There are people like Senhor Jose everywhere, who fill their time, or what they believe to be their spare time, by collecting stamps, coins, medals, vases, postcards, matchboxes, books, clocks, sport shirts, autographs, stones, clay figurines, empty beverage cans, little angels, cacti, opera programmes, lighters, pens, owls, music boxes, bottles, bonsai trees, paintings, mugs, pipes, glass obelisks, ceramic ducks, old toys, carnival masks, and they probably do so out of something that we might call metaphysical angst, perhaps because they cannot bear the idea of chaos being the one ruler of the universe, which is why, using their limited powers and with no divine help, they attempt to impose some order on the world, and for a short while they manage it, but only as long as they are there to defend their collection, because when the day comes when it must be dispersed, and that day always comes, either with their death or when the collector grows weary, everything goes back to its beginnings, everything returns to chaos. [page 11]

That’s a brilliant critique of the “collector impulse” and how most of what is collected and passed off as “valuable” or “interesting” is really just more kipple. Collectors, Saramago points out, may delude themselves that they are creating a sense of order, as opposed to chaos, but what they are really doing is just creating organized kipple, and organized kipple is still just as kipply as disorganized or non-organized kipple. In other words, the byproducts of the collecting impulse are merely an arbitrarily “organized” manifestation of, in Technovelgy’s words quoted previously, “available resources transformed into objects that cannot be used for anything (kipple).”

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):