by Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
Pupi Avati’s The House with Laughing Windows (La Casa dalle finestre che ridono, 1976) does not offer much in the way of traditional giallo iconography, but what it lacks in readily identifiable motifs it makes up for in a near suffocating over-abundance of atmosphere. Perhaps even more than Argento’s famous animal trilogy (The Bird with Crystal Plumage, Four Flies on Grey Velvet and Cat O’ Nine Tails), The House with Laughing Windows hinges upon a process of defamiliarization taken to its most perverse extreme. While it is often associated most readily with Russian Formalism (particularly that of Viktor Shklovsky as described in his 1929 book Theory of Prose), in giallo (and I would argue, most other forms of horror-tinged paracinema) defamiliarization works less according to the formalist (or neoformalist) version, and closer to Carlo Ginzburg’s version, that involves not just ‘making things strange’, but leans more specifically towards a ‘riddling’ of reality. The titles of Argento’s animal trilogy make this explicit: the names of the films themselves function not so much as mysteries or enigmas as they do almost child-like riddles. Avati’s title works exactly the same way: “How can a house have laughing windows?”
The opening sequence of The House with Laughing Windows demonstrates how powerful even the most simple of visual “riddles” can be in this context. Sepia toned shots set to oddly dreamlike tinkling piano music show a series of bizarre shapes – what looks more like abstract paintings than anything else. It is only when a man screams that the riddle is “solved”: he is being tortured. The unusual, unfamiliar angles and shots—shown in dreamlike slow motion—construct images that jigsaw together an extreme vision of human suffering. It becomes clear that what we have been watching all along is knives piercing flesh, exposing organs. Rather than objectifying the trauma, or distancing the spectator from the events on screen, this “riddling” catches us in its grasp, unaware of what it is we are viewing until we are already complacent. Over this sequence—more Kenneth Anger than giallo auteurs Argento, Martino, Lenzi or Fulci—a mechanised male voice recites the following poem:
My colours
My colours, they run red hot in my veins
Soft, so soft
My colours are soft like the fall
Hot like fresh blood
The liquid flows down my arms
My colours
The yellow decay
My colours flow through my veins
My colours in my veins
Creating a brutal nobility
God, my colours will paint death clearly
Death, purity, death
Purification
Holding me at their mercy
My colours
Yellow, soft, dripping from their eyes
Purity
Purity of death
My colours.
As this last line is recited the camera pulls back and shows a young man, slashed and torn, hanging from his arms in front of a vaguely naturalistic landscape with a silhouette of a tree behind him. The image is, suddenly and inescapably, a tableaux vivant of the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian.
There is little need to emphasize just how important Saint Sebastian is to this film, but it is worth reiterating precisely how this image is introduced. Just as the Saint’s posthumous identity has spanned from the patron saint of lace makers to pestilence, from being a middle-aged (and somewhat haggard) soldier to a young, beautiful gay icon, his depiction in Avati’s introduction encompasses both the sacred and the profane, the archaic and the modern, the pure and the dangerous, and the abstracted and the real. What begins as tone and shape becomes suffering flesh, which in turn morphs into an instantly recognizable iconographic point of reference. It is within this tension that Avati both formally and thematically houses the film’s propelling dynamic. Inherent to defamiliarization or ‘riddling’ is, of course, a process of refamiliarization, where the strange is normalised, and the riddle answered. But in The House with Laughing Windows, with its heavy dependence upon art historical imagery, Avati shatters this two-step strategy into an infinite and unsolvable logic jam.
The story itself is far from complex. A young artist, Stefano (Lino Capolicchio) is hired by Solmi (Bob Tonelli), the dwarf mayor of an isolated village to restore an unfinished fresco in the local church of Saint Sebastian. Painted by a local artist, Bruno Legnani (Tonino Corazzari) who committed suicide before its completion, Solmi hopes the restored work will prove to be a tourist attraction to the small town. Lengani, he is told, “suffered from a dark soul” and was often called the “painter of agonies”. Stefano finds the village strange, and almost immediately begins receiving anonymous telephone calls demanding he leaves immediately, and does not touch the fresco. His friend Antonio (Giulio Pizzirani) warns him of strange goings-on, but is mysteriously killed before he can tell Stefano any details. Thrown out of his hotel, Stefano moves into the crumbling house of an elderly female paraplegic on the advice of the local priest (Eugene Walter). Beginning a relationship with the young schoolteacher Francesca (Francesca Marciano) who has also recently moved to the village, Stefano investigates Legnani’s history and discovers through the local drunk, Coppola (Gianni Cavina) that Lengani had two sisters. Equally as insane as their brother, they withheld money from him and he set himself on fire in front of them, although his body was never found. The sisters would murder and torture models in front of Legnani to paint, and Stefano believes the two women in the church’s fresco with Saint Sebastian are in fact Legnani’s sisters. Taken to a mass grave at Lengagni’s house (the stemming from the large smiling mouths painted on the outside windows), Coppola too shows up dead. Although having agreed with Francesca to leave the village, Stefano is too late and after she is raped by the young church hand Lidio (Pietro Brambilla) Stefano finds her body in the attic of the elderly paraplegic’s house stabbed and hanging from the ceiling in front of the same background as the opening sequence. Although the police find no evidence to support his claim, when he returns to this attic he finds the two cloaked sisters murdering Lidio the same way. The paraplegic woman is not paraplegic at all, and as one of the Legnani sisters, she explains the ritualistic power of this type of killing in relation to art and, showing Stefano Bruno’s burned corpse hidden in a vat of formaldehyde in a wardrobe, explains that the killing is an attempt to communicate with him. Although stabbed, Stefano manages to escape to the local church where it is revealed the male priest is in fact a woman, the other Legnani sister. The film ends as the two sisters laugh, and the sound of approaching police sirens is heard.
Both Adrian Luther Smith and Mikel Koven make much about the obvious snuff element of the film in regard to using ‘real’ death as Legnani’s primary material feature. Koven even goes as far as to suggest that “the timing of Avati’s film coincides with the appearance of Snuff in 1976, so the echoes may be intentional. By changing the artistic medium from filmmaking to painting (specifically fresco painting), Avati seems to be suggesting that regardless of the presumed contemporary nature of these snuff stories, they are—anachronistically—as old as Italy’s artistic traditions” (120). But while the more fashionable notion of ‘snuff’ certainly leaps to the attention of contemporary critics, to claim this is where the film’s primary thematic significance lays grossly neglects the very deliberate utilization of the Saint Sebastian figure. While Saint Sebastian does not hold the “key” to solving the sophisticated, riddled diegesis of The House with Laughing Windows, it does to some degree allow insight into precisely why this particular figure was so essential to Avati’s project. The first image of Saint Sebastian shown in the opening sequence (and later mirrored with the bodies of both Francesca and Lidio in the attic of the supposedly paraplegic Legnani sister) mimics a familiar pose.
Guido Reni, “St Sebastian”. Pinacoteca Capitolina (Rome). Oil on canvas. 128×98cm. (1615-6)
Early in the film, the fresco in the church maintains this similar (although not identical) basic composition:
But as Stefano’s restoration work continues, it is his uncovering of the two gorgon-like women at Sebastian’s side themselves that shows a significant deviation from historical representations of the Saint. Again, the basic compositional relations are hardly new – although not common, there are instances where Saint Sebastian is shown with the Holy Women (most often St Irene and her servant tending his wounds) at each side with him standing in the middle:
Bernardo Strozzi. “Saint Sebastian Tended by Saint Irene and Her Maid” (c. 1631–6). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Oil on canvas, 166.7×118.7cm
Tanzio da Varallo, “St Sebastian healed by St Irene and a slave” Museo de Belles Arts de Valencia (Spain). Oil on Canvas, 136×98.3cm. (1640-1650).
And it’s not only the Holy Women who have been placed on either side: as demonstrated in this 15th century German woodcut, the archers who inflicted Sebastian’s wounds have also shared a similar compositional position:
Hans Paur, “The Martyrdom of St Sebastian” Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, München (Germany). Woodcut, hand-coloured, 25.5×18.2cm (c. 1472).
It is worth noting that these compositions, while obviously not non-existent, were far from common. Seventeenth century images of Saint Irene and her servant tending to Sebastian in particular predominantly featured either pieta-like compositions, or at least featured Sebastian slumped, lying or hung up by one arm, with the women usually either hovering above, or both to one side. As is obvious by their malign and sadistic expressions, it is clear that Lengani’s sisters are positioned to effectively ‘trap’ the Sebastian figure within their torturous frame. By doing this, Legnani combines the otherwise morally and functionally opposed roles of the archers (who inflict Sebastian’s wounds) and the Holy Women (who nurse those wounds).
The merging of the Holy Women with the archers allows Avati to expose a fascinating yet unspoken assumption. In the Legnani painting, it is visible that the women are sticking the knives into Sebastian – their vicious expressions of glee, the way that the painting is shot, and the priest’s foreshadowing observation that “Saint Sebastian’s killers seem to be enjoying it”. This merging of the archers with the Holy Women allows the very way with which these types of religious scenes in paintings have been viewed: by defamiliarizing what is an otherwise assumed scene of Good Women nursing a Good Man, Avati permits the scene to be viewed in a far darker (and blasphemous) manner than Saint Sebastian’s legend has permitted. This can be demonstrated most immediately by looking at darker paintings of the scene by Ribera de Jusepe and Trophime Bigot:
Trophime Bigot, “St Sebastian healed by Irene”. Pinacoteca Vaticana (Roma, Italy).
Trophime Bigot, “St Sebastian cared for by Irene” Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux (France). Oil on canvas, 129.7 x 170cm. (c. 1620-30).
Jusepe de Ribera, “St Sebastian healed by St Irene”. Museo de Bellas Arts de Valencia (Spain). Oil on canvas, 208×157cm.
Jusepe de Ribera, “St Sebastian, St Irene and St Lucila”. The Hermitage (Russia). Oil on canvas, 156.5×188cm.
The question Legnani’s Saint Sebastian fresco raises in regard to works such as these is this: how do we know the Holy Women are taking the arrows out, rather than sticking them in? In these de Ribera and Bigot examples, the answer to that is solely a question of faith, dependent not upon the action within the painting itself, but rather on intertextual assumptions about the broader legends of Saint Sebastian. These paintings do not share the deranged cackles of the Legnani sisters, but each, taken on its own merit, could arguably be seen to make ambiguous the directional force (and therefore moral intent) of the women’s hands.
This is not to suggest, of course, that Saint Irene might have stuck arrows into Saint Sebastian. But it exposes the fact that even the most sacred and seemingly straightforward art can contain aspects of ambivalence. And it is this sense of ambivalence that is critical not only to The House with Laughing Windows, but as Mikel Koven has pointed out, to giallo as a broader genre. While there are two immediately striking images in the film that blur assumptions on gender, for instance—the self-portrait of Legnani with his head painted onto the body of a reclining nude woman, and the revelation in the film’s final scene that the male priest not only has breasts, but is one of Legnani’s sadistic sisters—but there are less memorable suggestions that equally drive this notion of gender fluidity throughout the film. For instance, both Francesca and Lidio’s bodies are shown hanging in the Legnani’s sisters attic mimicking the Saint Sebastian figure in the opening sequence – this figure turns from male to female back to male. The casting of Eugene Walter as the unnamed androgynous priest not only explicitly references his appearance as Mother Superior in Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits (1965), but for spectators that recognize him earlier in the film, his camp star image adds to the biological melange (Bill Goldstein at the New York Times once described Walter by saying “think Truman Capote without the fame”).
This blurring of gender does pay almost obligatory lip service to the contemporary notion of Saint Sebastian as a gay icon, but it is only one of many representational shards produced by Avati’s broader aesthetic blitzkrieg. Koven misses it completely when he states that the killers in this film “get…away with their crimes” (108), although as the she-priest and faux-paraplegic Legnani sisters cackle and mock the now-trapped Stefano at the church, his impending demise does seem certain. The final moments of the film, however, include the sound of arriving sirens and the sound of car doors slamming. That Solmi called the authorities while (like the rest of the village) simultaneously refusing Stefano refuge while he sought to escape the crazed sisters, this (combined with the general sense of compliance with which the town as a whole silently accepted the Legnani families blood-thirsty peculiarities) renders it impossible to tell if the authorities have arrived to help Stefano, or to help the Legnani sisters. This is exactly the same ambiguity—one at the intrinsic intersection between art history, spectacle and morality—that governs the depictions of Saint Sebastian in the film. That the arrows might be being pushed in rather than extracted is a terror of ambivalence equal to the thought that Stefano might be saved or doomed even further by the involvement of the authorities. It is this haziness that provides Avati’s final retort to the deceased Legnani’s opening poem: no matter how determined ones intent, death cannot be painted clearly.
