I Am What I Am

 

All that was once directly lived has become mere representation.
— Guy Debord 

To watch Col cuore in gola today is to enter a film that seems unwilling to stand still for even a single second.
Tinto Brass runs, cuts, accelerates, slows down, overlaps images, colours, photographs, comic strips, posters, bodies, cars, shop windows, installations, clubs, corpses. The London of the film is not so much a city as a vast visual apparatus in which everything seems already to have been transformed into an image.
It is a film that can feel exhilarating and irritating, brilliant and redundant, entertaining and, at moments, surprisingly dull. But perhaps it is precisely this contradiction that makes it interesting.
Col cuore in gola is a thriller that seems perpetually eager to escape its own genre. It is a crime film that behaves like a comic strip, a love story that distrusts love, a thriller that appears more interested in images of crime than in the solution of the crime.
And above all it is a film in which reality never seems to exist in a pure state. It exists only after passing through a photograph, a comic strip, an advertisement, a cinematic quotation, a pop image.
Not by chance Brass enlisted the graphic collaboration of Guido Crepax, who produced colour panels used as storyboards for the action sequences.
Crepax is not a mere ornament. He is part of the film's grammar. 

Bernard: not a man in love, but a man bored
 And it is here that the figure of Bernard, played by Jean-Louis Trintignant, becomes the real key to the film.
 The simplest reading would be that of a man who sees a woman in trouble, falls in love with her and decides to believe her. But Bernard is far more unsettling. It is far from certain that Bernard truly believes Jane. On the contrary, it is possible that from the very beginning he suspects something does not add up.
 The line he delivers when introducing himself as an actor — "acting and lying is my trade" — reads almost like a programmatic statement. Bernard understands fiction, knows that people perform. He knows that stories can be constructed, and yet he decides to enter the story.
 Why? Because something is finally happening to him.
 Bernard is a tired, closed-off, disillusioned man, probably bored with his own existence. His encounter with Jane suddenly offers him what his ordinary life no longer does: danger, sex, fear, flight, violence, mystery, pursuits, death.
 And so the question is no longer: "Is Jane telling the truth?"
 The question becomes: "Why does Bernard need this story to continue?"
 The answer may be far simpler and far more desperate: because without that story, Bernard risks returning to his own life — and that life interests him less and less.
 This is why Bernard is willing to push himself to the edge of self-destruction: he is not necessarily defending Jane, he is defending the experience that Jane has made possible.
 She is the detonator that reignites something in a man who seemed emotionally extinguished.
 In this sense the title Col cuore in gola takes on a different meaning. Bernard's heart finally begins to beat again precisely when his life becomes dangerous, and danger is his form of vitality.
Jane is not merely a femme fatale; she is more complex than the traditional thriller girl: she says she is what she is, and admits to wanting to be different without doing anything to become so. It is a line that seems almost to describe the entire world of the film.
Jane is a woman without illusions. Bernard, on the other hand, is a man who perhaps needs to construct one. This opposition is fundamental: she survives, he wants to live, and these are two entirely different realities.
Jane is progressively crushed by circumstances until everything is reduced to survival. Bernard, by contrast, seems to choose risk consciously.
It is as though the two meet at the precise point where their needs become incompatible.
He needs a story, she needs to get out alive and London is a gigantic film set, not the realistic London of social cinema, but a city photographed, manipulated, reinvented.
Photography studios, derelict buildings, industrial architecture, demonstrations, nightclubs, greyhound races, art installations, crowds and streets all become fragments of an enormous collage.
Even the corpses seem to become elements of a composition.
Brass is clearly looking towards Blow-Up, but has no intention of simply repeating it; he takes the Antonionian imaginary and detonates it, makes it faster, ironic, pop, grotesque.
The world of photography also echoes Antonioni directly: Jane's brother Jerome is a fashion photographer, an unmistakable echo of Blow-Up's protagonist.
And Brass goes so far as to transform cinematic quotation into narrative matter.
The film seems to remind us continually: pay attention, you are watching a film.
The captions, the comic-strip references, the graphic imagery, the accelerations, the distortions and the editing devices prevent the viewer from surrendering entirely to the story.
Brass does not want us to forget the apparatus — he wants to show it to us. 

A film made of images that devour reality: and it is here that Col cuore in gola becomes far more interesting than its plot.
The photographs are everywhere.
There are images of Hollywood stars, compromising photographs, photography studios, slides, photographed bodies, images used as evidence and images used as instruments of blackmail.
Photography should serve to preserve reality. In the film, instead, photography produces reality.
A photograph can blackmail, can accuse, can destroy a family, can transform a person into an image, can become more important than the person it represents.
This is the film's true obsession — not the crime, but the image. 

Pop Art as the film's philosophy: the graphic quotations, the comic strips, the advertising imagery, the heightened colours and the almost two-dimensional figures make Col cuore in gola a profoundly Sixties object.
But Brass does not use Pop Art merely to make the film "cool" — he uses it because Pop Art had already intuited something fundamental: in modern society images do not simply represent things; they begin to replace them.
A body becomes a photograph, a photograph becomes a commodity, a person becomes a character, a character becomes a stereotype, an experience becomes a spectacle.
This is precisely what happens to Bernard.
His real experience is progressively transformed into a kind of film within the film.
He runs, flees, is chased, fights, loves, risks death — and seems almost happy, because he is finally living something that resembles a film.
"Like in the movies": one of the most revealing moments is exactly this — Bernard quotes Mao, Jane says it's all pointless, and he replies, in essence, "like in the movies."
It is an apparently ironic line, but it contains the aesthetic programme of the entire work.
Because in Col cuore in gola reality is continually measured against cinema.
The violence looks like a scene, the flight looks like a scene, the love looks like a scene.
Even the torture — when Bernard is captured and has his eyelashes pulled out in a cruel game of "talk, don't talk" — takes on a grotesque, almost comic-strip dimension.
The violence is real, but its representation is artificial. And it is precisely this contradiction that disturbs.
How far can we still distinguish experience from its representation? 

Debord before Debord?
 Here the film becomes surprisingly contemporary.
 In 1967 Guy Debord published The Society of the Spectacle, and in the same year Brass made Col cuore in gola.
This does not mean the film is a cinematic transposition of Debord, nor that Brass is illustrating a philosophical theory — but the temporal coincidence is striking.
Both belong to a historical moment in which Western society is becoming increasingly aware of the power of images.
The spectacle is not simply something we watch — it is a form through which we learn to perceive reality. And Bernard already seems to be a man produced by this world.
He is not simply looking for a woman; he is looking for an experience capable of restoring the sensation of being alive.
And the only way he finds to obtain it is to enter a representation: from the real to the simulacrum.
It is here that the film can be approached — with all due caution — alongside that reflection on the substitution of the real by its images that would become central decades later in Baudrillard.
Bernard does not necessarily fall in love with Jane.
He may have fallen in love with the Jane the situation created.
The mysterious woman before the corpse: the woman being pursued, the woman who lies, the woman to be saved, the woman who might be a killer.
Every new revelation does not destroy Bernard's desire — on the contrary, it feeds it, because every complication makes the story more intense.
This is the most tragic aspect of the character.
Truth is not what Bernard is really looking for — he is looking for intensity, and the more dangerous reality becomes, the greater that intensity grows. 

A thriller that becomes a reflection on desire, and for this reason the film can also be read as a story about desire.
 Desire does not necessarily want to know its object — it wants to keep it desirable, while truth risks destroying desire.
 Jane is interesting to Bernard precisely because she is indecipherable: every doubt makes her more fascinating, every corpse makes her more dangerous, every lie makes her more desirable.
 Mystery becomes eroticism, and eroticism becomes a form of dependency. 

An imperfect film, but precisely for that reason a necessary one: not everything works, because not everything is meant to.
 The story is often thin, and the film can become repetitive. The chases and pursuits multiply; some digressions seem more interested in visual effect than in narrative construction, and the editing, rather than clarifying, frequently and deliberately heightens the sense of disorder.
 This is one of the reasons why part of the critical establishment considered it confused and redundant, while other readings have valued precisely its use of Pop Art, the comic strip, and experimental montage.
 But perhaps asking it for perfectly balanced storytelling means asking it to be the film it refuses to be.
 Col cuore in gola is above all an exercise in formal freedom; a film that seems to say: I can take the thriller, Antonioni, the comic strip, photography, advertising, pop music, art cinema, commercial cinema, violence and eroticism and put them all together and see what happens — sometimes something magnificent occurs, sometimes something irritating.
Often both at the same moment. 

The real mystery is Bernard
 In the end, the most interesting question is not: is Jane guilty?
 But why doesn't Bernard run? He could have. He could have chosen not to intervene in front of Prescott's body, could have chosen not to look for Jane, could have abandoned the search for Jerome, could have chosen not to confront the hitmen, could have chosen not to let himself be drawn in to the point of violence and death. But he does not.
 Because that situation gives him back something he had lost: the perception of still being capable of feeling.
 Bernard is therefore less a romantic knight than a desperate man.
 And Jane, more than the woman he wants to save, is the door through which he enters an existence that is finally dangerous.
 His heart is truly in his mouth.
 But perhaps because, for the first time in a very long while, he is finally feeling something. 

It is no coincidence that, more than fifty years on, another Italian cinema's incursion into comic-strip territory — the Manetti Bros.' Diabolik — can be placed alongside Col cuore in gola. But where Brass transforms reality into a comic strip, the Manettis make almost the reverse movement: they bring the comic strip back into cinema without stripping it of its artificial nature. In both films identity is a construction, and the world is above all surface, sign, disguise, image. Bernard enters the world of the comic strip because he needs a reality more intense than the one he possesses; Diabolik, on the contrary, dominates reality precisely because he knows how to transform it into fiction. One loses himself in the image, the other controls it. And perhaps this is the distance that separates desire from its mastery: Bernard needs the spectacle in order to feel alive, Diabolik has learned to live inside the spectacle. 

To watch Col cuore in gola today means watching a 1967 film that speaks, almost without knowing it, of a problem that has become central to our present. We live surrounded by images.
We photograph what we eat, what we see, what we desire, what we are.
We construct identities through images.
We desire people we often know only through their representation.
Reality is continually transformed into content.
Brass stages all of this before the process reaches its contemporary form.
This is why the film should not be sought only within the history of the Italian crime genre, or in the prehistory of the erotic Tinto Brass.
It should be sought in the history of a cinema that is beginning to interrogate its own nature as a machine for producing images — and Bernard is its perfect figure.
A man who no longer knows what to desire from reality, and who, when he finally encounters something powerful enough to shake him, decides to enter it without worrying too much about whether it is true.
Perhaps because, in a world that is learning to live through images, it no longer matters so much that a story be true.
It is enough that it makes us feel alive. 

The simulacrum is not what conceals the truth: it is the truth that conceals the fact that there is none.
— Jean Baudrillard