argento dissertation - by Keith Hennessey Brown

Conclusion

For 35 years Dario Argento has operated at an intersection of European popular and arthouse cinema, producing distinctly 'personal' films within recognisable generic forms1. His influences, ranging from Bava and Leone as exemplars of Italian popular cinema, to Eisenstein and Antonioni as representatives of a broader European tradition of intellectual cinema, to idiosyncratic figures like Michael Powell, reflect this, while also casting doubt upon the simplistic formulations that see Argento as little more than an Italian Hitchcock imitator.

Likewise, while the dominant form Argento has worked in, the giallo, undoubtedly has similarities to the better known (and later) American slasher film, the differences most obviously the lack of any obvious puritanical subtext point to the need to understand it within its own distinctive context as an example of Italian filone cinema, informed by but in the final analysis not reducible to the more familiar models of genre derived from the study of Hollywood. In particular, we can note the long literary history of the giallo prior to its emergence as a cinematic form in the 1960s and the immediate preceding influence of the German krimi films.

Argento's first film, The Bird with the Crystal Plumage, was a significant success, announcing his interest in exploring matters of gender, perception and art within the giallo framework, thereby also reinvigorating the form. Arguably, then, it ironically present a more successful synthesis of the conflicting tendencies of filone and auteur cinema than did its immediate successors. Cat o' Nine Tails was well received by audiences but too conventional for Argento himself, while Four Flies on Grey Velvet went in the opposite direction.

After the attempt to do something different with Le cinque giornate failed, Argento thus faced a dilemma: How to transform his vision of the giallo into something that to here echo Brecht's distinction could become rather than be popular. The solution came in the form of a strategy of excess: By providing a surfeit of interpretive possibilities and overlaying his interests on top of generic requirements, Argento was able to reconcile the requirements of his popular audience with his own artistic concerns, thereby going further than The Bird with the Crystal Plumage in transforming received notions of what the giallo, as an instance of popular cinema, could legitimately include within its discourse.

Thus, in particular, a conventional murder mystery plot complete with amateur investigator and black gloved murderer becomes also the place for a thoroughgoing interrogation of masculinity in the context of nascent 1970s feminism and an investigation of the nature of perception and the possibilities of the cinematic apparatus. If the usefulness of psychoanalysis as an interpretive tool is thereby confirmed, in line with Needham's remark that "The Giallo is a paradigm case in defence of psychoanalysis. It solicits psychoanalytic interpretation and stages every oedipal scenario literally and spectacularly"2 we would also wish to argue that we have seen to understand gialli solely through psychoanalysis is likely to be an unsatisfactory, partial reading particularly when deployed against the knowing, excessive Argento text with, for instance, a supernatural element that resists easy recuperation and seems to demand understanding on its own terms.

This seems further confirmed by the need to invoke different psychoanalytic theories at different points in analysing Deep Red. Thus, for example, Creed's formulation of the "monstrous feminine" incarnated by the figure of the castrating mother Martha derives from Freud whilst also seeking to correct and update him. Likewise, at a more general level, Lacan's notions of the symbolic, imaginary and real and distinctive understanding of the phallus were presented as an attempt to bring out what Freud 'really' meant3.

If Deep Red's excess can be characterised as a hyperrealist and melodramatic one, Suspiria's is more antirealist and operatic. Surprisingly, however, the conceptions of opera evident seem less those derived from Italian culture though Argento would deploy these in, for instance, Opera than the alternative German formulations of Wagner and Brecht. Crucial here was the fact that the film's soundtrack was completed before filming began, thereby allowing Argento to further experiment with the relationships between sound and image. He conceptualised Suspiria as a totally "composed" film where all the elements including colour, lighting, production design, mise en scène and editing were brought into play. This in itself, however, does not necessarily align the film with the Wagnerian gesamtkunstwerk, there remaining the possibility of separating these elements and playing them against one another. In the event Argento does primarily orchestrate everything towards emotional and visceral effect.

Every moment in Suspiria thus operates at a level comparable to the stand out set pieces of its predecessors, though there nevertheless remain individual moments the double murder, Sara's exploration and fall into the razor wire filled room that still manage to stand out as masterful examples of the director's ability to overwhelm the spectator with sensory experience. If, however, Suspiria is not 'progressive' in this way, that it can be seen as operating like an early cinema type "attraction"4 provides some defence against its aestheticisation of violent spectacle, as does the obvious antirealism of the piece as a whole: this is about art rather than 'reality'. (Although, as the examples of Pirandello and the Hollywood musical5 remind us, artistic reflexivity need not be progressive6.)

Yet, paradoxically, the film also appears rather more grounded in the 'real' than one might expect, offering as it does elements of social critique, associating its witch villains with capitalism and fascism, and deploying fairy tale and mythic forms in a knowing, self-conscious way as "Disney's hidden reverse"7.

Again, then, the sheer excessiveness of Suspiria makes it impossible to adequately comprehend through one interpretive scheme, with certain elements like the colour schemes at first glance reminiscent of Bava, but in fact inspired in the first instance by Disney and the plethora of unmotivated camera movements and lighting changes resisting obvious meaning. Likewise, while it is clearly possible to read the witches as another instance of the monstrous feminine exposing the director's masculine anxieties, counter posing Deep Red's interrogation of masculinity with an equally questioning stance that seems to suggest the feminine alternative to be little better, or even worse, this ignores Daria Nicolodi's distinctive contributions as a practitioner of magic a subject better approached with a Jungian than a Freudian approach from within the discourse of psychoanalysis, if at all to Suspiria.

With the two films that arguably represent Argento's greatest accomplishments showcasing formal excess, it may seem surprising that we have detected a more 'realistic' tendency in his more recent films; a tendency that further confirms the flexibility and endurance of the giallo besides Argento's ongoing dialogue with the form and, indeed, the broader institution of cinema. The question that arises is whether he can successfully communicate this 'intention' to his audience and transform their expectations as he once did with Deep Red and Suspiria.

The present challenge is a greater one: Argento is less attacking perceptions of filone cinema that battle has now been won as by now received notions of himself as an recognisable auteur. Thus, for example, when The Card Player eschews the extravagant mise en scène and set pieces for which Argento is famed, is he not confounding those who would see him as merely a great visual stylist, effectively demanding that they focus their attentions elsewhere? Yet, in terms of our overall thesis, might it not then be argued that this is but the latest in a long line of contradictions the knowing and hence trap laden use of psychoanalysis, say, or the question of whether montage theories pursue fragmentation less as an end in itself than as a way to achieve a greater unity and overall effect, the real difference that of targeting the head instead of the heart with which Argento's cinema has long been working through?

Paradoxically might then also see The Card Player's wilful refusals as yet another instance of the characteristic we have endeavoured to identify and isolate as but one way of understanding the director's cinema: Do they not signal a contradictory excess of restraint while simultaneously repudiating the notion that an author's distinctive signature is fixed and permanent rather than processual? Or and here introducing another conscious contradiction can we say that Argento's cinema has always been concerned with the real, albeit a very distinctive Lacanian psychoanalytic conception of it: Do not all his films ultimately revolve, as works of the imaginary around the same thing, namely the exposure of the horror of the terrifying chaos of the infantile and powerless state of the real lurking behind the symbolic order of society? Is this 'real' not that which characters like Marcus Daly and Suzy Banyon confront and struggle against? Or, as Opera's Inspector Santini opines, "It depends on what you mean by 'reality'." and, of course, to add further confusions, he is the film's requisite maniac.

In the final analysis all this is perhaps the best argument for taking Dario Argento's cinema seriously: His films question our preconceptions, demanding not only visceral, emotional responses but also intellectual ones, giving a rare combination of contradictory pleasures and sensations. In sum there is far more to Argento's cinema than immediately meets the eye.

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