profondo rosso analysis - by Charles Dryden

profondo rosso: a critical analysis by Charles Dryden, written as part of an undergraduate degree in media studies and horror cinema at de-montfort university leicester, held by dr. Ian Hunter, academic year 2001- 2002

Released in 1975, Profondo Rosso is the fifth film by Italian director Dario Argento, a film often cited as the ultimate example of a peculiarly Italian strain of horror, that of the giallo. We shall see how Profondo Rosso attains this accolade, in addition to determining what constitutes gialli filmmaking. Argento's films have also been very influential on both Italian filmmakers and horror directors further afield in Europe and the United States and I shall examine where the influence of Dario Argento and Profondo Rosso has taken horror filmmaking.

The giallo is a curious sub-genre of Italian horror filmmaking, which some critics pass off as being simply "the Italian way of the psycho-killer movie".1 The truth is rather more complex than this, with the format having gone through a long period of evolution.

The word giallo translates into English as 'yellow' and derives from the jacket colour of a series of crime novels published in 1930s Italy, superficially similar to the French serie noir crime novels which lent their name to film noir. The noir analogy does not tell the full story, with the giallo books being home to a much wider variety of crime fiction. The strictly plotted drawing room sleuthing of Agatha Christie was as likely to be found between the yellow covers of the giallo novel as were the depraved tales of hardboiled writers like Dashiel Hammet.

It is seminal genre director Mario Bava, creator of early 1960s Italian gothic horror classics like The Mask of Satan (1960), who is generally credited with being the first giallo director, having made The Evil Eye (1962). This film, and more importantly Bava's primary-colour drenched Blood and Black Lace (1964) were to set the tone of giallo filmmaking, defined by Stephen Thrower.

"The giallo crossbreeds the murder mystery with horror. It's a form where murder and intrigue… are taken to baroque extremes, frequently bordering on the ridiculous. Suspicion in the giallo is ubiquitous because everyone is hiding something. The general tone is one of moral decay and cynicism… the killer's motivation is usually as tenuous as his methods are elaborate."2

From this assertion we can see that the giallo is far more than a convoluted 'whodunit'. Those audiences members seeking logical deduction to determine the killer's identity were not best served by the mechanics of the gialli, with their convoluted narratives sometimes even cheating logical reason entirely. When Stephen Thrower asserts that "the horror ingredient comes from the giallo's frankly perverse dwelling upon violence"3 he is closer to the real justification for the giallo's existence. Blood and Black Lace was the first to turn the murderous acts within the narrative into operatic set pieces with a vibrant colour palette to match the action. Bava's gialli also set out many of the conventions that were to become clichés of the genre, such as the leather gloved dress code of the killer, elements which Argento would run with in his own films.

Profondo Rosso was Argento's fourth giallo picture. (His one other film Le Cinque Giornate (1973), directly preceded Profondo Rosso, in which it shared the cinematography of Luigi Keveiller and the baroque production design of Guiseppe Bassan). His three previous films The Bird with the Crystal Plumage (1969), The Cat O'Nine Tails (1971) and Four Flies on Grey Velvet (1972) had been enormously popular and led to a glut of similar cryptically titled giallo movies flooding the Italian box-office, aping the Argento style, and "whose outlandish titles were the only interesting things about them."4 With these three films, Argento had grown steadily as a filmmaker, experimenting with composition, tracking shots and jarring editing techniques. Also, Argento was showing an increasing fascination with technology on both sides of the camera. The use of sound analysing equipment to trap the killer in Bird with the Crystal Plumage gave way to ever more outlandish pseudo-science like the XYY chromosome pattern in Cat O'Nine Tails. He later utilised sophisticated high-speed medical camera equipment for a slow-motion car crash in Four Flies on Grey Velvet and would continue to experiment with new techniques such as the then-new Louma crane or hi-tech halogen stage lighting to create shots in the later Tenebrae (1982).

As a prelude to Profondo Rosso, these films also utilised another Argento obsession, the importance of the visual and the act of seeing. How much trust can the individual place in what he has witnessed with his eyes? The central scene in Bird with the Crystal Plumage is testament to this as Sam (Tony Musante) thinks he has witnessed a murder but was entirely wrong about the facts. Cat O'Nine Tails takes this theme a step further by having a blind protagonist, who in finding a vital clue in a cropped photograph, helps uncover the killer by discovering the unseen. The theme of the visual is explored further in Profondo Rosso, Argento's first film to deal with the otherworldly phenomena of parapsychology, where your eyes might definitely not be the most reliable witness. Making specific reference to a key scene in Profondo Rosso, in which Marc (David Hemmings) sees the killer's face reflected in a mirror, Patricia Moir observes that:

"Argento is a master of misdirection, teasing audiences with misleading possibilities… His characters too, repeatedly interpret and misinterpret what they see. In Argento's world, visual evidence can never be taken as fact".5

This reliance on the visual is key to the casting of David Hemmings in Profondo Rosso, as he had previously played a similarly obsessed character in Antonioni's Blow Up (1966), another film with the "device of the ambiguous 'scene' that needs decoding".6 It is Argento's unique manipulation of the camera that is key to this misdirection. Profondo Rosso has numerous shots where "the camera will break off to go exploring 'by itself' - not motivated by the actions of a character but explicitly controlled by the hand of the filmmaker".7 At other times, the camera will suddenly shift perspective on a scene. Jumping from a POV shot to a vertiginous high angle long shot that cannot reasonably be deemed the viewpoint of a character. "The camera seems to have become unhinged, operating in ways running counter to conventional notions about the role of the camera in the narrative process".8 Argento himself, constantly exploring new camera technology, has argued that this "technique is a form of poetry".9

McDonagh observes how Profondo Rosso's "manipulation of the killer's eye POV provides no easy vicarious thrills… the viewer is kept always at a distance, always on the outside looking in".10 A scene in Four Flies on Grey Velvet, which Argento views stylistically as "the father of Profondo Rosso",11 a candlestick murder "pushed subjective camera trickery to new levels because in the editing you suddenly switch from murderer to victim in a flash. That was to say we are all murderers and victims at the same time".12 In Profondo Rosso Argento finds other methods of allowing us access into the mind of the killer, specifically via the fetishised macro close-up of bizarre childhood toys juxtaposed with knives and weapons of murder. The camera obsessively 'plays' with these objects as the sinister lullaby music, previously heard in the mid-credits sequence, can be heard on the soundtrack.

The distorted Rome of Profondo Rosso is a major part of Argento's plan, Guiseppe Bassan's baroque, oppressive sets take full advantage of the larger budget available, allowing Argento to create compositions in which "characters are dwarfed by the looming presences of classical statuary and cyclopean buildings, creating an almost hallucinatory sense of distorted proportions".13 Likewise, many of the film's interior sequences are "perspective shots present[ing] an exaggerated sense of the distance between the subject (the camera, us) and the object in any given shot".14 Like the jarring camerawork, these shots are again saying, "keep your distance".15 These devices also allow Argento to simulate the strange world in which Marc finds himself. He is a lonely man in an alien Rome, and he becomes embroiled in an investigation in which he finds himself increasingly adrift in an environment where his masculinity counts for little. There are several scenes where Marc is constantly belittled by his female counterpart Gianna Brezzi (Daria Nicolodi), not to mention his occupation as a pianist being called into question by other characters. This aspect of the film drew on Italian male fears of women asserting themselves in areas outside the traditional domestic environment. Nicolodi's character is a journalist and "a very masculine woman. This is something which had never been seen in Italy at that time".16

Indeed, a giallo like Profondo Rosso had never been seen before, "the plot moorings with the everyday… well on their way to being jettisoned".17 As Maitland McDonagh asserts, "even the title suggests Profondo Rosso is a different order of film from Argento's first gialli, shunning their precious obscurity, it's brief and evocative".18 This does not mean the plot is simple, Profondo Rosso "casts out allusions in all directions; the more you know, the more it resonates".19 Many previous giallo pictures by other directors had attempted to stamp their own identity by pushing the film in a particular direction, such as the overt sleaze of Luciano Ercoli's Death Stalks in High Heels (1971) or the pastoral-set chain-whipping violence in Lucio Fulci's Don't Torture a Duckling (1972). Balancing the various elements employed in too many giallo pictures, Profondo Rosso "is the first film in which the levels of overt narrative sickness and structural perversity are evenly matched".20

The loosening of narrative in Profondo Rosso is nearly overshadowed by the film's heightened stylisation and can be seen "as a stepping stone to the gothic settings of his next two horror slanted ventures".21 These films, Suspiria (1977) and Inferno (1980) "abandon the giallo format for a hallucinogenic fairytale approach to horror",22 incorporating a "dreamlike, sometimes elliptical structure".23 For these reasons Profondo Rosso has a central place in Argento's career where the film "is the key to Argento's stylistic conceits",24 bridging the gap between the cosmopolitan reality of the early thrillers and the surrealism of these later works.

Today, Dario Argento occupies a unique position in Italian popular cinema. His consistent early success, including a popular television series in which he personally introduced each episode, made him a household name in Italy. As the late Lucio Fulci observed "He's very good on the public relations side, creating a rapport with young people".25 He now owns a film production company, producing much of the most successful Italian genre products of the 1980s, notably Lamberto Bava's Demons (1985). In other markets, Argento's films suffer either at the hands of the censor or ruthless distributors. Profondo Rosso lost over twenty minutes of footage in its transition to the American market, and his other works have fared little better. In spite of this, Argento's films have had a notable influence on American horror filmmaking. John Carpenter readily acknowledges his influence in Halloween (1978) with its heavy use of gliding POV shots. The psycho-sexual voyeurism in Brian Depalma's 1980s thrillers is also very much influenced by Argento's films, as well as embracing giallo clichés like the black gloved killer. The central elevator slashing in Dressed to Kill (1980) is very reminiscent of Argento's heightened style as the light reflects from the blade in a jarring montage of subjective / objective shots.

Argento's films have for a long time walked a fine line between the divergent disciplines of art and exploitation cinema. Profondo Rosso was the first Argento movie to capitalise on its own heightened stylisation, and alerted critics to the thematic qualities evident in his work. Whilst using the latest technology to find ever more exciting ways of making the audience complicit in acts of violence, we have seen in Profondo Rosso how Argento juxtaposes these techniques with jarring shots which serve to distance the audience from these acts. Some critics contend that Argento is more interested in, "not why violence was happening, but how it happens",26 but ultimately his films question why we watch such acts in the first place.

Charles Dryden

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