Fortuno Ombra: Cruelty & Dissonance
“It is cruelty that cements matter together, cruelty that molds the features of the created world. Good is always upon the outer face, but the face within is evil. Evil which will eventually be reduced, but at the supreme instant when everything was form will be on the point of returning to chaos.” — Antonin Artaud, “Letters on Cruelty: Third Letter”
Italian filmmaker Fortuno Ombra (1920 – 1999) was once described as the “poet of backward glances”—the pursued, the paranoiac, the furtive killer, the nostalgic demoniac, the intrusive intangible, the operatic pervert. He wasn’t Argento. Wasn’t Fulci or Soavi or Pasolini or a Demon of Gore. He can’t be fixed, bound, caught and made a true double of any other director because he does not add up. The details of his life are boisterously hazy. At once he’s a flickering young pornographer, the seasoned director of gialli, the ailing furtive recluse, and nothing at all. The reflection of a shadow, untethered and unmoored. A figment with teeth.
His films never ended, not properly. The plots concluded, or in some cases stopped, but the ever-present hold that the past has on his characters, their motivations, and especially the cities and landscapes they wander through like dazed specters, is visible in the use of montage, hallucination, doubles, mirroring, hidden details, puzzling camera angles, flashback, nonlinear storytelling, as well as in how each of his movies ends in a moment of recursion: a return to an earlier location in the film; a dissonant tableau of striking violence and delicate arrangement; rotten and inescapable madness. This is nearly self-strangulation, a kind of torsion that throttles the movie until it ceases.
In his films, every surface is a façade. Their hollowness isn’t what is of interest, but rather it is the intruding knowledge which insists itself through the walls, doors, tinted windows, turned up collars, mirrored shades, and grotesque disguises, which insists that within the guts of a manor house, or in the mind of an unassuming real estate agent, atrocities accrete on walls and mirrors and psyches like scorch after arson. It isn’t only person and place that are polluted, but the entire world feels curdled and its streets, piazzas, and muddy fields blaze with cryptic revelation: every structure a maze and every face a mask. If there is one thesis to be taken from the body of his work, it is that everything conceals secrets and violence which are contagious. At once foreign bodies, splinters that pierce and become ingrown, as well as an ever-possible human twitch.
Ombra moved to the U.S. in early-90s, and though he continued to make films for several more years, up until his disappearance in 1999, he never filmed a picture with an American studio. Despite that, his films found their audiences, entrancing, disgusting, and dividing viewers on both sides of the Atlantic. Ombra, like Death’s harvestman striding across medieval wastelands, came to those who went looking for him, even if we didn’t know we were. To me, his movies feel inevitable. As if they’d always been coming, always were already here. The double drifting after you, their shadow-heels stitched to yours. Pursuing you and indivisible from you.
I have seen three of his films. One on a worn-down rental VHS (Silent Ceremonies, 1999), one on a bargain bin DVD (Red Etiquette, 1967), and one digital rip (The Queen of Nooses, 1980). These poems are my attempt to recreate those viewings.
***
The Queen of Nooses (1980)
Truck with its headlights on
out front of the landlord’s house.
Where did you learn that from, this fear of the visible?
: visible though, from the back, you see it seeing
your genderless phantasm through dim panes :
chameleon yourself pattern the environment
across your visage fritillaria
wishful mimicry
premeditated transmutation :
Take the back gate. Wear through to another where.
Your body-aphasia, resting under tongue, the body’s low-sung vowel.
You cross-pollinate with shadows, silk beneath it all.
It feels like pissing on TRESPASSING ground: fear tucked into bliss.
Silent Ceremonies (1999)
From the black leather glove’s perspective, we’re all grip. You’ve watched so much decaying violence on VHS that there has to be a kind of osmosis.
From the venom’s viewpoint, a snake is just a sieve, a vein a container. Your intestines are coiled yards of magnetic tape : frames, dismembered instants : open
mouths ambered around scream : close-up of thigh and lower back : more meat or mound than human : and maybe just there, at the seam between blue backing light and shadow in the scene’s hollow : a figure : on the sidewalk : you writhe for a glimpse : samaritan in cathexis : edging
the new-slick baby crow toward the grass
°
You are of a killing kin, the hawk’s eye floating in her skull, slipping down the throat of rising day, its carnal arias, its pristine mutilation. There will be the Murdered with the heads of house cats, black vultures, butterflies lapping salt from puddled runoff, seeking the blood which clung to fatted leather boots, the hands which washed the knife whose filigree runs through some other flesh, and only the wilted specters of trashy flowers strangled up through gravel’s noose to witness. There are small gifts owed to annihilated things.
°
A strain of parasite, this film embedded like a sophisticated tapeworm, integrating itself
in the deeper sanctum of your guts siphoning mood, time’s diced corpus, the bloom of sight
in snuffed eyeballs : viewings narrow, thin as moldy celluloid : a flicker in smoke : attached, spooling, rewatching : the wound’s replica on six screens : darkness is : a clarifying lens: whether it be a hood, a night, the false sleep of the moviehouse.
°
On your sickly peregrination, you see dogs that aren’t there in the dark overgrown alleyways that strop this city like a net of shallow cuts. Embodied shadows; afterimages suspended from their heels. Walking fast, as if pursued and pursuing, your breath shortened by cigarettes and muddy fear, you remember Messina in the year of their Plague, where the dog-headed revenants bore inverted blades through narrow streets, cutting wide the crowds until the whole city was a forearm trussed and pinned.
°
Ambient slaughter is in the air ; all the earth a perfumed carcass.
Photographs bind the ephemeral ; the frame embalms.
The screen is a sheet of bone murmuring with the conspiracies of shadows :
a loom for violence’s reek : the incision of it : by mishap : by vile intent :
and its pieces stir and seethe a life in gore.
°
You’ve seen it several times before, yet the watching knifes you all the same. Half-a-dozen intimate apocalypses pinned to the screen like a peeled and dripping butterfly, etched into your gaze, twin tableaus of doppelganger carnage. Voice out of sync, overdubbed and poorly mixed, you sing before the open curtains with only the milk-eye of the dead screen as audience. A fragile song, crumbling like a rotten tooth but pleasant, sickly sweet. A love song, or a longing song. Your voice a soft alto, androgynous and vaporous. Light steam rises from your stained lips, shakes your bloody teeth. Dark but for the exit signs, the gleaming footlights. You glow a glow you had in life—the grain of the victim—and a glow you’ve yet to achieve—the unruly corpse. Your voice unspools from your throat, saturated in a pall of synthetic butter and the hiss of static. You sing in another woman’s voice, her exegesis, her ghosting timbre, and build yourself an analog specter. The theater is a tomb, you are begging us to share it until we forget we’re there and think we’re outside in winter in the parking lot with all the tired secondhand cars, our hunched shoulders bearing freezing drizzle in garlands, our breath leaking from our lips,
too many trapped souls seeking escape.
°
Not nightmares, but visions : the final obstinate act of a dead eye : the killer’s profile glued
to the blood fade : you dream every night : each morning you can’t recall what about : each day, you dream: sit with intruders around the empty table : surveil the breath stifling your backseat : descend down dusk’s throat : when you see an image that you can’t utter, you make it razor enough to sever those fingers who bloom from your mouth : space is thick with unease : the shadows crowding, the angles canted, the seams of the walls : ripping slowly wide, trick : shots in broken : glass : you are : the acolyte : of backward glances
Red Etiquette (1967)
the house is deserted, the earth leers through its pores,
each pane anticipates fracture
names with the names X’d out
the air is abandoned, rusted
and rot near enough at hand
the breeze stuffed with soiled sawdust
how the screen rattles under your gaze
like bones shaken in a clutching palm
windows degenerate with watching
every boot cradles a tucked knife
emptied rooms contagious with specters
we recline in paranoia
in our chamber of nails
dark sap oozes from the bottle’s broken neck
a gift on the doorstep
trees slip the treeline like shinbones
through threadbare flesh
yellowjackets hoard meat all summer long
the hawk lies studded with nails
lacerations, lost threads strew this Province of Eyes
in this viced dimension, sympatric with our shambled confines
violation is handed down
a vicious inheritance
all the men I’ve ever loved worn like eyeholes through a tattered mask
fingers cinched neat in gleaming black leather
hands and dermestid beetles
accomplice with night’s crooked mirror
— C. Rees (they/them) is a queer poet and bookseller out of Austin, Texas. They revel in blood fades and high contrast violence; they lurk between canted angles and in the majesty of decaying magnetic tape; they are waiting for you behind the curtains. You can read more of their work here: https://linktr.ee/c.rees. C. is ideologically and materially committed to a free Palestine.