[ecrea] “The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh” and the giallo: an International Film Conference

“The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh” and the giallo: an International Film
Conference

Hosted by the Austrian Historical Institute and
Sheffield Hallam University’s Department of Humanities
in cooperation with Cineteca Nazionale


The giallo is a cinema of leather gloves and razors, of inappropriate
pathos, which dignifies murder as an artistic act. It is a guilty pleasure
whose concise mannerism represents a unique phenomenon within the history
of European film. Mario Bava who conceived the formula with “The Evil Eye”
(1963) provided its first masterpiece with “Blood and Black Lace” (1964)
to inspire very heterogeneous successors. Dario Argento, Massimo
Dallamano, Luciano Ercoli, Lucio Fulci, Umberto Lenzi and, especially,
Sergio Martino are the most influential but only a few of all the
directors producing perhaps more than 200 gialli in the 1970s. Through the
DVD boom, a new generation of cinephiles has gained access to the popular
film cycle, which has been enthusiastically embraced. The conference,
whose aim is to explore the genre beyond Bava’s and Argento’s well-studied
contributions, takes Sergio Martino’s “The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh”
(1971) as a focal point, but proposals on other films are just as welcome.

Likely topics include:
•	Cinematic characteristics of the film cycle
•	Configurations of the set piece
•	The significance of film music (of, e. g., Bruno Nicolai, Stelvio
        Cipriani or Ennio Morricone)
•	The giallo as a transnational phenomenon
•	Production/distribution/exhibition/reception contexts
•	The construction of authorship
•	Generic hybridity/the giallo’s relation to coeval popular film cycles
•	Cross-media appropriations
•	Studies of specific films or remakes
•	Archival sources stemming from giallo productions

Of course, the topics above are to be understood merely as suggestions and
not as constraints.

We are delighted to announce Professor Richard Dyer (King’s College
London) as our distinguished keynote speaker.

Venue: Österreichisches Historisches Institut, Viale Bruno Buozzi 111–113,
I-00197 Roma

Date: June 8–9, 2015

Deadline for submission: For presentations (max. 20 minutes) in English,
please submit a short abstract (title, topic, resources) and a current CV
by February 20, 2015. Notification by the end of February.

Contact: Andreas Ehrenreich, Sheffield Hallam University,
(andreas.ehrenreich /at/ student.shu.ac.uk)

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