Saturday 26 September 2009

La signora in giallo

Any non-Italians care to guess which US TV series the title 'La signora in giallo' (the lady/woman in yellow/giallo refers to)?

4 comments:

OcculusOrbus said...

I believe it's the Italian equivalent of 'Muder She Wrote', with a pun on being 'in giallo' as she would be the author of giallo books.

K H Brown said...

Correct. You win the no prize :-)

Abuelo Igor said...

OcculusOrbus beat me to the answer, which I learned while I was studying Italian and which has always been my main piece of evidence to prove that, to us non-Italians, the term "giallo" doesn't have the same kind of connotations as to the natives, who see it as a sort of all-purpose grab-bag into which fit all the variations of the whodunit, the suspense thriller and the film noir.

Which leads to the next question: How exactly do the Italians call the Bava-Argento-Martino-Fulci kind of thing?

K H Brown said...

Well, as I understand it, it depends.

Giallo film does not equate with giallo literature, which seems wider in its frame of reference. So, giallo film is a subset of giallo literature, referring to any kind of detective / mystery / thriller narrative

But the Italian posters for Nonhosonno / Sleepless promote it as the new thriller from Dario Argento. Go figure...