by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
In 1971, a waiter plucked Johannes Vermeer’s classic of the Dutch Baroque period, The Love Letter (1669-70) right off the walls of the Rijksmuseum in one of the most notorious art thefts of the decade. The story goes he took it home, rolled it up and shoved it under his bed. While the painting was eventually restored to its rightful owner, this surprise sojourn into the world of suitcases and mouse droppings caused near irreversible damage to one of the Netherland’s most prized and canonical artworks.
On first glance, Vermeer’s work lacks the heavy metal doom of Caravaggio or the sensory dizziness of Peter Paul Rubens, painters who would perhaps more immediately share a sensibility – aesthetically and thematically – with the films of Lucio Fulci. Vermeer is altogether too domestic, too ordinary, too provincial, too twee. Fulci, on the other hand, is best known for epic, explicitly gruesome horror films and giallo. At his horror best, Fulci produced some of the more fascinating and loved genre films in both Italy and the world, notably E tu vivrai nel terrore – L’aldilà (The Beyond, 1981), Zombie (1979) and Paura nella città dei morti viventi (City of the Living Dead, 1980). Despite this, there is still a vague attitude that surrounds Fulci as a poor-mans-Argento, an overzealous, bumbling second-in-command who sometimes just happened to fluke a remarkable film.
This is, of course, simply untrue. If one can extract oneself even momentarily from the starry-eyed cult of Argento, Fulci’s work differs substantially and, lets face it, both directors are as guilty of producing duds as the other (Il Cartaio, I’m talking to you). If there can be one distinct formal feature that separates them, it would be this: light is to Fulci what colour is to Argento. And it is precisely this point that marks the first intersection between Fulci and Vermeer – in their respective mediums, both artists relied on light to create their unique visions.
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Vermeer’s The Love Letter is much, much more than just a cute reference in the unfolding narrative of Fulci’s giallo-supernatural hybrid Sette Note in Nero (Seven Notes in Black, 1977). Much critical attention to Vermeer’s work by art historians has focused upon his signature utilisation of “paintings within paintings” – it is common for paintings to appear on the walls of the scenes he is depicting, and those mini, diegetically-contained paintings themselves provide “clues” as to the broader themes of the piece as a whole. In The Love Letter, for instance, it is the two paintings in the background that provide the main indication that the letter received by the woman in yellow is, in fact, a love letter. This frame-within-a-frame feature of Vermeer’s work is pivotal to Sette Note in Nero, both aesthetically and thematically, and is emphasised by the privileged inclusion of Vermeer’s painting itself.
Outside of the stunning Una sull’altra (Perversion Story, or One on Top of the Other, 1969) and the flawless Una Lucertola con la pelle di donna (A Woman in a Lizard’s Skin, 1971) (two of the most interesting – and most famous – giallos ever made), Fulci’s giallos on the whole are defined even more so than other directors of the genre by hyperactively detailed vignettes, strung together with little more than a flagrant disregard for coherent narrative. But on the whole, despite being such well-known genre staples, there is a distinct lack of consistency in Fulci’s giallo compared to those of Umberto Lenzi, Sergio Martino or (dare I say it) Argento himself. Murderock – uccide a passo di danza (Murder Rock, or Slashdance, 1984) holds little allure outside of its spectacular and novel engagement with its own era, Non si sevizia un paperino (Don’t Torture a Duckling, 1972) seems stylistically (let alone narratively) disengaged, and outside of some of the best gore in his entire filmography, Lo Squartaroe di New York (New York Ripper, 1982) feels like little more than an exercise in self-congratulation.
Sette Note in Nero is a relatively simple giallo, and despite the supernatural elements, there is nothing spooky or scary enough about these elements to dislocate the film from its firm giallo foundations. The film starts as a woman drives through Dover to a cliff, where she commits suicide by flinging herself over the edge. In Florence, her young daughter Virginia has a psychic vision and “sees” the death occur. These opening moments place us firmly in Fulciville – the lingering attention devoted to the collapsing skull of the falling woman allows no room for doubt as to why we are here:
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But despite this viscerally bombastic opening, the film is surprisingly low-key in its depictions of violence and (gasp) sexuality, with explicit displays of opened bodies kept to an uncharacteristic minimum. Cutting to a grown-up Virginia (played by Jennifer O’Neill of Scanners fame and, more recently, her vocal pro-life activism), it is she now who drives, smiling, happy and clearly rich as she takes her husband Francesco (Gianni Garko) to the airport. With a soundtrack gooey enough to make a Japanese bubblegum pop band overdose wretch, Virginia is a picture of wealth: it’s all jodhpurs, furs, pot-o-gloss eyeshadow and fedoras in what appears to be no less than a picture-perfect, trouble free life. As she drives away, the film wastes no time as it launches immediately into its key enigma. Virginia has another psychic vision, and this becomes the riddle that the film aims to solve. It’s a pretty straightforward method, and not that much different structurally from Ringu (Hideo Nakata, 1998), Spellbound (Alfred Hitchcock, 1945) or a multitude of other examples. Step 1: Provide incomprehensible sequence (dream, video, psychic vision). Step 2: Make sense of it. Virginia’s mystery montage consists of a shot of a broken mirror, a shot of a room with a red lamp, flashes of red light on a black screen, a limping man, a cigarette, a dead woman’s bleeding face, a magazine cover, a shot of a black and white reproduction of Vermeer’s The Love Letter, and a first-person shot of a brick wall being constructed. The final component is aural, appearing over a black screen: the jingly, haunting seven notes of the films title.
From here, the narrative trajectory from beginning to end is clear. As each element of the psychic vision is explained, the story moves along, snakes and ladders like, to its next stage. Shaken after he initial vision (and peevish at the dismissive response of her parapsychologist ex-lover, Luca – Marc Porel, who was also in Don’t Torture a Duckling), Virginia visits one of her husbands apparently many mansions to renovate it “as a surprise”. Entering a room, she is struck immediately: it is the same room, with the same red lamp, as her vision. Compelled, she decides to dig into the wall, and discovers a skeleton:
When Francesco is arrested for the murder of this young woman (an ex-lover of his), Virginia’s investigation begins in earnest, despite Francesco’s often-violent dismissal of her psychic abilities. Assisted by Luca and his gorgeous assistant, Bruna (Jenny Tamburi, who was just as memorable in Martino’s 1975 film Suspected Death of a Minor), begin to unravel the past. Led to an art gallery, it is here where the film takes a radical shift in mise en scene as Luca and Virginia are suddenly reduced from key players to flat black silhouettes:
It is only moments before the sight of the Vermeer painting strikes Virginia down. The camera lingers so unnecessarily long on the title plate of the painting that it becomes apparent it is not unnecessary at all: Fulci goes to great lengths to make sure we know what this painting is and who this painting is by. To prove the point, the camera pans up and is intercut between the “original” hanging in the gallery, and Virginia’s memory of it from her vision:
The discovery of the Vermeer leads them to the last of the film’s key players, Emilio Rospini (Gabriele Ferzetti), one of the policemen involved when the Vermeer painting was stolen years earlier (note here the synchronicity between the diegetic world of the film and the extratextual realities of this particular paintings history). As the man with the limp from her vision, Virginia is convinced Rospini is involved with the murder of the girl and Francesco’s arrest, and lies her way into his house past his wife to confront him. As she awaits his arrival, Fulci carefully restages in three separate shots Vermeer’s own “picture within a picture” structure:
The film barrels along at a cracking pace, until Luca realises that Virginia’s visions may not be a flashback to the past at all, but a prediction of the future. Having proven her husband innocent of the girl’s murder, Virginia should theoretically relax, but the opposite tellingly occurs: she becomes even more determined and frantic to discover the truth behind her vision, suggesting that whatever had lay behind her previous motivation to liberate her husband was, by now at least, far from her primary concern. The discovery of the body of an old woman who had left a message on her answering machine regarding the promise of clues to the riddle corroborates again with another element of her initial vision, confirming Luca’s theory that it was in fact a premonition rather than a memory. Hastily grabbing “the clue” in question (an envelope, its hiding place also divulged to Virginia through her vision), she is chased into an old church in one of the most perfectly executed sequences in all giallodom:
With such a satisfyingly taut climactic chase scene, it seems only necessary to conclude with the perfunctory dénouement. Virginia arrives back to the mansion and awaits the return of Francesco. She takes the letter but, not reading it, places it on a sideboard. As Francesco approaches, he walks with a limp. having hurt his ankle, and Virginia realises that was he, not Rospini, from her vision. Seeing the letter, Francesco assumes Virginia has learned the whole story and, for our benefit, Rospini recounts from a hospital bed the truth that Virginia had sought. Francesco, Rospini and the young girl were in cahoots in the theft of the Vermeer painting, and Francesco had murdered the girl to keep the spoils, telling Rospini she had in fact escaped with the valuable art. Realising Virginia is now a dangerous witness, Francesco bops her on the head and places her in the empty wall cavity, and begins to brick it up: in a bitter twist, this is the image that she had seen in her vision.
By the time Luca and the police arrive, Francesco has removed all traces of Virginia who is by this time buried beneath the wall, falling in and out of consciousness. Luca questions the cocky Francesco, but the police become increasingly disinterested until all men decide to leave. It is only here, in its final moments, that Sette Note in Nero shifts from colour-by-numbers giallo to something far more important. A large dresser stands at the wall in front of where Virginia has been buried alive – we do not see her again, and we do not know whether she is alive or dead. Just as Luca is about to leave the room, the alarm to Virginia’s watch – the “seven notes” of the title, the same that featured so notably in the church chase sequence with Rospini, goes off.
The formal construction of these final moments is far more brutal in its ambivalence than it ever could be by showing the dying or dead body of Virginia. Luca approaches the dresser, but despite his position as the rescuer in the scene thus far, this action is instead depicted with so much melodramatic foreboding as to make a German Expressionist blush:
There has previously been little evidence to suggest that Luca is anything less than an ally – a little biased towards Virginia, perhaps, considering their implied romantic past and his consequent dislike of Francesco, but certainly nothing warranting the vicious condemnation of this shot. The camera follows the trajectory of the approaching shadow until the final shot of the film is reached and, in case you dared to miss the savageness of the past moments, ends with this image as the credits begin to roll over the sound of Virginia’s alarm:
Why is this one final image so important? Take another look at Vermeer’s The Love Letter, paying particular note to its composition:
The semantics of this visual match cannot be underappreciated. In effect, Fulci has “cut out” the middle ‘action’ section of the frame. He has removed Virginia, just as the lines of Vermeer’s paintings suggest that centre third of his paintings may be equally detached, as it hovers in a strange feat of perception both behind and above its frame. In this way, the two paintings behind the couple in Vermeer’s work are not the only internal fractures. The painting as a whole functions as a kind of triptych. Not only has Fulci removed this central “panel”, but he has removed all decorative traces from the already less ornate side blocks: there are no curtains, there are no maps. There is just a block of brown, and a block of black. The violence inherent in this reduction – a reduction at the expense not only of Virginia herself, but in many ways the narrative as a whole as it was so intrinsically linked to her perspective – for me commits an act of aesthetic subversion akin to that which can be measured by the difference in approach between Vermeer and the American abstract expressionist, Mark Rothko:
Flip Black on Grey (1969/70) on its side, and we can see precisely the jump that Fulci made at the end of Sette Note in Nero. There are exactly three hundred years between Vermeer’s The Love Letter and Rothko’sBlack on Grey, and Fulci – in some crystalline stroke of manic formal genius – demonstrated the pure force of that leap in 20 seconds of languageless film. Argento came close to completely crashing the framework of representation through his art historical engagement with the Italian renaissance painting in The Stendhal Syndrome (1996), but while doubtlessly his most unrecognized master achievement, it simply does not come close to the eloquence, simplicity and unmitigated power of Fulci’s Sette Note in Nero.
