Continuity and Rupture Revisited

Lucio Fulci’s The Beyond

Just as there are certain verbal expressions of which it is right to say ‘I know what this means but I can’t say what it means’, so there are certain films of which something similar may also be properly said.

There comes a point in the appreciation of such a film at which one finds oneself almost forced to say: ‘This is what I see. Reasons, explanations, interpretations, have come to an end’.Michael Grant, ‘Fulci’s Wasteland: Cinema, Horror and the Abomination of Hell’, Film Studies (Issue 5, Winter 2004), p. 30.

‘This is what I see. Reasons, explanations, interpretations, have come to an end’.

In Hollywood cinema, a specific

sort of narrative causality operates

as the dominant, making temporal

and spatial systems vehicles for it [...]

Here in brief is the premise of Hollywood story construction:

causality, consequence, psychological motivations, the

drive towards overcoming obstacles and achieving goals.

David Bordwell, 'Story causality and motivation’, in David Bordwell, Kristin Thompson and Janet Staiger, The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style & Mode of Production to 1960 (London, Routledge, 1985), pp. 12-13

Causality

Consequence

Psychological motivations

overcoming obstacles and achieving goals

We shall consider a narrative to be a chain of events in a cause-effect relationship occurring in time and space.David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction 4th Edition (New York, McGraw-Hill, 1993), p. 65

Narration sustains a movie's plausible performance by arranging plots according to a principle of cause and effect, with a minimum of redundancy and a maximum of coherence. The operation of causality enjoys a privileged place in most aesthetic accounts of Hollywood cinema.Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema (Blackwell, 2003) p. 463

‘a minimum of

redundancy and a

maximum of coherence’.

Redundancy – NO

Coherence - YES

Patricia MacCormack suggests that describing Fulci’s horror films is a paradoxical thing to do.

This is because the act of describing them

may well create the impression that they are ‘poverty stricken

within the constraints of signification of

images, narrative and their capacity to be

viewed as a readerly text’.

Instead, MacCormack suggests that we need to shift our focus from why or what the images mean to how they

affect.

For MacCormack, this involves inverting

our entire understanding of the way in which cinema works.

Things that require inverting:

Characters as integral to plot

Repulsion as unpleasurable

Narrative as the context for action

A spatio-temporal normality

Patricia MacCormack, ‘Lucio Fulci’, www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors

Conclusions

Supernatural themes and weird logic collide with flesh-ripping gore to breathtaking effect. Bleak and incessant

horrors are transformed into bloody poetry.

Bodily disintegration, nightmare images of

impossible attacks on the integrity of the human face, and the morbid menacing of

child characters – all this could have been unbearably

grim [...]

[...] and yet the whispers of a strange sadness, captured through the loving camera technique, and a decayed,

mottled splendour in the art design, designate these films

as more than just a gross endurance test.

Stephen Thrower, Beyond Terror: Films of Lucio Fulci (Guildford, FAB Press, 1999), p.12.

The pleasure of Fulci’s gothic films stems from two key factors – their visual style and the way in which they foreground violence. They propose a highly unusual set of

relations to more conventional film practice. Whether this experience of

difference is exhilarating or frustrating depends on how fixed the viewer is on the rites and manners of

dominant cinema.Thrower, p. 152.