The Colors of Darkness – the title a nod to Sergio Martino's All the Colours of the Dark – presents an experiment in sound and vision. The Vertovian creator/supervisor, DJ Speedy, has combined images culled from 17 Italian giallo and horror films with a continuous sequence of ten techno tracks. His aim is to build a bridge between the two cultures, offering something "whether you're a Euro horror fan who never quite understood techno or a techno head that never gave Euro horror a chance".
And, despite the lack of an obvious affinity between them – the stereotypical horror fan would surely be a metalhead, whether it be Black Sabbath taking their name from a Bava film and/or a Dennis Wheatley novel or Necrophagia with their enthusiastic if crude Fulci tributes – the combination works well, at least as far as this reviewer – arrogant enough to think he can comment on cult cinema, but unable to make any such claims with regard to techno – is concerned.
Speedy knows both camps and, with films like Dario Argento's Suspiria and Lucio Fulci's The Beyond functioning primarily in terms of set-pieces anyway, with conventional narrative logic taking a backseat to a primitive, sensory "cinema of attractions" there is no shortage of powerful material to use.
The danger, perhaps enhanced by the fact that only the first and last tracks include obvious samples from their film sources, is that of decontextualisation.
Here one thinks of the way in which cult cinema archivist and researcher Jack Stevenson has declined to make a film like Army Medicine in Vietnam available outwith theatrical presentation, wary of its likely appropriation as backdrop to a shock rock stage show.
While the stakes aren't as high here, the risk perhaps remains. One of the centrepieces of the campaign against the so-called video nasties in the UK in the early 1980s was, after all, a screening of selected excerpts to Members of Parliament – whereby one brave anti-censorship voice presented as counterfactual how easy it was to distort meaning thereby through an itemisation of the atrocities within Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus.
Thankfully, one would also like to think that both horror and techno fans are sufficiently open minded to check this out for themselves rather than simply dismissing it out of hand.
Contact DJ Speedy at spacetoonz@hotmail.com for booking and sales information or visit the spacetoonzmedia.com website.
Copyright © K H Brown 2002-2005
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