Tuesday 10 April 2007

Comizi d'amore / Love Meetings

Although this blog is nominally about the giallo film and Dario Argento, I think it is important to maintain a sense of perspective and try to watch a variety of cinema. You can never tell when something is going to prove relevant, or provide some new insight or idea.

This 1965 documentary from Pier Paolo Pasolini is a case in point. In it the director goes round Italy, microphone in hand, conducting vox populi interviews in which he asks ordinary Italians for their views on such topics as divorce, homosexuality and the whether the closure of brothels via the 1958 Merlin Law was a good or bad thing.

As such, it provides a fascinating insight into the kind of discourses around modernity that Mikel Koven argues - I think correctly - that we see in gialli five or ten years later. Putting it another way, I think anyone who enjoys – say – the debates between Marc Daly and Gianna Brezzi in Deep Red as much as the set-pieces would get a lot of out this.

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