Las variaciones Gastaldi: el juego del productor y el giallo isterico. The Variations Gastaldi: The Game of the Producer and the Isthic Giallo

This essay is a demonstration of how a filone, the Italian film studies term often more accurate than “sub-genre” or cycle of Italian popular cinema, operates within a relatively brief period of time. I shall be using Sergio Martino’s The Strange Vice of Mrs. Wardh (Lo Strano vizio della signora Wardh, 1971) as an effective “end point”; that is, taking signora Wardh as a culmination of filone influences and traditions which Martino masterfully weaves. As a master of any filoni he works within, Martino often subsumes his own (potential) auteurist signature in deference to the film’s genre; in other words, the genre takes precedence over the director’s authorship (Koven, 2017). This demonstration explores those gialli which precede signora Wardh, a form of the genre I refer to as “Giallo isterico” for reasons which I hope are obvious as we work through them.