowczyk. However, Siritzky imposed an actress on Borowczyk, Monique Gabrielle. Borowczyk did not speak English and, by all accounts, did not get on with Gabrielle. Having left the main shoot to his assistant director, Borowczyk focused on the second unit photography: close-ups of objects (including those Borowczyk fashioned for Une collection particulière), reportage of the 1986 Cannes Film Festival, not to mention the recreation of a plane crash using scale models (having led an uprising in a harem, Emmanuelle joins her lover, a Howard Hughes type, in an attempt at flying a ‘Spruce Goose’-type seaplane…).

If Borowczyk was guilty of a crime, then it was his inability to delegate work – he had to do everything all by himself on his terms in total freedom. In later years he sought out producers that he thought would allow him to work in complete freedom. He spent much of the 1980s fighting producers (over the title change of Le cas estrange du Dr Jekyll et de Miss Osbourne to Dr Jekyll et les femmes, the inserts from a Joe D’Amato feature spliced into Ars Amandi, not to mention losing control of Nefertiti, which was eventually produced in 1995 as Nefertiti, figlia del sole). Some see Borowczyk as a Jack-of-all-trades, while others see him as a Renaissance man in the vein of Eisenstein or Welles. At his best, Borowczyk made films as if he had invented cinema. At his worst, he filmed like a Martian who had fallen through time and space to make clandestine documentaries about human mating rituals. In many ways, Borowczyk was ahead of his time (his later work deserves to be taken as seriously as, for example, Von Trier’s Nymphomaniac or the films of Catherine Breillat). He was by far the most interesting Polish filmmaker of his generation, and his best films – the shorts of the 1960s and the features from the early 1970s – rank alongside the best of Bresson (in terms of rigour) and Buñuel.

Daniel Bird