TINTO BRASSTHE WORKS OF TINTO BRASS
Avant-Garde, Underground, and Guerrilla Filmmaking—Continued
(Howl, 1968–1970)
MIDNIGHT SCREENING AT THE SILENT MOVIE THEATRE IN HOLLYWOOD ON FRIDAY, 10 APRIL 2009!!!!!!!
Click here to read a really nice promo piece
Artwork by Piero Iaia for what appears to be a proposed English-language release, which never happened
(From Dott. Lorenzo Codelli et alia’s Nerosubrass, p 68.)
DVD NOW AVAILABLE! THANKS TO CULT EPICS! The 1:1.85:1 transfer at 16×9 is not the best, but don’t blame Cult Epics! That was the best material available. Really. I’m not joking. So don’t gripe. Just enjoy it. If you really feel compelled to gripe, then help out with a proper restoration, and cross your fingers and hope that the master elements still exist somewhere.
If you have a really, really, really fast connection, click here to see a (distorted) clip.Are you in the mood for something a little out of the ordinary? Well then, this one’s for you! Edvard Munch’s painting Skriket (The Scream) and Alan Ginsberg’s poem Howl, along with the omnipresent countercultural movement, inspired Brass to make this movie, which stars Tina Aumont and the great Italian clown Luigi “Gigi” Proietti. Below is a bare-bones summary which contains spoilers that really aren’t spoilers because even if you know they’re coming they’ll still surprise you. The movie is brim-full of social and political commentary, but when you see it, you can figure all that out on your own. No description can possibly do this film justice!!!!! The synopsis is only here to give you the smallest hint of what you will witness. Watch the movie, and you’ll see what I mean! It’s a one-of-a-kind movie, and I still find it it the most exciting movie I’ve ever seen.
I’ve watched this movie countless times. Now, I can’t speak, read, write, or understand Italian. I need to spend just a few months in Italy to pick up the language. In the meantime, I can struggle a bit and get the gist. But not with this movie. Finally I got a translation of the dialogue. And now I see why I could never understand it before. Here’s an example. A priest is performing a wedding ceremony:
PRIEST: Can the bird of Paradise strike against the annihilated consumed tree of your sap without a parachute?
GROOM: Yes.
PRIEST: And can the tired turtle fly fast in the months of July on Wednesday?
BRIDE: Um.
PRIEST: Ergo I lengthen a box on tip-toe, figs and cloves of breath. Anise.And what did the lion tell Coso and Anita in the cemetery?
Stop. Don’t play the game of the cemetery too. Block the communication circuit with barbed wire. Is he there? Will he be there? When will he be back? Clean-cut and resolute. An obol to the obelisk, a somersault in the middle of the night, piercing a syringe in the nose. Two perfumed fingers in the anus to draw syntactic, semantic and orthographic eggs. Hey, what are you doing? Pulling my leg? Then you didn’t understand a damn thing. Stop or I’ll eat you.Well, I still feel stupid. But I don’t feel that stupid anymore.
SPOILERS: England, 1969. All the inhabitants are Italians except for one American who wears a barrel. Anita has been incarcerated for participating in an anti-war riot, so her bourgeois fiancé Berto bribes the police commissioner for her release. Berto immediately proposes that they set their wedding date for Sunday. At the ceremony, in a dump and with the officiating priest wearing a shrunken head on his necklace, Whatshisname (“Coso” in Italian) chances by and smiles at Anita. Before she can say “I do” she runs off with him and catches a London double-decker bus (driven by Tinto Brass) that drives out to the countryside. The passengers occupy the bus and set it aflame in time for the Keystone Kops to arrive. Anita and Whatshisname somehow escape from prison and hitch a ride with another incarnation of Berto and Anita to an ultra-mod Bosch-like hotel where Anita runs into another incarnation of herself as a guest. The next morning the hotel’s cowardly nightwatchman chases after them into a field, where they are all accosted by The Greatest Philosopher, attired in a loincloth and periwig, who invites them to his unbuilt house in a field where he offers them a freshly cooked man for lunch. Before they become the next guests’ meal, Anita and Whatshisname run off to catch a train. While Whatshisname threatens to eat Anita, a priest stabs a masturbating passenger, and Whatshisname, made up as a sad clown, tearfully muses on the bitterness of dreams and then tries to eat a corpse. Anita and Whatshisname jump off the train and end up in a battlefield, for England is being invaded by the Nazis, the Blackshirts, and the Vietnamese. Anita is assaulted by Berto’s troops, and Whatshisname meets the assassinated-but-resurrected Intellectual who pretends to direct him to her. In the midst of the battlefield, a piano player who speaks in sound effects promises Whatshisname that he can find Anita by singing. They are rounded up by a firing squad who somehow manage to miss Whatshisname. Anita finds him and together they locate the dictator, a wind-up midget wearing a Napoléon costume and a Hitler mustache who conducts his hymns from a foley studio, while the atrocity sequence from NEROSUBIANCO is projected on the screen behind him. They machine-gun him and Anita takes over the microphone, causing the resistance to gain the advantage. The war over, Anita and Whatshisname party with some hippies in a sewage tunnel, steal a motorboat that immediately explodes, and are caught in a fishnet by medieval minstrels who place them back on shore where, after hearing Michelangelo speak to them from a rock, they liberate a prison that’s run by Berto and a pig disguised as a lion. The prisoners worship Anita as a goddess but then unceremoniously dash away as soon as they find the exit door. Anita and Whatshisname converse with dead historical figures in a graveyard that Berto tends, and are scolded by a lion for disturbing the repose of the cemetery. In a field, decorated with motionless people and a trio who play invisible instruments, Whatshisname tells Anita to start over again. She steals a car and drives away. Anguished at the prospect of her future, she loses control of the car and dies. Whatshisname nonchalantly tells us that Anita was intelligent but crazy. He walks off into the distance to catch a bus.
Interesting that these lobby cards illustrate so many scenes that never made it to the final film.
I wonder if that footage still exists somewhere....Okay now, who wants to top that? Brass doesn’t want to leave his audiences feeling indifferent. Well, unless you’re a hopeless bore, this won’t leave you feeling indifferent, that’s for sure. The costumes (and the unexplained and impossible costume changes) are a wonder to behold. Much or most of the film was obviously improvised, written as it was being made. That helps. Many of the locations look nothing like England, and according to Cinema X (vol 1 no 4 [1969?]), in addition to England, the film was made “on location in Rome, Naples, Berlin, Paris, and on a nudists’ island.” Filming began at the end of September 1968 and wrapped by or before April 1969. The budget, as with Heart in His Mouth and NEROSUBIANCO, was close to zero. This was Brass’s first collaboration with the fabulous Fiorenzo Carpi, whose music is infectious, especially his upbeat theme song, “It’s an Evil World; It Won’t Tolerate Love” (“È un mondo cattivo non tolera l’amor”). L’urlo received its world première a year later at the Berlin Film Festival on Saturday, 27 June 1970.
Edvard Munch, Skriket
Hieronymous Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights
Yes, I know I’s an ignoramus because I don’t know who painted this. De Chirico maybe? What’s the title?
Whatshisname catches someone’s attention.
Escape.
Tinto Brass as the bus driver can take no more.
Remember those days?
The Keystone Kops come to the rescue.
Occupation.
Hitchhiking.
Berto is everyone.
Hotel regulations:
“We are in a free country and whoever pays can have whatever he wants — all in advance, please.”
Who is this? Bonifacio by any chance?
’Twould never be.
(Who is that actor? Giorgio Gruden maybe?)
Hovering over...
...Spike Hawkins’s Tree Army Poem:
Alert ruin!
They shout
from the trees
stupid bloody acorns.
That’s it. That’s the whole poem.Some of the hotel’s guests
The woman-and-swan motif would pop up again in Caligula but the humorless editors would cut it out.
Another motif that would pop up in later movies.
Taking dictation.
Tino Scotti as The Intellectual.
The hotel’s confessional
Guests in a hotel room.
And why not?
The gentle art...
...of underacting.
(That’s Tino Scotti again, this time as a security guard.)
The Greatest Philosopher.
Thanking Mother Nature.
Entering the home of The Greatest Philosopher...
...who prepares a meal.
Inside the philosopher’s home
How to rescue a deleted scene.
Who on earth is this actor?
Awakened from a dream.
A political discussion.
(Who is that actress?)
Encountering Diogenes, the American (Edoardo Florio)
Commentary.
Geloni = chilblains = swellings caused by exposure to cold (to say nothing of the decapitated head mounted onto the cello).
Realizing that something is amiss.
The Intellectual resurrected.
Line-up for the firing squad. Goes by so quickly you can hardly make out what’s happening: The musician plays a recorder and a member of the firing squad brings a chair for the little old lady.
At long last, they discover command headquarters...
...operated by awind-up doll .
The return of Bonifacio B?
I swear that’s Sady Rebbot. He also appeared earlier, as one of the threesome in bed at the surreal hotel, but we couldn’t see his face clearly and he was on screen only for the briefest moment. But even in bed he had his helmet on!
Take over.Anita ends the war. Who wants to convince me that Richard O’Brien never saw these stills even though they were published in England in 1969?
Party time.
They’re homeless, and their only property is a lunch box, so where do they get all the costume changes andmake-up and new hair styles?
Mondo cattivo!
Rescue by roving minstrels.
A place of expiation...
...and a place of Redemption!
Why can’t we dress like this at the office?
The Prison Warden and his lackey.Anita liberates the prison.
(Where on earth was this filmed?)NOTE ADDED ON FRIDAY, 24 NOVEMBER 2006: As he so often does, Marco Fornier answered my question. This is the prison on the island of Santo Stefano, off Ventotene Island, which you can see and read about at Ventotene & S.Stefano and at Wikipedia: Isola di Santo Stefano. Remember back in school when we had to learn about Jeremy Bentham and his new Utilitarian idea for prison construction, which he called the Panopticon? The Panopticon simply demonstrated to me that Bentham was out of his bloody mind. Interestingly, there was also another Panoptikon, an invention by Grey and Otway Latham, along with their father, Major Woodville Latham — which, of course, leads us into the story of the Latham Loop and the Motion Picture Patent Wars which were settled in 1908. Why am I interested in this stuff? And why did Americans back then have such unusual names?
Cemetery.
The tail end of an otherwise-deleted segment.The wedding that never happened.
A deleted sequence.“A ha!” I hear you scream at me triumphastically. “The frame captures above show that you’re lying, because they prove that there is a better copy of the movie than what we get from Cult Epics!!! So what do you have to say to that, Mister Know-It-All?” This is what I have to say. The above frame captures are from an Italian cablecast, which was letterboxed 4×3 and with a rather soft focus and pixelation. The broadcast was from some sort of professional videotape, not from a film element. The videotape ultimately derived from a film element that cannot now be located, and which was censored, at times quite severely. Nonetheless, I would like to find that film element. If you know where it is, please write to me. Actually, I would like to find the camera neg and the master audiotapes. If you have any idea at all where they might be hiding, give me a holler. Trims would be interesting too, because so much was shot never made it into the final movie.How could a movie like this miss? Simple—the Italian censors banned it. Brass could have compromised by cutting the film, but he stuck to his principles. By the time the censors cleared the film for release in 1974, the grooving hippie scene, which had inspired this film, had pretty much vanished, and so the movie died.
The Cry seems to have been planned at one time as the official English title, and then, as you can see above, a logo gave the title as Howl, but since the film was seemingly never released internationally, that hardly matters. Various journalists have referred to L’urlo as The Howl, The Shriek, The Screech, and The Scream. Take your pick.
NOTE: Luigi “Gigi” Proietti also worked on four more Tinto Brass projects: he appeared in Dropout, he sang two songs in La vacanza, he was to have starred in a never-made movie called Punch, and he also directed the Italian dubbing of Salon Kitty. So I guess they’re friends.
After you see this movie you’ll be a Gigi Proietti fan. So here are some web sites:
Gigi Proietti Home Page
Gigi Proietti in The Full Monty
Katia Ippaso, “Intervista a Gigi Proietti”
