Dir. Giulio Questi
France-Italy
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| From http://cdn103.iofferphoto.com/img/item/158/875/995/JwfxDJRzD6uG53n.jpg |
The line between the lurid and
avant-garde blurs with Italian genre films. Peter
Strickland’s Berberian Sound Studio
(2012) showed this, the film, for an improvised double bill, that I watched
before Death Laid An Egg for a night’s
viewing, a fitting signpost before the discordance of this one. Giulio Questi has an incredibly slight filmography,
really only consisting of this, the infamous Django Kill! If You Live...Shoot! (1967) and experimental shorts
that he has been making more recently at his own home, all of which I need to
get around to. Death Laid An Egg
however is a film that I have been wanting to see for years since I first heard
about it from Mondo Movie, one of
the first (and still one of the best) cult film podcasts in existence. The title
sequence of Questi’s film, of chicken
eggs being ovulated and chicken foetuses set to an abstract noise score,
instantly sets up how confrontational and divisive it will be. Only a few will
like it, but it lived up to its reputation for the bizarre fully.
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| From http://b.vimeocdn.com/ts/422/176/422176842_640.jpg |
Death Laid An Egg is not what you would view as a typical giallo,
which became more popular during the seventies, more closer to a politically layer
story of greed and deceit...that just happens to be set in the poultry
industry. Jean-Louis Trintignant, a
face for cinema if any on the silver screen, is the husband of a rich woman (Gino Lollobrigida) who owns a chicken
farm, a man with a peculiar sexual perversity. His wife Anna becomes suspicious
of him while her cousin Gabrielle (the blonde, waif-like beauty Ewa Aulin) may be far less innocent then
she acts to be. Eventually the strands connect together by the film’s end, but Questi’s film, edited and co-written by Franco Arcalli, is clearly designed to wrong
foot the viewer from the beginning, to unsettle and attack them. I have heard
it being compared to Jean-Luc Godard’s
Week End (1967), and it is not close
to that film in tone, but is just as abrasive. You are kept back from the
characters, by their cold personalities or questionable attitudes, and the
reality of the film is, a critique capitalist Italy of the time in an absurdist
genre movie, is that literally, as some illustrations show, the chickens seen
crammed in Anna’s mechanised battery farm are us. The human characters are
victims of their vices or trapped in their repetitious lives. The constant
clucking and shifting head movements of trapped chickens is no different from Trintignant’s awkward body language as
he goes from place to place. That the film goes as far as having mutant chickens
– a plot point I will not go any further with to not spoil – emphasises this
idea in an intentionally ridiculous way. With the tone of an episode of the
British series Brasseye (1997),
which had a similar idea as a joke in one episode, the weirdness of this
sequence adds to the coldness of the business, willing to break moral
boundaries, as well as potentially showing what the people could become if they
let themselves stay in their predicaments.
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| From http://gialloscore.com/img/films/43/grab1.jpg |
With a cold, distant look, the
film is not accessible, but is striking. Utterly strange, its political message
seems more noticeable. The atonal noises of the score by Bruno Maderna, percussion going on its own new rhythms and trying
to harm the listener on purpose, chips away at conventionality while the
editing breaks time structure so that numerous periods and moments can exist
within the same minute of each other. You will be baffled by it, maybe laugh at
the mutant chickens, but you realise Death
Laid An Egg is a genre film being intentionally strange for impact, its
world of industry and the middle class extravagance completely peculiar and off
to be trustable or to be populated by anyone vaguely human except the skittish Trintignant trying to understand what is
going on around him. It is an art film with a capital A but its pretensions
make it the stronger and more a true cult film than if you were expected the usual
blood and nudity. It’s something the Surrealist movement would have praised if
it wasn’t only made in the Sixties after them.
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| From http://1.bp.blogspot.com/__ZC6F3SCITU/TQvXSEJzbAI/ AAAAAAAAEW0/H8UAaZnyE6M/s1600/DLE%2BEwa%2B%2526%2BGina%2Bin %2Bthe%2Bchicken%2Bfactory.bmp |
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