Seven Notes in Black: Collector's Edition

Fans of European horror cinema often label Lucio Fulci's Seven Notes in Black (Sette Note in Nero, also known as The Psychic and Murder to the Tune of Seven Black Notes) as an oddity in the director's career, pointing out that this strangely placid piece is never quite sure whether it wants to be a giallo, a supernatural horror movie or a character piece. Certainly it contains many elements that differentiate it from the other three giallo-themed titles Fulci directed prior to embracing full-blown horror in the 1980s with Zombi 2 and its equally gory counterparts. However, the more one investigates Fulci's disparate filmography, which in addition to murder mysteries and visceral horror movies also contains Spaghetti Westerns, science fiction, two children's films and even a period drama, the clearer it becomes that he was an extremely diverse filmmaker, capable of turning his hand to virtually anything. As such, Seven Notes in Black is more remarkable for its bringing together of different elements of his career than any inherent uniqueness.

Virginia (Jennifer O'Neill), an English woman recently married to the Italian Francesco Ducci (Gianni Garko), heads off to reopen and renovate the country home of her new husband. While driving through a dark tunnel, she suddenly experiences a series of bizarre and inexplicable visions: a smoking cigarette, a dead woman, someone being bricked up inside a wall... Virginia, as it happens, is gifted with the Second Sight, ever since she saw her mother committing suicide when she was a young girl, despite being several hundred miles away from her. Upon arriving at the house, she discovers a corpse behind the wall, just as she saw in her vision. Soon, an investigation begins, and Francesco quickly becomes the chief murder suspect. Virginia suspects that there is more to this than meets the eye, however, and, with the aid of her premonitions, begins her own investigation.


It's no secret that I consider Fulci's 70s gialli vastly superior to the 80s horror movies for which he is best known. As a filmmaker, he, perhaps more than any of his contemporaries, is frequently assumed to have been a hack who peddled in excessive gore to disguise his inability to tell a coherent story. A quick glance at his gialli, however, especially A Lizard in a Woman's Skin and Don't Torture a Duckling, proves that this was unquestionably not the case. Perhaps more than any other gialli other than those of Dario Argento, they stand up as tightly-written thrillers which, especially in the case of the former, do an excellent job of capturing a sense of isolation and paranoia. Like it, Seven Notes in Black takes a housewife for its protagonist and uses the whodunit narrative to crack open her very psyche, uncovering all manner of inner turmoil.

Unlike Carol Hammond in Lizard, Virginia is neither mad nor homicidal. She does, however, have otherworldly powers, but they are very much a burden rather than a gift in the conventional sense. As Stephen Thrower notes in his book Beyond Terror: The Films of Lucio Fulci, Virginia's premonitions contribute to an air of pessimistic inevitability that seems to infuse so many of Fulci's thrillers. More a conduit than a real character, one gets the impression that she is in some way compelled to complete the prophecy, when in actual fact she could have remained safe had she been in charge of her own will and resisted in pursuing her inquiry. Like Florinda Bolkan in Lizard, Jennifer O'Neill - coincidentally (or not) also Brazilian-born - does a magnificent job of conveying the paranoia and instability of a woman with one foot in another reality. Virginia is never really a suspect in the murders herself, but the truth of her preminitions is continually under suspicion, so the plot is very much cut from the same mould as numerous gialli featuring a desperate heroine surrounded by disbelieving men.


Stylistically, Fulci is decidedly restrained here, although the level of precision is such that he's undoubtedly at the top of his game, technically-speaking. This is definitely the most understated of his 1970s gialli, and the main reason that it tends to be given short shrift is probably its deliberately-paced narrative and lack of audacious visual touches, although you can see him beginning to go overboard with the zoom lenses of which he would become so fond during the 80s. The plot contains the clear influence of Poe's The Black Cat, as well as Argento's Profondo Rosso: the scene in which Virginia hacks away at the wall to reveal the skeleton is a dead ringer for an almost identical scene in Argento's seminal 1975 giallo. Like virtually every filmmaker working in Italy during this period, Fulci was certainly not above capitalising on various trends, but given that he always hotly denied being directly influenced by Argento, the presence of such a fascimile is surprising to say the least.

Seven Notes in Black remains something of an anomaly in Fulci's filmography. Not quite a conventional thriller and yet not quite supernatural horror, it constituted something of a turning point in his career, and, while he subsequently directed other thrillers (including the infamous The New York Ripper), his next major film, Zombi 2, ultimately heralded a new cycle that was to occupy the remainder of his career until his death. As such, this remains, for me, the last great Fulci film. Later moments in his career showed touches of the brilliance of his 70s thrillers, and this film is, when all said and done, not perfect, but it is overall a compelling and underrated effort that deserves to be seen by more people.


DVD Presentation

As indicated in the review above, Seven Notes in Black is far from the easiest Fulci title to come by. Until the release of this Collector's Edition, the only legitimate DVD was a bare-bones French release, which was in turn used as a source by Alfa Digital for their bootleg US release. This version utilised a PAL to NTSC standards conversion, resulting in greatly reduced image quality, and an attempt to marry the visuals to an English audio track, while admirable, resulted in some synchronisation issues and various drop-outs.

The two French releases, meanwhile, feature a nice but not perfect transfer, demonstrating a decent amount of detail and good, if not great, compression. The level of noise reduction applied, however, is distractingly high, interfering with the film stock's natural grain pattern, while the contrast levels look a little off, resulting in some dark greys where black should be.

Audio, meanwhile, is considerably more problematic. Despite claims to the contrary on the packaging, an English track is nowhere to be found. In its place are the same French and Italian tracks that were found on the previous French release, as well as French subtitles, which are forced when Italian audio is selected. Normally, in the case of Italian films of this period, it's difficult to call one language more legitimate than the other, because there is no "original" audio as such, since everyone tends to be dubbed, regardless of their nationality or whether they provide their own voice for one or more language tracks. In ths case of Seven Notes in Black, though, the lack of an English dub is a real shame, since it is one of the few gialli to make an issue of the language barrier, contrasting Jennifer O'Neill's native English with the heavy Italian-accented English of the natives. This issue is absent in the Italian version, because everyone is speaking native Italian, including O'Neill. As such, the Italian track is serviceable, provided you speak either Italian or French (via subtitles), but it's definitely a compromised presentation.


Extras

Released at the same time as the French Collector's Edition of Fulci's The New York Ripper (review here), Seven Notes in Black is given an equally extravagant 2-disc release. The Alfa Digital bootleg, predictably, featured nothing more extensive than an image gallery. The previous French release, meanwhile, while featuring the same transfer and audio as this new release (as well as roughly the same menus), was also fairly bare-bones, barring some rudimentary text-based material - a biography of Fulci, filmographies for some of the cast and crew, and a few pages of liner notes.

The first disc of the Collector's Edition duplicates these features, but also includes an audio commentary featuring cinematographer (and Fulci crew regular) Sergio Salvati, with journalist Federico Caddeo joining him as an interviewer/moderator. The track is in Italian, with French subtitles, and is quite lively and informative if understandably technically oriented, although the pair do discuss some more general topics, such as the film's identity as horror, and various on-set squabbles. Of course, like the rest of this disc, it requires that you understand either Italian or French in order to get by.


The second disc is where the real gems are to be found, although the sheer quantity of material on offer may make trawling through it all a little off-putting. Like the extras for The New York Ripper, they were directed by Daniel Gouyette, whose approach is generally to plonk various participants in front of a camera and allow them to ramble on for as long as they like. It's a pleasingly unaffected approach, lacking the intrusive feel of the average EPK, but, as with the interviews accompanying NoShame Films' various releases, one gets the sense that the material could have been tightened up a bit with a little editing.

The main "Making of" documentary lasts for a little over 66 minutes, and features actor Gianni Garko, composer Fabio Frizzi, writer/journalist Antonio Tentori (whose Fulci connection is his collaboration with the director on the script for, one of his last films, A Cat in the Brain), Fulci scholar Paolo Albiero, cinematographer Sergio Salvati, camera operator Franco Bruni, editors Ornella and Bruno Micheli, and effects artist Fabio Traversari. It's just a shame that no-one thought to record Fulci's thoughts on the film before his death, and that Jennifer O'Neill does not appear, but no-one can dispute the documentary's thoroughness, or the lengths gone to in order to secure as many participants as possible. Albiero's comments are especially appreciated, as he places the film within the context of the rest of Fulci's filmography, while offering historical information about its inception, as well as its critical reaction (it's one of the few Fulci films that met with favourable reviews at the time of its release).

Garko, Frizzi and the two Michelis are then interviewed separately across three featurettes, each lasting between 15 and 25 minutes. The Michelis also appear again for a 28-minute demonstration of editing on an archaic Moviola machine, which serves as a fascinating illustration of how much the industry has changed since the inception of digital editing systems such as Avid. A gallery containing a paltry five images completes the collection of bonus materials.



Overall

Had it contained an English audio track as the packaging states, this could probably have been accepted as the definitive version of Seven Notes in Black. As it stands, however, this oversight means that, despite the generally impressive transfer and in-depth extras, this release is seriously flawed. Hopefully, one day, there will be a legitimate English-language release of the film. Until then, however, it's disappointing that most English speakers can only watch this underrated entry in Fulci's filmography by means of an illegal bootleg.