A typical Mondadori giallo cover.

Giallo is the Italian equivalent of pulp fiction + film noir, though, being Italian, sexier. And more lurid. Here’s how Wikipedia defines it:

Giallo (plural gialli) is an Italian 20th century genre of literature and film, which in Italian indicates crime fiction and mystery. In the English language, however, it is used in a broader meaning that is closer to the French fantastique genre, including elements of horror fiction and eroticism. The word giallo is Italian for “yellow” (see Wiktionary: giallo) and stems from the origin of the genre as a series of cheap paperback novels with trademark yellow covers.

Giallo Fever, written by Edinburgh-based “PhD student and self-employed computer guy” Keith Brown, is a great blog devoted to all things Giallo. I especially appreciate Mr. Brown’s in-depth analysis, accompanied by a fantastic assortment of screen shots, of many very obscure films that I and probably most people in the United States have never heard of. As an example, check out Mr. Brown’s post about Paranoia (released in the U.S. as A Quiet Place to Kill), a 1970 film by director Umberto Lenzi, the final part of a trilogy that includes Orgasmo (1969) and Così dolce… così perversa (1969). Here is a sample of Mr. Brown’s analysis that sets-up a series of film stills that I have assembled below into a grid (click to enlarge):

Up-tight American women meet “typical European male, selfish, amoral and corrupt,” but finds him irresistible nonetheless; blocks of red recur throughout Lenzi’s compositions, with colour being used in an expressive manner.

And speaking of yellow/giallo, here are six stills from Una sull’altra (1969), by director Lucio Fulci (In the U.S., One on Top of the Other) — the top three use the color giallo for expressive purposes, and the bottom beautifully demonstrating “time-capsule eroticism, tease and sleaze from 1969″ (click to enlarge):

Michaux’s drug investigations also landed him the job of making his only film, Images du monde visionnaire, in 1964 for the drug company Sandoz, the company that first synthesized LSD.

Henri Michaux, Images du monde visionnaire, 1964. Click to enlarge.

You can view a video of the 38 minute film in its entirety at UBUWEB, which found the film via the blog Ombres Blanches, which tells the story of how this amazing and forgotten film came into being:

It’s not an experimental but an educational film which was produced in 1963 by the film department of Swiss pharmaceutical company Sandoz (best known for synthesizing LSD in 1938) in order to demonstrate the hallucinogenic effects of mescaline and hashish. Still it shares many traits with some of the more interesting efforts in avant-garde film making of its time. Maybe the most remarkable about it is that it is the only venture in film of notable French writer and painter Henri Michaux who wrote several accounts of his experiments with drugs. In charge with the filmic translation of Michaux’ prescriptions was director Eric Duvivier (a nephew of Julien Duvivier) whose other films include an adaptation of Max Ernst’s collage novel La femme 100 têtes.

You can read more about Images du monde visionnaire at each of these sites, and see some film stills. I went through the film and assembled the above composite of 30 images that especially struck me and evoke the flavor of this film – click on it for a larger version. It’s a beautiful film.