suspiria study

Notes

1 The only marker of separation between the different scenes in the film is the clean cut. Thus I did not note all the times it happens.

2 The lighting is very peculiar in this film: "We dealt with the problem of how to give this film images no longer seen. We said ‘Let’s do it in technicolor’. We used the most recent technicolor system, consisting of taking from just one film the matrixes of the three fundamental colours, and then painting them with those colours one by one, with the different hues we wanted. We didn’t paint one of them , that is, we completely elimininated one colour. For me, that was the only way to make a different film" (Luciano Tovoli, cinematographer, from the documentary "Dario Argento’s world of horrors").

3 All through the sequence Daniel’s voice is apparent.

4 To tell the truth, it is not a real aerial travelling. Luciano Tovoli has said how they managed to get that shot: "we tied the camera to a steel wire, anchored to the ground. The camera free-fell from thirty-forty metres, only hooked up to this cable railway. Below, on the floor, there was an electro-magnetic device, by which, pushing a button at a certain moment, the camera, instead of crashing on the ground, went up again" (from the documentary "Dario Argento’s world of horrors").

5 As Metz says, "sometimes (…) we know that the shot is subjective, i.e. that there is someone else different from us that looks at it; it is the definition itself of much suspense" (Metz, 1995; 137). But I think that Metz wants to say that immediately we do not see who sees, but that, at the end, something can make us retroactively read all these nobody’s subjective shots, so we can attribute them to somebody. In Suspiria, and this is its peculiarity, this does not happen at all.

6 All through the film, it is homage to the sensorial dimensions of listening and hearing. It is sufficient to think about the words Pat cries out, that Susy cannot, just, hear, and to the investigations of Pat, Sara and Susy, led by the sound of the teachers’ steps.

7 For example, the image of the bathroom window in front of which Pat stands, just before her death: it appears as a bright little square right in the center of the screen. Moreover, there are some shots of Susy and Sara in the swimming pool, taken from above, overhanging the water.

8 "I saw her in Phantom of the Paradise, the Brian De Palma film, and thought she would be perfect" (from an interview with Argento in Fangoria no.35).

9 in Japan, Suspiria had such a great success that, after it, Profondo Rosso was distributed with the title of Suspiria part II.

10 Guglielmo Biraghi, in an Italian newspaper, "il Messaggero" of September 27, 1977 writes about an "exasperation of the sound effects", and renames the film "Griduria", something like "Screamiria" (reported in Giovannini [1986; 103]).

11 It is not a case that one of the last books on Argento published in Italy is called "The Sensuality of Murder" ("La sensualità dell’omicidio", by Antonio Tentori, edizioni Falsopiano, 1995).

12 This adjective is surely better than the much-used "psychedelic" actually some shots remind the suggestive expressionist atmospheres. Where the effect was obtained juxtaposing shadows and light, here is obtained using highly saturated colours.

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