CITTA VIOLENTA

Sometime in 1969, after a semi-successful period of script hackery and genre heroism, Lucio Fulci began to film a serious period drama. At this moment, his movies and his prospects were slowly improving; Italian cinema was at its commercial peak and Fulci's budgets were growing in line with his audience. His personal life, however, was falling apart, as it would do over and over again until his lonely death in 1996. Fulci was a pessimistic, dyspeptic character, a tortured Catholic whose best films were fuelled by his hatred of the Church; this drama, the tragedy of Beatrice Cenci, as previously rewritten by his hero Antonin Artuad, would be one such film.

Beatrice Cenci took an axe taken to Renaissance Rome and Papal sanctity, prompting walkouts and violence in cinemas during first screenings as well as censure by the Vatican. More than just a punchy and poignant historical drama, then, the film was an assault on a system of order and thought that was still, in the late Sixties, rotting the base of Italian society. In this sense, and in this context, the film fully justified and deserved the hostility it aroused -- a fact Fulci was surely proud of.

He certainly pulled no punches: Cenci is a rancorous, physically violent film, seething beneath decorous finery. The sets and costumes are lush and expensive and Erico Menczer's cinematography subtle and painterly -- but the violence, when it comes, is harsh, graphic, undramatic, an awful routine of institutional torture. In his other anti-Catholic masterpiece of the period, Don’t Torture a Duckling, the rural south is clogged with religious dogma, vice and prejudice: locals are moral hypocrites and prone to irrational mob violence, while city slickers and clergy are perverse imports, sexual and emotional predators. But in Cenci's 16th Century world, violence and depravity are the exclusive preserve of the aristocracy and clergy; the masses are at their mercy, oppressed on all fronts by greed and extortion and the random physical and moral violations of the Church. In this sense, Beatrice’s impulse and sacrifice is cathartic and redemptive. After her death, she is lauded and idolised by an adoring public who lay fresh flowers at her tomb daily: the young girl who struck back at cruelty and turned the logic of authority back on itself is, finally, martyred.

So this is Fulci's world, alright -- a domain of power, sexuality and violence. But within these early films, unlike later visual assaults such as The Beyond and New York Ripper, a human heart is pounding hard. Fulci’s Beatrice is not symbolic – emphatically not Shelley's Romantic sypher or Artaud's abstract repository or the idol she became in Italy. At the required moment she is as hard and cynical as her father; as manipulative and scheming as is necessary to succeed at murder. She lets her vassal and lover (Thomas Milian’s Olimpio) die on the rack to preserve her innocence but, later on, holds firm against her own torturers as the other Cencis succumb to the screws and branding irons. Fulci’s young actress, Adrienne La Russa, plays out these contradictions well: toothy and gauche when needed, but tough and blank as granite at the very end. La Russa also plays another Fulci trick, or trope, of this pre-Zombi period: a proximity of tenderness and brutality. (For a man who famously despised actors, this is as close as he ever got to thespian-orientated direction. He must have been pleased with her performance.)

Don Francesco Cenci (played with flamboyant menace by the French stage actor, Georges Wilson) is the epitome of patriarchal evil in this production. Nearly always flanked by a pack of rabid dogs, a key visual theme in Fulci’s early films, he abuses his family and terrorises his tenants. His dogs are not wild dogs, but trained dogs let loose on the vulnerable and victimised -- a representation and facilitation of human cruelty. His handsome 1966 Western Massacre Time opens with a pack of hounds chasing down an anonymous innocent and tearing him to pieces, a remorseless and explosive moment. The dogs belong to the son of a local landowner, a demented sadist who wields a long white whip whenever he is on screen. In Duckling, the unfortunate gypsy witch La Magiara is chased through thick forest by police dogs, as the mistaken suspect of a series of gruesome child murders. This scene crystallises her world of persecution, hounded by state and religious officials, gangs of children and male vigilantes. (Also, think of the vivisected dogs in Lizard in a Woman’s Skin, strung up in a laboratory, their little hearts still pumping blood into tubes; a different expression, or example, of human cruelty.)

In Cenci, the dogs are Don Francesco’s own demons, his own tools. At one moment, they are an instrument of arbitrary, violent justice, ripping apart an unfortunate tenant in raw, gory detail. At another moment, they express his own unnatural, animal depths: on the evening that he is celebrating the death of two of his sons (“two less mouths to feed!”), as he corners his defiant daughter in order to rape her, the hounds start to snarl and howl, in the courtyard and inside his skull. Organised cruelty, the irrational exercise of human power, and the perverse and violent impulse this engenders: the dogs impart this, and are part of it.

It is ironic – or is it indicative? – that the director of New York Ripper should depict human cruelty and vulnerability with such graphic and relentless fury in these early films. The overt sympathy for victims (and the fact that his martyrs are both women) preludes and precludes his later, bitter blasts of cynicism and brutality. In both Duckling and Beatrice Cenci, Fulci's outrage had not yet hollowed out; his films still pulse with anger and passion, however cold, stony, ruthless. Later, the slick city sheen of Ripper and glossy latex gore of Zombi will reflect (or deflect?) a profound and uncompromising disillusionment – with the Italian film circuit, and with his own emotional and aesthetic failure. (Cannibal Holocaust could not match that particular horror.) He wouldn’t have said it at the time, of course, and loved Zombi and The Beyond as much as every one else did; but still, it is notable that in a late interview he would finally consider Beatrice Cenci to be his finest work.

Beatrice Cenci (Lucio Fulci, 1969)