The Creeping Eye
But art and love are a matter of mouths open in cinnabar, of blackness and redness turned to velvet by assiduous grinding, of understanding the colors that benefit from being rubbed softly one into the other: the least that the practice will make you is skillful: beyond which there’s originality… This is all in Cennini’s handbook for painters, as well as the strict instruction that we must always take pleasure from our work.
— Ali Smith, How to Be Both
Georges Rivière is haughty. Like he smelled something bad. The script?
Here, in 1964’s Castle of Blood, playing a penurious dandy silly enough to spend the night in a haunted castle on a bet, Rivière seems to think aloofness will be all the protection he needs. It won’t be! Indeed, only one thing can save the film’s leading man from the visual shibboleths of a dying genre, and that’s the cameraman.
Camera artisan Riccardo Pallottini, playing savior and tormentor, coaxes Rivière onward while punishing his progress. Nobody would be more surprised than the late Signore Pallottini himself hearing his cinematography praised as “experimental”. And yet, this is Gothic Horror’s greatest master shot — a case of push and pull, whose tension and elasticity continue to create rebounding space 115 years after its creator’s birth: so praise it we shall.
With ace cameramen, point-of-view becomes a more problematic concept, as when George O'Brien wanders glazed through F.W. Murnau’s swamp in Sunrise. There, the camera sometimes recedes from the hero’s advance, sometimes lets him pass and follows him, sometimes loses him altogether to rediscover him later. While Castle of Blood’s cliches would seem to be the thumpingly obvious point — a door’s creaking swing illuminates a wall bristling with harnesses and cartwheels… zoom in as a black kitten abandons its lair in a piece of spangly lacework… an organ wheezes as the hero’s sputtering candle casts the impossible shadow of itself on the crumbling masonry — those same hackneyed moments synthesize utterly unexpectedly into cinema pur.
As Georges Rivières gets lost inside his own master shot, little daubs of 1960s aesthetics miraculously harmonize with the 19th century vibe. Hairspray lingers throughout this legitimate evocation of monodrama, Romanticism’s stock theme, the solitary and roaming hero — think Schubert’s Winterreise or Caspar David Friedrich’s painting Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog.
It’s as if invisible tendrils were connecting Rivière’s body to Pallottini’s will.
The camera moves through and around apparent obstacles to our hero’s progress, seeming obstructions that justify the shot’s reason for existing. They make us conscious of the fact that we are spying on a man who thinks he’s alone, even if he fears he may not be. The dry ice fog, the wind machine, the spray-on cobwebs, the backlighting, and the reverberant footsteps all emerge from the same Gothic toy box (the one with the squeaky hinge), but Pallottini’s execution is exemplary, and the shamelessness total.
In The Virgin of Nuremberg (1963) AKA Horror Castle, again starring Georges Riviere, Antonio Margheriti's camera, again under the control of Riccardo Pallottini, prowls a thunderstormed mansion, first alone, then following Rossana Podestà in auburn wig and negligee, as she lipflaps "Max?" repeatedly, in response to obviously female moans from offscreen/a dubbing studio in Rome. "Max, is that you?" No, obviously not.
The dark and stormy night aesthetic is very on point. Podestà is freaked out by all of it, except, apparently, the torture chamber, complete with caged skeleton, which she wanders into on the ground floor of her medieval home. That's normal, we all have one of those. Margheriti structures the sequence as a series of languid tracking shots, interrupted by abrupt, quick stationary angles which jolts us closer to his leading lady as she gazes from the window (abrupt lightning!) or lights a candle (abrupt lambency!), to the stabs of Riz Ortolani's suspense score, which will, upon the discovery of a leaking iron maiden, segue absurdly but with dreamlike inevitability into a swooning sex-sax pop track for the opening titles — The Love Theme from Horror Castle.
And here, amidst the splendiferous cheese of Italian Horror, we enter the deepest metaphysics. Since Cabiria, Italian films have utilized the camera to explore space, show off the sets, and to bring the environment to dimensional life. In horror cinema, this becomes an atmospheric duty: the prowling lens suggests a roving POV dislocated from anyone onscreen. The American camera eye is a stalker; the Italian a bewitched cat that sees all.
Shot weeks after Castle of Blood but slipping through bureaucratic censorship more efficiently, The Virgin of Nuremberg reaches audiences first — in color so velvety that nigh-obsidian shadows emerge. An illusion perhaps, we nonetheless register Black & White form underlying that fully saturated color palette, that erotically charged excitement Italian cinematographers bring to their experiments with light.
by David Cairns and Daniel Riccuito