All the colours of the dark: genre, modernity and the Italian giallo film

This project uses the Italian giallo film to investigate and reflect upon the complexity of film genre as a system. Produced principally in Italy between 1960 and 1985, the giallo’s status as a culturally valuable artefact has, since this time, been ignored, contested and reviewed. This diachronic approach to the study of the historically marginalised genre seeks to uncover the multiple sites of meaning-production that exist within and around giallo films, foregrounding particularly the mechanics of film genre and the development of new audiences as sites of critical shifting. The project argues that under sustained investigation, these sites begin to function as apertures through which the giallo genre begins to express a complex and unsettling critique of the conditions of late-modernity. By asking what it has meant, historically, to consider a group of films as a genre, the study positions the giallo film as a perpetual irritant to the project of genre criticism as a classificatory exercise. It also considers the problems inherent in the recent critical trend which classifies the films as filone (vein, tradition or formula), thereby eliding the difficulty of coming to terms with genre as a system. Instead, this project argues for a new conceptualisation of film genre that, based on the mechanics of the kaleidoscope, is able to account for both difference and repetition, while continuing to function as an active producer of meaning. It also asks how the giallo genre’s more recent audiences have, via the unprecedented availability of this material through online networks and new technologies, interacted with this system to participate in meaning-making processes. Having undertaken these critical shifts, the giallo emerges as a genre fundamentally concerned with the conditions of late-modernity. This preoccupation is articulated across and through the many layers of the genre and its films, from their narratives of detection to their highly stylised use of film form. This approach to the giallo as a late-modern text draws on the critical theory of both Walter Benjamin and Siegfried Kracauer and their writing on the detective novel. Specifically, it considers the way city space is rendered in the giallo film in light of the relentless progress of modernity, as well as the way in which this space facilitates urban experiences and ways of looking which build upon and extend those described by Benjamin and Kracauer. Finally, the thesis argues that the giallo genre is a body of films that, using the strategies of modernist cinema, conjure the irreparably fragmented and ambiguous state of the world on the eve of modernity’s collapse.